Eating Grasshoppers

While there are new things to experience and adjust to every day here in Uganda, yesterday I did something I would have never in a million years considered doing elsewhere. I ATE GRASSHOPPERS. I was so freaked out and grossed out by the idea that the whole thing was caught in pictures (my face doesn’t adequately show my fear). These insects are considered a delicacy here. They travel up from the Saherra Dessert and are only available for a month or two. People catch them, pull their wings off, and then fry them and chow away…eyes and all. Once I swallowed my pride and picked one of the dead bugs up to finally put it in my mouth….

I discovered they actually weren’t that bad. Maybe even almost good. I’d be more apt to say that if they didn’t look and feel so nasty in my hands.

Besides eating insects what have I been up to you ask? Well I have a new best friend. Albert, from my last post, one of the pharmacy nurses’ sons, comes to the pharmacy after school every day (around noon). I had brought a coloring book and crayons with me from the US and gave it to him on Saturday. His joy over this simple gift was too beautiful for words. Just look at his little face!

 

He now walks into the pharmacy and searches immediately for me, grins, grabs his coloring book and pulls up a chair as close as he can next to me. Yesterday I had my Ipad out for drug research, so when he came, I turned a Disney movie on for him and he thought it was pure magic. He kept alternating between beeming at the computer and turning to grin at me. I taught him to give high fives (I hope that’s culturally acceptable) and he can now recognize fish (He was watching the little Mermaid) – in his words, “FEESH!.”

Tomorrow I get to talk to one of the sisters who teaches in the grade schools. I asked if I could come work with the children a day or two and we’re setting that up tomorrow. I’m super excited! I’m also going with one of the pharmacists on a patient home visit. This man was just released from the hospital, but is not well still. I have been labeled the American asthma expert and am being summoned to his home to manage his case.

Random fact, but people here have no idea what daylight savings time is, which means that I am now 1 hour farther from home than I was before all of you Americans fell back and hour.

One more.  Here in Uganda, people don’t “honk” their horns when cut off in traffic, they “hoot” them. J