Holiday Party!

For the second year in a row, Jeff and I threw a Holiday Party for the massive army of people that work for me. 16 Ugandans were invited, but only 13 made it. We still had up all our holiday decorations as well as 14 big gift bags for my workers. We overworked our little fridge chilling beers and sodas for the big night. We started the night with a bit of socializing and munching on mondazi (fried donut) and g-nuts (roasted peanuts). Then we went outside for some games, which included Who can hit the wiffle ball the furthest? Who can hit the most pitches? Who can throw the Frisbee closest to the tree? Who can throw the Frisbee in the basin? Who can kick the football (soccer ball) closest to the tree? Who can kick the football in the basin? Who can flick the card into the bucket? Who can estimate the distance to that tree stump? The guys really like these outside games. I think they especially like me demonstrating and seeing if I can do it. My two super star wiffle ball hits were ooh’d and aah’d over (pure luck) and my pretty accurate football kicks earned me lots of points with all those guys. At one point, the resident little kid, Atooki, came over and tried to participate. Jeff got a cute picture of him hanging out (see below).

We moved inside for more games and played Guess how many Sodysponia fruits are in the jar and Pictionary. For the grand prize, we made everyone write down how tall they thought Jeff and I were and then the person with the closest total (adding them together) won. One person thought we were 9 m tall together!!! We are giants! We had a three way tie and had to do a tie-breaker (guess what our favorite colors are). We had a two way tie after that one (Alice Akiiki guessed mine was green, but said Jeff’s was white and Dennis guessed that Jeff’s was blue, but said mine was pink). Finally, we had them write down a number between 1 and 20. Earlier in the day, we had written down the number 17 in case we ran into this very situation. Dennis wrote down 8 and Alice was the winner with a perfect 17! Wow, why did I just type all that out? That was pretty boring, huh?

After games, we gorged on tons of food that Akiiki and Abwooli had spent 11 hours cooking. We had mashed matooke (starchy bananas), kallo (millet bread- a doughy, sticky bread), boiled sweet potatoes, g-nut sauce (a thick peanut sauce), farinda (a creamy mashed bean sauce), tomato eggplant veggie sauce, cabbage, and fruit for dessert (fruit salad with bananas, mango, papaya, pineapple, and passion fruit plus a side dish of jackfruit – a super sweet fruit). Afterwards, it was music time, presents, speeches and that was it. It was a good time. Check out our pictures.