Day 8: Graduation Day

Today's journal entry is not going to be as long... We slept in until 7 and then walked to school holding a few homemade cakes that I helped Marissa make before bed last night. She's amazingly resourceful. She has a real old-school dutch oven that she bakes these big cakes in. Most of these Ugandans had never had homemade cake before Marissa came. At school I spent the first couple hours making a zillion rainbow daisy chains out of construction paper and decorated the library for the primary school graduation with Josh and a few of the teachers. As I was cutting all the strips of paper and stapling them individually, I started laughing out loud to myself about how ridiculously efficient I was being. I'm a machine. I said outloud to myself, "Just Mickey and Judy puttin' on a show!" (I thought of you, Matty.) A few minutes later, sweet Teacher Jemimah came up to me to ask "Who is Mickey and Judy?" Instead of having graduation on the last days of school, they hold it at the beginning of the next term, just before secondary school starts. The graduation celebration today also honored the graduates from secondary school that AAH sponsors. The graduation ceremony started very late and went on even later. It felt like every single person in the room had the opportunity to make a speech, some in both English and Lugisu. The most moving part of the ceremony was the recognization of the highest scoring student from secondary school, an albino girl named Pennina who has overcome many challenges to graduate in the top 99.8% of her class and get into an excellent university. I cried. She can't see very well, so she asked every teacher to please sit her in the front row and her sponsor got her glasses as an elementary student. Kids made fun of her as a child, but at AAH, children treated her as an equal. Also... Apparently, albino children are highly sought after by witch doctors here because their blood is rumored to heal dying people. So they kill them. Most parents either hide their albino children and don't send them to school - or sell them as babies. She was threatened several times in secondary school and had panic attacks, but Pennina is a survivor. And here she is now one of the most academically successful students in the country, humbly standing on the library stage. Cue the waterworks! After graduation and a brief lunch in the staff room, I was exhausted and not feeling well ...and took a 2.5 nap before dinner. Quote of the Day: After I slipped and almost knocked over the graduation sound system, which would have tipped over the table with 45 candles on it, Dad laughed almost to the point of tears and said "I think the worst thing I ever let you guys do was watch Airplane. You've never been the same."