Deja Vu

We leave early in the morning for Kampala. We buy snacks for conference. The chocolate yogurt was warm by the time I ate it and tasted weird. I threw it away and Jeff and I starting eating our generic Pringles, which turned out to be nothing like Pringles at all but more like those rice cake health snakes. We’re disgusted. We catch three boda bodas to Kololo and I feel even more in a gang because these are actual motorcycles. After walking everywhere, it’s really fun to be on a motorcycle.

We sit down in church and get ready for the broadcast. And we see President Faust. Was it just a rumor that he had died? Then with the first speaker we realize that this is the conference from six months ago. We are so confused. We follow along with the Ensign we’ve been reading all week.

We asked and found out that because Kololo doesn’t have satellite, and for every stake that doesn’t around the world, they watch the last General Conference. They said eventually they’ll get a satellite. I ask what will do for the conference they will have missed if they start getting current ones and the missionary suggests they’ll have a makeup day or something. Ha.

Marvin is here. Did I write about him? He’s the kid who saw Meghan and I swing dancing and wants lessons because he’s supposedly in some music and dance group. I tell him we can’t since Meghan isn’t here.

I meet Madeline. She is has a Masters in Art Therapy. SVA offers this and I thought about going to school for this for just a while. She is with a group of people from the Chicago Institute of Art.

After the meeting we go to Kampala and get a person pizza. It is so so good and I wish I was eating it right now. The dough was fresh. It was a cheese pizza with tomato, green olives, and feta cheese. Madeline is friends with a Ugandan man named Simon and he’s come to eat with us. His English is very good. He is a teacher at school. We get into a conversation about caning and it’s pretty surprising how he defends the practice.

“Africans are stubborn. They will not learn any other way.” He talks about how when he was in school they would take tests and for every question you got wrong you were caned. I ask him if he was familiar with learning disabilities. Three Americans vs. a Ugandan on the ethics of corporal punishment.

He also said that if you do not beat your wife, you do not love her. He says if you don’t beat your wife, then she asks why you don’t love her. We told him how ridiculous that sounds. He seems to be such a rational person otherwise.

We decide to go to Mukono instead of staying in Kampala for the night. It will be about 30,000 sh cheaper. We check into the hotel that is the floor above where I use the internet. The room is nice sized with a bathroom! And a showerhead by the toilet. No hot water, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t end up taking a shower. I hang up my mosquito net, talk to my mom on the phone, and go into town to look for real Pringles.

Pringles are the only snack food that you can get here that’s familiar. I think the reason they’re so popular is their packaging allows them to be imported without crunching all the chips. I go to four stores looking for bbq and settle with cheezums. True story.