Welcome to my new blog, and perhaps to a corner of my life.  I have so much to say, but as I've already been in Uganda 2 days and haven't sent much more than a hello, I'm going to start in the middle.

It has been amazing and difficult here.  Amazing country, people & trip.  Difficult learning the ins and outs of adoption here.  Since I've only had 2 meetings about the adoption and everything seems up in the air right now, I'll come back to that with hopefully more clarity tomorrow.  Sorry to keep anyone waiting.

But what I've seen here!  I am staying in a beautiful home of my sister Mary Kay's mother-in-law, Conche.  She introduces Mary Kay as her daughter, and now sometimes me too.  She is an incredible woman  - she runs Bega Kwa Bega, literally "Shoulder to Shoulder", a foundation for Uganda's orphans.  But it does not do anything for adoption - it targets nutrition, clean water, schooling, health.  I will get into that on its' own post as well.  Her home is on a road where many families who work in the US Embassy live.  So there are many Americans here - I am not the only "mzungu".  But she has the required barbed wire around her gated home.  Her doors all have bars and double locks, as does her gated entrance.  Her refrigerator has a lock! Her backyard is lovely - a tropical green patch with all sorts of lovely flowering bushes (bourganvillas!) and fruit trees - papayas (pawpaws), mangoes, avocados and oranges.  Things grow well here on the equator.

Today I traveled into the city of Kampala - the capital of Uganda.  It makes the traffic in NYC seem civilized.  There are many many cars on Entebbe Road - the main road to & through the city.  And there are more walkers than cars and many more "boda bodas" - motorcycle taxis - than walkers.  And the driving!  If I stuck my arm out the window, I'm sure it would have been bloody by the time we got to the city.  The boda bodas pile many people with their many things onto the moped like things.  1 or 2 people in addition to the driver get on, sitting straddle or side saddle.  Often they have all their things piled in too.  I saw a woman sitting side saddle, holding her sleeping baby on her shoulder with one hand, and the back of the bike with the other.  I saw a man with some sort of pipes - sticking straight up- definitely 20 feet in the air.  Another boda boda had some sort of small mattresses, stacked up behind him and over him - he looked like he was on the bottom of a double decker bus.  You could not even see the motorcycle under him.  Other boda bodas were broken down, walking to one of the many people along the road selling tyres (their spelling) or fixing them.  One man, crossing the busy 2 lane road with 4 lanes of traffic stuffed in it, didn't see a boda boda speeding between 2 rows of cars and got his ankle nipped.  Just in time the driver swerved and the man jumped off the road.  I saw him hobbling away.  Conche's sister was killed by a boda boda just last month. 

Now that I can blog, even though I cannot email, I will try to post.  I've been writing it all down, so I just need to transfer it here.
Love from Uganda.