A group of medical students dropped by to stay at the guest house tonight. Two are from Stanford, another from Canada, serving six weeks residency at public hospital in Kampala. They drove here to trek with the mountain gorillas, successfully. They were staying at one of the resplendent lodges nearby but left….due to mice in the rooms.

One of the girls was telling me about this on the patio before dinner and said they just had to leave. Of course, I had plenty of discretion NOT to mention the rodent infestation underway in my room. I walked in my quarters, turned on the light, and saw the critter climb the wall near my bed to his exit near the ceiling.

After dinner, I walked in again to get my head lamp, and the rat ran up the wall again. I told the manager, and he vowed to get the rat tonight, while I went to (my first) choir practice.

One of the guests shrieked when a lizard crawled from her pants while she was in the loo. I remarked to her that, heck, this is rural Uganda. There’s a lot to like about lizards. They help keep insects under control.

So imagine: the manager and two others in my room, waiting, chasing and clubbing at the critter, and rearranging the room in the mayhem, while in the adjacent dining room, the guests were cheerfully oblivious to what was going on next door, chatting up the staff doctors about the vagaries of clinical care in the jungle.

I find the scene so deliciously funny, so typically African. Great fun tonight.

And the mouse/rat lives on. For now….