Dining Out Friday

The orphanage director has some old very close friends, Sol and Jose, who are retired teachers that live and work here as missionaries, teaching and training pastors. They invited us out to dinner at the same pizza place as THursday, but they have a car and drove us. We accepted. Jose was ill and so Sol came without him. Again, we had a very nice dinner and great conversation. She is an interesting woman with a lot of stories to tell. Unfortunately, toward the end of the evening those stories included vivid descriptions of some of the bad things in Uganda, like mango flies. Mango flies are flies that will lay eggs in your clothes and sheets if you hang them outside to dry during mango season. Then the eggs hatch from the heat of your skin, the larvae burrow into your skin and grow into full size maggots which you have to remove. They are very painful and unsightly welts and can't be removed until full grown which takes a 7-10 days. I had heard about this but not in detail. It is not currently mango season here so we don't have to worry about, thankfully, because our wash has been hung out to partially dry. (It takes several days to fully dry in this humidity so she folds it and gives it back to us to hang from the clothesline in our room.) Sol also told us about jiggers that burrow under the finger and toenails, and gave us a lengthy description of how painful malaria is.

When we arrived home, our friends found 2 cockroaches in their room. This, combined with the huge spider they found the day before and all of the stories we'd just heard, incited them to spray an immense amount of raid in their room. I went into the hall to knock on their at just this time, and it opened with a cloud of raid rushing out at me, which got me coughing. Brandon and Carrie came stumbling out coughing and gagging, and had to spend the next half hour in our room until theirs aired out. Despite the raid, they found a 3rd cockroach later that evening, in their bed. I just used a normal amount of raid, figuring that the risks of insecticides had to be almost as bad as the risk of the insects themselves.