hillary's uganda journal - july 4

Alright, so I found out that that actually wasn't Julius's mom. So good thing I didn't beat her up. Sam told me that in Uganda it is really, really looked down upon when people have children outside of marriage, and so they try to cover it up, I guess. So, since his mom abandoned Julius after she had him, this other lady decided to take him in as a son. I think it's a fairly new decision though, because he's always told me that he doesn't have a mom. So anyway, that's that, this lady is his mom now I guess.

I only got 1 1/2 hours of sleep last night, don't ask me why. I just laid in my bed for hours. So I was extremely tired today! I spent half of the day in and out of naps at my desk. Then at 5 I went up to play basketball, even though it had been raining all day. My flip flop also broke so I had to walk up there barefooted, which apparently is a crazy thing for a Ugandan to witness. So I had even more staring at me than usual. There's millions of kids here that don't have shoes, but when a white person goes barefoot it's weird, I guess. But it's so much easier walking barefoot in the mud than with flip flops, I'm thinking about starting a trend one of these days.



Bruno, Julius, me, and Masad

When I got to the school I couldn't find any of the guys at first, so Joseph (one of the boys in the choir) wanted to teach me chess. As he taught me, a huge crowd gathered. Which is pretty unnerving since it's a really difficult game with too many rules, in my opinion, that takes a lot of concentration. So, I had everyone telling me what move to make, and after each move telling me what I SHOULD’VE done instead. And then they decided that I wasn't playing up to their standards, so they ended up just moving my pieces for me. I'm not quite sure if it was very educational for me, but I think I got the gist. And I even WON! But I can't really claim that victory for myself. It was a team effort. haha