Right in my own backyard

Less than 5 days to go...I can hardly focus on anything else! My list is slowly getting shorter, which is a VERY good thing. I went today and picked up the donations I received from The Learning Palace -- lots of markers and crayons and a huge number of pencils -- all great stuff! I went ahead and bought some sharpeners too, otherwise the pencils become alot less useful :-) I'm so grateful to them for their generosity.

I've had some amazing coincidences over the last couple of days. My old neighbor Ciel sent me a link to an organization right here in Portland called Hands to Hearts (http://handstohearts.org), headed up by a woman she used to work with. Ciel said they recently started working in Uganda, and lo and behold, they're based in the same city we'll be visiting! So I called, and long story short, I'm going to be delivering some items for them to their 2-woman crew in Uganda, and those two women are going to come have dinner with us while we're there! We're also invited to participate in one of the trainings they'll be giving the day before we leave. Hands to Hearts is focused on providing early childhood education to the mothers and other caregivers, going over basic health issues and helping them to understand their babies better -- things that seem maybe obvious to us, but are not so for women whose main focus each and every day is to collect enough water, find enough firewood, and try to somehow earn enough (usually less than $1/day) to feed their children at least one meal. Many women are caring not only for their own children but also for orphans that they've taken on due to the long periods of violence the country has suffered. I'm thrilled that this opportunity has evolved out just following a link!

The other coincidence also involves following a link provided by another friend to yet another organization in Portland, this one working in Kenya with the Maasai tribes. Out of all the tiny villages in Kenya -- a country twice the size of Nevada with nearly 40 million residents-- this organization, Jamii Moja (www.jamiimoja.org), is working with the exact same village, and the exact same woman in that village, that we are already planning on visiting! So of course I called them too, and although there's nothing I can help bring over for them, their friendly representative gave me a fascinating history of her involvement with the village, and the work that the Maasai woman Hellen Nkuraiya is doing in her village to help bring an end to the traditional practice of female genital cutting as a coming-of-age ritual, as well as helping to provide a way of making a living for widows who traditionally become liabilities and/or outcasts from the village once their husbands died. You can read more about Hellen and the work that's being done in the village either through Jamii Moja or through the village website www.majimoto.org.

So I am more than a little stoked.

I was also asked about my packing progress, so here's that update. Going over the list of what I'm supposed to bring for the trip, NEUTRAL COLORS were highly recommended for the safari portions. If you know me at all, you know I look like death warmed over in NEUTRAL COLORS. I dug through every single drawer without locating a single neutral garment in my possession. So down I trooped to my favorite resale clothes store (The Dig for you Portlanders), and emerged two hours later -- the poor, kind clerk stayed 20 minutes past closing as I whittled down my original selection of over 50 try-ons -- with two big bags of NEUTRAL COLORS, all for $50! Ya gotta love resale! I will now blend SO WELL into the background, they'll probably leave me behind, mistaking me for a pile of sand.