Recent poll: If a worm crawled out of your guava, would you still eat it? Yes.

“Assist me to become upright,” Clovis said, gesturing with open palms as if seeking help.
“I’d like to assist half the country with that one, dude...”
“No, help me to stand up.”
“Oh. Yeah... No problem.” I pull her up. Guess that can serve as my Peace Corps Duty of the Day instead?

So being south of the equator and whatnot, it’s technically Spring here. But damn, winter might as well be approaching: the rains have come, and when it rains, people hibernate. True, the maxim “when it rains, it pours” garners its literal meaning here and tin roofs and a lack of windows fall so far short of the mark in providing a conducive learning environment in schools. Okay, yeah, the rains are making my summer squash, beets and basil sprout faster than I can clear away new transplanting land. But I don’t care! To me, this meteorological alteration signifies three things: unreliable power, the disruption of playing outside all day, and boredom, eliminating any excuse I’ve had for dogging it on the blog front. The more lengthy the span between posts, the easier I find it to offer up picking mud out from underneath my fingernails as a legitimate excuse for not blogging. It would help if I took pictures…

Okay. In the two months since my last blog, I’ve been mentally torn (not to mention physically; a big “Thank you!” to Peter for steering our bicycle into that barbed wire fence): is everything different or has nothing changed? As far as adjustments I’ve made in this country go, the ones I’ve had a go at in the past 2 months have been insignificant, inconsequential, negligible. I haven’t been forced to learn a new culture, move 8 hours away, nor lived out of a backpack for longer than a week. Congratulate me. I’m feeling pretty good about this accomplishment. I’m still teaching computers to 110 13-16-year-olds. I’m still failing at learning Runyankore. I’m still loving the pace of life in the village. My head is still reeling at the possibilities for this place that stare unblinking at me through the infallible sunshine. So nothing has changed changed; unless it’s me?

There are some obvious things that have affected me. Like people. Yeah, be careful, they’ll do that to ya if you’re not obstinate. Constant vigilance, Mad-Eye, constant vigilance… But in all seriousness, I’ve had a few people really change my outlook on Uganda. I used to think that the cultural differences were too disparate, the education level gap too vast for meaningful communication, until Peter and Sanyu. Peter, a Peace Corps Volunteer from Chicago (might as well be from Timbuktu: he’s a Cub’s fan), just finished his 2 years and is extending for a third year in Botswana. He and I became fast friends over a decades-old cross-town rivalry and a knack for sarcasm. It could have also been the Hare Krishna service we strolled into one lazy Sunday in Kampala that inexplicably bonded us, religion has that power I suppose (a free lunch is always delicious, even if they were fasting from beans and grains…). But really I think I just admired his non-condescension when interacting with Ugandans. It was really refreshing and it opened my eyes to a population that enjoyed wit, toyed with the English language, and could dish out sass as easily as the best (best?) spoiled brats from suburbia. A certain lightness has to be what kept him sane during his service.

But alas, Peter is out like the Cubs and the playoffs and Sanyu is in like a new Blackhawk’s lineup. Who’s Sanyu, you say? My neighbor/school secretary/Fr. Charles’ niece/my best friend. The villagers know us to be inseperable; can I even by a tomato without Sanyu accompanying me? Nope. Why would I want to? This girl, aged 23, gets me, gets me like I’d presumed only another American could. When she’s around (which is thankfully every day, all day), I’m reminded of how generous, how understanding, how amusing Ugandans can be. I buy us a jackfruit to eat until our stomachs scream in protest and she pays be back half the next day. I help her plant beans in her garden (not even kidding, this is how it’s done: shove a handful into your mouth, store them like a chipmunk, take a swipe at the ground with a hoe, spit a seed into the hole, move on and repeat) and she’s out the next week helping me clear the knee-high weeds from mine. It seems I forget about my garden’s existence easily… I want to turn my courtyard into a dance floor and she shows up with tunes. I want to play football, jump rope, do cartwheels and handstands, learn netball, run sprints across the field, dodging grazing goats and cows all the while, and she’s right there next to me. I could go on all day, but what you need to take away from my diatribe is this: Sanyu makes me view my time in the village as so much more than “two years of service”. Her only downfall is a relentless consumption of my gum, so thanks for the dozens of packs you all have sent her way!

Right, so people have changed me. But so has the universal Ugandan contentment. Sure, sometimes it manifests itself in an lack of concern for work, children, eating, bathing, or more generally, living. But it can also surface as a “happy here in the now” attitude. Some of the best shit comes from the times you decide to cede and acquiesce to let the wind take you where it will. The power goes out before a computer lesson and instead of holing up in my room, reading a book, I play a trivia game with the kiddos. Questions I’ve received: can you kill us because all Americans know karate? Do Americans need oxygen to survive? Are Americans immortal? Is your skin 100 times softer than ours? Pretty confident those ones’ll stick with me for a while.

General contentment comes with removing stressors as well. What does that mean for me? No marathon training! And safaris! Why take 10 hours out of your week submitting yourself to harassment and hills when you can be playing football with kids? Why put in extra hours working, the only one to do so, when you can get up close and personal with elephants and lions on safari in Queen Elizabeth National Park? Exactly. Exactly…

But don’t get me wrong, I am working! As proof, I’ll leave ya’ll with a little doozy from one of my girl students that left me staggering during my reproductive health and sex ed. lesson: “can you lose your virginity by riding a bike or climbing a tree?” Ha. Ha. Help me.