so i survived the campout for basketball tickets. there is only one word that can describe it -- craziness! there were over 2,000 people camped out in tents, rvs, and moving trucks hoping to get a season ticket. i had heard that the graduate and professional students are the ones at the duke games that are the craziest ones and after this weekend i believe it! you have to be a little crazy to begin with just to be willing to camp out. whatever sanity you had left is quickly robbed by the lack of sleep, loud thumping music, and constant whistling. i think i got 5 to 6 hours of sleep the whole weekend - 45 minutes here, and hour there. i think the longest break we got was 3 hours saturday morning from about 4 to 7 am.

i wish i had a camera to record what happened when the whistles blew. there was one central check-in tent set up. at the tent you had a specific line you had to got to each time to say your name or number and get checked off the list. when the whistle would blow it was total chaos. people would start screaming "whistle! whistle!" and then people would run from every direction to get in line. it was pretty hilarious and just that sight helped me keep a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing. by the end of the weekend we were all pretty well conditioned to the sound of the whistle - there were a few false alarms on saturday afternoon and night because people were watching basketball and football games and the whistles would just set something off in people. i'm a little curious to find out what will happen to me the next time i hear a whistle!

i didn't personally get tickets, but i had gone in with a group of my classmates to improve our odds. out of the 18 people in our group, 7 people got tickets which means i'll get to go to almost half of the home games! this makes me very, very happy.

so on to more important things... there is an interesting situation unfolding in northern uganda. a cease fire between the LRA and the ugandan government has been in place for almost 3 weeks and they are hoping there will be peace talks soon bringing an end to the civil war. the international criminal court (ICC) has issued warrants for the top 5 leaders of the LRA and has charged joseph kony personally for 33 different crimes against humanity. kony and the LRA have said they will only participate in the talks if they are granted amnesty which is not what the ICC wants at all. musevni has granted the amnesty, at least for the time being, stating that this is the best chance they've ever had to end the civil war. needless to say, this does not make the ICC happy. the other interesting part of this is that many of the people of uganda don't want to see kony and the other leaders tried - including some of the people who have had lips, ears, and hands cut off. they want to reconcile and for the war to the end.

i'm still trying to get my mind around this and my class is about to start so i'll have to write more about it later!