Pabo; the 'b' word and little Trisha

I had forgotten how bad the road to Pabo is when you are riding in a SUV Vehicle. I went with Jenni and Pablo who are the two American teachers that have been placed at Pabo this summer. They only have one week left before they will return to America. The school had a celebration day because the organization Better World Books had come to donate some books to their new library.
One of the most amazing things was to walk into their library and see all the shelves of books. They were so proud of the books. While walking through the library all I could think of was my students back in King of Prussia and the HOURS, really DAYS, we spent in the basement of the school packing and organizing books. Some of those very books we boxed up in our school basement, and I saw them sitting on the shelves of the Pabo Secondary School library. I was just amazed at the sight of the Better World Books boxes stacked up around the room. Those very same boxes could’ve been sitting in the basement of Upper Merion Area High School, or maybe I loaded them into a truck with 1000 other boxes and the help of 15 students on a Saturday, or maybe they were loaded into the truck at 10pm while 3 inches of snow came piling down from the sky. Either way, I have now seen the fruits of our labor, and boy is it an amazing feeling to see the excitement on those kids faces when they are able to check out a book and take it home with them.
So at this point I felt like I could not hold anymore excitement or warm fuzzies for the rest of the day, but I knew there was more to come. It was so wonderful to come back to Pabo and be greeted by so many teachers who were there two years ago. Baloo, Dennis, Boron, Peter, Walter, Geoffrey and Christine were all SO excited to see me in Pabo again. I had met some of them at the conference including Chrsitine. If you are an avid blog reader than you realize that Christine is the woman who was pregnant when I was there two years ago. I met her daughter, my namesake. Little Antimango Lisa Trisha is a beautiful little 22 month old Acholi girl. She spends most of her time at home, thus she was pretty shy with not only a ton of Acholis around, but she was real quiet when a Munu (white person- me!) was sitting next to her, trying to play with her. She had a whole pink outfit on and even had little shoes that squeaked whenever she took a step.
I asked Christine what Antimango means and although she had a hard time explaining in English, finally she said it means “it is just there.” As I asked her to elaborate what she explained was that it deals with the way she felt at the time of the birth. She talked about struggling to provide for her family, and the idea of living through those struggles. This may seem very pecular to us in America, but all of the tribal names here are given in a way that it describes the state of the world, or of the family’s/mother’s life when she gives birth. It is very, very common to have a name that some how deals with struggles, or not being able to provide, etc. Oh, and her birthday is September 24th. She’ll be two years old this September.