Interesting sight walking home Friday afternoon...

I really wish I could've taken a picture of this, but 1) don't want to tempt fate when armed people are involved, and 2) everyone walks so much slower than I do here that dropping back enough to do it inconspicuously would've been really hard.

But anyway, walking down the street in front of me, having gotten off of a big truck, was a group of maybe five or seven guards. They weren't police, must've been a private security company (Ugandan rent-a-cops, I guess), probably guards for rich houses/compounds going on for the night shift, and got dropped in a group to walk to their respective places.

Anyway, so just kind of idly looking at one, noticing their guns and so forth, and then I see one of them is holding hands with another. Better yet, he's just holding onto the other one's pinky. It was cute, I dare say (though I certainly wouldn't have dared say so to them). And then shortly thereafter those two and one on their right were all three holding hands in a row. The one on the right had an AK-47 slung on his other shoulder.

I really wish I could've taken a picture of it and then captioned it something about how the US military could learn a thing or two...

Although, of course, in truth it was just a casual friendly thing. I haven't noticed it often but I have seen it before. And it's important to note that Uganda is, I gather, a country that is by and large extremely homophobic. For instance, I've heard talk of a law that would ban any and all discussion of homosexuality. Not exactly the first step toward anything better. Anyway, I can't say I really know a great deal about the state of the issue here, except that it's really quite bad, and I don't have a great deal of exposure to local news, so most of what I know is from the Ugandans who hang out at La Fontaine.

The point of the story was just the amusing anecdote about the three big tough armed guys in military garb walking along all holding hands. Alas, I don't have a picture to prove it, though.