Another day, another community

Today was a vast expanse when I woke up--all three of my Hadassah classes were cancelled for the music competition, so I needed to find some other diverting activities to keep me to keep me occupied.
First, I took an extra shift at SK, teaching reading comprehension this time.  In eighty minutes, we got through about four paragraphs of one of those "world history" newspapers, which you may remember from your grade school days.  It was pretty frustrating, as I was working with S1 and the reading comprehension level, save for one or two exceptions, is pretty low.  Afterwards, I talked with Satte, who I've been teaching with since the beginning (who also happens to be the deputy headmaster) about ways to improve, including a possibility of introducing book reports using the short story books already owned by the school.  He seemed to think it was an interesting idea, so we'll see what happens!
After class, I decided to take another excursion to an outlying Jewish community.  Namanyoni (which is actually the name of the sub-county, not the village, but that is how it is referred to) is not so much outlying as neighboring Nabugoye, and it took me about 50 minutes to walk there.  Once there, I visited the home of Athalia, the sister of Gershom, J.J. et al.  She's the least seen of the siblings around Nabugoye as she usually attends the Namanyoni synagogue, only coming to Nabugoye for committee meetings, so it was nice to be able to spend some time with her.  She told me about traditional weddings here (average length: 9 hours) and her personal struggles as well as communal, religious ones, including the lack of a sefer torah (one should be coming from Nabugoye, but it hasn't made it yet).  She also showed me pictures from her daughters' bat mitzvah, which was a joint affair with several other girls from the community.  Bar and bat mitzvahs here, while preferably taking place at the traditional age, can actually take place when the boy or girl feels ready to read from the Torah and lead the service, which is often at least a few years later.  Thus, a bunch of girls, including two of Athalia's daughters, Rabbi Gershom's daughter and several others all had a joint affair.  She also told me about her life in Namanyoni, the crops she farms, the animals she's had over the years.  It was a nice, relaxing way to spend an afternoon.
After chatting with her for a while, two of her smallest daughters led me to the synagogue, which they jimmied open.  The building was very similar to Nabuogoye, somewhat surprising after the miniscule structures at Nasinye and Putti (though those are both being replaced).  On the walls were some entertaining, chalk written (presumably by children) transliterated Hebrew phrases, like "Shavua tova!"sic ("Good week!")  Inside the ark was one, miniature Torah scroll, waiting for a big brother from up the hill.