there is a character here who is quite unlike anyone I have ever met. His name is Mona, the driver, or "Minister of Transportation" as he calls himself. Lanky and mid-forties, he wears the same too-short pants every day that display his fabulous striped knee socks. When I first met him, I thought he was just an offbeat guy who liked to compare stories in life with animals. When he wouldn't admit to how many wives or children he had, he simply said, "like the elephant is big, I am a big African daddy."

But soon his attitudes on gender became the bane of my existence. Mona calls all the guys "General" and slaps them on the back when taking his leave; with the girls, he does not even make eye contact. He only talks to us when giving bizarre advice on following cultural norms ("Do not eat the pork. It is a man's food. If you eat it, it will make your children make the noise of pigs") or when yelling at us for leaving our belongings in the vans. The other day when he was dropping Barbara and I off at our rural homestay, he started turning around and giggling at us as he was driving, and then suddenly screamed and startled us half to death. It turns out he was trying to warn us about about hyenas by improvising being attacked.

another day a few of us were having a focus group discussion under a tree with a self-help group in Mbale district. I suddenly start to hear this snorting noise that I assume must be coming from a cow, only to look up and see Mona, holding a small child he has caught, blowing intensely to get the dust out of the child's hair and swatting his clothes. This went on for a full ten minutes, before Mona came and joined the discussion and started talking about cows or something, I can't even remember.

so we just came back from the eastern Uganda excursion, where we were treated to a full week of Mona's company. We started out in Sipi Falls, where I turned 21 and went on a couple of AWESOME waterfall hikes where we climbed around the rocks and were bombarded by torrents of water. I know that everyone says this about every rock that happens to be large and in Africa, but we found this rock that really felt like pride rock--beautiful and windy and looking out over the savanna--and just spent a long time sitting and watching the sun go down. We were sleeping in dorms built right into the hillside which had spectacular views, and the Academic Directors even got the place to make a huge batch of guacamole for us. I mean, it's green. Not the worst way to spend St. Patrick's Day.

the big event of the week was the rural homestay--we were split into pairs unlike in China, but we were each in our own little village, about a kilometer from the Kenya border. Barbara and I stayed with a jolly politician named Mango who seemed to have significant clout in the village and therefore helped us arrange focus groups right away to do our "participatory rural appraisal" on school dropout rates. It was really cool; our host father brought us to the school and the headmaster talked to us and brought us around to each of the classes, then we talked to a group of parents and a group of teachers. Barbara and I felt really proud of ourselves for getting our research done until our host father asked us if we could recommend any NGOs to help the village. That's when we went right back to feeling useless again.

my rural homestay family actually seemed richer than Kampala family--there was no running water or electricity but the compound had dozens of buildings and huts and they had eleven cows (wow!!). Our host dad told us he had had to pay eight cows to marry his first wife, but "it is necessary to pay a bride price to put a padlock on the wife." Okay.

today I went wading in the river Nile.