A small tin of tuna costs 5,000/- (£1.60, $3.70), a biggish box of Kellogg’s cornflakes is 23,000/- (£7.40, $17), 500g of cheese costs 24,000/-, Heinz baked beans cost 3,200/- (£1, $2.40) and a normal sized pot of cottage cheese 16,500/- (£5.30, $12). And bear in mind that Ugandan income is usually lower …
Food from the market is cheap, and while there are many stalls selling fruit and vegetables, they all sell the same goods. There will be stall after stall selling onions, carrots, green peppers, potatoes (which they call ‘Irish’), tomatoes, bananas, mango, paw paw and pineapples. You can get apples and oranges (‘orange’ oranges, not the green Ugandan oranges which are quite bitter) though they are imported, and aren’t cheap.
You can’t however get any berry fruits, grapes, peaches, plums, pears, broccoli, celery or mushrooms here.
To maintain my sanity I decided to learn how to cook a few different meals (eg lentil dahl), and splashed out on some expensive items (eg muesli).
It is, apparently, grasshopper season at the moment. You can buy them at the market either raw (green) or cooked (orange). There are people cooking them in big vats and selling them for 500/- per cupful. I wasn’t tempted, even if it would have made my diet more varied!
As I hold the lofty title of ‘Jinja representative for the British Residents Association’, it was my role to round up the local British people for the Remembrance Sunday event, which this year was held at the Jinja African War Cemetery. I have never actually been to a Remembrance Sunday event, strangely enough, and found that it w
as a really nice ceremony. The war cemetery is small and beautifully maintained and there was a nice crowd of people attending. It was however very hot, and the area where we had to stand had no shade. A woman fainted with the heat. One of the people attending was THE doctor from Kampala that all white people go to. He took one look at her, said “Lay her down in some shade” and then left her to it! He had presumably seen it many times before, and sure enough she was up and about in a few minutes. During the two minutes’ silence at 11am, I heard a little boy’s voice shouting “WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?” I turned round to look, and saw that it was the British High Commissioner’s son!
Another thing I have never done is have my hair cut since I’ve been here. I’m wary of using a Ugandan hairdresser as they don’t generally deal with hair like mine, so I usually get Jon to trim it with my dressmaking scissors. When I was back in the UK Jon’s mum (who is a hairdresser) gave me a proper style. Thank you Carol!
However, that was in June and I haven’t had anything done since. A hairdresser from NZ is now working here, though she is quite a way out of town and charges 40,000/- for a cut. One day I was waiting with Jon and Jordan while they had their hair cut by the barber (yes, Jordan finally decided to get his mane cut!), so I had my hair cut there too. It seems to be alright and he only charged 20,000/-.
Jordan’s main homeschool tutor and her family have gone home to the States for a month, so I’ve been teaching Jordan a lot.
Kira’s school term finished on 28th November. As it’s a parent-run homeschool centre, we choose our own dates. We have
three terms, and had a short mid-year break so we could finish earlier at the end of the year as two of the children (ie almost 1/3 of the pupils!) were going home to Australia for two months. We had an early school nativity show on 17th with singing and dancing performances, and a school trip to a rainforest on 19th where the children used the swimming pool and had a meal. The local homeschooled children and their families were invited to join, so we had a decent turnout for both events.It’s all very different to how we lived before.
One day I took a ‘snapshot’ of a morning we were having:
It's 11am, Jordan has just come back from a 2-hour sports lesson. This week it was golf training at the golf course, with the local Ugandan sports tutor Ronnie whose golf handicap is 0. He came back on a boda boda (motorbike taxi), got a drink of water and jumped back on the boda boda to go off for a Maths lesson at his Maths tutor's house. She is a Zimbabwean secondary school Maths teacher who is here for 2 years.
Jordan is very good at sorting out prices with the boda boda drivers - much better than me. “Mum you don’t ask them how much the fare is going to be, you tell them how much you are going to pay!”
Jon is working from home again today as it's the 6th day there has been no electricity at the place where he works. It's a challenge being an IT specialist in a country where there are regular power cuts.
I've been homeschooling Kira from 8-10am, and then took her to the homeschool centre she attends (only seven children there).
I'm about to go to Kampala this afternoon, staying overnight with friends, in readiness for a two-day course there tomorrow.
Jordan has started another carpentry ‘apprenticeship’ with a different Ugandan carpenter. Has made computer desk – very handy – and is now making a ‘geek workbench’ which Jon designed. Both he and Jon are planning to use it in the garage to do and make geeky things.
He’s supposed to be going to carpentry twice a week, but cannot go if it’s raining (not sure why… everything stops here when it rains). It’s the rainy season at the moment, which hampers things a bit. Today he was meant to go but the carpentry workshop has had no electricity for a week, which doesn’t allow him to do the work he needs to next.
Jon and I have finally got rou
nd to painting the canvases we bought a few months ago. We had to get the paints from Kampala, and it took us three trips to find the place! We bought just five colours, red, yellow, blue, black and white, and are making all the colours we need from those. My canvases are 40cm square and are quite simple. I painted the colours to match the sofa, the cushion and the lamp. I want to sew small beads onto each canvas in a pattern that signifies the three parts of the world I’ve lived in: the UK, NZ and Uganda. For NZ I will do a koru shape - ie spiral, which is a shape significant to Maoris. For Uganda I will do the crest of the Crested Crane, the national bird of Uganda. For the UK, I did think of doing the top of the Catholic Cathedral in my home city of Liverpool, though it will look very similar to the bird’s crest, so I’m still thinking about that one. Any suggestions you may have are most welcome.
Mind you, I don’t think you can find any beads here, so it may be a while before I can do it. The craft tutor at Kira’s homeschool centre got some, but he had to ask a friend to bring them from Kenya. Whenever people travel to a different country, they will always have a list of things that people have asked them to bring back.
Jon’s canvas is huge, 1.5m by 1m. He’s drawn a rough sketch and has just started painting it.
We have started to put curtains in our house. The house was newly finished when we moved in and had no curtains at all. We put sheets on the bedroom windows and have managed without curtains in the living and dining rooms. The landlord said he would let us choose and pay for the curtains, and then take the money off the rent. However we have been hoping to buy the house, and if that happened we would put good quality curtains up. We have been asking over a period of months if we can buy the house, but the answer has been ‘no’. I don’t blame him though, I wouldn’t sell it either, it’s in a good area and will increase in price.
So we’ve now started curtaining the place and it’s amazing how different the rooms look with curtains. They’re something you normally take for granted, but it’s been quite an exciting experience for us.
I’ve been mainly using a local curtain shop to buy the material.
There are many, many people here who sit in the market or
outside shops with treadle sewing machines (as you don’t need electricity for them) making a variety of items. The curtain material shop has a woman who sits outside with her machine and makes up the curtains. We chose the material and went back an hour later and they were already made. However, we have had our usual challenges of making ourselves and our ideas understood, and I’ve ended up with not exactly what I asked for, but they are curtains and they are mainly OK.
Today I went to order curtains for the living and dining room. The sewing machine lady was asleep on a mattress at the back of the shop and we had to climb over her to see the material. The average Ugandan working in a shop or market stall, works very, very long hours and it’s very common to see people asleep at their place of work. The Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 mentality is a world away from how most Ugandans live. Their work is virtually their life, and they live and work long hours, in a community setting. Some friends or ours came back from a party at 3.30 in the morning and there were still many roadside stalls open.
There have been times when I haven’t been able to buy things from the market because the owner of the stall has been asleep.
As we can’t buy the house we are living in, we have been looking around for another one to buy. We don’t want to live in it, as we are happy where we are, but want it as a rental property. We have found a nice one, and it happens to be one we looked at (once) last year when we were looking for a house to rent. We met with the owner and asked if we could look round it again. He was surprised “You have already seen it. It has not changed.”
He didn’t arrange for us to have a look at it, but we know the people who are living there and had a look anyway. We are now in the process of getting some reports on it from the electrician and builder.
This billboard poster never fails to amaze me, every time I see it.
I cannot understand why you would be drawn to join a bank which assigns you a GIGANTIC banking consultant who produces a tape measure and measures your boob ….
Jon went to Kampala for an internet conference for a couple of days. I don’t know what it is about him leaving, but things go wrong when he does. Just after he left Jordan used the mixer tap in the kitchen. It had been leaking slightly, but it now started leaking a lot, spraying water everywhere. Jordan had a go with the wrench and almost stopped it, but at this point it broke and the water came shooting out, soaking him, then me and the kitchen. We had to switch the water off at the mains. As it was Sunday evening there was no point calling a plumber, as we needed a new mixer tap for him to be able to fix it.
I called him the next morning. I think he must have been walking past our house as he arrived almost instantly. Anyway he went off into town and got a new mixer tap and fixed it.
“You need a new washer” he said “this one is too hard. It needs to be flexible.” He showed me the old, brittle washer and then showed me the new flexible one he was installing. I thought it unusual that it was red and yellow. Then I looked on the floor. There was half a flipflop / jandal there with a circular hole in it. That’s what he had used to make the new washer out of!
One of the things that I find quite affronting (if that’s a word) is the tone of the wording on the electricity and water bills. Even though I always pay our bills when they come in (we pay by cash or cheque – I wouldn’t trust the banks to sort out APs or DDs) I never feel they really appreciate my custom or willingness to pay promptly:
Water bill: ‘Dear esteemed customer, we would like you to enjoy our services without any inconveniences. We encourage you to urgently settle your water bills to zero upon receipt of this invoice to avoid being disconnected. Please expect no further warning.’
Electricity bill: ‘Thank you for keeping your account up to date. You are however advised to settle the current bill by the payment due date.’ (Why do they need the ‘however’?)
Similarly when I saw the school reports of the three children we sponsor, the wording seemed very old fashioned and harsh. It was like looking at the school report my Nan had shown me. My Nan was born in 1911 and her report was from around 1916. There were no positive words, no words of encouragement on the children’s reports. Just words telling them they weren’t performing well enough. Even the report of the littlest one, aged 5, who came 2nd in class said ‘Try harder next time’.
The people who asked us to look after their dog, Lotte, were due to come back to Uganda in November. However the woman is having a baby and as they are German they are going to go to Germany to have the baby and will return in August next year. This is good timing as that is when we plan to leave, and they would like to have the dog back.
The man, Jens, came back for a week recently and came round to our house. Lotte hadn’t seen him for a year but recognised him as soon as he came near, and was very excited. It was very sweet!
I’ve been doing some presentation skills training in Kampala for the British Council and am fortunate that I can stay with our ex-neighbours Eric and Lindsay, and Lindsay’s teenage twin children. They have 4 dogs, one of which ate a hairy caterpillar recently and came out in a bad rash all over its face. Another one ate a dead rat and as a result got botulism. It has been lying paralysed, unable to move. Over a period of weeks it has started to regain some movement and is now using its front paws in order to drag itself around.
One of the things I like about running presentation skills courses is that people often give interesting speeches. One of the attendees on one of the courses – James - told us about an incident that happened when he was 4 year old. He used to live in a village 260km from Kampala. His father was the village chief and was invited along with some others to go to Kampala. As James was the oldest son, he got to go too. None of the villagers had been to Kampala, though they had all heard that it was a place where it never went dark. Visiting Kampala was such a momentous occasion that the night before the group left, the whole village came out to celebrate.
Early the next day the group walked for 22km to the bus stop. They arrived at 8pm and slept at the bus stop until the bus came at 5am. The bus only seated 35 people, and while the driver allowed 70 people to get on, there were too many people, so one almighty fight broke out to see who would get on the bus. James and his group got on. All the children sat on the floor, and it took them a day and a half to travel. They had a great time in Kampala then had to do the whole trip in reverse. James is now 48, but because it was such a momentous event he remembers all the details very clearly.
Lindsay is one of the committee members for the Caledonian (ie Scottish) Society in Uganda. Every year, to celebrate St Andrew’s night on 30th November, they bring out a Scottish ceilidh band - three people, who play the fiddle, drum and accordion. The Society get funding, this time from a cellphone company, and give the band an all-expenses-paid trip out here. The guys love it. They get to leave the frozen Scottish wastes and come to a wonderfully warm and sunny land. Their flights are paid for, people provide accommodation, and all they have to do is entertain people for a few hours. They party till after dawn and get taken out to barbeques and get-togethers. They do some sightseeing, all of which is paid for. Last year they went on safari. This year they went on a boat trip, a light aircraft flight, a visit to an animal sanctuary, along with a trip to Jinja where they did quad biking. All this to do something they love doing - and they get paid for it as well. I went to the ‘do’ the night after the St Andrew’s day event which was held at the sailing club. We got a boat over there. The scenery is just stunning. Very beautiful.
They were a good group of guys, and they did a good ceilidh.
We plan to be around here over Christmas and then go to Queen Elizabeth National Park (a game reserve) over New Year. We will be staying at Simba Safari camp http://www.ugandalodges.com/photogallerysimba.php We will share the photos with you.
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