Carrots, A Hut, and Reusable Bags

I have three things to tell you, as referenced in the title of this post:  

First: I have been wanting a garden for years.  Years.  Imagine my excitement, then, when one of the guys working with my roommate's NGO stood outside my window the other day and held up three beautiful, freshly-pulled-from-the-ground carrots.  I went crazy over them, and ate my first raw carrot in Uganda.  Carrots here just aren't very good - that weird woody inside part of the carrot is always really big and really woody.  This wasn't much different, but I ate it anyway, for the shear novelty that I was eating a carrot grown in MY yard.  Someday I WILL live in a house with a yard that I can plant my own garden in.  But until that day, playing around in my roommate's garden will suffice.  I can't wait to try whatever comes up next!

Aren't they just so pretty??

Second:  I visited St Monica's compound again this week and this time was able to see the new water-bottle hut they finished a couple months ago.  It's pretty awesome.  They have some volunteers staying there at the moment, and the volunteers were put to work painting the inside of the hut.  It's a pretty large hut, and is "self-contained," meaning it has its own fully-functioning bathroom.  And it has electricity.  Oh yeah, and it's made entirely from water-bottle bricks.  So dang cool.

You can see the dots on the top half?  Those are the bottoms of the water bottles.  

The water-bottle caps in a diamond cut-out on the inside of the hut.  

The hut's in a bit of disarray from the volunteers and painting, but you get the point - that weird protrusion is the bathroom.

Painting volunteer.

Third:  I am on a one-woman mission (well, I guess everything about my being here has been a one-woman mission all along....) to train supermarket checkers in Gulu what to do when someone says either, "I don't need a bag, thank you," or "can you put it in this bag I brought, please?"  It's difficult every time.  I'll buy a single item - say a bag of sugar.  It's in its own bag already, why do I need another?  So I'll say, "No bag please," and by the time I've finished paying and go to grab my sugar, it is inevitably in a bag.  And then I have to take it out and explain that I don't need the bag, but please do re-use that bag for someone else, and I get all manner of strange looks.  If I have many items and ask them to use the bag I brought, they just set my bag aside and use their own anyway.  Oyoyoy.  My trip there Saturday evening was especially difficult.  The store's new produce section is in one part of the building, but you have to take it to be weighed in another part.  Everyone does the same thing we do in America - use fifteen different little plastic bags for each peice of food they are purchasing.  Three tomatoes?  That's one bag.  One green pepper?  Second bag!  Of course my being the "recycling lady" here in town means I cannot indulge in this behavior, so I just put the produce in my basket - bag free - took it over to be weighed, and this is how I received it back....

Sigh.  What could I do?  So I took it and headed to the checkout stand, where I had to tell the nice man bagging that I didn't want a separate bag for my eggs three times, and then STILL had to take them out of the bag, and said, "Please, let's put them in here," referring to my own bag I'd brought.  Finally he said OK, and proceeded to put the rest of my food in his own plastic sack.  I just started laughing at that point, and trying not to be offensive, once again took everything out of the store bags and put them in my own, resting the eggs carefully on top.  (None of them were broken when I reached home, even without his extra plastic bags.  Imagine.)  I really prefer to use the main open-air markets that stink of fish, but where you know the produce was grown in some woman's back yard, and she'd rather keep her own expensive polyethylene bags if you have one already.  But when you're in a pinch late Saturday night.....

Awesome headless self-portrait of me and the bag I knit on the plane ride over.  Yes, I make the best environmental spinster ever.  

Moral of this story, boys and girls, think of my struggle here in Uganda, and when you go to the store in America, bring your own re-usable bags (or reuse a plastic one!) where the cashier will easily know what to do with them and just might even give you a couple nickles back for bringing them in.  Don't let my efforts be in vain!