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At the invitation of Janet Agenonga, the cleaner at the WellShare office here and the cook of my Monday through Friday dinners, I joined her family yesterday on a visit to her daughter Proscovia at St. Mary's Girls' Secondary School. The school is about a mile away from Janet's home, but the firm, loving grip of the Catholics keeps her daughter out of sight for three months at a stretch. I know this is nothing new for Catholic boarding schools, but I was a little surprised by the isolation. But who am I to say complete isolation isn't what girls between the ages of 12 and 20 need most? As far as I could gather, about 1,000 girls live and study at St. Mary's, many of them hailing from the Arua area. Parents are allowed one visit on one particular Sunday each term, so the the walled school grounds were covered with excited parents and siblings, enjoying a rare visit inside the walls.

The visit involved the four other Agenonga family children, along with Janet's husband, Richard, and a few cousins eager to see Proscovia, or Pross for short. I met the family where they live in the nearby village of Ediofe, which curiously is a sort of Christian enclave from the religious heterogeneity of the main Arua town. So, as any good Christian village sheltered from neighboring Muslims will do, Ediofe eats a lot of pork. This is kind of the pork capitol of the sub-county. In the center of the small village, you can spin around and count at least half a dozen "pork joints," many of them are walk-up shacks where you order your pork and then grab a seat at any number of bars. When the pork is fried or roasted, ready to eat, they bring it to you where you're sitting on a patio, drinking a cold beer. What a world, eh? Clearly, a case of Christian ingenuity.

I toured the school with Janet's family, following Pross around, trying not to get in any trouble as a 26-year-old white man wandering the grounds of a Catholic girls school. I listened as Pross, 16, talked about her studies and doted on the siblings and cousins she sees rarely nowadays. She wants to become a doctor, which will involve another couple of decades of studying, but could eventually lead to a lifestyle a little less austere than the one afforded to her by Catholic school. Included here are photos of Janet, her husband, Richard, her children, Mother Mary, an unusual statue of the school's founder, and the imposing school gates.

On leaving the school, we walked past an aging red stone church, which looked like it could've come from Italy. The sun was low on the horizon and shouting kids played football (soccer) on a wide dirt field. After seeing Janet and Richard's house, we walked a little down the hill to the center of town. There, Richard and I had a beer before I caught a ride back to Arua. It may have been a Sunday, but the din coming from the patio bars in the small town of Ediofe didn't show it. Drunks on the left, drunks on the right. Empty bottles littered the tables and you could see at least one flask of Ugandan gin (that is, not gin) passing around. This, I thought, must be the dark side of the pork joints. A different sort of Christian ingenuity. As best we could, Richard and I talked over the noise of the drinkers and beginning of the football match on t.v. We were interrupted by an especially tipsy man who insisted that I allow him to marry my sister. His words, as I understood them, were "I would like to confer with a lady like you." After making sure he wasn't propositioning me, I explained that I wasn't in a position to give away my sister. He persisted. I told him I'd get back to him.