Meet Alon

This is Alon, my driver, and this is his car which reliably takes me to and from the clinic. Before I took this picture I asked him playfully how his morning and afternoon had been. He replied in a solemn manner, "Not good." I immediately got serious, thinking he was going to tell me a relative had died. He continued, "I haven't yet taken my lunch."

He can be a pain in the ass sometimes. 'That makes two of us', I wanted to reply. As always, there were many more patients than can be seen in a day, and he had spent the last 6 hours napping in his backseat. And he way over charges me. But I still like him. He teaches me loads of Luganda (the local language), he's usually on-time, and he's really serious about his two little girls going to good schools.

I bought us both a late lunch and we ate sitting in his trunk with our legs dangling over the dirt road. I tried hard to pretend like I cared about his ranting about Manchester United and how they had crushed their last opponent. I wanted to tell him about ND's win over Utah, but realized it would take 30 minutes just to give him a frame of reference. But we just beat USC for the first time in 8 years. He may be getting a short lecture on American football tomorrow...

A Ugandan Thanksgiving

Despite being far away from home, I had much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

I started the day by opening a package from Annie whose contents were kept a secret from me until now. Inside the package were literally dozens of individual letters from the important people in my life: friends and family. High school friends, college and med school friends, cousins, aunts and uncles, Gran, mom, dad, Brendan, and Kate, and the organizer of it all – Annie. It was the perfect way to begin a Thanksgiving Day.

In fact, so inspired was I by the letters I received, that I decided to do something special to celebrate. So Okumu and I walked up a hill into a village to seek the owner of a turkey. As we weaved between the houses it became obvious by the reactions from the children passed along the way, that this was a path not many mzungus had taken. The children were even more excited to see the mzungu walking down the hill – this time with a big, dirty, squalking turkey in his arms. They began following and before long, I was leading a sort of parade with my trophy held precariously in my arms.

After laying down a bed of matooke (banana) leaves on the ground, we slaughtered the bird and plucked it naked. Okumu did the rest in the way of organ extraction while Matt (an overseas lay missionary also from Sorin) and I began calling local religious houses looking for a functioning oven. Ovens aren’t used much here, so when they break nobody bothers repairing them. About 7 km away was Brother Alan’s house and he had an oven.

We were off. I had two plastic bags: in one hand was the bird, in the other were a few Nile Specials to keep us busy during what was sure to be a long baking process. Okumu was the general in the kitchen, while Matt and I made the stuffing and tried to stay out of the way. By 8:45 – only 2 hours late, which, on African time, is basically early – we were on the way back to Bugembe with our prize. Matt was in the front seat with the turkey on his lap and a cutting board beneath so as not to burn his thighs. I was holding the gravy which was spilling out with every bump and pothole we hit, and Okumu was next to me with knife and thong in hand. So - worsecase scenario - the car would break down and we’d still have everything we needed to celebrate Thanksgiving in the middle of the road.

Fortunately, we made it back to Bugembe and the rest of the overseas lay missionaries – Terry, Whitney, Damion, Joella, and Derrick - were waiting to receive us in their house to begin the festivities. They had made all the peripheries: potatoes, cassava, vegetable salad, and apple pie. Luckily, we were also joined by Mike Otremba, my Yale colleague who is in Uganda filming a documentary. He arrived from Kampala minutes before we cut the turkey. We circled around, shared what it was we were thankful for on this day, Brother Alan said Grace, and we enjoyed a Ugandan Thanksgiving.

And it all began that morning with the inspirational words from the people I love most. Indeed, we have much to be thankful for.

-Michael