Ugandan birds are terrifying. While China was filled with furry and adorable puppies, the streets of Kampala instead run amok with giant storks. Their wingspans are larger than a middle-aged Kodak employee, and they swoop dangerously low over taxis and hapless pedestrians. They have huge drooping sacks under their beaks and pink humps that look like tumors on their backs. In short, they are evil, and I will add them to my list of things that are evil.

things that are evil:

the US farm lobby
the Chinese government
storks

so far everything else about Uganda has been great. My homestay family are dairy farmers who live in what, for all practical purposes, I will call a village on the outskirts of Kampala. We have four cows and an adorable baby calf with the longest eyelashes. We also have three little pigs, a dog, and mango, pineapple, papaya, and guava trees in the backyard. There's no running water and a pit latrine, but China prepared me well for that! I still have to work on bathing properly out of a little plastic basin. My host sister Rebecca is the same age as me and helps me out a lot. She also takes care of a baby named Tim who was orphaned and lives with them. Tim likes white people (mzungus) a lot and cries when I am not holding him. I have some other siblings older than me, and two cousins about 8 and 12 who came to live with us when their father died of AIDS. The family, like a lot of families here, is polygamous, and my host father leaves at night to visit his other wife.

lectures so far have been awesome, exactly what I came here for. We're at Makerere University taking Luganda classes and a seminar on development studies. It's kind of frustrating to get to school, though, because everyone lives over an hour away. There are no buses here, just shared taxis that squeeze as many people in as possible, and you have to figure out which route goes where you're going or else you get totally lost.

I don't miss American food at all. I have chai three times a day!