Jinja/Kakira: I'm glad you think of me as the misunderstood teenage daughter.

Life is a lot less fun when eating is not something to look forward to.

Yeah, whatever I had, it wasn’t malaria, so I’m still sick. I went to a good doctor today instead of the people at Crescent Medical Center and she thinks I have a bacterial thing. Hopefully I’ll know by tomorrow when my lab results are in. But for the past week, every time I have to have a meal, it’s literally painful. My host family thinks, for some reason, that when you have stomach problems you should eat big meals, so they get upset when I don’t want to eat much. Mama Fina hovers and makes me feel guilty about not eating, and I’m just like, “I’M DOING MY BEST, OK.” It’s really frustrating. Also, I have to say, I’m getting sick of Ugandan food. It’s not bad, I’ve just never lived in a place where you literally eat the same four things every single day—matooke (steamed and mashed plaintains), beans, rice, and greens. I never considered how most developing countries have only a few staple foods—and that’s actually all the people eat. People always ask what I eat in the U.S., and it’s hard to explain, since there’s so much variety. If you name one or two things you like, people tend to assume that you eat those things every day. That is one thing I really miss about the U.S.: variety. But when you can barely get the food or the water to cook it with, I suppose that it isn’t something you worry about. First world problem right there.

I haven’t posted in a bit since I have just been lying around sick, so not much to report. (I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for my next utterance.) Becky and I went to Jinja today to shop around for some stuff for the agriculture project—mainly improved maize seeds, saucepans to cook the porridge, and hoes for digging/planting. We bought ten hoes with handle sticks for a little less than we’d budgeted for—score!—but none of the agriculture stores had the seeds we needed, since farmers are on those seeds at the beginning of the planting season like a mother on Target at 5 am on Black Friday . Hopefully they will be in tomorrow.

Our search for saucepans took us to the scrap yards at the edge of town, which were almost their own village. The place was a labyrinth of stalls with ridged metal roofs where men worked on metal using hammers and iron pegs. Scrap is big business in Uganda—in fact, it’s probably the reason that the borehole at Kagogwa Primary was broken in the first place. Many of the boreholes in Uganda are vandalized because people want the parts from the pumps so that they can sell them. The fact that any usable metal is so valuable results in the sprawl of the scrap yards, which I’m sure exist in Kampala and elsewhere as well as Jinja. While we were walking through looking at different sizes of saucepans, I kept trying to think of the best way to describe it—the only thing I can think of, and this may be totally off-base, is what shipyards in Dickens’ London must have looked like. It was really cool, but kind of scary, since it was clear that it was not a place that mzungus went (ever) and we were drawing even more attention than usual. We weren’t able to get a fair price for anything, so we made a deal with a shop owner near the big market in Jinja for a special order of saucepans that will be less than a third of the price of one saucepan in the scrap yard. So that was work today—hopefully we will be back up at the school soon to meet with parents, which we haven’t done yet. We only have a week and half of work left!