Work, rolexes & the best woman ever

So not much has happened since I last wrote other than… I worked. Nearing the age of 30, I can confidently say I have never had so much work to do before in my life. That probably makes me sound like some sorta slacker hobo but it’s totally true. (And I did spend most of my 20s either in uni or drifting around the world so the hobo part is also true…) Last Saturday, after leaving the house at 7am to go in the field and only getting back on the road to go home at 6pm, I saw my coworker and he said, “Diana you must be tired because you are not used to hard work.” And it is damn TRUE. My coworkers always work well past 5pm, which is generally when I try and bolt for the door, and I have to say that (massive but complimentary generalization here) Ugandans must be the hardest working people I have ever met.

During a stopover from my trip to Kampala which feels like a million years ago even though it was only a couple weeks ago.

Anyway, I’m just lying in bed right now typing this up because I cannot decide what to do for dinner. I’m not starving cus I ate a rolex as a snack, which is a chapatti wrapped around an omelet but I will be soon enough. Rolex. Amazing name, right? I know I hit a low point because Honey Boo Boo came to mind. I never watched the show but I did see a youtube clip a while back where the mom makes spaghetti with butter and ketchup. And so I was lying here thinking, what do I have? Spaghetti, butter, ketchup….Honey Boo Boo sketti. Don’t worry; I won’t do it. But I would kill for some poutine and a pepperoni pizza. I was actually completely devastated this weekend because I went to the next town over, Ishaka, because I heard you could get cheese there. All I could find was a couple wheels of expensive mystery cheese and decided I’d only be more devastated if I took one home and it turned out to be horrid. So here I am, cheese-less.

I just read over what I wrote, and I am clearly all over the place. I have a lot going on at work right now and I’m pretty overwhelmed. Working on a template for community emergency transport plans, documenting the Community Development training course, developing criteria, indicators, and modes of collecting data for functional VHTS, and developing the guidelines for a Healthy Homes competition. Just listing all that makes me panic a bit so I may as well go back to thinking about what I should make for dinner…

For my field visit in Ryomiyonga to interview a community savings group about their community emergency transport plan. They are demonstrating how they use a stretcher (ngozi) to transport people from their homes to the main road. However, prior to their transport plan, they were relying on using the ngozi to transport people for hours to the nearest health facility.

One last thing. Last week marked 3 years since the death of my mom and this definitely did not make life any easier. My mom was just the coolest woman ever. One of the many things I was thinking about was how she’d always save my ass whenever I got robbed abroad. I remember when my wallet got swiped in a Belgian train station and I was stranded all by myself, she somehow sorted out a bit of money to me and sent a credit card to my friend’s farm in Ireland where I’d be getting to soon enough. She would’ve made getting mugged in South Africa a lot more pleasant ‘cus she just had that way about her. She was definitely a much needed calm to my crazy. Also, if she were around, she would be printing out my blog entries and sticking them in a binder the way she did with all my blog entries from the entire 8 straight months I spent backpacking Asia so very long ago. Sometimes, I’m still surprised that life can keep going on without her in it, but it does. Just the coolest woman.