mego.

my blog today is dedicated to my mom (mego in acholi) in honor of her birthday! i think it's the big 3-0 (wink wink)!
in the past few weeks it has been the time in the maternity ward which has made me better appreciate the relationship a mother has with her children - most especially her daughter. i have seen mothers spend countless night sleeping on the floor of the ward next to their daughters after they have just undergone surgery or just experienced the pain and beauty of labor for the first time. i have witnessed the relationship women have with each other, which tends to be much different from the women-men and men-men relationships, and i am very thankful to be able to experience that wonderful gift. i have rediscovered it here working with the women at the hospital and want to share a small bit of it with you all.
happy birthday mego!

garlic press.

i almost forgot. so our new place which we moved into a little over a week ago has been so wonderful! we have cooked dinner nearly every night with our french roommate, we've all kinda turned into the three musketeers, or not really but it sounds nice. but yea dinner every night has been wonderful and it seems like no matter what we cook, we need to add some more flavor and it is salt and garlic that seems to always be the answer. salt alissa has covered, she was smart and brought her own shaker to uganda just to be safe. it was last night while chopping up what felt like my 200th clove of garlic i realized that i would be much much happier here if i had my garlic press. next time, i guess.

milk paint.

okay so alissa and i were introduced to a new term this weekend after we finished what we thought would be a fun painting 'party;' which i made the mistake of calling it that because there was no food or music and the people that we work with showed up looking 'smart' (the ugandan word for looking all dressed up and good) when they really needed to be in grubby clothes because we were painting for goodness sake! lejoaney! ('oh my goodness' in acholi) we were painting the outside of the clinic a base coat color before the kids between the ages of 10-17, who are patients at the hiv clinic come and paint a mural this saturday. it started out just alissa and i with a bunch of 'smart' looking ugandans breathing down our necks criticizing us from all sides: the way we painted, the way we poured the paint into the basins, the way we didnt mix the WATER-based paint with water, the way i called this work-day a party...the criticism never ended. ha so alissa and i had to give into some of what they were saying otherwise it would've never stopped so we decided to let some of the guys who were actually helping us paint add some water to the paint, which did the trick no more complaining and it actually saved us some money because we used half the amount of paint that we would had we not added water...it was after painting, which alissa mom kindly informed us that the proper term for adding water to water-based paint is milk paint.