rain etc

So its raining again today. Since it’s one of the rainy seasons, it rains practically every day or every other day, most of the time accompanied by thunder and lightning. I love the storms. I love waking up to a tremendous thunderstorm in the middle of the night. I just lie there and watch the lightning flash and hear the thunder interrupt the rain or feel it shake the house. That is one time I feel most alive or at home. I prefer being out in the storm, but ill take hearing it from my bed. Most things in kampala just stop when it starts raining. Very few people risk the rains to walk around or take a boda. One reason is that the rains rarely last more than an hour or so. Also, the water washes the trash all over the roads before washing it into the ditches. Once the rains stop, the sun doesn’t take long to dry up the water. Then the city starts up again. When it rains, work for us stops just like the rest of the city. So we have a lot of downtime.

Yesterday the guys and I went for a boat ride to scout out some sites for reconstructing the ferry. No, we haven’t started on the actual boat yet. The containers are still at the border so far as I know. So we look for sites. This time taking a boat across the bay was much faster than driving around it by car or boda. Riding in a banana boat powered by a 5hp engine casts a different atmosphere to a boat trip than a fast power boat, a difference I found quite enjoyable. I saw swamps of papyrus, trees full of weaver birds and kingfishers, and several white egrets, both great and lesser. In one of the palm trees I saw a huge bird that looked like a gray eagle. It was actually a African harrier hawk, still really cool looking.

We had to travel thru the most crowded market I have seen yet to get to the boat dock. But once on the boat we traveled to the other side which looked and felt like jungle. Only banana trees showed where people lived in settlements. Standing at the edge of the jungle looking out to the water, I felt this is the reason people love Africa. This is why I could fall in love in Africa.

p.s. as we closed up the house tonight, something flew in. I thought it was a large hummingbird. Bryce thought it was a moth. It flew around the ceiling flashing yellow and brown. When we finally caught it, which took quite a while, Bryce was correct. i couldn’t catch it with my hand cuz it felt so weird to hold a small wriggling body with flapping wings. Bryce teased me about acting like a girl. The moth looked about 3 inches long with a fat body. We took pictures then I tried to hold it to take it to the door. It wouldn’t hold still, not till I walked outside. Then it didn’t seem to want to leave my hand. Why is that?