It's funny to get your socks back ironed.
Let me explain.
Our current arrangement (the standard one for New Hope) is that the ladies do our laundry everyday, and we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with the students from the Institute or other teams that happen to be here. Also, our house/hut is cleaned every day. It is quite a shift from what we're used to.
So the socks- The ladies that do the laundry do it all by hand in a wash-basin and hang it up on clotheslines to dry. The reason that we get our socks ironed is not because Ugandans are fastidious about appearance. (which they are, by the way) It is because there is a bug called a mango fly/botfly that lands on drying laundry and lays its larvae there. When you put the clothes on, the larvae in turn burrow into your skin.....and i'll stop there for our more squeamish readers. (do a google search for mango fly if you're curious)
Luckily, this is easily solved by ironing everything to kill the larvae. So underwear, socks, hankerchiefs and all get ironed. And not with a fancy auto-steaming electric iron, either. They use your grandmothers hot-coal-filled piece of iron.
The team has left, so dinner is much quieter these days. It was nice for me to get a day off today; I was pretty tuckered out from last week.
As you can see, safety is job #1 in Uganda.
Structural integrity is a little different here, as there are no building codes. So 8 foot on center is good enough for these trusses (Some are 9', some 7')
This is Abu and James. They work with me on the guest house.
Uncle Mark fixed the merry-go-round. The kids are very happy.
Heres a link to a video of the kids on the merry go round.
Click Here for Video
We have bats living in our ceiling. They make an awful lot of noise during the night. Their landings into the metal roof are kind of sloppy sometimes. heh.
As always, make sure to click on the pictures to go to the web albums where there are more pictures.
Peace
John
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