July 4th. The 4th of July. Independence Day. America's Birthday.
All good reasons to celebrate no matter where you are, even in Uganda. Since we had a lot of work to do we couldn't take the day off, but that doesn't mean we didn't do anything to celebrate. In fact we got pretty wild.
What did we do, you ask? Ate hamburgers and milkshakes, of course! Well, we WANTED to eat milkshakes, but the restaurant we were at didn't have all the ingredients for them so we had to settle for smoothies.
While sitting at the table waiting to get our patriotism on we are spotted by Ali, the man who teaches language lessons to most of the Mzungus in Jinja. Katie and I hadn't seen him yet this trip (though we'd often heard him downstairs in the mornings for Lori's lessons) so Lori asks if he remembers us.
"Do you remember Katie and Sarah?"
"Of course!" he replies as he shakes Katie's hand, not quite convincing anyone of complete recognition. Then he reaches over to shake my hand, a perplexed look on his face.
"Do you remember me?" I ask. His face falls into even deeper furrowed thinking and then -
"Ah! She has come!!!!" Click. Ali has now locked into who I am and, apparently, how much he likes me, rushing over to my side of the table to shake my hand again. This time with GREAT enthusiasm.
"How are you?! How is America?" he peppers me with questions. By this point everyone else at the table is just watching, dumbfounded by what just happened.
After Ali left, we fell into a fit of laughter.
"Whoa, I had no idea Ali liked you so much!"
"What'd you do, pay him extra?!"
"Geeze Katie, what does that make you? Chopped liver?"
And many more similar comments flew back and forth across the table. A short time later our food arrived and we tucked right in, finally leaving with full bellies and satisfied airs.
Happy birthday America, it was one to remember.
I was a bit nervous to see how class would go. I was
preparing for the worst (i.e. each class being a near if not total disaster and
having to make monumental revisions to the curriculum) but hoping for the best. I had no idea how it would go - I’d basically
just met Margaret and had no idea of her teaching style or how she’d
work with Sarah, among a number of other reservations I had
As mentioned at the beginning we have 8 students, 7 women
and 1 man. We also have a ‘teacher-in-training’ named Sylvia. She is a member
of the group but already has tailoring skills and will be learning how the
class is taught from Sarah and Margaret so she can teach it to future groups.
The classroom is small and each sewing machine is shared by two students. The group varies in age, but I would say the
majority of the students are pretty young (at least in comparison to the
business classes, where most of the students were significantly older). 
So far the four classes we’ve had have gone well. All of
the students seem to be very smart and eager to learn, which is exciting and
encouraging. However, it became quite clear this last week that learning
measurements and how to read a ruler/tape measure is much harder than I remembered. The result of this is getting behind
schedule. My goal 
