In between, all this time, there was the city of Mbale.
And the market place.
The marketplace where Ana searched and found the best Calvin Klein shirts on earth for twenty cents. The best Liz Claiborne, best name this side of the valley. The best dried fish wholesale, best groundnut paste and sesame, best cloth. Dainty white hands touched the greenish silver of antelope home-made from Zambia, a tingling sensation, smooth fingers lingering over merikkani cloth of Zanzibar, maybe the yellow lions of Kenya touched on a coffee cup. Blue eyes delighted in the raised texture of gold trim surrounding cloth of indigo. Protection cloth, she was told, for the young girls who did not know "what to do with themselves". She was told, the best plastic colanders ever made from China. Sculptured airplanes out of tin, oil can into airplane lamp, the best she had seen engineered and thought out so far. Exquisite sense of gadgetry, the tiny, the large, wear ever forever in there for the flow of their lives.
