Priests and Miniskirts

So today officially marks the halfway point in my trip to Uganda. Sadly I don't have anything momentous planned for this post. You'll just have to deal with my usual ramblings.

• Doing laundry by hand sucks. It's not particularly difficult it just takes forever and your clothes don't even get that clean (luckily I don't really care). It takes forever to wash them and then it takes at least a day to dry depending on the weather. I wonder if they have laundromats around here?
• This weekend we had a Benedictine monastic priest stay with us for a few days. He had a lot to say but one piece of his wisdom seemed distinctly un-priestly so I thought I'd share: "A good speech is like a good skirt; short enough to arouse curiosity but long enough to cover the essentials." Last I checked monastic priests weren't supposed to be considering those sorts of essentials but hey, what do I know?
• The priests here really get a kick out of the whole David-Samuel biblical connection. So this week after mass they would just not shut up about it because there was a reading from the book of Samuel. It was the part where I yell at him for having Uriah offed so he and Bathsheba can go bump uglies. They spent the whole day trying to derive some significant parallels about our lives.
• Tuesday when I was teaching the prostitutes I found out that I had been very unclear when I explained to them that I was romantically unavailable. Apparently in Uganda the term girlfriend just refers to a friend who's a girl. Apparently the colloquial term they use here is "girl-lover," which has just a few too many connotations for my liking. Nonetheless I will now attempt to bring the term back to the United States because lets face it that's a hilarious thing to refer to someone as. I can just picture sixth grade boys all across the country: "Will you be my girl-lover?"
• I was offered my first wife this week. By a complete stranger no less. On my way to school some workers randomly asked me if I had kids. I told them I was too young. On the way home they asked me if I was married. I told them in the United States I'm too young for that too. But they said that here I was mature and could marry. Then one of them asked me if I wanted to marry his sister. At first I thought he was joking but then he started trying to negotiate a dowry. After the previous girl-lover confusion I just skipped that entirely and told him I was engaged...
• The nursery kids are now addicted to having my throw/spin them in the air. At first this was fine when only one or two of them knew about it. But now every time I arrive at school or walk near the nursery classroom I get gang tackled by twenty 4 year olds insisting I throw them in the air while five others use me as a human jungle gym and race to the top. In their defense though, they're still adorable.
• Apparently I'm losing weight. After four weeks Whitney claims she can already see it in my face. However I have no way to determine how much weight I've lost so far because there are no scales and the largest mirror in our house is 5 by 9 inches. So who knows. Maybe I'll come back all starved looking and emaciated. That'd be sexy right...