Loose Ends

Just to cover a few loose ends- I mentioned earlier how Hasifa would give her right hand to not stay in Apac, and how she said there was no food to eat. In reaction to that, I brought 2 cans of this bug repellant stuff from REI (when I was choosing it out, there were like 5 brands- they all had deet in various concentrations, like 18%, 23%, 12% etc... until REI's brand, which had a whopping like 98% deet- not sure if it's a typo, but they mean business if that's true) and I also brought like a backpack of snack foods to supplement whatever little amount of food I expected to get.

It turned out that staying there would have been a nightmare, but we drove over to Lira, a city/town about an hour away (the US Embassy forbids US government employees to be in Lira, or the environs, because of the danger level...). It seemed fine, about as hectic as Kampala was. I stayed in this one room, tiny little place with just enough room for the bed, a tiny tablestand, and a chair, but that was about it. Thankfully, there was a bednet, and a high powered fan, because though the bednets keep mosquitoes out, they also do a great job of keeping the heat in and roasting you alive, so the fan really helped keep me alive that night.

The food actually was really decent- I got some good eggplant, cooked like the way I cook zucchini, to the point where I couldn't even tell the difference, and free range chicken. The chicken was good- it tasted like chicken, and the only difference was that the chicken was extremely buff, the way you expect chickens that have grown up in the bush, living off of what they can find, and fighting off attackers. I got a drumstick, and when I tried to put my fork into it, it was like the entire thing was made of bone- I couldn't even dent the drumstick. Eventually, I applied a good deal of pressure in one promising groove and I got through, and ate very tough, but good chicken.

Will do a separate post for the city of Jinja, which I went to see with Derek today.