Fruit, fruit and more fruit!

Hi All
This is Lorenda again. I have spent the last three days “up country” in Gulu. My friend Judy was doing a “facelift” on the guesthouse there and needed a hand to get some things finished before a huge team arrives within the next couple of days. Judy and some of the Living Hope women had already done a lot of the work like sewing the curtains and toppers for all the windows. We spent our time getting curtain rods up and hanging all the curtains. Judy had also started to recover the chairs in the dining room- she had the majority done, but we still had ten more to do while we were there. I’m not sure how much help I was, but we got them all done and they look great!
The road to Gulu is a very interesting one! The road itself is in horrific shape and has a lot of traffic on it. The actual distance is just over 300 kms, but it takes 5-6 hours to get there. We also had a team of four Americans in the same van as us- 3 of them had been here before and one was a “first timer”.  It was hilarious to listen to Adam (the first timer) as he commented on the road, the landscape, the trip in general- it certainly made the trip go much quicker.
It is “full on” mango season in northern Uganda. The landscape is covered with thousands of mango trees and every tree is absolutely loaded with up to 1000 mangoes. There literally are mangoes everywhere and we took full advantage of that! One day I ate 5 mangoes, as well as having fresh squeezed mango juice at every meal- did I mention that I like mangoes a little? On the way home we stopped at a stand to buy some mangoes and I ended up buying 29 mangoes for 2000 shillings! At today’s conversion rate, that is just under 80 cents for 29 mangoes- less than 3 cents per mango!
We also picked up “a few” pineapples on the way home. In the end, we had 29 pineapples in the van with us! Each one cost us 1000 shillings- yep, that’s under 40 cents for a huge, juicy, fresh pineapple. Some days it is really tough to be here!
Judy bought 8 huge avocadoes (about 4 or 5 times the size of what we get at home) for 2000 shillings. She also picked up a few mangoes and then we bought three bunches of bananas while we were waiting in the road construction area. Needless to say, if our van had broken down, we would have had plenty of food to sustain us!