On Stranger Tides...

In other news... While we were gone, we kept getting called from the team at home with some kind of sketchy stories... A preface, we have a TON of thefts here. We wash our clothes outside (obviously), hanging them up to dry, and they get stolen like there's no tomorrow. One boy came here with 6 shirts, and left here with... only one. I haven't had anything stolen yet, (luckily), but we are getting a guard, so that should hopefully stop it from going on. Anyway, there was a physical encounter a couple weeks ago between a boy on the team and a local kid who stole his shirt... And while we were in Lugazi, the boy who was involved in the fight, and all the other boys who have been stealing stuff off the line came to the front of the gate of our compound, and were just kind of standing around. When Mike went out in the morning, all the boys just kind of surrounded him, yelling and harassing him, which was kind of freaky, so he called us and asked what he should do, and the country directors said to go to the police, and just let them know what was going on. Another preface... the police here are corrupt. But little did they know, they are REALLY corrupt. The police officers went to the home of where they thought the boys lived (but it was the wrong home), beat the kids, and threw them in jail. These are like... teenage boys. We were apalled. Not only did they beat kids, but they beat innocent kids. It was completely ridiculous. A few other ridiculous laws they have here... Homosexuality is punishable by death, and common punishment for theft is burning alive. Luckily, the kids weren't burned alive... But still, we were really angry. Now we know to just... not enlist the police. Other weird stuff that's happened... A lot of men are just kind of jerks. There are these random stands on the highway that taxis stop at, and all the workers just swarm your car with food and drinks, pushing it in your face, trying to get you to buy it. I've had one person like... tap a water bottle on my head repeatedly... its just really obnoxious. We stopped at one of these stand on the way home from Western Uganda because some of us had to go to the bathroom, me and Haley just kind of stood by the car, and a bunch of guys just come up to us and start talking to us and asking us questions, and just staring, and being... yeah creepy. Not the funnest 5 minutes of my life, one of the guys on our team came back and got rid of them, so that was good. And today, I took a taxi to mukono, and we were at another one of these stops, and one of the guys (mom- if you are reading this, i'm not trying to scare you, haha. i'm fine, life is good, and i am always safe!) stuck his arm in and just started like caressing my arm... yeah creepy? so i shut the window on his hand. sucker.