Weekend Update

Our first weekend in Mbarara was spent moving into our place and Ben worked through last weekend with the pilot testing of his survey. So, this weekend felt like our first real weekend here in Uganda. Originally we planned on the rather ambitious tourist agenda of going to Queen Elizabeth Park – about 4 hours from Mbarara for a safari drive. We scrapped that plan on Friday after a couple of nights of very limited sleep due to Ani’s teething and Ben’s huge workload. Instead, we went on a beautiful hike on Saturday with a handful of doctors (British and American) working at the University. Ben carried Ani on his back and she seemed to enjoy the scenery as much as we did.

On Sunday afternoon we checked out the English mass at the nearby Ugandan Martyrs parish. Mass was reasonably the same as in the States, although a bit longer with more singing interspersed throughout. I won’t be attending with Ani in the future, however. She was fine, really, by normal American standards, but Ugandan children seem to always be very quiet and well behaved in public, so Ani’s perpetual babytalk babble seemed distracting and inappropriate in that setting.