in which i almost step on an unidentifiable dead rodent

I’m not going to write anymore about the Blogger’s Bane: Work, for a while at least. (I have been rereading the Lord of the Rings books. Can you tell? Although I use the word bane a lot regardless of what I’m reading. I just like it.)

So then all that’s left, BASICALLY, is my evening walks. Almost. There’s also the fact that I broke the door off the girls-only bathroom. I’m not quite sure how it happened, except that you sort of have to lift the door in order to move it open or closed, and as I pulled to open it, it broke. And it really broke, not just a little bit of broke. The hinges and the one side of the frame that is attached to the hinges stayed in place, but the entire rest of the door broke off in my hand. I sort of propped it up, and then I left it. Now it’s propped outside, which is bad because it means I’m using a bathroom with no door.

Oh, and also, in other breaking news, I broke my colleague’s Ramadan fast. Because I break things. That’s what I do. I offered her some chocolate sitting out in the sun after I had eaten lunch and before either of us knew it, she’d eaten it. Fortunately, mistaken eating doesn’t actually ruin the fasting effort, otherwise I’d feel terribly bad.

Then there’s the daily walk. It’s all snippets of loveliness and chaos, like Africa generally. Today was something like this: walk, greet people, walk, greet people, notice at the last minute that I was about to step on a dead rodent, manage to avoid rodent carcass, walk, ask people if there were oranges for sale anywhere, get a no, walk, turn back before the river, meet a young teenage girl who walked with me for a mile or so, walk.

The girl, after we talked for a while in the clearest, most precise English each of us could manage, said to me, “I love having this good body, but I don’t like this,” as she pulled at the skin of her arm. “Your skin?” I asked. “You don’t like your skin?”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Yours is very smart.”

That led, of course, to the requisite, “God makes us all colors, and all of them are good” conversation. (And I told her about sunburn. Because, frankly, the lack of natural sun protection sucks in this climate.)

At the duka of the day, I bought mango drink and apple juice boxes. Apparently Uganda allows a company to label its juice “Pure Fruit Juice” when the ingredients are apple juice, sucrose, citric acid, malic acid, and vitamin C. I’m okay with four of them, but sucrose? Let’s discuss.

The duka guy didn’t have enough change, so in lieu of the final anticipated 10 piastres (the cents of the Sudanese pound) / 100 Uganda shillings, he gave me three gumballs out of a plastic bin. They disintegrated upon chewing and I was picking bits of blue gum out of my teeth for an hour.

…

If I had to live in a mud house, I think I would pick one in Elsewhere. They are not just mud houses, they are works of art. They are painted. They have windows (no one bothers with windows back where I come from; I mean, where I’ve been living), and neat little doors of metal or wood or cloth. The yards are wide and swept clean, with patches of bright green grass. The fences are made of a living plant that I’ve seen before in Rwanda. I’m not sure how to describe it – it grows up entwining its branches with its neighbor into a perfect fence. It doesn’t have leaves, or it is all leaves, depending on your perspective. I would compare it to a cactus, without prickles. Clearly I just need to take a photo, because this is impossible to describe. Anyway, I like the houses and the yards. They look homey to me.