tidbits

• It seems to me that Ugandans speak faster when they're praying than at any other time in their conversant life.
• Every church has a slightly different take on the offering basket...at the church on the Mission, they use these plastic buckets that I first knew as "potty buckets" (aka. chamber pots) in the duplex. At the church in Bubandi we went to on Sunday, they use a desk drawer...whatever works.
• Yesterday, when I went to give a dose of IV gentamycin to a sick little baby with meningitis, and there was a bug in the partially used ampule of medicine, I actually considered fishing the bug out and giving a dose from the rest of the ampule...don't worry - quickly the American nurse in me snapped into action, was appalled I would actually consider such a thing, and I went and found a new ampule. Little Atuhaire deserved a sterile ampule, or at least one without a bug in it.
• There are a couple of big malnourished kids on the ward right now..."big" as in like 3-5 years old instead of < 2 yrs...and all of them are just sooooo precious. Constance: you just look at her and smile and shrug your shoulders and she giggles up a storm and hides her face. Biira, gets her groove on to her mom's cell phone ringtone every now and again (yeah, her mom has or at least had a cell phone...maybe she should be buying food for her kids instead of airtime...), and Baraka's face is so swollen with Kwashiorkor, but when I waved to him he totally shot me a huge grin through the puffy cheeks and eyes. We gave him a Hot Wheel car today and I played a bit with him on the porch. The power of a smile. Amazing. I guess i hope that my smiles are as healing to their souls as theirs are to mine.