Saturday, October 25, 2014

It’s My Birthday and I’ll....


…….eat all the Snickers if I want to!


My 21st and 25th birthdays will officially be remembered as ones spent in faraway foreign lands. The big 2-1, the rite of passage for the official adulthood in the States for drinking, and the big 2-5 the age to rent a car in most places or realizing you are now a 1/4 of a century old both celebrated in places where neither of those American concepts exist. My 21st birthday was in the Netherlands; imagine having to literally beg the person behind the counter to ask for your ID as you purchase your first bottle of vodka. Now imagine being in a country where most people do not even know when they were actually born, it is hard to fathom such a thing. Here is Uganda however, that’s the fact of life. You ask someone when their birthday is you may get a reply of “I don’t know”. 

How I spent my day of birth…..It has been just any another day in Uganda but there was a celebration, just not for me. The in-charge at the health center has been accepted to a program to further his studies as a doctor and we had a celebration for him. Motorcade, speeches…lots of speeches (even one by yours truly), yummy food, stung by wasp type insect (ya… it hurt), lots of dancing and now relaxing in bed eating a bunch of Snickers one of the nurses was nice enough to pick up while in another town. So that's the first of 2 birthdays in Uganda. 
Hello 25!

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