Flame Lilies

I'm in Kabale, and about 40 km for the Rwanda border. It's a decent size town. The kind of town where they have internet cafes, for example. I'll spend a day here and then cross over.

But what I most wanted to say was that I saw some flame lilies yesterday and it filled me with so much joy.

When I was a young boarding school student, the flame lilies used to bloom right before Christmas vacation. The older kids would take an afternoon and collect buckets and buckets of them to decorate before the parents arrived.

I remember one time a group of us had to testify at the court in Mwinilunga. The case was about a guy who stole a bunch of things from the school including my towel and my Hawaiian shirt. That's not important for this story.

On the drive back to school, we passed through an area with lots of flame lilies. The deal was the car would go pretty slow so we could stand on the rear bumper and if we saw one, we'd jump off, grab it, run and cling on again. I had never jumped off a moving car before and didn't hit the ground running. It wasn't like I fell over, it was more like I stayed standing up but the ground came up and smacked me in the face.

Ha ha. You get better with practice.

I still remember that day as one of the best ever.