Bomb

At least the most exciting part of my week made international news! Sunday night a group of us went to watch the World Cup Finals in town. As you probably heard, a bomber in Kampala (the capital city 30 miles away) killed 74 World Cup watchers there. I awoke at 7:30 a.m. Monday morning to our country directors (with whom I share a room) talking about a bombing in Kampala and deciding what we should do. A BOMBING in Kampala??!! No WAY!! No WAY!! I was totally disoriented by this; we soon found out more details about the attack. The plot thickened and we found that the bombers were linked with any variation of Al Qaida, Samalians, and the LRA. At that point, we had different news reports speculating. Strangely enough, I’m not scared at all. My only concern is that the Ugandan people kind of shrug it off as an isolated event—and that reminds me all too much of Rwanda. People rationalized away what was happening as “isolated events” until the full force of everything blew up in their faces. I only wonder if this is the beginning of something big—something terrible and big.

So… our group of 24 shacked up in the house and have been under self-imposed “house arrest” until we heard more from the Embassy. A full day of Nertz, Phase 10, Skip Bo, Scum, Monopoly Deal, and Egyptian Rat Screw followed. I didn’t think we could entertain ourselves for so long in such tight quarters, but we joyfully managed. Yeah, trusting the Embassy… dumb idea. They said nothing all day, and nothing into today. I know they’re dealing with a lot of information and deciding what to dole out to us, but luckily we have the missionary’s phone numbers here. One of them called us and told us that they were going to be under official, Church-imposed house arrest because they got wind of more information that the attack was not isolated, and that more bombs were potentially planned to go off this week. We called the mission president and decided that if the Church is restricting travel of its members, we should probably follow suit. Luckily this morning, we found no more threats had happened overnight, so today we are free to walk outside the compound walls—really, that feeling is LIBERATING!

That has been the main cause of excitement.