Tomorrow I Fly

Hello, all. I am quite annoyed with slow, slow, slow internet.

I’m not feeling particularly eloquent this afternoon, so I will type the updates and a few stories, then I will go home and eat some fat, oily food, enter my mosquito net/bed cave, and sleep for the rest of my life.

First of all, I’ve managed to injure myself. It’s pretty humiliating; here’s the tale: I was playing soccer with a local team of kids that the Youth Outreach Mission (one of our partner organizations, based here in Lugazi and composed of splendid secondary- and university-aged Ugandans) started along with a HELP International volunteer, a few years ago. Don’t ask me why I agreed to play against these kids. They’re ludicrously gifted at football. But play I did, and it was so much fun! Anyway, in the midst of getting my butt kicked by a twelve-year-old, I tripped over a mountain in the center of their field and annihilated my knee. I stayed on my feet, but all I could do was say, “Um…. I think I may have hurt myself.” It was discomfiting, to say the least. I had to be assisted off the field, while a million little African school kids stood on the sidelines and mocked me in Luganda. Great. Then Wilson, the Youth Outreach president who’d been playing with us, knelt by my foot and asked if he could give it a twist. My answer was a vehement no, of course. Why the eff would I want him to twist my throbbing appendage? No. No no no. Apparently that’s what they do here, when you hurt your legs. What a beneficial practice that is.

Anyway, the knee’s not so bad anymore, just rather tender and sore. I’m pretty sure it will improve with time.

Um… oh, I am going whitewater rafting on the Nile tomorrow. Class five rapids, I’m told. It should be terrifying; I’m quite looking forward to it! And later tomorrow afternoon I’m scheduled to have a leisurely bungee jump over the Nile. I’m sure I will be absolutely petrified, but if I don’t go for the rest of my life I will think, “Why the freak did I pass up an opportunity like that?” So I’m bungee jumping. If I stop updating, that means I’ve died.

That sounds rather severe, for those with weaker constitutions. I won’t die! The company is legit; run by Australians, I think. Maybe. I promise I will survive and tell my tale upon my next blog post! Woot!

On the work side of things, my life is going rather smoothly as well. A few other volunteers and myself are working on organizing the Eye Camp, which will give a ton of local people their eyesight back! I can’t wait; it’s going to be spectacular. Preparing is pretty tedious, but it must be done, I guess. Sometimes it gets discouraging, trying to arrange and organize and manage so much when there are so few of us and such little funding. But then something happens that completely validates what we’re doing! This afternoon I went to a business training with a group of widows. I only went because one of the volunteers needed to get there and she had no one to walk with, and I had helped to create the group in the first place, so I tagged along. Thus, I was draped over a teeny little chair in a primary school classroom, simmering in the boiling heat and trying not to lose consciousness… then our translator mentioned that the women were asking about my friend Cecilly’s glasses, and saying that many of them suffered from eye problems. They wondered if there was some way we could give them eyeglasses.

One thing that I’ll say, here in the middle of my story, is that, even though we’re here to help as much as we can, there is really very little that we can do, in the long run. We can help in our small ways, and give what little we have to give, but so frequently people ask us for help, and we have to say that we can’t. It’s truly heartbreaking. So when these women asked about their eye problems and I got to speak up and tell them, “Yes! We can help you!”, it was basically the most fulfilling little moment of my life. Yay!

I have to wrap this up, I think. Wilson, one of my very favorite Africans, just sat down next to me at the internet café. Yes, the same Wilson that wanted to twist my annihilated knee. Yeah, have African friends. I’m cool like that.

Bye everyone!