Stoney.

Today might have been the day when the contours of this trip took shape and it became a real and tangible creature with real and tangible claims on my affections.

Autonomy.  I went for a run with Corrine, Brady, and Matt, and came back to find that we'd run about two pages' worth of big-comprehensive-Kampala-map-book each way -- probably close to 4 miles total.  No marathon, but enough to see new scenes at a proximity impossible from a matatu ride.  A matatu is a kombi.  And enough to feel some slender sense of dominance over the geography.  Corinne made homemade chapati for lunch, after which she and Brady and I took off for central Kampala to get Things done on our various Projects in the Uganda Bureau of Statistics -- a tall building with an exotic outside and a shabby inside, both of which feel like about 1963.  It has enormous steel letters on its side reading "STATISTICS HOUSE".  We discovered a restaurant sunken down in a roundabout on Nile Avenue and accessible only by a dark, smutty-looking passage underneath the road.  We never got lost or mugged or kidnapped, facts which I attribute at least partly to my map book.  At Family Home Evening there was another foreigner, even newer than me -- a BYU Public Health Master's student who has been here all of one day.  There comes a point when the mantle of total wide-eyed dependency passes on.  I guess I wrote from that perspective a few days ago, and I'm glad I did because today was the day I realized it's gone.  I mean to her credit, this girl seemed pretty savvy.  Still, I'm not the newest muzungu anymore.

Community.  While we were eating homemade chapatis for lunch, Peter announced he'd received a text message from Lillian, a branch member, who had seen "CRN, MTH, WYN, and BRD" out exercising by her place of work and sent "GRTS to all".  I've been here four days and already someone in the branch knows my name, or at least 3 letters in it.  In the right order.  On the matatu ride into Kampala, I started talking with a guy named Alinda because he had really cool sunglasses on, and he helped me figure out the word the driver was yelling at every stop ("Wandageye" - it is, perhaps predictably, the matatu's destination).  On the matatu ride back to our house in Ntinda, I talked to a dude named Patrick who is a chef at three different restaurants, and who told me his favorite radio station (91.3 FM.  Our phones have FM radio!).  Brady and Corinne and I celebrated our survival watching the French Open in an ice cream parlor.  Family Home Evening with the young single adults of the Ntinda branch was a delight.  We played Simon Says and Duck Duck Goose and then ate chapati and drank watery hot chocolate; I mean it was like a chocolate tea more than anything.  And it was a delight.  I was able to have actual conversations with some of the ward members, who are bright and humble and warm and riotously funny.  Later, Brady and Corrine and I met Matt and Peter at "GABRIELLAZ" for a regular, traditional Ugandan dinner of assorted starchy things and beans.  Washed down with Stoney, the spiciest and most mysteriously beautiful ginger ale I have tasted.  And we just enjoyed one another's company.  Last night we ate at Khana Kazana, the best Indian restaurant in Kampala, and talked about our research and other people's research and our travels and other people's travels.  Which was good.  But tonight we just sat around and shot it and some of us even got more than one drink like they were real drinks.  And it was good.