Happy Father's Day!!

Because of a combination of poor internet availability, crashing computers and busyness, we have been having a hard time making blog posts. We actually have a couple that are almost ready to be posted but saved on a computer that isn’t working, so we’ll try and update you on the latest happenings. This will be a joint blog post between the two of us.

Laura is leaving early tomorrow morning and will be back to the States on Wednesday; she’ll put up a few more blog entries and then Ashley will start posting by herself again.

On to the big news, Father’s Day was on Sunday! To say a proper Happy Father’s Day to our Dad, we thought we would include a couple of [very manly] animal stories from both of us:

Story 1: Killing, taking apart, cooking and eating a chicken.

Ashley: Learning how to properly “prepare” a chicken was on my maybe list of things to do while in Africa. On Sunday I happily moved it over to the “I’ve experienced this” list. I guess I can really only halfway check it off the list because Kent did the honors of the chop while Laura and I looked on. But it really wasn’t bad. I’m pretty sure I could even do it on my own in the future. I’m also equally as sure that I wouldn’t want to, but at least I know I could if necessary. And the biology lesson that fresh chickens provide is quite interesting. Nerdy? Maybe, but true.

Laura: The chicken was eerily warm inside afterward. After holding it in my arms as it snuggled against me, I wasn’t about to chop its head off. Once it was properly dead, however, (it is true that chickens don’t exactly stay still right after they’re killed) taking it apart wasn’t quite as bad as I had imagined. Surprisingly, I was even able to eat it when we were finished! We had very good chicken spaghetti: if you ever need some fresh chicken for dinner in the future just give me a call…

Story 2: The white ants.

Ashley: This was the second and largest swarm of white ants that I’ve experienced. It’s hard to understand how many bugs swarm during these times. Literally 1000s. You can hear the wings through the windows.

Since Ugandans eat white ants, we helped collect the ones that were making their way into our house. I would say at the end of an hour we had collected somewhere between 200-400. It was quite disgusting, but a very Ugandan experience. And our night guard was happy to have the extra bugs that we collected for him.

Laura: Despite the name, these look nothing like ants. They are oversized, fat termites each possessing four wings, and there were 1000s of them. Since our house is in the middle of huts, the light attracts the swarm. Being outside when one of the largest swarms came, I might have had more bugs hit/crawl/sit all over me in that 1-2 hours than I have in the rest of my life combined.

Because of a varied audience, we thought pictures would be best kept off the blog. If you do want to see some of these experiences just let us know. The videos and pictures are great! Happy Father’s Day, Dad! We love you!!