reunion

It was about a year ago that I left on my research trip to Uganda so some of the ladies I went with and myself got together at the Sapphire Hotel tonight to reminisce and eat spinach dip.

Christina asked us to share out favorite memory from the trip and there were a few that were shared that I'd completely forgotten about.

Liz reminded us of the time we had sent all our dirty clothes off to the hospital laundry. Because we had to pack light for the trip in order to bring over all our donations and teaching supplies we had planned on being able to do a load of laundry mid trip. We gathered up everything and sent it one morning before heading over to the teaching center. About lunch time Sister Olive, one of the nuns who had taken our laundry came back with a laundry sack half full. She pulled me aside and discretely let me know that the launderers had sent back ALL of our underwear! The launderers at the hospital it turned out were all men and in Ugandan culture the men weren't supposed to handle womens under garments. News quickly spread through our group and Asmaa issued an announcement that that evening there would be a party in her room at Ataco for the "dividing of the underwears".  I didn't attend the party because lucky for me the men at the laundery didn't recognize my special religious under garments as underwear at all so it came back nice, clean, and even folded!

One of my favorite memories was shortly after a hike we took through a series of side caves. Our tour guide whose name was Winston brought us back up through the wild and sat us down in an open air picnic building. He then proceeded to tell us the ancient legend of the cave and how it was formed. The story went that the King in the area had a very lovely daughter that was highly sought after by all the men in the kingdom. They hoped to marry her and become the king themselves. The King was wary of this and worried that whoever married his daughter would try to kill him in order to take his throne sooner. To avoid all of this he decided that the best thing to do was to disfigure his beautiful daughter so that no man would want to marry her. He blinded her but the men still came calling. He then cut off her breasts and threw them into the local river.

Here's Winston the breast storyteller you ever met

That's Sister Olive on the right

Now after this point in the story I got very sidetracked because Winston explained to us that in the caves we had walked through there were many stalagtites that dripped what looked to be a milky substance and it was believed that the stalagtites were formed after the breasts were thrown into the river and that they would drip forever in rememberance of the beautiful princess who was mutilated by her greedy and jealous father.  So you can see we quickly made the connection between the dripping stalagtites looking similar to a womens chest ---Our storyteller Winston however seemed convinced that we were not understanding the connection he was trying to make so he told us repeatedly in the story about the symbolism each time clutching his own chest to illustrate the connection and trying to ensure that the 12 women listening knew without a doubt he was telling us all about breasts and their milk. I don't think I would be exaggerating if I said he grabbed his chest at least thirty times, each time saying "Breast" and making eye contact with each of us until we nodded our head in understanding.

When he was telling the story I had the most difficult time keeping a straight face each time he grabbed himself. I'm just glad he didn't grab one of us to make the point even clearer.