Tugende!

The state of the union is that I have eight assignments (in various stages of completion) in the works, and my dissertation, to finish by the end of March.  Lord, please have mercy.  One I plumb forgot about, so we're tackling that right now.   Because it's due on Monday.  I have no idea how that fell off my radar screen, but the deadline was set about four and a half hours ago, so here we are.


But something funny happened in class... we have John and Romans with Canon Musiime, whom I absolutely adore, and would love to sit at his feet and learn from, for, about, forever.  He's got a wicked dry sense of humor, and can be a bit strict, but he's been loosening up a bit this semester.  I presume it's because he's retired from active ministry; his last assignment was as the Diocesan Secretary for the Diocese of Kampala, which kept him pretty busy.

So, we were having a student presentation today, and for some reason, the presenter stopped what he was doing and got into a small side conversation about something.  Me, being tired and somewhat exasperated, told him "tugende!" (two-GEN-day, hard g, like guess), which in Luganda means "let's go!"


My Luganda vocabulary is around 15 words.  I know the basics... sir, ma'am, let's go, thank you, how are you, OK.  By far, my favorite is tugende.  My class is used to hearing me say it.  Canon Musiime isn't.  I thought the poor man was going to fall apart he was laughing so hard - to say I caught him off-guard is a bit of understatement.  Seeing him laugh made me laugh, and I wish I could have taken a picture of the look on his face.  Priceless.


In other news, we had rain.  Hallelujah!  It was a nice, rainy season-type of rain, which we desperately need.  I hope the trend continues.

I think the rain came because Sarah Olmstead came to campus for a visit; she's in Mukono for about three weeks on her world race, before they take off for India.  It was great to see her, give her the tour, and get stuck in the dining hall during the monsoon.  Maybe I'll ask her to come back next Monday to test the correlation does not imply causation theory.