March & April

I spent a couple of days in Dar after the retreat, working on the TCRS Annual Report at our head office, meeting with the printers, etc. After that, it was back to Kibondo and my normal routine. Thanks to the Annual Report and a couple other projects, I’ve been keeping busy and looking back, I’m not quite sure exactly where March went! There were a couple of fun weekends with visitors/friends, several more successful face-offs between the kitchen and me (I’ve now perfected my bread recipe and added quiche, spice loaf, vegetable soup, cupcakes, Irish soda bread, oatmeal cookies, pancakes, and lemon chiffon pie to my cooking/baking repertoire), and a run-in with an ENORMOUS spider in my den (it was hairy, too. ugh) ... but aside from that, March was a pretty uneventful month.

April, on the other hand, is shaping up to be anything but uneventful. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Nkya family (my former neighbors) was passing through Kibondo last Friday, so I got to see Nkya, Nuru, and little Everbright, and got to hear all about how they’re adjusting to life in Ngara. Then, I made another trip down to Kasulu this past weekend to hang out with Tim one last time before the end of his fellowship. This time, the highlight of the visit was not the garden but the show we saw at CasaDeco (the local disco) Saturday night. I wish I’d brought my camera and taken a video because there’s no way I’ll ever be able to describe the dancing; suffice to say the dancers were moving their bodies in ways I hadn’t known were physically possible – I’m fairly certain the women had quadruple-jointed hips :-) Today, as I mentioned was a public holiday – my personal observance of which has involved going to work anyway, trekking out to a secondary school on the outskirts of town (I’m trying to help a young girl who cleans at our office go to school, but so far the schools we’ve looked at have tuitions that are a bit more than I can handle), getting caught in that rainstorm, finally sitting down and writing up these posts, and heading over to UNHCR for dinner in about an hour. Nothing too exciting, but still a bit different! The really exciting chunk of April is still a few days off – I’m hitting the road again on Friday, heading north to Mwanza, then to Nairobi, and finally to Cairo for 9 days of pyramids, the Nile, and (best of all) Lisa! If the Law of Lisa holds (i.e., that she seems to act as a magnet for amusing/ridiculous/wonderfully fun moments/random happenings), then I’ll definitely be coming back from this trip with lots of pictures and lots of great stories :-D