African Adventure

August 2010

2010-09-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

And so, the final blog entry… for a while.
Congratulations to those who’ve been following our blog from the beginning - the word count when you finish reading this will be 65,000.

As I write this, Jordan Kira and I have been in the UK for three weeks. Jon is still in Uganda.
There was a lot to do before we left, so finishing schooling the children in mid-July gave us the time to be able to get things done. Like work commitments, and sorting out our plot.
Some people that we know are setting up a gardening business so we asked for their advice regarding our land. It became clear that we needed to get it fenced, otherwise people could go and squat on the land (in Uganda ‘squatting’ may include things like planting crops) and then it would make things difficult. So Jon has been doing a lot of work making sure everything is OK.
Along with John Bosco and Geoffrey they have put up wooden fence posts and barbed wire.
We have an agreement with Mukasa the blocker (estate agent) who sold us the land and who is very pleasant, that he will graze his goats there and take as much fruit from the trees as he wants, in return for looking after it for us.
Jon has been trying to see the LC1 (first level of local government) in the area to make sure everything is OK. He managed to see him recently but the man was too drunk to register him, so he has to go back again!

The children had many invites to go out with friends, and Kira went camping at Hairy Lemon Holiday Island with Jinja Explorers Club as a ‘goodbye’ to her and to celebrate one of the other girls’ birthday.

The removals people took our 17 boxes of stuff in early August, so to keep us going, I bought four plastic bowls, four plastic plates & four plastic cups, and borrowed some cutlery and bedding.
We have also arranged for our furniture etc from New Zealand to be sent over, to save us having to buy yet another house-load of things. Our Uganda furniture is being stored at a friend’s place.

To help the landlord, we have been advertising the house to see if we can get it rented for him. An American missionary family were due to move over in early Sept, so people from their church came round and arranged to rent it for them. People always laugh when they see our bedroom as it is absolutely huge!

We also had to arrange for someone to take the dog, Lotte. The German couple who asked us to look after Lotte for them have been overseas for 18 months and were due back in August. However they have decided not to come back so we had to find another home for her.
When we bought our car from the couple the day before they left, they hadn’t really arranged for anyone to take Lotte, so asked if we would look after her. We took her on the day they left. It was a real last minute affair. She is a lovely dog, very pleasant to have around, very friendly. It’s been great having her.
I had been trying to find a home for her for quite a while but without success. However I had a feeling that everything would be alright.
I ended up contacting a very helpful lady in Kampala who works for the USPCA and she kindly put up adverts around Kampala for us. We needed a home for Lotte by the time we left on Saturday 14th as Jon was going to be working in Kampala from Sunday.
An American family contacted us a few days before I left, and arranged to pick her up on the Saturday as they passed through Jinja on their way home from Kampala to a place called Mbale. It’s a family with four children who were very much looking forward to having a dog. We were all upset at having to say goodbye to her. I couldn’t decide if it was less upsetting for us to actually see the family who were going to take her and know she would be OK, or for them to take her once we had got on the plane. As it happened they came on Saturday evening after we had left (and before Jon left for Kampala the next morning), which I think was probably better.
Jon has never been a dog person, and had been a bit afraid of dogs when he was younger, but Lotte won him over and he was very sad to see her go. Apparently she jumped in the family’s car and sat on the seat looking happily out of the window. I had a real sense that she had chosen this family.

Jon spent a week working in Kampala then was back in Jinja for another week, on his own. He missed the dog, and said he could even feel her presence when she wasn’t there.
Anyway, given that we’ve said we may only be in the UK for two years, I will not be getting another pet as it’s too upsetting having to say goodbye. I miss my cat in NZ, and also Lotte. Kira and I don’t cope very well with the goodbyes, so if I seem to be on the verge of taking on another pet, someone please stop me!

Talking of pets, our resident frog, Boris, seemed to disappear a couple of weeks before we left. A while later a much smaller frog came into the house. Kira called it Borisina. However, it got a bit upset when people were around it and kept trying to escape by jumping into walls and banging its head, so we kept having to put it outside.

Kira’s teacher Vicky invited us as special guests to her church, the Jinja Miracle Centre, to celebrate its14th anniversary. Other local churches also attended, so it was quite a big do. It was a very nice event, with singing and lots of food.
Other than a couple of visiting missionaries, we were the only muzungus there, so we felt very special. While we were sitting there, some Ugandan girls sitting behind me were feeling my hair! They do that to Kira sometimes, as our hair is quite different to theirs and they want to know what it feels like.

Vicky also took us to see the new house she had moved into. She had to leave her other house as the landlord had sold it. She now lives in a couple of rooms in the ‘boys quarters’ at the back of a big house. The boys quarters are generally where the maid and other house workers live.
She has two rooms, each about 3m / 10 foot square. One room is the living room-cum-dining room-cum-bedroom for her three children and the other is the bedroom for her and her husband, with a separate bed for the maid. They cook on a charcoal burner in the yard and share a toilet (probably long drop) with people living in other rooms in the boys quarters. For a bathroom there is a small outdoor paved area, screened by a brick wall, but with no roof, where they take their bowl of water so they can bathe. She is very happy living there.

Before we left we gave the children a couple of treats. Kira wanted to go horse riding, so I took her with a group of friends to Nile Horseback Safaris and six of us had a wonderful ride along the Nile. The weather was beautiful and the scenery was extremely beautiful. There are little islands in the Nile covered with lovely green foliage. You can also hear the sound of mini waterfalls. I wish we’d done it sooner!
http://www.nilehorsebacksafaris.com/nhs_about_us.asp

Jordan wanted to go quad biking so Jon went too. They had to get kitted out in jumpsuits. Jordan looked like a World War 1 flying ace! They had a practise ride on a training circuit, and then went for a ride on tracks which took them around the local villages, and of course along the Nile. A great time was had by both of them. http://www.atadventures.com/ata/ATA-PHOTO.html

And so, we had to say au revoir to people.
I have been moving places and countries for 33 years, and having to leave people doesn’t get even the slightest bit easier. Even saying goodbye to the lady who owns the fruit and veg stall at the market was quite sad!
One of the mini supermarkets we use ‘American Supermarket’ gave us some chocolates and said ‘Thanks for your custom’.
Sandy, Jordan’s homeschool tutor arranged a leaving do for us at her house, which was really nice. She gave us a locally produced African painting which people signed on the back.

The two hardest ones for me were Vicky, Kira’s teacher, and Lotte. As I’m the homeschool coordinator, I see Vicky on an almost daily basis and have spent a lot of time with her, and also learnt a lot from her. She is a lovely person, very warm and caring, and very dedicated as a teacher. I couldn’t have asked for anyone better to work alongside or be a teacher for the children.
I’m not very good at saying au revoir to people and had considered sending her a text the day before I left saying it would be too upsetting to see her, but she asked to see me, and came to the house. Anyway I crumpled up into a heap of tears when she left, but I’m glad she came.

The next day when we left, I managed to just about say goodbye to John Bosco. I was OK saying goodbye to Jon as it’s only a month till he’ll be with us, but it was hard saying goodbye to Lotte. We got a taxi to the airport as it’s about a three hour drive away. Kira and I said goodbye to Lotte and got into the taxi in tears. Geoffrey our gardener was waiting at the end of the drive to say goodbye, but I was crying so much I couldn’t say anything to him, not even ‘goodbye’ or ‘thank you’. All I could do was shake his hand. It was terrible. He’s been working for us for 18 months tirelessly, hardly having any time off and I couldn’t say anything to him. However, I’d left a gift for him, and Jon was going to give both Geoffrey and John Bosco something when he left.

So we left on 14th August and arrived in Manchester on 15th. Jon’s work contracts are now all based in Kampala and so he kept the house on until the end of the month so he could sort out the plot and then put our stuff into storage. Our landlord bought the car off us, so that was a big help. Jon is now staying with friends in Kampala until he leaves on 10th September.
Just before he moved out of the house he had to eat out in the evenings, as we had sold the cooker. We don’t have a proper TV, and while he was at a café one evening he realised he must have missed watching TV as he found himself watching the news in Luganda!

Remember the caption contest last month? The winner is Neil from New Zealand, with his caption ‘Tea pot with Jack Fruit’ A painting by Jackassoo

And here we are in the UK. When we arrived at Manchester airport and got to passport control I felt like crying. It seemed to mark the end of our Africa life (for a while) and it feels like I’ve had to come back to the ‘real world’.

We had booked a taxi to take us to my Dad’s in Liverpool. We emerged from the airport with Jordan pushing the trolley with all our suitcases on it. The taxi driver looked at him and said in a strong Liverpool accent ‘Orright der?’
Jordan had no idea what he’d said.
‘You have to learn a new language now’ I told him.

Although the children have visited several times, it’s the first time they have lived here. The first week was cold, grey and rainy even though it’s summer. The children sat huddled in front of a gas heater. My dad called Kira an ‘icicle’. We did have some sun, but it's sunshine without ‘real’ heat, and it’s a world away from the horse ride along the Nile we’d had only a week beforehand.

We are getting used to things here, and getting ourselves settled. It’s very much Consumer Land, and having come from Jinja where there is so little, here there is so much and the children went into overdrive the first week, wanting everything they saw, and going onto e-bay to find out what they could buy.
‘It’s only £98, Mum’ Kira would say.

I had a haircut the day after I arrived. Haven’t had it cut in Uganda for two years. I feel I look less like a witch now!
The next step was to sort out internet connection and a sim card for my phone.
My Dad’s mechanic had found a good car for us which was great. I then had to work my way through the maze of car insurances. All very confusing when you are not used to having to make choices.
We moved up to Blackpool after several days and are now staying with my Mum.
Have managed to sort out schools for the children. Kira will be going to the local school for a year (http://www.st-john-vianney.blackpool.sch.uk/), until she moves to secondary school.
School starts tomorrow (6th September) for both of them. It’s the first time they have had to wear a uniform. Kira loves hers and has tried it on about 47 times!
Jordan is going to an international school (http://www.rossall.co.uk/). It’s quite amazing. It’s not like a ‘school’ it’s like a ‘world’ you enter into. Looks like Hogwarts. In fact J K Rowling visited the school and modelled Hogwarts dining hall on the school’s dining hall!

Have found a nice house to rent, not far from my Mum’s so am going through the steps we need to, to be able to secure it.

One of the nice things about being here, is not only being able to see family and friends, but also that we don’t have to say goodbye whenever we leave their house!

I emailed people in Uganda a few days after I left, to say au revoir.
Shortly afterwards I received a reply from Vicky:
Am so excited to hear from you and the children. I will really miss you people because sincerely speaking you, Jon and the children were the first whites I have met who treated me as a human being and considered me too, despite the colour I have, and this attitude helped other whites I am working with change, and are now trying to behave the same way. I thank God for having met you and your family.

I was absolutely stunned when I received this and had to read it many times to try and get my head around it.
If you’ve been following the blogs you will know that I mention Vicky a lot, as she’s the person I spend the most time with outside of my family. She has been great, and the fact that she is black never really figured, other than I could learn a lot about the Ugandan culture from her. It’s been an honour to know her.
The email truly amazed me.

Vicky is one of 8 children, six of whom have died. This means there are a lot of orphans in her family, or children with only one parent. Many of the parents are struggling to make ends meet, and some have had to put their children into an orphanage as they cannot afford to look after them. The orphanages aren’t always a good environment for the children to be in.
We have offered to sponsor one of Vicky’s relatives - her dead sister’s granddaughter, who is called Favour. She calls Vicky ‘grandma’. Favour does have a mother, but the mother’s wages are so low (they will be very low) - and she has two children - that she cannot afford to feed or educate them and so has had to put them in an orphanage. Vicky is upset at the level of care the children are receiving and wants them to have a better life.

There are a few other children in her family who need support.
If you or anyone else you know would be interested in sponsoring these children, please let me know.
One of the benefits of sponsoring children direct, rather than through an organisation, is that we know that 100% of our money is going to the children. We have sponsored John Bosco’s three nephews and nieces for almost two years, and know exactly how the money is spent. The money we pay is very little in Western terms, but for Ugandans, makes a huge difference.

I’ve been looking back over the many photos we have of our two years in Uganda, and I can see all the amazing experiences it’s allowed us to have. I am so glad we came. It has been a very special period in my life.

It’s been hard writing this last blog, I will miss Uganda very much.

Thanks for coming on this Blog Journey with us. It’s been great hearing from you and receiving your feedback. Please keep in touch.

Au revoir Uganda, and let’s see what the next two years in the UK brings us.

Kim, Jon, Jordan, Kira x

July 2010

2010-07-23T01:31:00.001-07:00

(Check out the caption competition further down)

And so this is the next to last (yes, ‘penultimate’ for you erudite people) blog entry from Uganda … at least for a while. I’ll write the final one when I am in the UK.

I leave with the children on 14th August, arriving in Manchester on 15th, and will be staying with my Dad in Liverpool for a while until we go to Blackpool. Jon will be following us over when his work contracts have finished.

And we finally managed to purchase a plot of land! Not of course without some headaches, but that’s how things work here.
One of the other plots we looked at whilst in the process of finding one to buy, was overgrown with weeds and bushes. It looked quite nice actually. However the man who owned it decided to get the compound slashed (ie get the grass etc cut back). We hadn’t asked him to, nor had the blocker (estate agent), but the man then said that it was our responsibility to pay for the slashing. Jon said no, and the blocker told him ‘Mr. Jon will not be paying’, but the man was quite miffed about it and kept phoning Jon’s cellphone and then ringing off. He did it late in the evening and even at 3 o’clock in the morning!
We’ve had an engineer look at our plot as there is a swampy bit in the middle, and have a report (hand-written on foolscap paper) explaining what we need to do to sort it out.
We are in the process of getting an architect to draw up some plans so we are ready to get started when we decide to come back and build a house.
I feel a lot comfier now, knowing that we can come back at some point.
The land is in an area just outside of the metropolis of Jinja, called Bukaya. We lived there for a few weeks at the beginning of last year when we were in-between houses.
The plot has many fruit trees and eucalyptus trees on it.
While we were there one time with a friend, we saw two huge jackfruits fall to the ground. The man who lives next door had decided to climb the tree and cut down a couple, one for himself and one for us. They are enormous! We brought it home, asked John Bosco to cut a piece off for us, and keep the rest for himself and friends. Our piece was tiny in comparison to what we gave away but it kept us going for about four days.
Our first piece of fruit from our own land!

When we lived in Bukaya we lived next door to a muzungu. I was going to go round and say hello, but I passed him one day as he was driving out of his driveway. He looked at me and instantly looked away. He didn’t come across as very welcoming so I didn’t go round.
Jon and I met him at someone else’s house recently and he’s actually very nice. We told him we had been his neighbours for six weeks, and he said ‘Oh! I thought you were missionaries so I didn’t come to see you’.

In Jinja the muzungu community doesn’t have the usual spread of people with varying religious beliefs. Typically in the western world you would get people ranging from anti-religious to non-religious to a bit religious to very religious to extremely religious. Because of the nature of people here, they tend to fall into two main groups - the non-religious and the extremely religious missionaries. There isn’t a huge amount of mixing between the two groups and the non-religious people tend to feel uncomfy being around people with very strong religious beliefs. Presumably those with strong religious beliefs will feel uncomfy being around non-religious people who are uncomfy at being around people with strong religious beliefs ….

Anyway, it’s a pity as he’s very nice and it would have been nice to make contact with him when we were there.

Jordan’s homeschool tutor recently arranged a trip to a place called Kakira, for all the local homeschooled children. Kakira is an amazing place. It’s owned by one of the richest families in the world (yes, here in little Jinja) and mainly deals in sugar. There are many sugar cane fields in the area, and they have built a huge factory to produce sugar. They have another factory producing sweets. The sugar factory also produces electricity, a large proportion of which is sold to the national grid. It plans to produce alcohol to be used in fuel.
Kakira covers a huge area of land and is a town unto itself. Employees live there. There is a hospital, post office, petrol station, airfield, etc. There are more people there than in Jinja itself.
We had a look round both factories and the children - happily - received lots of sweets at the end.

The end of term was on 16th July and Kira’s homeschool centre, Kiira Kids has closed down. It was very sad as I’ve loved being a part of the school and being able to help as the coordinator. It’s a very happy place and Kira loved going there every day.
We had an end of term celebration, attended by quite a few people, and it was nice to get everyone together for the final day.
The two remaining children and Vicky the teacher will be joining two other homeschooled children who are based at an NGO office called Kimanya, so they are now called Kimanya Kids instead of Kiira Kids.

Although I had said, before we came here, that I wouldn’t homeschool my children as I didn’t think it would be very good for them to be stuck at home with me all day, being able to homeschool them part time has been very nice. I’ve enjoyed it.
I really like the fact that I teach Kira from 8am to 10am, as it’s a lovely, gentle start to the day. We don’t have to rush around in the mornings to be on time for school, we start as soon as we’ve had breakfast. I teach Maths for an hour then teach a whole range of other subjects for the other hour, eg art, recorder, science, French, typing. I like the freedom to choose what we can do.
I often find a reason for us to go out into the compound, as it’s so nice to be able to walk around a big garden in the early morning African sunshine. I will miss that very much.
I kept a log of what I taught both children and have been amazed at how much we’ve covered in the last year and a half.

I’ve donated a lot of our school text books to the new homeschool centre.There were three boxes’ worth. I hadn’t realised we’d amassed so much. However I’m quite reluctant to throw away all the school work books we have at home. It’s been such a big part of our life and has been such a nice experience that I’m struggling to bring myself to part with them. We are going to leave most of our furniture in storage for when we come back to build a house, so perhaps I will put the school work in storage too.

The two children already at Kimanya Kids (who are Kira’s best friends here) have different term times, and are still at school. They invited Kira to join them.
I asked her if she wanted to do more schooling.
She looked at me amazed.
‘Who wouldn’t???’ she replied.

When we first came to Jinja there were many street kids on the streets. They would come and beg from us a lot. After a while we got to tell which ones were really street children and which ones weren’t. There are several NGOs working with street children and there are now very few on the streets.
The other day I parked the car in town so I could go to the market. Two (genuine) street kids asked me for money. I said I would bring them food from the market. When I got back I gave them the food. They asked me something in their language, but I couldn’t understand them. The parking warden came over and said ‘The children are saying to you that they want to go to school and are asking if you will arrange for them to go to school’. It’s very sad.

It was interesting one day as I was in the car with Vicky, Kira and the two other girls from her homeschool centre, an Australian and a Ugandan. We drove past a Ugandan school.
The Ugandan girl shouted out in surprise ‘There’s a white child at that school!’
‘Yes…?’ said the other two.
‘That means it must be a good school’ she replied.
Kira and the Australian girl weren’t having a bar of it.
‘It’s just a white child’ they said ‘it doesn’t mean anything’, but the Ugandan girl was adamant it must be a good school.
I thought about it afterwards. I guess she will have got the idea from her parents. And I guess she is probably right. In Uganda white children go to the decent schools whereas in NZ and Australia, a white child at school doesn’t particularly mean anything.

I discovered recently that Uganda has 36 languages! Most Ugandans speak more than one and many speak several. Vicky speaks seven.

The dance school Kira goes to is also closing down as the teacher is leaving, and as far as we know there are no other dance teachers in Jinja. We had an end of term celebration for that too. The children chose all the music themselves, an eclectic mix including African music, 70’s disco and Tibetan ballet. It was held outdoors in the grounds of the Montessori preschool where the lessons are held and was a lovely event.

Jinja Explorers Club - the local version of Brownies which the children have set up - continues to flourish. They have baked biscuits for children at an orphanage and are having First Aid lessons. Before we leave they are going on another camp, this time to a holiday island Hairy Lemon, an hour from here in beautiful surroundings. It’s a goodbye for Kira and a birthday celebration for one of the other girls. It looks like I’ll be working those days, so unfortuntaley won’t have to have another sleepless, rained-out, lake-fly-ridden camp trip. No doubt the weather this time will be perfect and they will have no rain, no lake flies and lots of sleep!

Jordan is looking forward to having ‘real’ food when we get to the UK, and his goal is to get to a McDonalds as soon as possible and have a cheeseburger and fries.
However I really like the locally grown fruit and vegetables here and like to find recipes to be able to use them, much to his dismay.
‘I’ve found a new recipe!’ I announced to Jordan one day.
He held his head in hands.
‘Oh God’ he groaned.

And strangely enough I have very little to say about ants this time. They are keeping themselves at bay a lot more than normal. However, obviously not for everyone, as one of the women here said ‘I can’t now call myself a vegetarian, given the amount of ants I consume on a daily basis’.

We were invited to a 4th July celebration, our first one. There were lots of Americans there - didn’t realise there were so many in Jinja. Lots of people wearing red white and blue, lots of singing American songs and national anthem, lots of fireworks and lots of food including hot dogs cooked on a campfire.

Many of you will have heard of the bombs in Kampala. A couple were planted at venues where the finals of the World Cup were being shown, and 74 people died. The bombs were planted by Somali terrorists al-Shabaab. A BBC report said that ‘Attacking Ugandan peacekeepers in Mogadishu can be squared with al-Shabab's nationalist agenda, but killing foreign civilians in Kampala reveals an entirely different, imported and alien ideology.’
The local newspapers are wont to printing graphic photos, and showed scenes of people dead in their chairs. One photo showed a man rooting through the pockets of dead people.
Jon was in Kampala the following day, and things were operating slowly and cautiously. Since then some things take a long time as guards now check your car and your bag when you enter a place.
Jon had phoned most of the people he knows in Kampala to check they were OK, but couldn’t get hold of a contractor who is working for him. When the contractor failed to turn up for an assignment the following day we feared the worst, but it turns out he is OK.

From 12th -17th was the annual Agricultural Show which takes place in the Showgrounds just opposite our house. It plays LOUD music, ALL DAY AND NIGHT. Jon had a constant headache, and it was hard to get to sleep. People feel very sorry for us living near there!
We were very wary of going to the show in case there was another bomb, and I thought about it quite a bit. In the end, Jon didn’t have the time, so Kira and I went at what I felt was a safe time - Thursday afternoon, after the bus loads of school children had left and before the evening revellers turned up. Jordan decided to wait until Saturday to go with his friends, but we decided that Saturday wasn’t a safe day to go.
It’s a good event, has various agricultural exhibitions, entertainment, fairground rides and lots of stalls. Of course, being muzungus we had to deal with rip off prices. I saw a pair of shoes for Kira which sell in the market for 7,000/-. The man asked for 25,000/-
We decided to go to a café. There are lots of tiny, very basic café’s. ‘Café’ is a bit of a posh word for them. They are small areas which have wooden poles with old bits of material draped on them to form a ‘wall’. I let Kira choose the one we went to. She chose one that wasn’t getting the full blast of the music, and was actually relatively quiet.
They had a few tiny tables covered in plastic table cloths and several non-matching plastic chairs. The menu was handwritten. They cooked the food on a charcoal burner out the front of the café. The menu was basic and very cheap. If you wanted to clean your hands you used a plastic jerry can with water and tipped it onto your hands over a washing up bowl.
One of the women working there had a small child of about 18 months who was sitting on a mattress on the grass in the café. I don’t think he had seen muzungus before and he came over and stared at us. His mum called him away, but he couldn’t help himself - he had to come back and have another look!
As we sat there Kira said ‘This is a lovely café, I really like it’.
‘Me too’ I said ‘I love it’.
I was very proud of her, that she can find pleasure in a very simple, very basic facility. I think that small comment counts as one of my highlights of our time here.

And so we have the CAPTION COMPETITION!
This is a photo of Jon with the jackfruit from our jackfruit tree. It is crying out for a caption!
Email me with your caption - kimilena@gmail.com

June 2010

2010-06-24T05:23:00.001-07:00

(You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them)
So, Kira has recently emerged from a weekend of parties.
She, and a friend Naomi, share the same birthday - they were both 10 on 20th June - while another girl has a birthday three days later, so all three had their parties at the weekend.
We have here a newly-formed ‘Jinja Explorers Club’, which is similar to Brownies, and they all decided we should go camping to celebrate Kira’s birthday.
We went to the camping grounds of a beautiful hotel resort called Kingfisher Resort on Lake Victoria, owned by Naomi’s mum. There were 10 girls, plus me, Vicky the teacher and another parent.
Those of you who know me well, know that I’m a Jolly-Nice-Hotel Person rather than a Camping Person, but as it was Kira’s birthday and as it’s Africa and going to be warm, I thought it would be OK. And anyway we were only going to be there from Friday afternoon till Saturday morning.
Of course, the whole time we were there the weather was uncharacteristically sun-free. It rained while we were putting up the tents.
Anyway I provided the food - sausages which Vicky cooked on a charcoal grill (see photo above), bread rolls, a rice dish and an ice cream birthday cake (cheesecake base with ice cream on it).
We then sat around the campfire while people told campfire stories. It was very interesting as it was only the Ugandan children who told stories. They told stories of Ugandan legend and folklore tales. Some of the girls were excellent story tellers. The western children were very impressed, as it’s not something we really do in our culture.
Off we went to our tents at 10.30pm. At midnight I got up and told the girls to stop running around and get back into their tents. They told me the next day they got to sleep at 1am.
At 4am a couple of the girls got up and woke the others up. They all got up and got into their swimming costumes, ready to go into the pool. A bit later I heard Vicky saying ‘Girls, go back to bed it’s not even 5 o’clock’.
Anyway after a morning swim and breakfast we all went down to the jetty, but the grey clouds looming overhead made us go back and pack up. As we were taking down the tents, the heavens opened and the rain came down in torrents. We threw all 13 mattresses into one 4-person tent and we all sat in there, listening to the deluge and the thunder directly overhead, whilst telling more stories. After 45 minutes in there we could hardly breathe through lack of oxygen, and I tried to take photos but my camera had steamed up. The steamed up photo below is Kira amongst the duvets in the tent!
I got a fit of the giggles. Surely you would expect camping on the equator to be a lovely, warm sunny experience? We had the worst weather we’d had for ages in the short period of time we were there. Of course by the time we left at lunchtime it was sunny again.
So, struggling with lack of sleep, I tried to pack the soaking wet tents - complete with large snails and frogs on them - when the rain finished. My clothes were wet through, and the lake flies had come out in their hundreds and were sticking to my hair, flying in my face and going down the back of my neck.
What IS the big deal about camping?

Anyway we got home at lunchtime, I went to bed, and Jon took the girls off to their next party.
The next day we were back at Kingfisher for Naomi’s party and disco. By the time we got home in the evening, Kira was asleep!

And talking of sleeping, Kira’s friend had a sleepover one weekday. In the morning I homeschool Kira from 8-10am. We did Maths then a music lesson where we filled glass bottles with different amounts of water, and hit them with a spoon. They also got out some empty tin cans and used them too, accompanying their playing with loud singing. Although Jordan was in the next room, he managed to sleep through the entire cacophony!

He is now pretty independent here, getting around on his own, either walking or using a boda boda.
I’ve been using boda bodas a bit more at the moment as Jon has contracts in Kampala and takes the car with him. They are an excellent way of getting around, as there are many of them and they are very reasonably priced.

A number of people here have a ‘driver’ - which we would call a chauffer. It’s pretty common, and basically you give the driver the use of a car, money for petrol, and then pay him a salary. The salary won’t be huge, which makes it affordable and extremely helpful for people who have busy lives.

And how could I write a blog entry without mentioning the ‘A word’ … Ants!
Yes, they continue to share our life, more so than they used to. Not sure why things have got worse.
Jon had made a nice meal of tuna and herb potato cakes. It wasn’t until we had almost eaten them all that Kira decided to look at hers closely and noticed that a number of the ‘herbs’ had 6 legs on them …
And then when we were out one time, a couple of the big safari ants got into one of my shoes. They either bite or sting you, and embed themselves in your skin. It’s very painful. I hopped on one leg, trying to pull them out, and tried to steady myself by grabbing onto the nearest thing - which happened to be a barbed wire fence! I have a hole in the palm of my hand now.

Other than the ants, Uganda is generally a lovely place … if you can float above the surface and not have to deal with anything even vaguely official.
For example I don’t think I know anyone here who hasn’t had the power company threaten to cut them off for non-payment of bills. This is due to the fact that the power company often don’t provide people with bills.
I’m responsible for paying the school bills. As people don’t have letter boxes, the power company employs people to hand-deliver the bills to people’s houses. We hadn’t received one at the school for two months so I went to the offices to find out how much we owed. It was more than I’d anticipated so I paid as much as I had on me. I then asked why we hadn’t received the bills. The woman phoned the man responsible, who said he hadn’t delivered the bills as “There is a dog in the compound”.
I couldn’t believe it. Not only do many people have dogs in their compound, but the school has had two dogs for a long time. Not only that, but surely the recruitment policy would be such that you wouldn’t recruit people who are afraid of dogs…?
As expected, a couple of days later we received a bill saying the power was going to be cut off.
I decided to send the power company an email. I went onto the website, found the email of the local manager and sent him my thoughts.
Of course the email address was invalid.
I sent the email to the Managing Director instead. I am awaiting a reply. Ha ha.

Sometimes we decide to just not do things as we know the process is going to be extremely laborious and most probably fruitless.
For example I thought I might phone up to find out what time the squash courts opened in the morning. Or at least I thought about it for a fraction of a nano second and then decided it wasn’t worth it, given the steps you would have to take to do that, each of which could prove futile.
Firstly you would have to be able to find the phone number in the phone book. The chances of it being listed in the phone book are … well, nil.
The phone book only goes up to the letter ‘S’ for some reason (which means many organisations starting with ‘Uganda’ are not in there, including the phone company Uganda Telecom). So although the squash courts are at Jinja Club and have the chance of being in there, I knew they wouldn’t be. I checked a few days later and they weren’t.
It is rare to have a landline here and most people have mobile phones.
Assuming I did know the phone number, that would mean someone would have to be in charge of the mobile phone, not lose it or steal it, and be able to answer it.
They would then need to be able to understand me, and vice versa. Although English is the official language here, in general only educated people speak it in a way that I can easily understand.
And then, assuming we could communicate, they would need to know the answer to my question ‘What time does the squash court open?’
Generally Ugandans like to give ‘pleasing’ answers, so if they don’t know the answer, there is a chance they will make one up, just so they can give you an answer.
So even after all of this, if I did get an answer, it isn’t one that I could necessarily believe.

Similarly, we need to know how we can access details of our bank account once we leave Uganda. The bank doesn’t have internet banking.
I was homeschooling Jordan, and Jon was about to go to the bank. (Banks, aargh!) I said to him ‘If the teller looks like they may be able to answer the question, why don’t you ask them how we can access details of our account when we leave?’
All three of us looked at one another and fell about laughing.

We’ve decided not to buy a house, but to buy a plot of land instead, with the intention of coming back sometime and building a house here.
Although we’ve seen lots of plots and have tried to buy a number of them, things are not as easy as you’d like them to be.
The main one we found is in an area called Masese, overlooking Lake Victoria. We had all the relevant searches carried out, agreed a sale price with the owner, and went to the solicitor to sort out a sale and purchase agreement.
‘This is very straightforward’ he said. ‘In fact, it is so straightforward that I don’t need to deal with it and can pass it over to my assistant.’
We were amazed. Nothing here is straightforward.
‘Unless…’ he continued ‘there are conditions where you need approval from the Jinja Land Board’.
Needless to say there were conditions which did need approval. The lease on the land said it could only be sold if there was a building on it, and if there wasn’t, then the Land Board had to approve the sale.
The owner hadn’t built on the land. Typically this wouldn’t have been a problem getting approval for the sale.
However, the Jinja Land Board has ceased to exist (!), so any land sales needing their approval can’t go through. People have no idea if or when the Land Board may reconvene. It may take years.
Other plots we looked at also posed some challenges, so we have looked in a different area which comes under a different Land Board - which is in existence.
We saw a couple which looked OK. One of them was sort-of owned by someone. The man had bought a plot, but the Land Board had taken it off him and given him another plot, and we weren’t sure how valid his ownership was.
Another plot seemed to be OK, so Jon went with the blocker (real estate agent) to pick up the owner and drive to the Land Board to get the documentation. He picked her up, and drove to the office, but she realised she had left her phone in town. So he drove her back to town and then back to the office. She then realised her phone was out of power, so he had to drive her back to town again so she could pick up a relative’s phone, and then back to the office. When they got there the owner’s husband said he didn’t want to sell the plot after all...

Anyway we have found another plot we like, and are in the process of buying this one. It is very nice, and has banana trees, matoke trees, pawpaw trees, mango trees and jackfruit trees on it. Fingers crossed! Watch this space.

One of our friends has bought a plot and is having a house built. This is a very common thing to do. I went with her to have a look at the house. The walls and roof are up; it is currently being plastered, then will need windows, plumbing and generally finishing off.
She has hired builders from Kampala. They basically spend a period of time here working, and live in the unfinished house, along with what looked to be their families. They sleep on the floor on sheets of newspaper, dig a hole in the ground for a toilet, and cook on a charcoal burner. When I went round, they had a chicken sitting in a washing up bowl on the floor in the kitchen. They keep it so they can have eggs to eat.

Most of the people we spend time with here have either left or are leaving, or are going away for a period of time. It seems like a time for change.
When we leave, Kira’s homeschool centre will close down, and the remaining children (all two of them) and Vicky will move to different premises where another couple of girls are being homeschooled by a teacher.

Our friends from Zimbabwe who were due to move to New Zealand last week, unfortunately found out that their daughter in South Africa had been involved in a bad car accident.
As their passports were in NZ getting approval, they had to find an official in Jinja to approve a flight to Kenya. They then had to go to the Zimbabwean High Commissioner in Nairobi to get approval for a flight to South Africa. When they finally got to South Africa their daughter - who had just graduated from University - was declared brain dead.
So instead of boarding a plane to NZ to start a new life, they found themselves arranging a funeral. It is very very sad.
They will be moving to NZ next month.

We are leaving here probably mid-August. At least I will be leaving with the children, and Jon will probably need to stay on for a bit longer to finish off some work contracts.
We are off to Lancashire in the North West, to live in Sunny Blackpool.
Well sunny-ish Blackpool.
Well OK, sunny occasionally.
Oh alright then … it was sunny once.
A long time ago.

Having lived away from the UK for 15 years, it seems very strange to be moving back. I like moving to places I don’t know, learning how to live there and then moving on. This will be the first time I’ve gone to live in a place I know. Jon and I stayed with my Mum for three months in Blackpool before we emigrated to NZ.

To be honest I’m quite concerned about having to live in a cold climate again. The weather in Uganda completely suits me, I just love it. I appreciate it every day.
My body doesn’t cope well with the cold. It never did even when I’d only ever lived in the UK. Having lived in warmer climates for so long, and especially living on the equator for two years, it’s going to be a bit of a shock.
Does anyone know of any natural therapies that can warm up your body temperature?

Anyway my plan is to set up a Centre for women and girls in Blackpool offering a range of activities, eg courses, expos, seminars, classes, hobby activities etc. supported by a website offering advice, articles, online training etc
If you know of anyone who could offer something via the Centre, or a venue that may be suitable, feel free to let me know.

Until next month…

May 2010

2010-05-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

Introducing our resident frog.
In the last blog I mentioned that we have many frogs living around the outside of the house, and that we often have stray frogs coming in. We discovered that it isn’t actually a range of stray frogs, but is in fact the same frog that comes in on a regular basis. I’ve called him Boris. He’s a lovely beige colour and is very cute.
This is a photo of him in a cup – he was in our bedroom one evening and we tried to help him get out. He decided to jump out of the cup, and we couldn’t get him again, so just left him in the room with us.

Most evenings I go into the kitchen to soak the cat’s food bowl overnight. One evening while I was doing this I noticed a piece of toast in the cat’s water bowl. I bent down to pick it up, but it jumped out!
It was Boris … and he was having a bath.
His routine seems to be to jump in the front door in the evening, hide behind the couch, then go into the kitchen when the light is off and we’re not in there, and sit in the cat’s water bowl. Cute!
I know in the morning if he’s been there during the night, as the water bowl is - for some reason – full of fluff.

And so I may as well carry on with the creature theme again … yes, we have had lots more ants again. This time Jordan went into the storage room we have, off the kitchen.
When our clothes washing is dry, we put it in a big Ali Baba basket. He reached in there to get some socks, only to find it absolutely full of ants, crawling all over the clothes.
As we looked around the room we noticed many trails of ants around the room. They travel in straight lines, round the top of the row of wall tiles, or down the grouting between the tiles, or around the edge of the room. Hundreds of them.
Fortunately John Bosco offered to take everything out of the room, spray it with insect killer, and sort out the clothes basket.

Last month I mentioned the dog at Kira’s homeschool centre which was put down for possible rabies (or possibly not). The children were very upset, as the dog has been there for quite a while, and used to happily wander around the classroom.
The following day I asked her if the dog had been buried. ‘No’ she said ‘one of the tenants said he cut it up and used it as fish bait.’
Poor soul, she was heartbroken again.

Yesterday Jon and I went for a swim. All the pools here are outdoors, which means you often get dead flies floating on the surface of the pool. The staff regularly go round the pool with a net, taking them out. However that hadn’t been done when we went, and there was quite a collection of them. After our swim I went to the changing room, looked in the mirror and discovered I had a nice coating of dead flies on my hair!

And then last week I met a friend for coffee at a café in the shopping mall in Kampala. It’s a typical modern mall.
He ordered African tea, which is tea made with milk (not water) and spices.
‘Normal’ tea is called ‘English tea’ … except that it comes with hot milk.
Anyway, his tea came with a small serving of honey in a bowl. As soon as the waitress delivered it, we were surrounded by a swarm of bees. I was amazed at how they happened to be in a mall. I looked around the café, and everyone else was sitting there bee-less, while we were sitting in a cloud of them. He put the honey on another table, but it made no difference. We moved to the other side of the café, but they just followed us. He gave his cup of tea to the waiter to take away, but still they surrounded us.
It was very strange sitting in a swarm of bees while everyone else was completely unaffected. It wasn’t until about two minutes before we left that the bees decided to move elsewhere.

End of creature stories!

And so I’ve given the two little boys who live in the compound at the homeschool centre a few ‘driving lessons’. They enjoy them so much that they want one every day now. Whenever I drop Kira off, they call out ‘Mama Kira, mama Kira’ (ie Kira’s Mum) ‘can we go in the car?’

The Sports Day that Vicky and I organised went well. We held it at the homeschool centre, invited pre-school children, home schooled children, tutors and parents.
I seemed to take on the role of ‘overseer’ and official photographer on the day, while Vicky and Ronnie - the sports tutor – sorted out the games.
The children had a great time, and the adults seemed to join in with great gusto. There were some rather competitive parents (of the male species), going all out to win the egg & spoon and the sack races!
There were lots of prizes and certificates, an auction, kite making and some wonderful South African catering.
I thought it was interesting that even in a small town in East Africa, people were familiar with the games I’d played in England – sack race, tug-o-war, three-legged race and egg & spoon race (though they did hold the spoon in their mouth). I have to say I found this very difficult, dropped the egg many times and came a well-deserved last! However, I made up for it in the relay race … Ha!

The day before the sports day, the children who go to dance classes did a show for all the parents and guests. It was held in a wonderful venue – a very impressive hall, purpose built for one of the local schools. The girls - and one little boy - put on a great show of ballet and jazz dance, complete with a range of costumes – all very impressive as there is little to buy in Jinja.
Anyway it went so well that they will be doing another show in July.

Schooling in Uganda is different from western schooling. The Ugandan children attend school for many hours a day – we see them going to school at 7.30am and coming home at 5pm, then having homework to do. They may also go in on a Saturday. Our perception is that children are taught in the old-fashioned chalk-and-talk way. They seem to be taught to ‘learn’, rather than ‘think’ and problem-solve. Many children attend boarding schools, it’s a very common form of schooling.
Our landlord is a lecturer in chemistry at a college. One day I was homeschooling Jordan when he came round. I showed him some of the science books Jordan was using.
He was surprised.
‘They do exercises?’ he asked.
‘Yes’ I replied.
He explained that Ugandan children don’t do that, they learn simply learn the theory.

Ugandan schools started back on 24th May after a month’s Easter break. School fees are due at the beginning of term, and with Uganda being a cash society, parents go to the ATM to draw out the term’s fees.
Vicky went to get her children’s school fees out on the Saturday before term started– she uses two banks. She queued for three hours at the first bank and two hours at the second. In all she waited in ATM queues from 10am to 3pm.
Some banks even provide rows of benches for people to sit on while waiting in the queue.

Since doing the Chinese calligraphy with the children as part of homeschooling, we have looked at art from other cultures. We did rangoli, Indian art. A rangoli is a floor painting which is an expression of warm hospitality, and ideally should be painted outside the house to welcome people. First the children chose a design they liked, printed it off and coloured it in. Then we went outside and they painted them on the drain covers, using a mixture of flour, water and food colouring.
We moved onto Scottish art and looked at various tartans and some Rennie Mackintosh art.
We’re now looking at aborigine art. We’re planning to paint something aborigine-style for some Australian friends.

Some friends of ours from Zimbabwe are going to be moving to New Zealand in June. They have never been there before, so we thought we’d hold a NZ afternoon for them and a few others.

(You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them)

We prepared a hangi – the traditional Maori way of cooking food in the ground.
Jordan valiantly dug a hole in the ground at the height of the sun, just about passing out with the heat. He then laid a lattice of wood at the bottom, and covered it with igneous rocks.

We’d asked John Bosco to track down some wood for us, and he found someone who was able to deliver two lots of wood to us, on his bicycle.
Jordan went around the compound with a hammer, knocking on various stones to check if they were igneous rocks.

With everything together, he started off the fire and burned it for about an hour in the pit. Men are supposed to sort out the fire, while women sort out the food, so Kira and I prepared potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, onions and pumpkin, along with meat. As the butchers here do not have any refrigeration and the meat is always covered in flies, I tend not to buy it. They only seem to sell beef – except that it is bits of cow, hacked with a big knife, rather than any specific cuts of meat. To be on the safe side, I just bought sausages from the supermarket.

We put the food in silver foil containers. Last time they let in a bit of soil in, so this time Jon stapled the lids, and we covered them with a sheet of silver foil.
When the fire had burned down, we covered it with a damp cloth (one of Jordan’s old shirts) and put the food containers in, on top of the hot rocks. Then we covered it with the earth and some banana leaves to stop the steam coming out, and left it to cook for three hours.

I painted a ‘haere mai’ (ie ‘welcome’) sign for the front door, and we greeted people with a hongi. This is the Maori alternative to a handshake, where you press your nose against the other person’s.
The girls made a Maori headband and some poi balls. I bought red, white and black wool for them to plait to make the string, and we used material wrapped in plastic bags for the balls.
I put some moko (tattoo) on the girls' faces using eye liner.
Once the food was ready, Jon dug it out of the pit. It was cooked beautifully.
Before we ate, Kira and I played ‘God Defend New Zealand’, the national anthem, on the recorder. We had practiced for about 3 weeks!

The week before I had practised making a pavlova (meringue), a typical NZ dessert. We didn’t bring any kind of whisk with us, so I had to whisk the egg whites by hand with a fork … for hours and hours. Although it looked fine, our oven isn’t the best. It only has one setting – hot - and the element at the bottom for the oven, and the element at the top for the grill are always both on at the same time. This didn’t make for the best cooking environment, and the pavlova which was meant to be in for about an hour and a quarter, came out as a burnt crisp after about 10 minutes. Oh well, fruit salad had to do for dessert instead.

And finally we downloaded some You Tube videos, one of a haka and one of a poi performance. We were feeling quite homesick.

A few days ago I received a text message: ‘Hallo, dear. Am julian, female and aged 23. I request 2 be ur friend if u don’t mind. I came across this number in prime.dats ma no,I shal be greatful if u reply’
I wasn’t overly sure what some of this meant (prime.dats ma no) nor what she wanted overall, so I left it. A bit later she called up, and I said I didn’t understand the text message.
So she sent me another one: ‘Am requesting that you be my friend. In other words friendship, nothing more besides that. Please am not force you.its ur choice 2 say yes or no. feel free'. Anyway I didn’t reply as my assumption was that there would be some ulterior motive. There are some things here that I still don’t understand.

Using cellphones is very commonplace here as very few people have landlines. It’s the main way people keep in touch with each other, and forms a major chunk of the Ugandan communication infrastructure.

Sometimes when I run training sessions, I get people in the group to do an exercise ‘Autograph hunt’. I give them a piece of paper which has items written on it such as ‘Find someone who owns a pair of red shoes’ ‘Find someone who has three brothers’ etc. One of the items said ‘Find someone who has 3 coats’.
A couple of people came up to me and said ‘What’s a coat?’
How lovely to live in a climate where you don’t know what a coat is!

At the weekend I was asked to speak at a Literacy event on the topic of Communication. Some speakers were invited to read out a poem. The speaker before me read out an emotional poem on FGM, Female Genital Mutilation. It still happens here, even though there are many people opposed to it.

A few days before that, one of my friend’s sisters had a baby. She chose to have her baby in a tiny maternity facility, which my friend described as ‘less than basic’. Although my friend is Ugandan she has lived in England, and when she was pregnant, chose to stay in England to have the baby, as medical care here isn’t the best. She was surprised at her sister’s choice of maternity facility. When the baby was born, she and her mum could see that there was something wrong with the baby. They expressed their concern but the doctor said the baby was just tired. Over a period of several hours they told the doctor of their concern, but nothing was done. Unfortunately the baby died at 12 hours old, having received no medical treatment.
The baby was buried soon afterwards without an autopsy, and so they will never know what the issue was.

And carrying on in a similar vein, one of our friends has a part time business as a funeral director. It isn’t uncommon for people to use a funeral pyre instead of traditional cremation.
Some things therefore work differently. For example, to ensure the skull doesn’t crack, you have to drill a hole in it before placing it on the pyre. There is also the possibility that the gases in the stomach will cause the body to sit upright so you have to weigh it down with heavy branches to avoid that happening.

And so onto a lighter note!
John Bosco has been away seeing his family – they live about a 9 hour bus trip from here, near the Rwanda border.
We fund his nephews and nieces through their schooling, and as term was due to start, he went home with the money to pay the school fees for them.
I was contacted via the ‘expat blog website’ by someone in the UK who originally comes from Jinja, who will be visiting here soon, and who is keen to sponsor some Ugandan children. As we are leaving, he very kindly offered to take over sponsoring the three children when we leave. He also sent over some money so I could buy some clothes, shoes and toys for them. Some people are very kind.
Kira and I went round the shops and market buying a range of items for them – there were quite a lot, as English money can buy a lot of things here. John Bosco somehow had to take all those items on the bus too! He isn’t back yet, but I hope they appreciated them.

One of our friends has a house worker whose friend offered to work for us while he was away. Her name is Salome and she seems very pleasant. It has been nice having a female around the house for a change. She turned up with a pristine white apron and looked quite the part.
She has been trained in catering but hasn’t found a job yet, so I think doing some work here was a help to her.
On the first day, she left her shoes outside the house (a very common thing for people to do here). When I took Kira into school, she thought they were her friend’s shoes and so took them. This meant that when Salome came to leave, she had no shoes! She borrowed a pair of mine, but as her shoes seemed to go from friend to friend in a round trip to get back here, they were actually away for several days. I don’t know if Salome has any other shoes, but she kept hold of mine until they came back!

April 2010

2010-04-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

The month started with Easter, but no Easter eggs unfortunately as they are an unknown item in Jinja. However there is chocolate around so that has to suffice. Cadbury’s chocolate here is pretty gruesome, I have to say, but being a chocaholic there are times when I have to eat it. The only way I can do that is by buying chocolate with nuts in it to mask the taste. I have now discovered Moro peanut bars and they are much more palatable.

A couple of days ago I had put half a bar of chocolate in my handbag on the couch. I took it out yesterday, and without particularly looking, I broke off a piece and ate it. Then I sat down and put the chocolate bar on the table. After a short while I noticed an ant on the table. Then another one. I looked at the chocolate bar and there was a huge amount of ants swarming out of the wrapper.
I must have eaten some. I must have.
Mind you I believe they are full of protein and a natural source of vitamin B12. Great…
Anyway Jordan, Kira and I went to inspect my handbag, and found a huge trail of ants from the floor, along the length of the couch and going into my bag.

Ants are a big problem here. We are never without them. The kitchen is the worst place. Every day we have hundreds of them around the sink area and I must waste gallons of water swilling them away. Sometimes I use a spray like mortein, but don’t really like spraying poison around the house, and anyway it doesn’t stop them coming again.
One of John Bosco’s jobs is to do the washing up, so we leave the washing up from our evening meal overnight for him to do in the morning. Even though I rinse the plates and dishes, by morning time they are covered with ants, hundreds of them.
You can’t leave any piece of food around, any food in the cat’s dish or even a dead fly around as the ants come out in their thousands.

We have a friend Craig, who recently moved from Jinja to Lira, further north. He is a white American who has adopted three special needs Ugandan children. As he is single, he employs a couple of helpers to look after the children and run the house. Last week they had what they called ‘The Invasion of the White Ants’. They woke up in the morning to find the whole of their large compound (garden) and part of the living room covered in white ants.
Living, as they do, a typically Ugandan life, they collected a big basin full of them, cooked them and had a white ant feast. Apparently they are equally as tasty as grasshoppers…

And seeing as I seem to have started talking about creatures I might as well carry on. Apologies to squeamish people.
(My mother says “Kim, I can’t understand at all how you can live there!” )
Sometimes the cat catches a gecko. Although I know that the gecko’s tail falls off and carries on moving as a defence mechanism, I’d never actually seen it happen until recently. I was amazed at how the tail moves – manically! It twists and turns on the floor at an amazing rate of knots for a long time. Mind you, it obviously didn’t work as a strategy as the cat completely ignored it and carried on with the gecko until Jordan freed it. I saw it the gecko a few hours later in Kira’s room, tail-less.

One nice thing about creatures is the frogs which live nearby. Every evening at around 9pm they seem to break into song simultaneously and sing for hours. It’s very pleasant listening to them.
Fairly often we'll get a – presumably - lost frog wandering around the house. They are very cute!

April is birthday month for Jordan and me. This year he was 14 and had a group of friends around. They had pizza and birthday cake and stayed up watching DVDs till 4am and then all had a sleepover.

Sandy, one of his homeschool tutors, had made him a birthday cake – a Raiders one (American football team). She baked it, decorated it, and left it on the washing machine. Unfortunately someone turned the machine on, it vibrated, and the cake fell onto the floor! She had to salvage it, but it looked pretty good.

My birthday was a few days later. It's hard to believe that the birthday card Kira gave to me saying 'Happy 51st birthday' was actually for me. 51 is the age of your parents, not yourself!

A while ago I was driving through a village when I saw a young boy, aged around eight, running around with a plastic bag on his head. I was horrified.
Life here is different, and so a hundred thoughts ran through my head – shall I stop and tell him? Shall I tell some adults? Will they understand me? Will they appreciate what I say? Is it safe to stop? Will they lynch me?
One of our friends in Kampala has lived in Uganda for many years, and she said to us “Ugandans are…, they are….” she searched for the right word, “they are …. unpredictable.”
This thought ran through my head too. People in the villages think very differently to how we think, and I decided that there was a possibility that they may lynch me, so decided to carry on driving. But I still worried about the young boy.

I was telling Vicky, Kira’s teacher, about the boy we met last year whose family came here from the States to open an orphanage. They took in orphans from one of the villages, only to discover a year later that they were not orphans, but were actually the villagers’ own children and that the villagers felt they were onto a good thing by having their children fed, clothed and educated for free. When the family worked this out, they asked the villagers to take the children back, but the villagers accused them of child trafficking and the boy’s father was put in prison.
Vicky has helped set up an orphanage here, but as she is Ugandan, she understands how things work. If someone tells you a child is an orphan, you can’t necessarily believe it. Women in the villages often have many children – birth control isn’t commonplace – which means many children are unwanted, and the women may be happy for someone else to take on their child.
When Vicky was finding children for the orphanage, she went through a very rigorous process for determining whether they really were orphans. She went to visit the LC1 – first level of local government – the registrar, plus the probation service to check that there were no other family members who could look after them. She even insisted on going to the graves of the parents to check if what people were saying was accurate.
It seems very strange to us, but many people’s lives here are a world away from what we are used to in the western world.
Vicky herself has a sad story – she has seven brothers and sisters, six of whom have died. Two of her sisters died two days apart, from very different illnesses. This means there are quite a lot of orphans in her own family.

And so we still use the library regularly, though it isn’t easy finding books there we want to read. Fortunately there are now a number of new-ish books which have come via Book Aid International, Ranfurly library service which provides books to libraries, hospitals, refugee camps and schools in order to support literacy, education, training and publishing in a number of countries around the world. Given there are no real bookshops in Jinja, we are very grateful for this service!

There is a ‘Book exchange’ though. An English person living here brings in second-hand books donated from the UK. He puts them in cafes, and the way it works is that you take a book along, swap it, and pay 1000/- which goes to a local charity. The range of books is small, and the longer the books are there, the more the English ones are replaced by ones in Dutch, German, Japanese etc, brought in by tourists!

Jon and I have been doing some more painting. He is producing a couple of paintings which will make his big painting into a triptych. Almost finished, I’ll include the photos next time.

Meanwhile I’ve had a few orders for my paintings – seven in total. Three for a friend and four for another friend who wanted them for her children. She will take them back to Reunion Island. My butterfly one is my favourite.

I’m also in the middle of organising a Sports Day for Kira’s homeschool centre. There are now only three children there on a regular basis, which seemed a tad on the small side to hold a sports day.
Mind you, they would all get a placing in every event!
So we’ve opened it up to children from the pre-school, and home-schooled children plus tutors and parents, so it should be a decent sized turnout. Lots of eggs, spoons, sacks and three legs needed!

There are a couple of dogs who live in the compound at the homeschool centre. One of the tenants living there said one of the dogs was howling at night and frothing at the mouth. When we went in in the morning the dog looked perfectly OK, but we called the vet. He doesn’t have a surgery, he visits the animals. I wasn’t there when he came, but accounts differ as to what happened. One says that the dog was showing early signs of rabies. Another says the vet said there was no sign of rabies at all but that he decided to put it down because he didn’t like the dog. Anyway, the dog was put down. The vet gave it poison to eat. This happened at the homeschool centre while the children were there. They were heartbroken.

And on a lighter note, Kira’s friends who are in the Baha’i religion had another celebration recently, Ridvan, which is a twelve day celebration starting on 20th April. We were invited along to the first day. It’s nice to see how different religions operate.
There was a lot of food there - Ugandans are keen on celebrations which include food. I like the Ugandan dishes – matoke (green bananas), sweet potato, rice, spinach, beans, groundnut sauce. All very natural foods, grown locally.

We buy quite a lot of locally grown food from the market. I worked out recently that we must easily buy 100 bananas a month! And that’s just for three of us, as Jordan doesn’t like them. They are very cheap and readily available and make up a large part of our diet.

When I was at the market a couple of weeks ago, it was so hot that I was starting to suffer from dehydration. I staggered out, went to the nearest mini supermarket and bought a carton of juice. That hasn’t really happened before, so it must have been a super hot day.

And talking of things that haven’t happened before – when Kira and I arrive at our house, she often gets out when we reach the gate, jumps on the back of the car and holds onto the spare wheel, while I drive down the driveway. One morning she decided to jump on the back of the car while we went out of the driveway. She hasn’t done this before so I forgot she was there, and went sailing merrily down the lane until I heard a little voice shout “Mummyyyyyy!”

March 2010

2010-04-02T10:50:00.000-07:00

We are very much in the rainy season now, with lots of spectacular storms and very heavy downpours.
At the beginning of the month I was caught in a flash flood while driving back to Jinja from Kampala. All of a sudden the main road turned into a raging muddy river. You would have thought that the Nile had broken its banks, the amount of water rushing along the roads, with the huge storm drains unable to contain the vast deluge.
Amazingly I was able to drive along - very slowly – though the people on their pushbikes were struggling a bit! They were up to their knees in it.
A man on a boda boda was holding onto the back of a truck and getting through it by being pulled along.

However whenever it rains things seem to stop working and we now have almost daily power cuts. You get very blasé about power cuts after a while, and if we are, say, eating our evening meal and it goes pitch black, we just carry on regardless.
I had to smile when reading about what people throughout the world were doing for Earth Hour (where people switch off non-essential lights for an hour once a year). We decided not to participate …

Not only do we have power cuts, the power we do get is what Jon calls ‘dirty electricity’. We get lots of power fluctuations and it is very common for electrical items to be damaged or even destroyed. I’ve lost my laptop because of it. Jon’s laptop battery now holds no charge; I have to charge my cellphone every day; the TV now only shows pictures in blue and pink (we watched a black and white movie on it last week – it now shows in ‘colour’!) and the other day the modem stopped working. We decided to buy a new modem and switch internet providers at the same time. Orange has recently entered the Uganda market for cellphones and internet, so we are now with them.

Kira’s friends are in the Baha’i religion, and they recently celebrated their new year (Naw Ruz) on March 21st with a party that Kira went to. Their year consists of 19 months, each having 19 days and they are now up to the year 166.

We have some friends who come from Reunion Island, a small island to the east of Madagascar. They have recently been home for a visit and will be leaving here in June to move back there. They bought us a lovely book showing photos of the island and have invited us over there. It looks very beautiful, and we look forward to going.
We’ll have to brush up on our French though!

Recently I gave Moses, Kira’s craft teacher, a lift into town. He wanted to get a boda boda there. He made me park round the corner so the boda drivers couldn’t see me. If he had been seen with a muzungu they would have charged him more.
Moses has been running a project for a few street kids, teaching them crafts in a tiny, dark building. He has now managed to rent a large house in big grounds and will be able to house and organise education for 22 street kids. I asked him how he had managed to make such a big move. He said he had met a group of young adult volunteers from the UK who have rich parents! One parent provided 6,000,000/- (about £2000, $4000) to pay for 6 months’ rent of the building, while another parent held a coffee morning and raised the equivalent of 3,000,000/-
Some of the street kids are orphans, while some of them have parents, but once they reach a certain age (around 11/12), their parents throw them out and leave them to live on the streets.

There are many, many organisations helping people here. Uganda has the largest number of NGOs (non governmental organisations, i.e. Aid Agencies) per capita in the world. Every year millions of dollars, euros and pounds flow into the country. Yet despite that, there is still a lot of ‘need’ here.
International help, NGOs, charities etc are a double edged sword. While on the one hand they provide a lot of help, there is a huge amount of ‘learnt helplessness’ amongst the Ugandan people, an expectation that people will come along and help them, rather than working out ways to help themselves.
Jordan and I read a book about the Black Death as part of his home-schooling. The Black Death occurred in the 1300’s and part of the book described how people in the villages in England lived at the time. It’s how Ugandans in villages live now. It took me aback a bit to think that in 700 years many people here haven’t moved on.

One of Jon’s suggestions is that a great way to help Ugandans would be to have people come over and teach people driving skills, and how to be safe on the roads. The standard of driving here is very scary.

Anyway, I continue to write. A magazine I used to write for asked me to submit some articles, and I’ll be having four published in their next editions. A bit of an eclectic mix: Using Failure as a stepping stone to success; Do you want a job, career, or vocation? Women in business – how to juggle life’s demands; Marriage is a mathematical relationship.

I’ve also made one of my books into an e-book: Better Speaking Better Thinking. I never run out of ideas for books to write.

Kira had a friend stay over last night. In the morning they got up early and made breakfast for us all. Jordan will be having his 14th birthday party on Easter Sunday, and will have friends sleep over. At the last sleepover they stayed up watching movies till 6am. Jon has told them he’ll expect them to prepare breakfast in the morning too …

2010-03-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

Aaargh!

No, that doesn’t adequately express how I feel.

AAAAAAARRRRGHHHH!!!!!

That’s better.
Yes, we’ve been dealing with the banks again. I find it so difficult dealing with their way of working, sometimes I can’t cope.
All we wanted to do was open a bank account in another bank. It should be so simple, but despite going in to find out what we needed to provide, spending a few days gathering all the information and going in again with 10 sets of papers, we ended up walking out in frustration at how difficult they made it for us.
Other muzungus have expressed similar frustrations and apparently many have left their banks and have all joined the same bank, so we need to have a look at that one.
Aaarrgggh.

Anyway, Jon has been spending vast amounts of time setting up a new website for Uganda - an online advertising site called Find it in Uganda.
It’s at www.finditinuganda.com
We are aiming for it to be the largest advertising site for the country and are now in the process of marketing it. Someone I know is very impressed with it and has offered to work alongside us to promote the site.
(And so if you, or anyone you know, have anything you would like to advertise that could be sold over here – eg e-books – feel free to place an advert. It’s free, there is no charge.)

And talking of e-books, I wrote a book with some other speakers a few years ago called Successful Woman which we self published and sold. I have now made it into an e-book.

The beginning of the year is the warmest time and we’ve had some very hot days. John Bosco our house helper took a few days off and so I had to do the clothes washing (by hand – we have no washing machine). It was so hot that I would take the washing straight out of the bowl, dripping wet, hang it on the line and it would be dry in 3 hours, even jeans and towels.

Jon struggles a bit with the heat, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be standing out in it for any length of time, but having been following the UK temperatures of -2 degrees and lower, and I’m more than happy to be in an overly hot place.

I’ve been having some swimming lessons. I can already do breaststroke, I can also do backstroke - though tend not to here, as pools are outdoors and I find it the sun too bright when I swim on my back - but I can’t do freestyle/crawl.
I’ve been having lessons with Ronnie, the sports tutor who teaches the children. It’s really nice going for lessons as we go in the morning when the pool is empty, it’s outdoors in beautiful surroundings and it’s nice and warm & sunny.
I do like the easy way of life here – eg if you want a golf, swimming, squash or tennis lesson – Ronnie is available, the pool, course and golf course are usually not busy – you don’t have to book, things aren’t rushed or oversubscribed.
Anyway my swimming is improving – though it would be much easier if I didn’t have to breathe. I can do the swim stroke OK, I just can’t get the breathing right!

Jinja is home to thousands of bats, though they are not here all year round. They came back at the beginning of the year for a few weeks and stayed in the trees in the street next to us. It was lovely listening to them. Unfortunately people from the tribe that eats bats also came along as well. They have slingshots and little balls made from the red earth and they spend hours every day firing the balls at the bats to knock them out of the trees. They pick up the bats, hit them over the head with their slingshot and them put them into sacks. At the end of the afternoon I would see the men going off with their sacks full of dead bats.

There have been a couple of incidents recently.
Firstly my friend in Kampala found that there were a lot of cockroaches coming into his house. He called out the pest control people on 30th January. They came and sprayed the house. He then asked them to put something in the septic tank as he felt that’s where they were originating from. The pest control people took the lid off the septic tank and found a dead body in there.
Apparently the neighbour had killed his girlfriend on Jan 21st and put her body in the tank on Jan 22nd. Just after this the landlord turned up and locked the guy out of the house as he hadn’t paid his rent for 5 months.
My friend called the police on 30th who went into the neighbour’s house and found the crime scene untouched as the man hadn’t been able to get back into his house to clean it up.
Even though the woman’s body had been in the tank for 9 days no one had reported her as missing.
My friend and his family weren’t able to stay in their house and had to go and stay with relatives. He’s now had to move house. It was quite a big deal here and he was featured in the papers and on TV.

Secondly the teacher at Kira’s school told me one day that one of the girls had been picked up half an hour late from school the day before.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because of the incident on the bridge’ she replied.
Apparently a local woman had abducted a girl aged around 9-10 and had planned to kill her and use her as a sacrifice to the God of the Nile. She had taken the girl to the bridge which goes over the river, had tied her hands behind her back and had put a sack over her head. This was about 5pm when it was still light.
People saw this, realised what was happening and went over and beat her up.
Police came in to clear the crowd. They were going to fire shots into the air but the crowd was too large and rowdy so they decided to shoot two people. They shot one in the arm and one in the leg. The crowd dispersed after this.
The girl was physically OK, though was taken for rehab. The woman – very badly beaten up - was taken away by the police.
People involved in child sacrifice don’t use children whose bodies aren’t ‘intact’, and so parents will get their daughters’ ears pierced and have their boys circumcised so they are safe from being sacrificed.

Only a slightly lighter note Jordan has an African friend called Shalom. His mother was out one day and found a tiny baby girl – still with umbilical cord attached – on the grass. She took the baby, informed the hospitals and the police but no one came forward to claim her. Despite her husband having died and having a family of 7 in a tiny, tiny house, she took the baby in and called her Gift. Gift is doing well and is very much a part of their family now.

The craft teacher at Kira’s school has started a craft project for some of the local street children. He found a room – very basic and with no furniture – and set up a project using his own money. He himself is an orphan and was brought up in a large orphanage in the Jinja area. The children have very little, so Kira and I took round some of her and Jordan’s clothes and shoes they have grown out of, to give to them. It was all very exciting and they put the clothes and shoes on straight away!

Kira’s school have been doing some community work each week by going into one of the local orphanages. They felt it was time for a change, so I arranged for them to go into a different orphanage, a much bigger one, which has around 50 babies and small children. They go from 4-5pm once a week and enjoy being with the tiny children.
Whenever I go to pick her up it’s a real overdose of cuteness. The children are so little and sweet. They all swarm around you and they all want to hold your hand or get you to pick them up. Choochie!

We have arranged for music lessons at school, using African instruments, and have found a Ugandan musician who comes in. He can’t always access enough instruments to bring along, so I’ve been out with Vicky the teacher to find some to buy. Each child chose an instrument they want to learn - I’ve bought some pan pipes, some thumb pianos (see photo of Jon trying it out) and a tube fiddle. Kira just loves the tube fiddle (‘endingidi’) which is a ‘1 stringed bowed chordophone from the Baganda people’. It’s a little bit like learning to play a one-stringed violin.

I still teach Kira every morning from 8-10am, and we recently finished a Maths book we have been working on for a year. We decided to have a celebration, take a morning session off and go and have breakfast at a local café. Yum!

We arrange for someone to provide school lunches for the children. The person who was doing it would prepare the meals and bring them in each day. However he became too busy and so we have found another person, a man called Ivan, who doesn’t have a proper kitchen he can prepare the food in. To help him, we bought a charcoal burner and some charcoal, and he comes into school every day with the uncooked food and prepares it outside the back of the school building on the charcoal burner!

I also still homeschool Jordan for about 12 hours a week.
As the boys he’s homeschooled with are American, they all decided to watch the Super Bowl at a friend’s house. Over here it was shown at 3am, so they went to bed at 8.30pm, got up at 1.30am, watched the game and came home at 6am. Jordan went straight to bed, but I made him get up for his Maths lesson with his tutor at 11am, and then do some school work in the afternoon!

A few days ago he said to me ‘If you didn’t dye your hair, you would look as old as your dad’. My Dad is 80.
No offence Dad, but I guess it must be time for me to have a face lift.

Meanwhile, John Bosco was telling me about his mother.
‘She’s very old’ he said, ‘very very old’.
‘How old is she?’ I asked.
‘She’ll be making 45’ he replied.

One day we decided to go round the shops and the market in the evening. We haven’t done it before and it was a really nice experience. Jinja is quite a different place in the evenings. There are different vendors selling their goods on the pavements, and the market looked so lovely. There are no lights in the market and only a small portion of it is open – the part which sells fruit & veg, fish and meat. The vendors sit on the ground with their wares spread out around them, and have small paraffin lamps. It was a lovely sight to see so many stalls lit by lamplight.
There are a number of stalls selling beans, in huge huge sacks. Whenever we buy them, we have to sift through the beans to get rid of any unwanted matter.
The people in the small towns and villages who grown the beans, dry them out at the side of the road. Sometimes they are laid out on sacks, but often they are simply laid out on the road. This means you have to get rid of pieces of gravel, dust, leaves, twigs etc. before you cook them.
A few times I’ve bought lentils from the market, however you have to check those too, as a couple of times they’ve been infested with weevils!

And talking of food, Jordan has been longing for a McDonald’s hamburger. There are no McDonald’s outlets here, so one day, when we had been invited round to some friends’ for a meal, I made a ‘hamburger and fries’ for all the children.
For the hamburger I made some scones, and some round, flat, chocolate crispie cakes. I cut the scones in half, and put the crispie cakes inside.
For the fries I cut up pieces of toast into thin strips, painted them with yellow food colouring, and made a French fries packet by painting some paper bright red, making it into a packet shape and painting a yellow McDonalds’s ‘M’ on it. It looked pretty convincing!

And for some reason I was thinking about pavements recently. Our driveway isn’t paved, and we live in an area of unsealed lanes. Pavements aren’t common in many places in Uganda, so Jon and I were trying to work out where the nearest pavement to us was. It’s probably in the town centre, a 10 minute walk from here.

And finally … In 1992, when I came back from honeymoon in late September, I started a night class in CLAIT - Computer literacy and information technology - at Runshaw college in Leyland (England). I completed the course after a term. Recently I received a note from Runshaw saying my certificate was ready to be collected…

January 2010

2010-01-23T03:54:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

At the end of December we went on our safari in western Uganda. It was a long, long trip there and back, but it was nice to see more of the countryside and some parts looked quite different to what we are used to.
We took the ‘top road’ on the way there which was fairly slow as they are repairing large portions of it, but mainly the roads were OK. We had had our shock absorbers replaced – they take a bit of a battering here – as I couldn’t face a long trip on bumpy roads with shonky shock absorbers.
We stayed in Kampala with friends the night before as that reduced the journey by two hours, but it still took us eight and a half hours from theirs.
We stopped on the way at a café. On the menu we saw they were selling ‘fruit scorns’.
Anyway we arrived in the evening on 30th, and asked about going on safari the next morning.
“You need to have breakfast at 6am then go on the game drive at 6.30am” they said, “as the animals sleep in the afternoon.”
We were far too tired to get up at 5am the next morning so had a sleep-in, had breakfast, then arrived at the National Park around midday on 31st.
The entry fee was198,300/- , so we gave them 200,000/- in notes. “Don’t you have the correct money?” asked the man.
We took our own car on the safari and managed to find a ranger who accompanied us on a game drive, showed us the best routes to take and explained about the animals and birds we saw. It took three hours to drive round.
Later in the day we also went on a 2-hour boat trip and saw lots more animals. We even saw a hippo doing a barrel roll - it rolls onto its back with its legs up, then rolls onto its front again. Jordan managed to get a shot and is very proud of it. We saw hippos, elephants, lions, kobs (like antelopes), a baboon, crocodiles, buffaloes, warthogs, banded mongoose and lots of birds.
Safari parks talk about the Big Five – hippos, elephants, lions, leopards and rhinos. This park has the Big Four (no rhinos) we saw most but we didn’t get to see the leopards.

There were many, many kobs, and they have a mating ground there. The males stand in a big circle and the females come to look at them. If they don’t think a male kob is good looking enough, they move onto the next one. All the kobs looked exactly the same to us, so I don’t know what criteria the females use!

As the entry fee gave us 24 hour access to the Park, we decided to go again in the morning, so in the evening (New Year’s Eve) we went to bed early, in order to get up at 5am for another game drive. We used the same ranger to show us round, who not only had been celebrating New Year, but also his birthday and hadn’t got to bed till 4am. He was wide awake while we were all too tired to really appreciate it, and the children even slept through a large part of it! Mind you, we actually got to see fewer animals than we did the afternoon before, so it wasn’t too bad.

It was quite different to the safari I did in Kenya many years ago in the Maasai Mara, and Jon and I were a tad disappointed. As we drove around on designated paths it felt a bit like being in a big park in the UK….
The safari lodge we stayed in is new and uses solar power. Unfortunately the weather was uncharacteristically overcast for the week around Xmas, which meant we had no hot water or electricity. Given that the lodge was about 2km from the equator, and January is the hottest month of the year, you would have thought we’d have had a pretty good chance of the solar power working!
There were also no power points in the rooms, so everyone had to charge their cellphone in the dining area (which must have been on mains electricity).

We drove back on the ‘bottom’ road and went through a beautiful area called Ankole. It’s probably the most attractive part of Uganda we have seen.
Fortunately we stayed with friends in Kampala again, which helped us hugely as the trip back took 10 hours this time. We couldn’t have faced a further two hour drive to Jinja.

We crossed the equator twice – once near our safari lodge, and once on the way back. On the way back, a little trading area has built up around the equator, with very nice gift shops and café. An enterprising Ugandan has set up three sink-like bowls, one on the equator, one slightly north and one slightly south, to show the different ways that water goes down the plughole. I would have asked him to demonstrate, but he was charging 10,000/-. Having lived in both the northern and southern hemisphere, I’ve actually done the experiment myself, and it isn’t that exciting!

As we reached the outskirts of Kampala, I texted our friends to say we had reached Kampala. Traffic there is appalling, so after an hour and we hadn’t arrived, they phoned us up and said “Which Kampala did you go to?”

I spent some time looking through the Uganda travel guide to see where else we would like to visit before we leave. There are not many places. A lot of the country is long roads with small towns or villages which offer little for tourists.
One of the more touristy things is a trip across one of the lakes. On one side of the lake is a tiny town with two places you can stay in. As the better of two places to stay costs $1.50 a night including breakfast, we thought we may give it a miss.
For those who want to cross the lake, there is a boat which seems to travel once a day at random times. If you happen to miss the boat and it’s evening time, they recommend you go to Police station and ask to sleep on their floor.

Earlier in the month we were invited to a party where the children had to go in medieval costume. Jordan had made some Crusaders armour out of cardboard and painted red crosses on it. For Kira I designed a top and long skirt, bought some royal blue satin material, and we had it made up by one of the sewing ladies who has a treadle machine on the pavement. I then sewed silver braid on it and made her a pointy hat with a ribbon of material coming down from the top. She loves it. The people hosting the party had made a tree house that looked like a castle; had made some stocks and had got wet sponges to throw at people in the stocks; someone had painted a huge sheet with the family’s coat of arms on it and someone else had painted a huge picture of a dragon. They had made a sword for all the children, and had made a birthday cake in the shape of a castle. Very impressive!
Kira wore the outfit the next day when we went to a restaurant. The owner saw it, was impressed, and so brought some chocolate cake over for everyone at the table.

I went to the shops with Jon as he wanted to buy some new trousers. He found some he liked but they were about an inch too long. The woman in the shop said “I will take them to the tailor” and zoomed out of the shop. She will have taken them to one of the many males who also sit on the pavement with a sewing machine. We wandered around the other shops for a few minutes, came back and they had been shortened. The tailor only charged 1,500/- (48p, $1.10), and he even ironed them as well.

As we were wandering around the shops we spotted one of the Pineapple Men. These are people who sell pineapples from a big wooden wheelbarrow. You can either just buy a pineapple as it is, or you can get him to ‘peel’ it for you. It’s very impressive how they do it – he holds the top of the pineapple, and using a very sharp knife cuts all the peel off. Then he puts 8 slices in it like a cake, from the top down. Then he places the pineapple into a plastic bag, bottom first and as he does this he cuts off the top off which leaves 8 slices of peeled pineapple in the bag for you. Much easier than struggling to peel and cut it yourself.

The children started back at their respective ‘schools’ this month. The boys Jordan is homeschooled with went on a homeschool conference for a week in Kenya. They have worked out some alternative lyrics to the film Highschool Musical and have called it ‘Homeschool Musical’. It’s very funny.

While they were away Jordan had a golf lesson as his weekly sports tutoring. He asked me to join him, so I did. It’s only the second golf lesson I’ve had and I enjoyed it, despite the blistering heat. My shoulders were aching the next day though.

Last year Kira’s school had seven pupils. One has left, we think to go to Italy, and another has been abducted by a family member in another country! This leaves five. Two are overseas until February and one decided to start back in the second week. This meant that in Week One there was only Kira and one other girl.
Not only that but the teacher was on a course, so we had a replacement teacher. This teacher loved everything about the school, and the children liked her, so everyone was happy.

A couple of little boys, Dan and Kennedy, live in the school’s compound with their mother in the ‘boys quarters’ at the back. They are nice children and sometimes I give the older one, Dan, a ‘driving lesson’. They both come in the car. Kennedy sits in the front seat, Dan sits on my knee and I let him steer the car. The roads round there are very quiet and you rarely see another vehicle. He loves it and tells everyone he can drive. I took this photo and showed them it. They both laughed!

I took Kira and her friend Michelle swimming one day. Michelle is Ugandan, and as she watched me putting sunscreen on she said “If I put sunscreen on, my skin turns purple.”

As part of Kira’s homeschooling we have been studying composting, and have now got a compost bin. Our research shows that it needs to be in a shady spot in the garden to keep it from drying out. This has proved - well – impossible, as we have no shady spot in the garden. Amazing, isn’t it, no shady spot. I’ve put it behind the house which has shade for a few hours, and then have to give it a dousing with water every day to keep it moist.

Mind you, it is helpful having a sunny garden when you decide as I did, to have a hangi. A hangi, for you non-New Zealand people, is a traditional Maori way of cooking food – in the ground.
First we dug a hole in the lawn (a hidden bit of the lawn), then put a lattice of small branches near the bottom to support the igneous rocks we had to find. Then we put wood/branches in there and burnt them for one and a half hours to get the rocks hot enough. Then we scraped the ashes off the rocks, put a damp cloth on them and put our food on, in silver foil containers. As this was a trial, we just used potatoes, onions, carrots and sausages. Then we put the soil back on, ensuring no steam escaped and left it all for a couple of hours.
Now, as people have pointed out, it is much easier if you put them in the oven … but where’s the fun in that?
The hardest part was finding enough wood. Many Ugandans use wood for their own cooking, so there wasn’t much around. We did manage to find a bit of what smelt like a pine tree and loaded it in the car. My car boot carpet is now full of tiny pine needles I can’t get out.
Anyway the food was cooked wonderfully. The only small problem was a bit of the silver foil cover buckled under the weight of the soil and some earth got in. Jon and Jordan weren’t bothered and just washed a few sausages and potatoes under the tap and they were fine!

You have to get used to the red earth round here, it gets everywhere. When you go shopping round the Jinja shops your hands get dirty when you pick things up as they have a coating of dust on them. Some supermarkets have a cloth at the till and wipe the products, while one supermarket gives you hand wipes at the checkout.

And talking of cleaning things, I asked John Bosco to give our fridge a clean. I expected he would take the items out and wipe the inside of the fridge. Instead he took the items out, and carried the fridge outside onto the lawn with the help of Geoffrey the gardener and cleaned it there!

And so the squash court here, which was newly refurbished not so long ago isn’t being looked after, and will look quite run down if it’s not maintained. There is usually a collection of creatures in there – the occasional bat, lizard or spider, along with a regular cloud of mosquitoes. It’s hard trying to hit the ball when several mozzies decide to fly in front of your face. We spend as much time swatting the mozzies with the racquets as we do the ball.
There must be leaks in the roof and there are streaks of dried rain down the walls, which have caught a lot of dead mozzies.
At times when there is no electricity, it’s quite hard to play as you can’t see. One time I was playing with Jordan when the power went off. He decided we should play with the door open. The ball hardly ever hits the door, but the first shot we took saw the ball sailing out of the court and onto the grass outside. It went outside a few more times, one time landing in a muddy puddle.

Jordan has got an idea for a version of Monopoly called Uganda Monopoly. Basically you have a board with potholes in it and you drive round the board any way you like, overtaking, going the wrong way or going across the board. Instead of the top hat and the shoe and the dog, you use pieces like a boda boda, a matatu (minibus), a goat, a banana fibre sunhat etc The first few properties are mud huts, moving on to small houses and building up to the posh hotels in Kampala. If you land on the electricity or the water companies, you only have to pay sometimes, as the chances are they won’t be working. I think the game should catch on …

One of the UK people we know here works for the British Forces. He gets sent DVDs of English TV programmes from the BFBS – British Forces Broadcasting Service. He’s lent us a whole wad of them – it’s great, as we don’t watch TV here, the reception is poor and we only get two not-very-interesting Ugandan stations. We feel like we are watching ‘real’ TV. I guess it is also good training for when we move back to Blighty. At least we’ll know some of the programmes.

A Ugandan I met a while back is getting married. Here, people have expensive weddings they can’t afford, so they have a group of people who help them fundraise for the wedding. Each week they have a meeting. Although I don’t really know this person well, and haven’t met the fiancée, I have been invited 14 times to the many pre-wedding meetings. Crikey!

And while I very rarely talk about politics there are a couple of current issues that are getting a lot of coverage. One is the proposed ‘Anti-Homosexual Bill’ that would criminalize homosexuality and institute the death penalty for gay HIV-positive people.
A U.S. news report said that ‘Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the strongest statement yet by an administration official that the United States will not tolerate efforts to criminalize homosexuality among countries that receive U.S. funding to combat HIV/AIDS.’
And secondly ‘The US Congress has directed the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to closely monitor the Uganda Government’s preparation for the 2011 general elections.’ Uganda’s general election is a year away, and Jon and I had decided that if we were still living here then, we would leave the country for a while, while it was going on. It is Africa after all.

Now that we only have a few months left here I do feel a sadness at leaving. I love the sunshine, the relaxed atmosphere, the fact that you don’t have to dress to keep warm, the African-ness of it all. On Saturday mornings I go to the market. I love going there; it’s so ‘African’. I will really miss things like that. I will have to come back…

December 2009

2009-12-26T10:45:00.001-08:00

Sekukulu enungi!
Yes, ‘Happy Christmas’ in Luganda. I hope you all had a good time over Winterval / the festive season / or whatever politically correct term we are now supposed to use.

Santa came this year (possibly for the last time, as a certain person will probably be too old next year) and we managed to remain ‘unwoken’ until 7.30am. We opened the presents and then didn’t really see the children for many hours as Jordan played a new computer game and Kira watched several DVDs.
In the afternoon we went round to a house dubbed ‘The Pink Palace’ – a pink house, rented by several people we know. This was the meeting point for many muzungus from Jinja, elsewhere in Uganda, and overseas, who came along for a shared Xmas meal.
We didn’t stay long as we had our Christmas meal with some friends. They are a French family, and they had also invited their neighbour who is English and a friend who is from Chile.
We had a lovely meal of tilapia - a local fish - as two of the people work at the tilapia fish farm. We also had a treasure hunt in the garden which was not only in the dark and involved Jordan climbing onto the roof, but was also in French … mon dieu!

The weather was strangely un-Ugandan on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The sun didn’t shine at all for 2 days - very unusual. People were even wearing cardigans!

John Bosco our house boy has gone home to his family in the village for Christmas. Good grief, we now have to do housework! We’ve divvied up the tasks and I have the job of doing the washing. We don’t have a washing machine so I have to do it all by hand. Crikey!

I was a bit disappointed this year as Jinja seems to have discovered Christmas decorations. The mini supermarkets were selling tinsel, baubles and Christmas trees. Even some stalls in the market were selling decorations. Last year there was no evidence of Christmas at all.
Mind you, by western standards it was very low key, and as we don’t watch TV we had no adverts to sit through either. Christmas next year when we are in the UK will be very different.

Earlier in the month Jordan had a bad dose of malaria. He had been felling unwell, but he has been like this before and has become fine by the next day. I did a malaria test on him and it showed negative, so we left him overnight.
However in the morning he was in a bad way so I took him to the doctor’s surgery which has an on-site hospital and they admitted him straight away.
He had a temperature of 40 degrees, rapid heart beat, vomiting, dehydration and was delirious. They had to sort out all of these before they could start malaria treatment. When delirious he couldn't understand even simple things like 'clench your fist' or 'sit up', and was saying very unusual things. He tried to take the drip out of his hand and tried to get out of bed to leave hospital.
Kira got upset seeing Jordan so ill and was crying so I had to take her to a friend's.
He has never been able to master the skill of swallowing tablets so that made things more challenging. They gave him quinine in a drip but it made his blood pressure drop so they put him on artinam, which they gave by injection.
Jon stayed in hospital with him overnight. He was in for a day and a half then came home and was very weak afterwards. He’s probably recovered now. It’s been two and a half weeks.

As we arrived at the hospital, a strange looking man was crossing the road. As I got near to where he was, he threw himself on the road in a very melodramatic dive and started shouting out in Luganda, as if I had run him over. As I was near the hospital, I parked on the road just a few metres from where he was.
“Oh that’s just great” I thought, “I’m sorting out a very sick child and now someone is trying to claim I ran him over.”
Fortunately a Ugandan man was walking past. He looked at me, looked at the man and raised his eyes.
“Oh good” I thought, “He isn’t going to convince any Ugandans to go and call the police.”
The room Jordan was in looked out onto the road. I could see him from where we were, and he sat in the middle of the road for ages.

Although the room we were in was very basic, I think it’s the best room in the hospital. There are two beds there and when we arrived an old Ugandan lady was in one of the beds. I assumed she would be there for a while as she looked pretty ill. She had quite a few of her family members there who looked like they had camped out on the floor overnight, they had brought some mats to sleep on.
It took a few minutes to get Jordan sorted – to explain what was happening (though he didn’t understand) and to stop him trying to run out of the hospital. When I looked round the old lady and her family had gone. I think they had moved her to a communal ward, because muzungus tend to take preference for the best things …

I have been having Luganda lessons from Vicky, Kira’s teacher. I want to learn some basics so I can communicate with people, and so have been learning how to ask for things like ‘two kilos of potatoes’ from the market, which you translate as ‘potatoes kilos two’, or how to say ‘good morning’, which translates as ‘did you sleep well?’ Luganda is nothing like any other language I’ve learnt and so I can’t work anything out, I just have to learn the words.

Many Ugandans in the towns go home to their family in the villages over Christmas. I asked Vicky if she would be going to her village. She said she wasn’t because she didn’t like to see her Mum and Dad or Granddad. None of them are alive.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Apparently it’s very common to bury your relatives in the garden, and she doesn’t like to stay at her Grandmother’s house, because when she comes out of the front door she can see the graves.

And so the Panto – Aladdin – went very well again this year. Many people from last year were in it again, plus a few new ones. Jon was the pantomime dame again - Widow Twankey – and Jordan and Kira were in the chorus.
Unfortunately Jordan was recovering from malaria at the time of the performances and so wasn’t able to take part. He had been rehearsing for about 3 months, so was very disappointed.
I was due to do the makeup, which was a bit of a challenge, as you can’t really find makeup in Jinja. I had to borrow some foundation, use some of my own makeup and brushes, and make all the eye shadows myself. I used cornflour, body lotion, vegetable oil and food colouring.
Anyway I got everything ready and someone else had to do it instead, as I had to look after Jordan.
Somehow he managed to drag himself along to watch the final performance. He hadn’t eaten for five days, was very thin and weak, and two hours beforehand had been so hot that I had to sponge him with cold water.
Anyway, the performance was great, and the audience loved it.

Our car insurance was due this month. Jon had sorted it last year so I asked where he’d got it from and went along to renew it. The office was closed, so I went back later and it was still closed. Kira and I peeped in through the lock in the door and it appeared to have closed down. We went to another insurance company. Companies produce a certificate for you to stick on the inside of your car window.
“I can’t give you your certificate” the woman said after she’d taken my money “my typewriter is broken.”
So we got in the car and went to another insurance company. They were out at lunch, so we went to yet another one (the fourth one I’d visited). Fortunately the woman there had a typewriter which was working perfectly and I managed to get my car insurance. Then I had to take the woman back to her office.

Some Ugandan ways we find difficult to deal with as they are very different to what we are used to. For example I was standing in the queue at Umeme, the electricity company, to pay my bill. A man was before me getting served. While I was waiting, another man came to the counter and stood next to the man who was being served. As the first man left, the other man pushed in front and gave his bill and payment to the woman behind the counter. I told him I was next, so he moved aside and stood next to (not behind) me. I gave my bill and payment in, and then a woman came in between us and pushed her bill and payment in front of me on the counter for the assistant to deal with.
Another time I was at the bank (aarghh, banks! aarghh) and when I got to the counter the man behind me in the queue came to the counter as well and stood beside me. He was very big and stood so close that I couldn’t actually get to the counter window as he was blocking most of it.
Sometimes if there is a queue Ugandans will go right up to the front and go behind the person working at the desk and get served there in front of others in the queue.
One thing I’d never really thought about until I came here was how men will always let a woman go first through a door. Here it’s vey different, men don’t let women go first, in fact they rush to get to the door before you or push you aside!

It’s very common to have geckos on your wall, both inside and outside the house. They are good to have around as they eat flies and mosquitoes. However, they do leave pooh around the house, and you need to check surfaces in case any has appeared overnight.
One day I decided to make myself pancakes for lunch while Jordan was at home recuperating. I made up the mixture and then popped in to see that Jordan was OK. When I got back a mozzie had landed in the mixture. I threw it away and made up some more. As I was making it, a fly dropped into the mixture. I decided to take a risk by taking the fly out and carrying on. I cooked a pancake and as I turned it over, discovered it had gecko pooh in it. We’d left the frying pan on the cooker overnight and I hadn’t noticed because the base of it is black. Groo!
I guess I wasn’t meant to have pancakes that day…

I’ve been quite creative recently, not only have I been producing some paintings for children which I’m aiming to sell, but have also produced a Haiku e-calendar with a verse for each month and a photo taken by one of us. If you would like a copy which you can print off, go to http://www.successfulspeaking.co.nz/products/

We are off to one of the national parks on 30th for three days. Will let you know how it goes

Jon has finished his masterpiece now – very impressive!

November 2009

2009-12-05T10:42:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of the month I was being driven mad by the lack of variety of food here, and had got to the stage where I was hardly eating anything, as I couldn’t face another meal of mince and rice, or corned beef hash yet again. Jinja has much less variety of food than Kampala, added to which I don’t eat wheat, along with the fact that the supermarket food here is expensive.
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 was 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 round 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.

October 2009

2009-10-22T13:44:00.001-07:00

Fairy tale: A Happy Story
Chapter 1
Once upon a time there was a nice man and a nice lady. They lived with their nice son and nice daughter in a land far, far away.
At first they lived in a big city, but it was too busy so they moved to a nice town by a long, long river.
One day while they lived in the big city, they decided to apply for a Driving Permit.
Can you say that children? Try it after me “Dri-ving Per-mit”.
Well done.
They enjoyed every minute they spent getting their Permit. They enjoyed travelling the long way between the nice town and the big city to visit all the different offices. They hired a nice taxi driver to drive them there in his shiny car and they paid him lots of money. This made the nice taxi driver very happy, and so the nice man and the nice lady were happy too.
Chapter 2
One whole year passed, and the nice man and the nice lady had to apply for another Permit.
“What fun we had last year” said the nice lady, “Let’s hope it is as much fun this year too.”
Unfortunately they didn’t go to the offices in the big city any more so they couldn’t do all the long journeys again, nor pay the nice taxi driver lots of money. This made them sad. But they decided to visit all the of offices in the nice town lots more times instead.
When it came to the last visit to the offices to get their Permit they were very sad. Very sad indeed. They wished the process could go on longer.
But The Luck Fairy saw what was happening. She is the fairy who brings good luck to nice people who are feeling sad.
She decided to help them.
So when they went into the Permit office for the seventh time, The Luck Fairy switched off all the electricity. This made the office lady very grumpy, and she held the nice man and the nice lady’s Permits in her hand and wouldn’t give them the Permits because she couldn’t use her computer.
“How fortunate!” said the nice lady “The Luck Fairy must know all about us. She helps us a lot and now she has helped us again.”
The nice man and the nice lady, however, pretended to be a bit cross. They said big words like “Inconvenience” “Customer service” and “Incompetency beyond belief.” They said the last words very quietly in case the grumpy lady heard them. The words were so clever that it might have made the grumpy lady want to speed up the system for them.
But the nice man and the nice lady weren’t really cross at all. Inside, their hearts were singing with happiness.
The nice lady felt so lucky that she cried with Jon. er … with joy. She cried with joy.
This meant that the nice man and the nice lady could go into the office four more, happy, times.
One time The Luck Fairy didn’t turn off the electricity, she stopped the Network from working instead. The nice man and the nice lady were overjoyed when the grumpy office lady held back their Permits once again.
The following time The Luck Fairy made the nice lady feel unwell and so the nice man asked if he could pick up the nice lady’s Permit instead, and showed the grumpy office lady a letter of authority from the nice lady. Fortunately The Luck Fairy’s power was strong enough to make the grumpy office lady refuse.
However The Luck Fairy then had other work to do and so the nice lady picked up her Permit on the eleventh visit. But the nice man and the nice lady had both had such a joyful experience that they were very happy. Very happy indeed.
The End.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I have discovered that I am vey delectable. At least to mosquitoes. They like me - a lot - and flock to be around me, ignoring all others.
Jordan likes to sit next to me as he knows that any mozzies will by-pass him and come and commune with me.
One evening time, which is the start of mozzie-coming-out time, I was doing my usual, trying to protect myself from getting bitten, and sitting on the couch looking like Eskimo Woman. I was wearing a high necked sleeveless top, a long sleeved cardigan with sleeves so long that they come down to my knuckles, ¾ pants and Jon’s long winter socks. I was boiling hot.
Jordan was sitting next to me, almost naked, wearing only a pair of shorts. The mozzies avoided him completely and bit me on the finger tip.
Other than wearing a spacesuit, I really don’t know what else I can do.
I feel a bit like Pig-Pen from Snoopy, who calls himself a dust magnet. I’m a mosquito magnet and seem to have my own personal entourage wherever I go.

I guess it was only a matter of time until I was bitten by the wrong sort of mosquito – a female who has bitten someone with malaria.
Half way through the month I got malaria, something I’ve dreaded happening since before we moved here.
I was in bed for four days feeling dreadful – aching all over, headachy, extremely weak, having strange dreams, and writhing in pain. Having to sit up to drink in order to take medication was almost impossible without Jon helping me.
Fortunately I have seen enough muzungus here who have had malaria and recovered quickly, to not get worried.
Many of them have had malaria enough times to self diagnose and treat themselves. When we first came here to have a look-see before we moved over, we asked people what they did about malaria. Most said they did nothing, and when they got it, took a few pills and came right pretty soon.
We keep a malaria testing kit and tablets in the house so were ready in case it ever happened. There are different kinds of treatment and the one muzungus use is called Coartem. I took it and came right after 4 days
Apparently it’s not used in the UK, and so people there tend to have a more challenging time recovering.
Anyway I’m a lot better now, but it’s certainly an experience I don’t want to repeat.

John Bosco and Geoffrey have both had it recently too, though they recovered more quickly than me because they have had it a number of times before.

The landlord has had a power line put in to their houses so they now have electricity there for the first time – must be very exciting for them. It’s rare for small Ugandan houses to have power.
Mind you we have to pay their electricity bill, so we had to tell them not to let the whole of the local community come in and take advantage of it.

And so our little kitten, Ginger, who Jon thinks is male, is growing. He is about half as big again as he was when we got him a few weeks ago, and has now started running and climbing. Lotte and Ginger get on well together which is a relief. He loves to eat the fish we buy that is found in Lake Victoria. It has a number of names, one of which is ‘baby fish’. They are very small, and are sold in the market very cheaply. We buy them dried, so soak them in water for a few minutes to make them easier for him to digest.

Generally we have a fairly cruisy life over here at the moment. Jon’s contract is for around three days a week, he teaches IT to Jordan et al, plus Kira and her schoolmates for one afternoon, and the rest of the time is his own, except for some private IT clients.
I do quite a bit of homeschooling. I do 2 hours each morning from 8-10am with Kira, and 3 afternoons a week with Jordan. I run some training courses from time to time, organise things at the homeschool centre, and the rest of the time I spend writing books.

For Jordan we have had to construct a timetable for him, and at the moment he is taught by Sandy, me, Jon, Rowena (a secondary Maths teacher from Zimbabwe), Ronnie the sports coach and a Ugandan carpenter called Richard.
He studies on Sunday mornings so he can have an afternoon off during the week.

I’m still giving him driving lessons and we decided to have a change from driving round in a circle on the open ground, so went next door to the Showgrounds - a large area of land, which most of the year is fairly empty. Everything went well the first time and he is picking things up very quickly. The second time we went, I drove in, then we swapped seats. At this point an older man and the guard came over. The older man was instantly very angry. He looked into the car, then pointed to the guard and said “You give this man some money. You give him 1000 shillings. He has not eaten since yesterday.” I said “We do not have 1000 shillings”. The man ranted on for a while, during which the guard looked very sheepish.
The man said “Who gave you authority to come in here?” We told him it was a public place and that we had been there often without trouble, which we have - at least without the car. At this point another car, driven by a Ugandan, went past us. “Do they have authority?” I asked, but knew it was pointless as they were not muzungus. Eventually we left them and went for the driving lesson.
As we went to leave, the guard came over to us. The older man had gone and the guard was no longer sheepish. He said “I have spoken to the management and they say you have to give me 1000 shillings or I will lock you in.”
“We do not have 1000 shillings” I said, “I really do not have it so I cannot give it to you.” It was true, I didn’t have it.
“You give me 1000 shillings or I will lock you in.”
“I will go home and I will bring it back for you” I said.
Jordan was appalled. “This is blackmail” he whispered “Don’t give it to him.”
Although I wasn't scared, given that the guard was standing there with a rifle, that Jordan and Kira were both in the car, and that he was asking for such a small amount of money (32p, 68c) my main aim was to get us out of the situation safely.
He let us drive off, on the promise that I would bring the money back.
Jordan was beside himself. “It’s corruption! It’s blackmail! It’s wrong!”
He was right, of course, but we were out safely, and part of me felt sorry for the guard. What must life be like for people who have to threaten others in order to get such a tiny amount of money?
“Do not go back!” yelled Jordan “Do not give him the money.”
He was very upset over the injustice of it all.
I tried to explain my viewpoint to him. “I will go back, and I will take him 1000 shillings” I said, “because I said I would and I don’t tell people lies. Plus, we only live over the road from the Showgrounds and it would make me feel safer knowing we didn't have an unhappy guard nearby.”
We had to go somewhere first, and then went home so I could get the money. As we arrived at our gate we saw the guard. He walked right past our car on his way home, but didn‘t seem to recognise us. It was pointless going back to the Showgrounds now.
Jordan told Jon about the incident, still very aggrieved over the wrongness of it. We all talked it through and tried to establish the various aspects of the situation.
The next day I went back to the Showgrounds, this time leaving the car outside!
The guard wasn’t there, but one of the Showground managers came over to talk to me.
He said “You confused us yesterday when you came in”, which I decided to take as the nearest thing I was going to get as an apology.
“You cannot have driving lessons in this place” he carried on.
“That is fine” I replied, “We will not come here again.”

And on a slightly lighter note, it’s now the rainy season, and when it rains it comes down in torrents. Fortunately it rarely lasts long, though the red earth becomes extremely muddy.
I took one of Kira’s friends home. She lives down a long, long dirt road. I’d only gone a few metres when I got completely stuck in the mud. Even when I changed into 4 wheel drive I couldn’t manage to get out. I called Kira's friend's Mum but she didn’t answer, so I called her Dad. He had to come home from work to get me out. Not only is he used to his driveway, he’s also a diesel mechanic. Very handy!

The rains and storms don’t help with the electricity supply. This means you can’t charge your mobile phone (it’s very rare to have a landline here), and when coupled with some drop outs in the internet connection may mean you cannot have outside connection at all for a period of time.

And finally, one of the things that I quite like is that Ugandan young adults and children often have what we would call old fashioned names, such as Agnes, Gertrude, Florence, Ethel, Humphrey and Godfrey. We know a couple of little children called Nellie and Cedric.
Cute!

2009-09-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

I finished off the training in Tororo at the beginning of the month. The others came over on the last day and we went away for the weekend to a place called Mbale about an hour from where I was working. We stayed in an older hotel, though it was nicely maintained.
The children liked it as they had their own room, complete with TV. Heaven only knows what time they got to sleep.
The first evening we ordered our evening meal, it took an hour and a quarter to arrive. We decided to be clever the next day and ordered our food an hour before we wanted it, while we stayed in our room. They called us through after an hour and a quarter for our meals, but Jon’s wasn’t ready. Even though he had ordered an ordinary meal from the menu, they thought he might want a variation on it. They hadn’t contacted him to ask, which meant they then had to go away and prepare it. He had to wait 2 hours in total!

On the Saturday we went to a place called Sipi Falls, a well known tourist spot which has three separate waterfalls. We used a guide to take us to one of the Falls. It was very impressive.
We spent the afternoon at a local guest house, having lunch and reading. It’s a new place and is decorated in a trendy yet homely fashion. We loved the living room, which had several book cases. Given the lack of ‘real’ libraries here it was a rare treat to be able to sit and read.

The scenery in the west is different to here and on the way back we drove past a small forest of thin trees.
Builders here use wooden, not metal, scaffolding.
“I didn’t know you could grow scaffolding” remarked Jon.

And so, not only did the shops not have any low fat milk, they had a phase where they hardly had any milk at all. We were reduced to buying the tiny 250ml cartons of milk, the ones that come with a straw!
Anyway a shipment must have arrived in the last week as supermarkets now have the longlife trim milk again. Excitement!

You may have heard in the news that there were riots in Kampala. Uganda has a president. It also has kingdoms with rulers of each kingdom. The ruler (kabaka) of the Buganda kingdom and the president don’t always see eye to eye which ultimately ended in riots flaring up over a proposed visit by the kabaka. Most of the riots took place in Kampala over a period of a few days. The city centre was virtually closed down and a number of people were killed.
Jon had been to Kampala the day before the riots started, and had seen the beginnings of unrest. The Buganda kingdom starts just outside Jinja, and apparently there were some minor riots on the outskirts, though we didn’t see anything. Things are back to normal now.

Jordan has decided that he is never going to cut his hair and has developed a mane of hair now. I said I’ll need to get the door widened so he can get in. He is several inches taller than me now, so must have shot up over the last year.
He is always talking about driving so I’ve started giving him driving lessons. We go to a grassy area over the road from us. Jordan is pretty competent and is doing really well. He picked up the basics easily in the first lesson. There is a path we can drive around and after we’d driven round about 230 times (in first gear) we decided to follow a track through the grass. Jordan drove about 100 metres down the track until we realised we were on the golf course!
Given that he’s only 13, I’m not exactly sure what he’s going to be able to do with the driving skills he is acquiring. He claims he’s seen a 12 year old boda driver, but I’m not convinced.

And talking of which, Kira and I were on a boda. It stopped a few hundred metres from where we were going. The driver had run out of petrol!
“The petrol, it is lost” he said.

Our houseboy and gardener have started a chapatti business in the garden. They cook rolexes for 800/- (chapatti with omelettes in them) and chapattis (200/-) for local folk. Quite often Jon and Jordan will order them for their lunch. Much more convenient than having to prepare food yourself!

Jordan and I decided to use the library again to see if there was any chance there would be a book on Mussolini for a project he was doing. We went along and discovered that it was ‘Reading Week’, where the aim was to encourage adults to read so that their children would also read. There seemed to be a bigger selection of books this time. We chose 11 and took them to one of the staff. “You can’t take books out, it’s Reading Week” she said, “come back next week.”
Given how long things take here I didn’t want to go through the hassle again and asked if we could take them.
“Have you got a card?” she asked.
I said I had been in once before, had filled in the application form, paid 10,000/- and assumed I could pick the card up this time.
“Go and see the Librarian” she said. I went to see her. She was having her lunch and told me she wouldn’t have my card and that I had to see the Secretary. I went to find the Secretary. She was out for lunch.
Anyway it went on in this vein for quite a bit longer and I began to realise that taking books out of the library was a very unusual occurrence. I also discovered that the system has changed and they don’t use cards now. Apparently the woman who had asked me to fill the form in last time had been dismissed. Use of the library is free and I shouldn’t have paid 10,000/-. They told me to find her and ask for my money back.
In total 5 staff members dealt with my query, including the Secretary who had come back by this time and asked me for 500/- so she could go into town to photocopy the application form as I had to fill another one in.
She came back a lot later. “Have you got a pen?” she asked, “No” I replied so we went into her office - the one with the typewriter – where she asked another woman for a pen. The woman rummaged through her handbag and found one. I filled in the form while the Secretary sat and watched me.
“How long do you want to borrow the books for?” she asked.
“How long do people usually borrow them for?” I replied.
They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said “Two weeks”.

Eventually they deemed that I was a suitable person to borrow books, at which point another staff member took them and made a log of them in a notebook. He spent so long that I thought he was writing the books out word for word in case they never came back. I then had to sign my name 11 times against each book.
Exhausted, we finally left the library without any books on Mussolini.

Reading the newspaper is always an education as they often write about issues that we’re not familiar with or have viewpoints very different from ours. For example there was an article about a cow suckling a dog. I thought it was quite amusing, but the cow owner’s view was that this was an abomination and the animals would have to be killed. He wouldn’t be able to kill them himself in case it brought a curse on his family and so had to get another person to do it.

Another article said that ‘A young man reportedly ran mad last week after charms were poured on him. The man, only identified as Umar, was bathing in a makeshift bathroom when an unidentified person poured the contents of a pot on him. Residents said the charms included chicken heads, human hair, claws and a mixture of blood and herbs. They said Umar began squeaking and growling and refused to get out of the bathroom. He was then taken to a shrine after doctors reportedly failed to treat him. The residents said a man whose son was jailed over a debt with Umar, could be responsible for the incident.’

Sometimes Ugandans talk in ‘Ugandan time’ and we have to work out what they mean. For them the day starts at 6am and the time is calculated on that basis. So 7am for them is 1 o’clock as it is 1 hour after 6am, 8am is 2 o’clock and so on.
One day I took the children from Kira’s school for a cookery lesson in the afternoon. I asked Vicky, the teacher, that morning what time we were leaving. “We will go early” she said “at seven thirty.” “Seven thirty?” I said “that’s pretty late.” I then realised she was talking in Ugandan time and that we were leaving at 1.30pm.

One of the sessions we have arranged at Kira’s school is Community Service. Those children who want to, go to help out at an orphanage after school once a week for about an hour. Kira loves it. She has got to know most of the children there, and while they mainly play with the orphanage children, it’s a big help to the staff there.

We have started to go to dance classes now. An Australian woman has started running classes. Kira goes to ballet and jazz dance, and I go to the same jazz dance class. We are even going to do a short performance in November.
Unfortunately there is no ballroom dancing here.

However the squash court has finally re-opened, it has been in renovation since we arrived here a year ago. It’s now the sport I play instead of tennis. Much easier as it’s indoors and you don’t have to cope with the African sun.
It’s also a sport Jon and Jordan enjoy so it’s become the family sport (or at least ¾ of the family!).

Some friends of ours, Bob & Sue from NZ, have been in Uganda recently, a place they used to live in during the Amin regime. It was nice to see them. It’s always good to catch up with people we know and hear news from the Outside!

And yes, it’s coming up for Panto time again! It was such a success last year that the newly named Jinja Community Theatre is holding another one in December, this time Aladdin. Jon is obviously becoming known as the man in Jinja who is happy to wear a dress as he’s playing the part of Widow Twanky. Watch this space…

Last week it was Kira’s half term break and the two of us went to Kampala to do voluntary work with an organisation helping women with HIV and people in the local community. It was set up by a woman called Moureen and she has done a great job of being able to provide help to a range of women in the villages.
As Kira is underage – and also the first child to be a volunteer – we were restricted in the number of things we could do. However we made health & social education posters and went to schools to give them the posters and explain ways to keep healthy and safe. We helped plant trees and shrubs around the health centre. The organisation is linked with Red Cross, so we would wear the tabards and meet with school groups who wanted to be Red Cross volunteers. Kira gave out weekly food rations to women with HIV.

The people in the villages are very poor and their housing is very basic. They can buy water from a tap at 100/- for a medium-sized jerry can and 200/- for a large one.
The women clients we met were very nice. Some of them had formed a singing group and gave us a rendition at the office. A blind guitarist from Entebbe had offered to join them.

Moureen is organising for someone to buy pigs for the group - 1 male and 3 females - as an additional way for the women to raise money. She asked if I would contribute as the women had decided to call one of the pigs ‘Kira’!

A couple who are both nurses from Belgium were volunteering too. They have been here for 7 months and have done a lot to help out. Moureen has no funding and relies on volunteers helping her. We paid 150,000/- per person per week ($109, £40) which covers our accommodation and evening meal. The rest she uses to fund the charity. She urgently needs volunteers, so if you know of anyone who would like the experience of being able to make a difference, let me know and I can give you the contact details. There are a wide range of activities people can become involved in.

I did a couple of things I said I would never do. Firstly go on a boda boda in Kampala because of the traffic, and secondly go on a matatu (minibus). However I didn’t have the car with me and there was no other way to get to the villages. We were fine.

I still miss my cats in NZ and a couple of days ago we got an email from our neighbour there, Shirley, who has taken our cats, giving us an update. The cats are doing really well, thank you Shirley and family.
Just after I read this email, Kira and I drove to the shops. We saw a tiny little kitten crossing the road. It was so cute and so much in danger.
“Oh mummy can we have it?” asked Kira.
“If we can find it when we come back” I replied.
We drove back, parked the car and wandered around trying to find it. We eventually found it down a back alley by a small house. A Ugandan boy of about 11 was by the house. I asked if it was his kitten. He said it was (though you can never be sure) and said we could have it.
The kitten had a bad eye infection, its eyes were closed over and the fur around the eyes was dirty and matted. I wasn’t sure if it was his to give away so asked if there was someone else we could speak to. There didn’t seem to be.
We called Jon to see if he was OK to have a tiny kitten. Kira was saying “Please Daddy” and held the kitten up to the phone so he could hear it mewing away. He couldn’t really say no.
“You give me 1000 shillings” said the boy “and you can take the kitten.” We brought it home and I called the vet. He does home visits and so came to give it antibiotics. We cleaned its eyes and it looked a lot better. We don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet, though it looks like a girl. It’s a gingery colour and because we live in Jinja, Kira has called it Ginger.
It is tiny and very cute and seems very much at home. Even though she’d been living presumably wild and not looked after, she took to using a litter tray straight away. She is too small to eat solids so we feed her with a syringe using milk, egg yolk, oil and warm water mixed together.
Jon pretended not to be interested, but he researched the kind of food we could give it and has been out buying things for it.
Jordan loves it and has made a box and given it a ball while Kira has it sleeping in her bedroom. Even Lotte the dog has been OK with her.

The next day Lotte was spayed. The vet came back again. He gave Ginger more antibiotics and performed the operation on Lotte in our garage. He mustn’t have given her the right dose of anaesthetic as she woke up during the operation and was in a lot of pain, so he gave her some more. I sat with her while she ‘came to’ afterwards and she was in a bad way, crying out loudly. When I went to close the garage door there was a group of Ugandan builders working at the house next door. They were standing and staring, wondering what the commotion was.
Anyway that was yesterday and Lotte is a lot better now.

So we now have a dog, kitten and geckos in the house, and goats, a cow, cockerels and hens next door. John Bosco and Geoffrey have bought some hens and a cockerel which live in our compound and sometimes wander into the house. Never a peaceful moment!

August 2009

2009-09-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

We’ve had a little mouse in our house for a while. It was a bit elusive when we tried to catch it, so we just let it roam around. It would come out of an evening and run from behind the TV to behind the bookcase and into the spare room. It wasn’t really a bother so we just left it, especially as Kira and I had been reading a book about a little mouse who just wanted someone to look after him and feed him.
One evening Jon noticed two mice behind the bookcase. Hmmm, two mice can mean potentially lots of mice, and pretty soon afterwards he found a whole family of them living in a box in the garage, and then we started to notice different sized mice running around, albeit one at a time.
Jon mentioned it to a few Ugandans who all recommended Mouse Glue. We had never heard of it, but on asking for ‘mouse glue’ at the supermarket we discovered that it’s a very common item. Basically you spread the non-toxic glue onto pieces of cardboard and leave these out in the evening in places you think the mice will go. The next morning we found 4 mice stuck to various pieces of cardboard. I didn’t want to see what Jon did with them, but suffice it to say they are no longer here…

Unfortunately a little gecko got caught on the glue as well. We took it off and left it on the windowsill overnight. In the morning it was still there and we realised it couldn’t move because it had glue on it. Jon decided to do an ‘animal rescue’ and got a cotton bud and washing up liquid to clean the glue off. He then covered the gecko with talcum powder. We weren’t sure if it could open its mouth. This would have been a bit of a problem if it couldn’t eat, so we tried prising its mouth open with a blunt knife. It could open its mouth so we let it go free in the garden.

I still struggle at times to know what to do when people ask for money. Sometimes it’s easy because people ask just to try their luck, but other times people seem very needy.

We support John Bosco’s two nephews and a niece through their education – they go to boarding school - as they are orphans, and were hoping that we wouldn’t have to make decisions about financially helping other people as it’s too difficult to decide who to help and who not to, but things aren’t that easy.

A man came to our gate. He said he was from Rwanda. As he spoke fluent French I assumed he was telling the truth. He told me he had HIV, hadn’t told his mother but hoped that she would accept him when she found out. He had been employed by the local hospital, but when they found out he was HIV positive, had asked him to leave. He needed money to go back to Rwanda. He didn’t ask for money, instead asked if I could give him some work and pay him. He asked if he could clean the car. John Bosco and Geoffrey had just cleaned the car, and we already pay them to do work for us, so I couldn’t offer him work. Instead we gave him some clothing to sell and the children’s tithing money. It wasn’t very much, and I felt uncomfy.

The next morning I was in the ATM queue when an old lady came and stood in front of me. Without words she begged me for money.
I was the only muzungu in the queue. It does get a bit tiring constantly being asked for money because you are a muzungu, so I said no. But then she asked the Ugandan male next to me, who gave her 30/-. I asked him what she’d said. She’d said that she had no food. I told him that we are asked for money almost daily because we are white. He said it’s OK to give to old people, not youngsters. Old people may give you a blessing. She had gone to bed without food.
Now I felt really bad.
It’s very rare you see old people and she had looked at me with old, old eyes. I drove round to try and find her. I drove round and round the streets several times but couldn’t find her. I went home and cried.

And so the shops in Jinja don’t have any trim / skimmed milk at the moment. We’ve been to almost every supermarket and there is none at all. There is such a limited range of food we can get here, so losing one item is a major deal!

Most of the time recently I’ve been working away, running 3 weeks’ training on behalf of the British Council in a place called Tororo on the Kenyan border.
A taxi took me on Monday; I stayed in a hotel for 4 nights while I was working Tuesday to Friday, then the taxi picked me up again on Friday. It was very nice being away, staying in a nice hotel and working from 8.30 - 4.00 then having the evenings to myself.

I hadn’t been to that part of Uganda, and the trip over there took about 2 hours. We went through rice fields and through a forest where baboons live. One time there were about 20 baboons at the side of the road, including a tiny baby. They are fairly people-friendly as they are used to people stopping and giving them bananas. I got quite close to one to take a photo and it didn’t seem bothered. One time a matatu (minibus) overtook us and got very close to one of the baboons. It ran to the side and then turned, looked at the matatu and pulled tongues!

For the first couple of days of the training, Richard the training coordinator from the British Council was with me. He had booked us some rooms at the largest hotel there. However it’s an older hotel and quite run-down and there was hardly anyone there. He had asked for the best room for me and they gave me the ‘suit’ (ie suite), which was basically two rooms that had been joined together. It still had two front doors to it and two bathrooms. One of the bedrooms had stayed as a bedroom (complete with a round-shaped bed), while the other had been turned into a living room.
We went out to see the hotel where we would be running the training and when we got back there was no one on reception so Richard went behind the desk and rooted through all the drawers until he found our keys!
At meal times we were the only people in the very large dining room. We were amused at the part of the menu which said ‘bona petit’.

When we tracked down the receptionist we asked her to order a taxi for us for 7.30 in the morning. Ugandans aren’t generally known for being on time so she said she would ask the taxi to come early. “I will order it for 6am.”
He was there at 7.30 and tried to charge us 35,000/- ($11, $25) to go two kilometres, a ride that should only cost about 5,000/-. We were appalled, but his view was ‘it’s a fixed fee’.

Anyway the hotel where we were doing the training was newer and nicer so we moved there. It was more convenient being based on the premises and also saved us the appalling taxi costs.
Tororo is known for its Rock, which is a small mountain in the centre of the town. The hotel room I moved to had a balcony with a wonderful view over the Rock. Very impressive, and very nice to wake up to such a lovely view.

In the second week Jon, Jordan and Kira came with me in the taxi on the Monday and we had lunch at the hotel then went to look at the Rock. It is breathtaking to see it close up. Jordan took 30 photos of it.
As we were there a Nun came to talk to us. She lives in the little convent at the base of the mountain and works in the hospital next door. She asked us if we wanted to look round the hospital.
It was very special being shown around. The hospital was as you would expect it to be. Fairly old and very basic. She took us into the children’s ward. The beds were very simple metal framed ones with green plastic coated mattresses. A number of women were there with very small children. It was a sad experience.
(Photo below is of me and Kira in hospital grounds)

Jon has learned some of the language and was talking to some of the nurses in Luganda. They are always impressed, and laugh at the fact that a muzungu can speak their language.
We then all went round the market and then I went back to the hotel and the others went home in the taxi.

The first day in the new hotel, Richard and I ordered an evening meal in the restaurant. “What on earth did you order?” Richard asked as my plate arrived at the table. It looked like two large crumpets.
What I had ordered was a pineapple and cheese salad. I had expected a salad with cheese and pineapple. What actually arrived was two large slices of pineapple topped with grated white cheese … and that was it!
During the meal, two small Ugandan children who were with their family at the next table came over to see us. One was about 5 years old and the other was about 18 months.
Ugandan children are not only very cute, but also very polite. The 5 year old came over to me, knelt down and put his hand up for me to shake it. Then the little 18 month old did the same.
The 5 year old went to do the same with Richard, then called out to his tiny brother “Come and greet this one.”
Choochie!!

Anyway the cheese and pineapple salad was actually very nice so I ordered it again a few days later. This time the hotel had no cheese, so my ‘salad’ was simply pineapple.
Undeterred, I ordered it again the following week. This time it came with much smaller slices of pineapple, a small sprinkling of red cheese … and an ant. This is Africa. I took the ant off and carried on eating.

The food we got on the course was interesting. Often morning tea would comprise a banana and a boiled egg. The lunchtime food was very filling, very carb-rich. They would have rice, potatoes, matoke (liked solid mashed potatoes), posho (very stiff maize and water mix), along with chicken, fish, beef or goats meat.

Quite often the hotel would lose their electricity supply and would provide a generator instead – very noisy! One time the power was off most of the day which meant there was no water either. They gave all the residents a jerry can of water during the day and then in the evening a little housemaid staggered around the rooms delivering a jerry can of hot water to everyone.

One of the things I found a bit unnerving was the fact that the public toilets in the hotel had a bolt on the outside of the door! Whenever I used them I made it a quick visit in case anyone felt the urge to lock me in…

Running training course for Ugandans does have its differences. For example when I asked people what their expectations were, about 50% of them said they expected a certificate at the end. Ugandans generally like their pieces of paper showing their qualifications. One person said she expected a test at the end. Traditional training here is of the ‘chalk and talk’ kind, so they appreciated the interactive and varied nature of the training.
One of the feedback comments at the end was ‘Very active throughout so that I could not sleep off’. Another comment said ‘Feeding was okey’.

Some of the training was on CV writing. Things here work differently and apparently it’s not uncommon for people to send in CVs that are not their own, so part of the interview process is to quiz people on their CV so that the employer can check if it’s genuine!

The course attendees worked in the health field. Part of the field worker’s role is to visit people in the villages and ensure that they seek medical attention when ill. Even when some villagers are ill with life-threatening illnesses such as HIV or malaria they won’t seek help. I asked why. “They have learned to be dependent and will wait for someone to come and help them” they said.

Part way through one of the days all the staff had to go off to a seminar about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Crikey!

Sometimes after the training I would walk into town (a 25 minute walk) and go round the market. They got to know me there after a while. Mind you, in all the times I went I never saw another white person, so I guess it wasn’t difficult.
You can get things very cheaply there, especially if you want to haggle. Often I don’t as the prices seem fair. I got Jon some smart leather shoes for 30,000/- ($22, £9). I bought myself some sandals for 3,500/- ($2.50, £1), both of them without haggling.

As I was buying my sandals I heard someone saying “Food”. I turned round and there was a boy of about 12 standing by me. He said “Food please.” He didn’t look under-nourished but he was shaking. I wondered if he was shaking with hunger or was perhaps ill.
I’d given the stall lady a 5,000/- note for the sandals, and as she brought back the 1,500/- change I handed it to the boy. Again I felt uncomfy as it wasn’t much, but he was very grateful.
Some other stall holders had seen this and were laughing and calling out to the boy in their own language. As I walked away I wondered if they were saying “Well done, you got some money out of a muzungu”, so I turned to look at him, but he just looked very grateful.

One of the things we have to be aware of is ‘muzungu prices’. This is when Ugandans bump the price up because you are white. Sometimes if we don’t have an idea of the price we don’t know if we are being ripped off. Sometimes we know that prices are just way too high, and other times we can tell because when we ask the price, the shop assistant will pause, then they have a certain look on their face – one which means they are thinking ‘If I really bump the price up will they pay it?’. They then come out with a figure you will never pay.
I went into a small shop in Tororo to buy some baseball caps.
“How much are the caps?” I asked.
Pause…The Look…
“Eight thousand shillings.”
I hadn’t bought one here before so didn’t know what kind of price they would be, but absolutely knew that that was a rip off price. I went round the corner to a market stall and got them for 3,000/- each.

During the training course I split people into teams and have team competitions. The team that wins gets a baseball cap each.
I paid for the caps with my money and so the British Council reimbursed me. They asked me to get a receipt so I went back to the market stall, but the man didn’t have any receipts. I gave him a blank receipt I’d taken with me and asked if he would fill it in.
“No” he said.
The man at the next stall looked at the blank receipt and said it looked like a simple form to fill in. “No” the man said.
The man at the next stall explained how easy it was to fill in.
Eventually I worked out that he couldn’t read or write, so we went to another stall where the stall holder filled out the receipt for him, accompanied by 6 other people who had gathered around. There was a part on the form where the man had to put his signature. He didn’t have one, so the other stall holder drew a shape on his hand in biro and the man copied it onto the receipt.

Uganda has many tribes and Tororo has about seven, which is a large number for a fairly small place. There are two main tribes, one which is in favour of splitting Tororo and one which wants to keep it as it is. Tororo has become known for a famous incident between the two tribes. During a presidential visit, a member of the tribe supporting the split, ate a rat in front of the president to show how committed he was to the cause...

July 2009

2009-08-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Jon and Jordan were in the UK for most of July, and Kira and I had a nice girly time together. Usually she gets very upset when Jon is away, but she managed really well this time. Sometimes she had sleepovers which meant I was in the house on my own (along with the dog). It seemed very strange, but I got used to it. We also had more invites out and actually had a better social life than we usually do.

We borrowed a DVD from a friend ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’. We hadn’t seen it before, and we both loved it. We ended up watching it 8 times! I love the African setting to it, and if I wasn’t living in Africa, would very much want to, having seen that film.

Kira slept with me every night, and decided to ‘take over’ the bedroom. “Daddy won’t need his dressing gown, so I’ll wear it.” Daddy won’t be using his wardrobe, so I’ll put my clothes in here.” “I’ll just bring my toothbrush and put it in your bathroom.”
Just before they arrived back she said to me “I want to sleep with you forever.”
“What about daddy?” I asked
“He can sleep here when I’m having a sleepover with friends.”

There are always lots of things to organise at the the homeschool centre.
Some are drastically exciting like buying carbon paper, Omo to clean the floor or a new lightbulb …. but they need to be done.
A couple of rooms in the building are rented out by tenants, and sometimes at lunchtimes Vicky, the teacher, would have to go and knock on their doors and reclaim some plates and cutlery so the children could have their lunch! She asked if we could have some new plates and forks so the children could easily have their lunch every day. Kira and I went off to the market and had a bit of a shopping spree.
We have arranged for a caterer to bring in a cooked lunch for the children every day and we pay 3000/- ($2.15 / 87p) per child per day.

The garage is also rented out by a young Ugandan who needed a place to stay. I popped in one time and he’s made it look very homely. He teaches African crafts to the children once a week. He’s very talented, the children have done some very impressive craft work (the photo is a picture Kira made), and they think the world of him.
Because we are a homeschool centre we can organise our own term dates. As people here are very ‘international’ and tend to travel a lot, we’ve organised the term dates around when people are going to be away, which means we have unusual term dates.

I am slowly working my way through ‘Mary Ominde’s African Cookery book’ and have made a few interesting recipes. I don’t think, however, I will be trying all of them even though the blurb on the book says ‘This book will lend glamour to any kitchen’. There are recipes for invalids (gruel, rice water etc); cow blood cookery; recipes for cooking fried white ants, fried grasshoppers and fried locusts.

I also think I’ve worked out the difference between maize and corn – I always thought they were the same thing. Do correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, sweetcorn is yellow and maize is white. Eaten as cobs, they taste very difference. Corn is sweet, and maize is tough and floury. As flour, maize flour (‘posho’ as they call it here) becomes very stiff and tastes very different to cornflour.

And so I am still having tennis lessons – twice a week in fact. It would be very nice to play tennis on a non-sunny day, though that’s not very likely. Even if the day starts out looking a bit overcast, it pretty much becomes sunny by mid morning. I usual have a lesson at 10am, and even at that time it’s really hot. One time I got mild sunstroke, and felt pretty sick for a few hours after. I’ve started wearing a cap now and it seems to help.

Mind you, I’m surprised I can play tennis at all, if Muwanga is anything to go by. Muwanga is the real estate agent (‘blocker’) who has been looking out for a property for us. I see him fairly often and one time asked how old his 7 children were. He didn’t tell me their ages, instead he told me the year they were born. He then told me the year he was born (1968) and at this point I felt obliged to tell him when I was born.
“1959” I said.
“You are 50 then?” he asked, astounded.
“Yes” I replied
“And you are still alive!!!” he shrieked.

The life expectancy here used to be around 45, though now is around 52. We rarely see older people here. We’ve got used to it now, but in the beginning we used to look around and say “Where are the old people?” Seeing someone with grey hair is quite unusual.

I’ve been trying to find a suitable building so I can set up my Activity Centre. I found a wonderful venue and put a proposal in, in April, to rent it. I’ve been waiting expectantly ever since. Unfortunately the proposal was turned down, and all the other properties I’ve looked at haven’t been suitable.

I’ve also been spending my time writing a book called ‘Better Speaking Better Thinking’, which is now ready to send off, so that’s my next project. One of my goals for coming here was to be able to sit in the Africa sun and write.

A friend from Kampala, Anne, and two of her children came over one weekend. We decided to go clothes shopping in the market.
Shopping in the market is quite an experience. It is outdoors, very busy, the alleyways are narrow, and 99% of the people there are African. Each section of the market is filled with people selling the same things – eg fruit and veg, clothing, DIY items, shoes.
There are two different kinds of clothing stalls – ones where they hang clothes up on the walls on hangers, and ones where they dump the clothes on the ground in a big pile. The ones with clothes hanging up are more expensive (though not expensive really), so we rooted through the ones on the ground. I got Kira a pair of trousers for 2000/- ($1.44 / 58p) and a t-shirt for 700/- (50c / 20p).
Anne, who is white, can speak Luganda, and most Ugandans don’t expect white people to speak their language. As we were walking round she overheard one stall holder talking about her, saying to another “That muzungu has got a big bottom”. She replied in Luganda, much to their surprise.

And so John Bosco our houseboy came to me asking if I had some brake fluid.
“Why?” I asked
He showed me his arm which had a big gash on it.
“To put on my arm” he replied.

A week before Jon and Jordan arrived back, there was the annual Agricultural Show which is the big event in Jinja. We live opposite the Showgrounds (a big area of land) where it’s held. When we moved into the house everyone warned us that we would need to move out for a week when the show was on because of the noise. They were right about the noise. It was unbelievably loud, from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock the next morning. Non stop.
A friend Trish, offered to put us up - she lives out of Jinja and has a self contained flat on her land. We thought about it, but I decided to stick it out.
I got very little sleep all week. Sometimes I got to sleep then woke up when the noise stopped.

Anyway Kira and I went to the show – once in the morning, but had to leave as it was too hot and there was no shade, and once in the evening which was a much better temperature but most stall holders didn’t have any form of lighting so we couldn’t see what they were selling! Kira also went a third time with some others.
It was quite impressive what some of the organisations had done – they had planted various crops at the right time in order for them to be ready for the show. There were animals around – cows, pigs, goats, horses, even a camel. There was also a mini zoo which housed an enormous snake. There were merry-go-rounds, all looking pretty old and not terribly safe, lots of food stalls, promo stalls for agricultural goods, and stalls selling clothes, crafts, shoes, etc.
One man had a mound of trousers in a pile on the ground. I wanted a pair of ¾ pants, so he rummaged through, determined to sell me something. We found a pair, but there was nowhere to try them on. At this point he produces a tape measure, measures the trousers and measures me and announced that they would fit. I bought them and they do fit.

Some people we know in Jinja are from Zimbabwe. They were telling us that before they left the country, their last pay check was for 3 trillion Zimbabwean dollars…

And so Jon and Jordan arrived back at the end of the month. I’d explained to Jordan a while ago how youngsters travelling on their own on planes are called UMs, Unaccompanied Minors. Since then he’s wanted to be a UM.
They both had one way tickets so needed to book return flights. Jon had airmiles he could use, while Jordan didn’t. It ended up being cheaper if Jordan flew separately, so that was one ambition realised!
Jon arrived back on the Sunday, so we stayed at a guest house near the airport, while waiting for Jordan who arrived back on the Monday.

And finally, Trish (who offered us her flat during the Agricultural Show) lives a few kilometres out of town. Some of her neighbours are Ugandan, one of whom is a 10 year old boy who plays with her son. The boy didn’t come around to her house for a while. They discovered that he had been sold by his teenage sister for sacrifice to a witch doctor. His body was found two weeks later with the tongue missing.

May & June 2009

2009-07-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

The month of May started off with my combined Birthday & Housewarming do, ably abetted by Sandy who baked me another wheat-free birthday cake.
There were about 40 people there and we are very thankful that we have a large garden when there are many children running around!
I’ve now mastered the art of making pizzas and impressed my guests with my culinary expertise.
In 50 years I have never impressed anyone with my baking. Someone even asked me for the recipe … crikey! Unfortunately my family now has to endure pizzas on a regular basis as it’s the only thing I can bake.

We are settled in the house now. I really like it here. Hopefully Henry the electrician likes it here too as he is a regular visitor. In fact he’s been a regular visitor in all 3 houses we’ve live in in Jinja. Although this house is brand new, the electrics are in a poor state – the light switches spark; almost all of them have had to be replaced; there was an explosion at the back of the cooker; lots of electrical things are live and we get shocks when we touch them. One time the vet was here while Henry was repairing the exploding cooker. He happened to be standing by the fuse box outside the house and said “there are lots of sparks coming from that box”. Henry came out to look at it and immediately ran off to town to get circuit breakers. Added to this, our brand new tv aerial is falling apart. We keep finding bits of it in the garden.

And talking of trades people, Jordan did a mini- carpentry ‘apprenticeship’ recently. We found a carpenter, Robert, who had been recommended by a couple of people and asked if he would train Jordan. He agreed and Jordan went for two afternoons a week.
Jon designed a TV cabinet, Jordan drew it up in a 3D package called sketchup, and he worked on the cabinet over a period of several weeks.
He went to the workshop where Robert is based – an amazing place – really ‘African’ in the heart of the ‘tradespeople area’. It is a very, very busy area – lots and lots of people milling around. The workshop is outdoors, is in a small area of many workshops, is very cramped and very basic, the flooring is just bare earth, but they had the woodworking machinery and all the right tools.
I took him a couple of times in the beginning, but after a while he would jump on a boda boda himself and go off, and come back on a boda boda after he’d finished.
Jordan did a great job and we are really pleased with the outcome.

It has been the rainy season, and when it rains it really rains. There is extremely loud thunder and lightning and the rain comes down in absolute torrents. All the brown earth turns to mud. It usually rains at night time, which is very considerate of it. However one time I was in Kampala – manically busy Kampala – when the rain came down. Instantly the city was like a ghost town. I was amazed; I’ve never seen it like that before. I have no idea where everyone went to!
Anyway I needed to get somewhere and so braved the weather – I was absolutely soaking. If I’d stood under the bathroom shower in all my clothes I wouldn’t have been any wetter. The occasional car drove past me and completely showered me with water from the road. The rain was forming rivers down the roads and I had to wade through it, inches deep, to get to the other side.
Within half an hour the rain had stopped and Kampala returned to its sunny and manic state again.
Fortunately I had a spare set of clothes in the car so nipped into the Ladies and got changed into dry clothes – and shoes.

We decided to visit The Rainforest Lodge in rainforest called Mabira, about a 45 minute drive from here. It’s an impressive Lodge set in beautiful surroundings. We went to use the pool, spend an afternoon lounging around, and have lunch. Unfortunately we chose the one cold day that we’ve had in Uganda. It rained heavily and the temperature really dropped. It was such an unusual experience being cold and we weren’t prepared for it.
The lunch menu was pretty expensive so we just ordered chips – they were the most expensive chips I’ve ever had - $10 for a plate of chips!
Anyway, while we were sitting waiting the rain to stop, I was watching the ants that are ever-present, and discovered that if you blow on a group of ants, they stop moving and ‘freeze’ for a short while, then move again. Try it – fascinating!

There are always small creatures around and you get used to it.
One time I went into a toilet at the golf club and was accompanied by a hornet, a lizard and a frog!
And regarding mozzie nets over the bed, one of the things you have to be aware of is to check that there are no creatures inside the net before you get into bed. One night there was a spider at the top on the inside the net – it fell down – onto my side of the bed! It took a lot of courage to get back into bed that night.

There are a couple of dogs at Kira’s homeschool centre, they live in the compound. One of them has just had 6 puppies – really cute. The children have all ‘adopted’ one each and given them names. Unfortunately we are going to have to find homes for them. Kira will be heartbroken if someone takes hers.

And so we are never short of interesting examples of the Ugandan approach to things.
I went to get some documents bound. You can’t assume anything here, so I asked if the binding included a front and back cover as well as the spiral binding.
“Yes” replied the woman “what colour do you want?”
“What colours do you have?” I asked.
“Blue.”

Last year Jon was offered a part-time lecturing position to degree level students on an IT course at the Jinja campus of Kampala University. The money was low, the hours were unsocial, and when he looked through the syllabus, the amount of time the students would spend at a computer was … 0%. He declined the offer. Jordan and I used to drive past the campus on the way to his carpentry sessions. We had to laugh when we the new sign they have had made. I wonder why they struggle for excellence!

Jordan and I managed to find the Jinja library, a now run-down old building housing half a dozen books or so. It would have been very nice when it was first built, and there is a plaque inside it to commemorate its opening. It says “This magnificent building…”
Anyway we very cleverly managed to find a very small number of books that had been published more recently than the 1950’s, one of which was a Star Trek book, filed on a shelf labelled ‘Personal development (Do It Yourself)’.
We ‘joined’ the library – I had to fill in a form. I needed someone to sign it to vouch that I was a citizen of good repute. The woman asked Jordan to sign it.
“I haven’t got a signature” he whispered.
“Yes you have” I whispered back “just write your name”.
Anyway she wrote down the books I was taking out on a torn piece of paper and asked me how long I wanted them for.

One of the books I had decided to get out was on Sikhism. There is a big Indian community here and I felt I should find out about the various religions. The book talks about one of the Sikh gurus who was incredibly generous, and spent his life giving to others. At this point the woman who had been to our house before, crying and asking for money (see end of February blog), turned up again saying she needed money to get back to her village, where her family would look after her. I gave her 20,000/= and immediately regretted it. My gut feeling said she had been lying to me, and when I thought about it afterwards, I had noticed that she was well dressed, didn’t look ill (she is supposed to have HIV), and this time had said she had 3 children instead of the two she told me about last time. When I gave her the money she didn’t look grateful, she just beat a hasty retreat.

We are always being asked for money – constantly. Constantly. Every time we go into town there are street children who beg, there is a woman who comes and stands by the car and just holds her hand out, John Bosco cut his leg and needed money for a tetanus injection, he got malaria and needed money for medication and a stay in hospital. He told us about a woman living nearby who had a baby, she didn’t get transport in time, the baby died, and would we give money to help her.
I have got to the stage where I see a Ugandan approaching me in the street or at our compound gates and I think “No, I don’t want to give money, just leave me alone.”

Anyway John Bosco and Geoffrey have done some good work on the vegetable garden – it’s quite large and they are growing maize, watermelon, onions and cabbages.

John Bosco usually comes into our house about 8.30am, and as we leave after this, we just leave him in the house, doing the housework.
One morning we got a text from him saying “I am in Kampala. Rock the house when you rive.”
We puzzled over this one for a while, and then I realised that in his language the sounds R and L are interchangeable, so he was saying ‘Lock the house when you leave’.
Similarly, Geoffrey usually calls Lotte ‘Rotte'.

I’m still spending quite a bit of time organising things for Kira’s homeschool centre, and am fortunate that the teacher, Vicky, is a Ugandan and can explain various things to me.
It’s also quite an education talking to her as I learn a lot about Ugandan customs.
It’s very normal, for example, for people to have a housemaid, and the one she had did a runner recently, so she asked her extended family if someone could find another for her. One of her relatives in the villages brought a 13 year old girl to be her new housemaid. Apparently by age 13 girls know how to run a house, so her job is to do all the housework and look after the 4 children, the oldest of whom is a 12 year old boy.
At the moment Vicky has no electricity in her house, so they use candles or kerosene lamps; they cook on a charcoal burner and even use a charcoal-filled iron.
Some tribes in the north and west of the country still pay dowries when their daughter gets married. The dowry ‘currency’ is cows, and the more educated you are the more cows you are worth.
Vicky’s housemaid will be worth 3 cows as she hasn’t completed her education. Those who do complete it are worth 5 cows. As Vicky is a qualified teacher she is worth 30 cows. She was a big expense to her family!

My business colleague Aziz got married fairly recently. One of the customs is to have an ‘Introduction’ ceremony before the wedding which is quite an event in itself and very costly. Then the wedding is even more costly as many people are invited, food is provided and it’s usually quite an elaborate do.
He was quite pleased because he managed to keep the costs down and only spent 5.3 million shillings on the introduction and 9 million on the wedding ($11,000 / £4,500). Most people spend a lot more than this. Given that Ugandan wages are low, this is a huge cost for them, so those getting married invite a select group of friends to help them fundraise for this. The group of helpers are expected to contribute a sizeable amount financially and then attend several pre-wedding meetings to help with the fundraising.
I asked how many people were invited to his wedding. “A thousand” he replied. “Did you know all of them?” I asked. “Well, I knew some of them” he said.
When he asked how many were at my wedding and I said 70 for the wedding and another 70 for the evening do, he thought this was highly amusing.

And so we all had plane tickets booked to come back to the UK at the end of June. However it is logistically easier if we go two at a time as then we can stay with people. So in the third week of May I wandered into the Emirates offices in Kampala to see if I could bring my and Kira’s flights forward a bit. We only had one-way tickets booked and I wanted to book a return flight using my air miles.
“To be able to use your air miles, you have to return to Uganda by 8th June at the latest” said the woman.
In order to make the trip worthwhile this meant we pretty much had to go almost straight away, and so a few days later we found ourselves on a plane to the UK, much to the surprise of our family.
We had the flights booked with Emirates and while it is a great airline and an excellent way to go from NZ to the UK, it isn't the best route from Uganda to Manchester. Whereas an airline like British Airways will go direct and take about 9 hours, Emirates goes to Adis Ababa in Ethiopia, then to Dubai (which is in the wrong direction). You have to hang around from midnight to 7am in an overly-cooled air conditioned airport and then have a 7.5 hour trip to Manchester. This takes about 23 hours.
However, the good part is that as there is only 2 hours time difference between the two countries we didn't get any jetlag, and in terms of the world, we feel so much closer to the UK and felt like we were 'popping home' rather than making the long, long journey from NZ.
The two weeks we had at home flew by. We had a lovely time though we didn't get to see everyone this time unfortunately.
It was a nice change being in a first world country, and things that are in reality very ordinary, seemed very novel to us. Like being able to buy a wide range of food at the supermarkets. Like being able to drive on non-potholed roads with drivers who know the road rules and who actually value their life. Driving on the M6 on a Friday rush hour was such a doddle compared to simply driving on roads here at 'normal' time.
I was impressed with how clean England looked. Because there is so much red earth here, seeing pavements made everything seem so clean!

Kira and I left the UK on 8th June and arrived back in Uganda on 9th. It's a 3 hour trip from the airport, so we used a taxi driver called Aaron to pick us up. Aaron is great and the muzungus use him a lot. The Ugandans who have worked out what white people want, and know how to work with them do very well in business here.

When I got back, Jordan's home school tutor and the boys were away so I taught him at home for 3 weeks. I still teach Kira maths every morning.

He has a sports lesson for two hours every Wednesday morning with the boys, and as they were in Kenya, he asked if I'd come to the tennis lesson with him. I haven't played tennis for about a hundred years, but decided to go along. We had changed the lesson to the afternoon that day, and - flipping heck! - it's hot playing tennis in the afternoon sun. I really enjoyed it but was aching all over for the next two days. I was in A Bad Way.
Unfortunately Jon and I went to an evening 'QBP' event (to be explained) the next day where we had to stand up all evening. We very rarely go out in the evenings these days, and when we do, we certainly don't stand up all the time! My legs were aching so much I was just about collapsing at the end of the evening.

Anyway I enjoyed the tennis so have started having lessons with Ronnie, the sports tutor, myself. He seems very good and has competed in the Davis Cup. I'm fairly coordinated and was doing quite well (or so I thought), though am having to re-learn how to play. He thinks it quite funny because I play in an 'old-fashioned' way. It must have been how I was taught at school and apparently the way you play tennis has changed quite a bit since The Old Days.

So, we were invited to a 'QBP' which is a Queen's Birthday Party hosted by the British High Commissioner in Kampala. Only a select group of people are invited to attend and I was invited because I'm the Jinja representative of the British Residents' Association. Jon came along as my 'plus one'. (He doesn't appreciate how lucky he is to be with me...)
We had no idea it was such a big deal to get an invitation, and had even considered not going, but there are some people who have been here for many years and are feeling quite put-out that they haven't had an invite!
The Commissioner invites those who have 'forwarded the aims' of the British High Commission in Uganda, so there were 500 people of all nationalities there, having drinks and nibbles in his garden. The UK had shipped over a couple of Household Cavalrymen (one of the country's most elite military group apparently), complete with impressive red uniform, helmet and spurs … but not the horse.
The invitation said you had to wear business dress or national costume.
I pondered the costume bit for a while, and given that I come from Liverpool, the most likely costume would be a Liverpool Football Club strip. But I didn't think it would go down very well at the do.

As we were driving over to Kampala for the event, we were flagged down by a policeman.
“Oh here we go again” I thought. The Police seem to go through phases of stopping you and checking your documentation.
I was driving, Jon was in the passenger seat, and Jordan was in the back (Kira stayed in Jinja with her friends).
Jon wound down the window.
“You are going to Kampala?” said the policeman
“Yes” said Jon.
“Can you give me a lift?” he asks.
So, Jordan gets in the front, and Jon and the policeman get in the back. Jon had a good chat with him, and as a result the policeman keeps phoning him up!

The day after we got back from the UK, I was driving along one of the main roads when we saw a woman lying face down on the road. She had just been knocked over by a motorbike a few seconds before. The motorbike was lying in the road, broken. Some people picked her up and laid her face down on the pavement. She didn't move, I thought she was dead. Pretty soon a group of Ugandans gathered around. None of them had a vehicle and I'm not sure how the ambulance service works here, but people weren't really doing anything for her. Fortunately Vicky was in the car with me and I asked if she would talk to the people and see if we could take the woman to hospital. People are wary of taking someone to hospital as it will mean that they are financially responsible for the treatment.
She went and spoke to the policeman who told her to wait, as he was taking a statement from the motorbike driver. We decided to take the woman anyway.
Her forehead was bleeding, she had hurt various parts of her body, and was quite dazed, but looked like she was going to be OK. A couple of people who knew her and happened to be around at that time came in the car with us. They carried her into the back of the car where she lay sideways, and then they got in with her. They didn't all fit, so we drove with the car door open. Kira and the dog were there too and they sat in the boot.
Vicky and the 3 people were talking in the Luganda. The woman was crying, apparently saying “my baby my baby”, but they didn't know where her baby was.
I took the woman to Jinja hospital.
You really wouldn't want to be in need of 'proper' medical care over here – the hospital looked very basic. We have joined the British Residents' Association as their main reason for existing is to help 'Brits in distress'. If anything happens they medivac you out of the country.
I assumed the woman must have been very poor as she had been carrying a basket of nuts and seeds on her head to sell – that will have been her 'job'. There are many women here carrying baskets on their head, usually holding bananas or nuts which they sell cheaply.
As the nurse came over to take her in a wheelchair, I gave her all the money I had on me – 15,000/= ($12, £4.50). Vicky said that would pay for quite a bit of treatment.
When we got home, Kira was very upset. She was in mild shock. She was crying and saying “I don't want Daddy to go on a boda boda again.” Jon gets a boda boda to and from work, but I told her I would make sure he was safe.
Vicky found out a week or so later that the woman's baby had died.

And so it was Kira's 9th birthday on 20th June. One of her friends, Naomi, shares the same birthday and is the same age. Naomi's mum had been trying to contact me to see if we could have a joint party, but I was in the UK and hadn't got her messages. Another girl here, Simran, has a birthday the day after, so they both had a party that weekend. Naomi's mum (who has 11 children) owns a beautiful resort here, and held the party there. The children went swimming in the pool then had the party food sitting in a lovely grassy area amongst the avocado trees. She had ordered 4 cakes – one for Naomi, one for Simran, one for one of her sons who had a birthday the same month and one for Kira.
The children drank a fruit juice cocktail out of scooped-out whole pineapples.

We decided to have Kira's party the weekend after, especially as that was the weekend that Jon and Jordan left to go to the UK for a month. It gave her something to look forward to.
We had the party at our house and had planned to play a range of party games in the garden.
It very rarely rains here during the day, even in the rainy season, but an hour before her party the heavens opened, there was the loudest thunder I have ever heard, and the driveway became a mud-bath. We had planned to have lots of water games and had asked the children to bring spare clothes, but hadn't planned for it to be quite so watery!
Anyway the weather cleared up for about an hour, so we went out and played the games, and the kids got suitably wet and messy - as did the house!
Sandy had made Kira an impressive High School Musical cake, and I had tried my hand at making scones. Amazingly they turned out well, and people liked them! Crikey, two culinary successes in a short space of time...
So all in all, a good time for birthday parties.

Jon and Jordan left for the UK at the end of June and will be there till the end of July.

And of course, how can I write a blog entry without some 'Uganda life' snippets ...`
There are times when we just can't make people understand us. For example my Mum and Dad have been using an incorrect PO Box number for us. Instead of 1204, they have been using the number 51209 (my PO Box in NZ). Consequently the mail hasn't been reaching us. Once I realised what was happening, I went to the Jinja sorting office and explained to the man that people had been sending me incorrectly addressed mail and asked where it would be.
“What is your box number?” he asks
“1204”
“What box number have they been using?”
“51209”
“It will not come into your box.”
“I know, where will it go?”
“There is no box with that number.”
“I know, so where will it go?”
“There is no box number like that in Jinja. Maybe in different part of country.”
“They wrote Jinja on the envelope, so I think it may be here.”
“There is no box number like that in Jinja.”
“I know. Where do you put letters with incorrect addresses on them?”
“We do not have that number in Jinja.”
…. and so it went on. There were a couple of young women there who explained to him in Luganda what I was meaning.
“You ask at Kampala Post Office” he said
So I emailed Kampala asking where the letters would be. They replied saying they would ask the postmaster at Jinja.
Aaargh

Then yesterday I parked in town. The parking wardens put a slip on your windscreen, keep a note of your car number and the time you parked, and when you leave you 'pay' by giving them a ticket and they make a note that you have paid.
I drove off, having forgotten to give them a ticket, so went back a bit later to give them one. Unfortunately it had rained and the slip had been ruined.
I explained to the warden that I had parked there an hour before and had forgotten to give a ticket.
“You want to buy tickets?”
“No I want to give you one for when I parked here an hour ago.”
“You did not park here”
“Yes I did, but I can't show you the slip, the rain has ruined it.”
“You want to park here now and want another slip?”
“No I want to give you a ticket for when I parked here.”
“You give me ticket.”
I gave him a ticket and said “Will you mark off that I have paid?”
“You did not park here.”
“I did, I am giving you a ticket for when I parked here. Will you check your notes and see if you have my car details?
“I will not have your details. You want to park here now?”
“No, I parked here an hour ago. I did not give ticket for when I parked. I want to give ticket for the time when I parked.”
“You have given me ticket.”
“Yes I have, but I need to you make a note that I have paid.”
“You did not park here.”
In the end I gave up, took the ticket back and left.

An hour after Jon and Jordan left for the UK, my laptop stopped working.
“Well that's just great” I thought, “what IS the point of marrying an IT person and enduring a lifetime of geekness if he can't be here when you need him??”
So I took it to PC World to be repaired.
“Don't leave your laptop there if there are Ugandans working on it” Vicky had said, “you need to be there while they are repairing it or they will steal parts of your laptop.”
“They are Indians” I said.
“Then it will be OK” she replied.
The shop assistant working there is Ugandan and as she was filling in the form for the repair work to be done (by the honest Indians!), she asked me my name.
Now, Ugandans find my name quite difficult, because the KI in Kim is pronounced 'ch' in their language. So really, they would say Chim and Chira instead of Kim and Kira.
And the CH sound in Chamberlain would be spelt Ki, Ky, Ci, Cy, Cu.
So what I've learned to do is either write my name on the form myself, or else give them one of my business cards and they can copy it themselves.

So the conversation went:
Shop assistant: “What is your name?”
Me (looking through handbag): “Hold on, I've got it written on a card.”
Shop assistant (amazed): “You have forgotten your name?”

April 2009

2009-04-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

One of the many things we have to get used to here is how the Ugandans speak English.
For example, the electrician said to me “Could you be having a flash light around?” which means “Can I borrow a torch?”
And when we park the car in the town centre we pay by using parking tickets. You buy them in a strip of five for 1000/-. The only way the parking wardens earn money is by selling tickets, so they are always asking if you want to buy some. I told one of them I already had tickets. “You’re remaining with many?” he asked, which means “You’ve still got a lot left?”
And when we lived in Kampala I used to buy bananas from a woman who owned a little fruit stall. I was back in Kampala recently and went to the stall again.
“You are lost?” she said. “Um…no” I replied. Jon had to explain to me that it means “Long time no see.”
They also use terms of address that we find quite endearing. We get called “Madame Kim”, or “Mr Jon”. Geoffrey our gardener calls me “Mummy”, which is a sign of respect. “Hello Mummy, how are you?” he calls out.

And talking of speaking English, I was on phone to a woman from the UK. “I take it you are from Australia” she said …

Cathy, the woman who asked us for a job, also calls me Mummy. I’ve been looking round for work for her, and fortunately she now has a job in a local factory which makes matches. She came round to see me the day before she started, as she needed some money to photocopy her birth certificate and HIV results and also to get a form from the LCI - the local government official.

Last month John Bosco asked if he could have a room built in our compound for him to live in as it would save him paying rent. We asked the landlord Christopher, who very kindly agreed. Christopher came round to get an advance payment on the rent which he would use to pay the builders. Literally 5 minutes after we gave him the money a truck turned up with the building materials and the men got to work! It’s been quite an interesting experience watching the building going up. It’s only a small room, but it took quite a while to build.
Anyway John Bosco has moved in now and is very happy there. He and Geoffrey sit outside on their bench in the evenings chatting away.

One of his jobs is to do the washing. We don’t have a washing machine, but it’s pretty normal for clothes to be hand washed here. In fact, it’s hard to find packets of washing powder in the supermarkets for use in machines. We have an outside tap in the garden and he takes his many buckets and bowls outside and does the washing there. Even though it’s sunny pretty much all the time, it usually takes two days for the clothes to get dry as he can only hand-wring them out.

We also don’t use a rubbish collection service, as it’s normal to burn your rubbish. John Bosco and Geoffrey have an area in the compound where they burn it all. They must go through our rubbish as sometimes I see stuff we have thrown away turn up in their houses! We haven’t had to buy any new bin bags since we came to this house as he empties the rubbish out then puts the bag back in the bin again!
I was woken up in the middle of the night last night by a sound I couldn’t identify. After a while I wandered round the house to see what it was. It turns out that it’s Geoffrey cutting the grass at 4am in the pitch black. When I asked about it later on, I was told that the grass needs to be cut in the morning!

One of the things I find quite amusing is the way Ugandans seem to want to lock things. They have locks on everything. Every door in our house has a lock in it. There are locks on the wardrobe doors and on the drawers inside the wardrobe. One of our friends even has a fridge with a lock and key on it! Our bedroom has 9 locks and two bolts in the doors and wardrobes, plus 8 bolts on the mosquito screens on the windows. We had some bedside cabinets made. and the man was most surprised when we told him we didn’t want locks on them.

So, things at Kira’s homeschool centre continue to be interesting - and challenging for me as the coordinator.
One of the things Jon and I do is pay people who are involved in the school. Part of the night-guard’s wages is 2 kilos of sugar! Each month I have to go shopping for sugar for him. Ugandans like their sugar. John Bosco goes through a huge amount of ours. We are forever topping up the sugar jar.
Because we use tutors who are not employed as teachers, there are times when they are not available and I have to find a replacement.
Sometimes I can’t – and have ended up teaching French a couple of times when the tutor was on holiday. Sacre bleu! It’s about 30 years since I studied French. Fortunately I have a friend who is French so I can ask her the words I need to use in the lessons. It’s very useful when you need to know words like ‘une balançoire’ and ‘un portail’.
We do employ one teacher, Vicky, a Ugandan, who is very good and very reliable. She teaches two of the children from 9-10am in a room downstairs while I teach Kira Maths at that time in the room upstairs. The other kids join the school around 10.30.
One day Vicky couldn’t be there so the other 2 children came into the classroom with me. One of them is a girl with special needs. Every day since then she says to me “I come upstairs with you today?”
There was a baby snake in Vicky’s classroom one day. It was only small like a silver worm, but a baby snake means a mother snake will be around. Vicky killed it with a stone.
We did an end of term performance just before Easter. It went really well as the 7 children did various performances, and some of the home-schooled children, including Jordan came along and did something too. Jordan recited the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It took him weeks to learn it as the language used is very complex, but he did well.

On Friday Vicky travelled the 2 hour journey to Kampala in a matatu (a minibus driven by lunatic drivers). She said that she usually avoids going in ones with young drivers, but this time was in a hurry so chose the first one that came along. After a few kilometres she realised that he was too dangerous a driver, so got out and waited for the next one. It came a short while afterwards, and when they arrived at the next town, she saw the first matatu she had been in. It had crashed and all the passengers had been killed.

Our friend Lindsay works for a health insurance company. They did eyesight tests on matatu drivers and found 50% of them needed glasses. Very few Ugandans wear glasses. Not only that, but many of them have HIV which can affect both the eyesight and the brain.

One time I was driving along and there was a boda boda behind me. On it was the driver and 2 male passengers, all of whom looked similar. All I could see was the driver and the heads of the two passengers behind him. As I looked in the rear view mirror it looked like a man with 3 heads. I got such a shock!

And – at last - after 6 months Jon has now managed to find a regular boda boda driver to take him to and from work, a nice guy called Kabuye. Although there are many drivers around and they spend most of their day sitting about waiting for customers, none of them was interested in having a regular customer. ‘Surely’ you would think it would be good business sense to have a regular source of income…. The added benefit for Jon is that he doesn’t have to haggle over the price every time he gets a ride.

And ‘surely’ you would think that the postal service, Posta Uganda, would work out that they need stamps of decent sized denominations. A package may cost 30,000 to send and they only seem to produce stamps of small denominations. The last parcel I sent had 24 stamps. That’s a lot of stamps to lick!

Some business things work differently too. Jon went on a training course in Kampala. For morning tea they had sausages and cinnamon cake.
I ran a course for the Hotel Owners Association with a person I co-train with, Aziz. He had hired a data projector for us. It came without a plug, just bare wires. Looking completely unperturbed by this, Aziz gets out a biro and plugs the bare wires into the socket, complete with blue sparks flying out.
I told the others about this and Jordan said “”Oh yes, that’s what it was like when I did the woodwork with Chris. We just had a drill with bare wires too.” Crikey!

Aziz comes from an interesting background. He is a Muslim, and his father has 3 wives and 27 children. I’ve spoken to a few men about this and in the towns and cities at least, there is a move away from having several wives and lots of children as they now feel it’s too expensive.

In Kampala there is a group of home schooled teenagers who meet once a fortnight on a Friday night for a get-together. As we happened to be there one weekend when they were having their meeting, Jordan and I went along. It’s a religious group and the people were very nice. At each meeting they have a ‘speaker’, and the time we were there it was one of the parents. He is from the US and is here as a Bible teacher, writer and counsellor. He gave a great talk, and also explained a bit about himself. He is married to a Kiwi and has two children. He lived in the Ukraine for a while and has 4 adopted Ukrainian children. He now lives in Uganda and has 10 adopted Ugandan children, and expects to adopt more. There are some very interesting people around.

And so Jordan is now a teenager, he was 13 on 6th April. To celebrate his birthday we took a group of his friends to a swimming pool at a sports centre, then came back to ours afterwards. We had planned to feed them all by asking the cook at Kira’s school to make pizzas for them, but she wasn’t around that day. So we decided to get them food at the venue instead. When we arrived we were told that chef was not in that day.
So I ended up going to a dukka (little shop by the roadside) that sells chapattis and rolexes. A rolex is a chapatti with an omelette in it. It is the kind of food that all the guide books tell you that you should completely avoid as you are likely to get an upset stomach due to the lack of hygiene in the food preparation. However, all the kids have been here long enough to get accustomed to it, so they were all fine.
One of the boys, another Jordan, left his clothes and bag in the changing room. When he went back to get them, his wallet and money had been stolen. I stayed by the pool looking after everyone’s stuff while they got changed, while Jon went to inform the manager. The manager’s reaction was to deny it had happened. “I did not see anyone” he said “you must have left the wallet and money at home.” While this was happening one of the children thought he saw the thief, so unbeknown to us the children decided to run after him across the golf course. Six teenage boys, pus Kira!
We wandered around wondering where they had all gone, and ended up jumping in the car and driving around to look for them. We couldn’t find them and so came back to the pool. Fortunately they had come back safely at this point – without the thief.
We then all got into the car to go back to ours – all 9 of us! Jon was driving, Kira was on my knee, 4 were squashed in the back seat and two were in the boot. Driving regulations here are very lax, and it’s not uncommon to have many kids in the car, several of whom travel in the boot. Sandy (Jordan’s home school tutor) has a 9-seater minivan. She once had 22 people in there, including her kids lying on the roof, holding onto the roof rack!
Anyway we had some snacks at ours, including a wonderful cake Sandy had made. She is the ‘cake lady’ for Jinja, and makes cakes to suit each person. As Jordan now has an interest in American football she made him a Raiders cake.
The day was topped off by someone spotting a snake under our car. We went out with torches but couldn’t find it, so just left it … it’s presumably still somewhere in the compound!
The other Jordan is from the States and was telling us the sad story of how his family are having to leave Uganda. They came over last year to open an orphanage. They went to one of the local villages, where the people handed over the orphans for them to care for. After a year, they discovered that they were not orphans, but were actually the villagers’ own children and that the villagers felt they were onto a good thing by having their children fed, clothed and educated for free. The people said they would have to give the children back, but the villagers then accused the people of child-trafficking and the husband was put in jail. He was released the day before Jordan’s party, and the family left to go home soon afterwards.

And my birthday was a few days later. I was in Kampala most of the day, and got back about 4pm, to find that Jon had arranged for us to have a TV aerial installed as part of my birthday present. We now have two whole TV channels we can watch!
He made us a nice meal, Sandy had made me a wonderful wheat-free chocolate cake, and then we all played Trivial Pursuit in the evening, so it was a nice day.
I’m having a combined birthday and housewarming party this weekend.

The weekend just gone we went to a St. George’s celebration in Kampala organised by the British Resident’s Association. It was a 60’s Night, and almost everyone turned up in 60’s gear. I wore a school uniform and was a ‘child of the 60’s’. It was quite strange because there were 200 Brits there, it was held in a lovely venue, there was a 60’s band called Beatle Juice, a disco, a buffet meal and a tombola. It wasn’t until I walked past the kitchen and saw the Ugandan staff that I realised I was in Africa!
Everything about the event seemed so ‘normal’ that I’d forgotten I was in a third world country.

We stayed with our ex-neighbours, Eric and Lindsay and her two 16 year old twins, Gordon and Tanya. Kira just adores Tanya and glues herself to her when she is there, so we don’t see much of her.
Jordan decided to lock the bathroom door when he went for a shower, something that no one does because there are internal doors for the toilet and shower. Anyway this door has never been locked, and so he discovered that he couldn’t actually open it to get out.
It was quite interesting watching the males’ different approaches to helping Jordan. Because the windows here have bars on them, he couldn’t get out that way, so they had to deal with the door. Jon’s tack was to get a screwdriver and take the lock off and see if he could get it sorted without any damage to the door. Eric kicked the door, put a hole in it, and as it still didn’t open went off to get his pickaxe instead, while 16-year-old Gordon used brute force and just kicked it down regardless. The door isn’t looking too good now! We need t provide a new door methinks.
That’s the second time Jordan has managed to lock himself in a bathroom since we’ve been here. Just be careful if we come and visit you….

March 2009

2009-03-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been a month since the last blog … and we haven’t moved house! Actually I really like our house and am glad we moved here. We had a lot of difficulty finding a suitable place and were disappointed when we couldn’t get other houses we wanted, but it has worked out for the best.

We’ve been spending time buying various household items. You know when you have a boring life when you get excited about buying a colander, or a tea towel that matches the décor of the kitchen. So much for an African adventure when the highlight of your month is buying a lamp! (But it is quite a nice lamp I have to say...)
Still a bit of a way to go regarding furniture. I do, in general, like the minimalist look, though what we have at the moment is pretty minimal.

We are getting used to having John Bosco the houseboy around again. We told him we only needed him part time Monday-Friday, but he seems keen to come every day and stays pretty much full time. I guess if the alternative is spending time in a little room on your own, it’s preferable to be at our house. He gets on really well with Geoffrey the gardener and after he’s finished his house chores he helps in the garden. He’s asked if the landlord will build him a room to live in on the compound, so we are going to sort that out this weekend.
When he first came he kept asking me to buy buckets and plastic bowls for the various jobs he does around the house. I seem to be single-handedly keeping the plastic receptacle industry going. Either that or he’s going to do a runner and set up a bucket & bowl shop!

John Bosco’s English isn’t very easy to understand and Geoffrey speaks very little English. It’s a real pity as we are all here together a lot of the time and I can’t really communicate with them. John Bosco has to act as translator between us and Geoffrey, which if it’s simple, like “Geoffrey needs more OMO to wash the car with” it’s OK, but anything more complex than that and I really don’t understand.

We live next door to a large house whose boy’s quarters back onto our house. A number of Ugandans live there and seem to have quite a menagerie in the compound. I really don’t mind all the goats baa’ing away and the cockerels cock-a-doodle-dooing all day, but they have one goat which makes a very unpleasant sound. It’s a humanoid sound, and to me it sounds like an old lady in distress. Jon keeps hoping they will kill it and eat it…

The children are doing fine.
We met a youngish guy from the UK called Chris who is out here for a short while doing volunteer work. He takes Jordan with him once a week in the afternoon to do various tasks, like repair school playground equipment, or use a jigsaw and cut out wooden signs. He turns up on a motorbike to pick Jordan up, lends him his helmet and bomber jacket and off they go. Jordan absolutely loves it.

Jordan also had a free rafting trip with the boys as a friend’s husband owns a rafting business here. He was in his element! At one point the boys jumped out of the raft and swam down a grade 2 rapid.

He will be 13 next month and has recently acquired the obligatory acne, and has started shaving! One evening Kira was in her bedroom. She was crying because she had had a bad dream and was scared to stay in her bedroom. Jordan went in to help her. He came to see us afterwards and said “I now know what it’s like to be a parent.”

Kira is very fortunate in that there are a number of girls her own age so she often has people to play with. Sometimes we don’t see much of her at weekends as she goes from one sleepover to another.
She keeps a number of soft toys on her bed and this evening she said to me “Do you know, none of my toys are married.” So she got her toys into pairs and married them. “Do you take this awful wedded man to be your husband?”

Her ‘homeschool centre’ is going well. Most parents do some homeschooling at home and send their children in for various lessons taught by parents or people we have hired, eg a sports tutor.

Jon deals with all the finances and I’ve become the coordinator for the centre. Even though there are only 7 children, there’s always quite a bit to do, from paying wages, to buying toilet rolls, buying gumboots for the askari, arranging for plumbers to come in, producing flyers, sorting out the printer, finding an art tutor, etc etc.

The art tutor is a ‘real’ artist who owns a gallery on the main street. Jon and I have decided to do our own artwork for the house and so ordered some blank canvases from him. I’ve got three 40cm x 40cm canvases while Jon ordered an enormous 1m x 1.5m canvas! We will post the photos once we’ve done the work. Watch this space…

And so we are still learning the ways of Uganda.
The pharmacies here use recycled paper to make up paper bags to put people’s prescriptions in. I bought some Calpol for Kira today and it came in a bag made from a ‘cash payment voucher’. When I opened it up, it gave the name of the person, how much cash he had received - 50,000/=, and the reason – to treat his wife who had had a miscarriage.

It’s very much a cash society here, you very rarely use cheques and don’t use cards of any sort as a rule. This means you are forever going to the ATM to draw out money. If you happen to time it badly, like we did the other day, it can take a long, long time. Jon waited an hour and 15 minutes in the queue. I went home and had lunch while he was waiting then came back to pick him up!
The start of term time is a bad time to go as parents are drawing out the school fees, plus once a month parents can go and visit their children in boarding school and that’s a time to avoid too.

There have been a number of buildings collapsing over recent times. In the last 4 years at least 79 people have been killed at nearly a dozen building mishaps within Kampala. The president’s view is “Buildings cannot continue to collapse like that; this is murder and the engineers must be hanged.”

One of the tribes here eats bats. As there are many bats in the trees near us we sometimes see a group of the tribes people here. They look extremely poor. I used to wonder why poor people always seem to wear brown clothes. Then it dawned on me that they probably only have one set of clothes which they don’t wash so they will become brown from the dust from the soil.
Until I came here I had thought that people wearing raggedy trousers, say in a play, to indicate they were poor was just a made up idea, but people here really do wear trousers like that.
Anyway to get the bats they use slingshots and stones to knock them down from the trees. Then they hit them over the head with their slingshot to kill them, then lie them in rows on the ground. I walked past one time and looked at the poor bats. One of them wasn’t quite dead. I felt sick.

And of course, we can always regale you with stories of unbelievable-ness.
So many times we encounter a situation and say “Surely they could have worked out that there is a better way to do that”, but I have now come to the conclusion that you cannot use the word ‘surely’ here, as what seems so obvious to us, obviously isn’t to other people.

Jon went to change internet providers today as the service we have had has been appalling. He decided to pop in and do it on his way to work. He arrived at 8.15am … but didn’t get away until 11.30. He said he got past the point of being angry and frustrated, he just lost the will to live.

In October he arranged for a carpenter to make a door for one of the rooms at work he had converted into a computer room. The carpenter came and measured up the doorway and showed him pictures of different styles and colours he could choose from. He said it would be ready in November. It actually arrived in February, complete with the carpenter demanding his money the day he delivered the door.
Anyway, a couple of people came along to fit the door - who were actually men building a house next door. At this point, there was no door frame; just a door-shaped hole in a wall.

Now you would expect, wouldn't you, that one of the essential skills of being a carpenter is the ability to measure (“surely”). However, experience has taught us that this doesn't seem to be the case.
The builders worked out when they tried to fit the wooden door frame that the door was about ¼” too wide for the doorway. The logical solution – to us –would be to get the carpenter back and ask him to shave ¼” off the door.
But no - their solution (being builders) was to spend 3 hours knocking chunks out of the brick, tile and plaster to make the door-shaped hole wider. As you can imagine, this was very noisy and created a large amount of rubble and dust. Bearing in mind that the computer room had already been commissioned at this point, Jon came back to the office to find dust and chunks of plaster all over the computers and on the floor.
Just to make sure they had maximised the inconvenience, having slapped new plaster into various holes to seal the door into place, they then proceeded to put scaffolding in a criss cross shape to hold the door frame up. Scaffolding here is made of tree branches and nails.
When he came home from work that evening I asked why he had pieces of bark on the back of his shirt. He had had to climb in and out of the scaffolding each time he wanted to go into the room. He also spent the following day removing building rubble from the room and a large amount of dust from inside the computer (and wondering how much the life of the computer had been reduced). You can see now why Ugandan companies offer very little or indeed no warranty on any products they sell!

February 2009

2009-02-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

And here we are, in our fourth house in less than 8 months. We took the last house as a temporary measure while we looked for a house back in Jinja. We finally found one and moved in over the weekend. It’s a fairly new 4 bedroom house with a big compound, and is walkable to the town centre.
It’s in quite a nice location as it’s not on a street, but is in a small ‘off-street’ area of several houses, with unsealed lanes. There are goats and chickens wandering around the outside of our compound and around the lanes.
The house is single story, has a nice dining and living room, bathroom, kitchen with a separate food storage room, an integral garage, 2 normal sized bedrooms, one smaller bedroom, and a huge master bedroom with en suite. It also has a veranda out the front. The compound needs a bit of landscaping doing to it, but could be lovely if we get it done. The man who owns it is an agriculturalist and wants to plant coffee in part of the compound. There are a few matoke and paw paw trees already here.
The owner asked if we would keep on the gardener, who lives in a small building on the compound, so he is around spending most of the day working in the garden. In the mornings he cleans the car. He trimmed lots of bushes and trees over the weekend, put the branches in a big pile and – in true Ugandan style – set fire to them. However he did this rather too close to the hedge and set fire to it!
Jon and Jordan kept running over to supply him with buckets of water, and he managed to put it out.
Before we moved in we asked if the landlord would get some work done on the house – we asked for mosquito screens on the windows, for some plumbing work to be done, and also to get a water heater in. The water heater only heats the water in one room, so we had it installed in the main bathroom which now means we can have hot showers. Woopeee!
This does mean though that there is no hot water in the kitchen or our en suite. However it’s a step up from the last house, which had no hot water at all. There are no curtains here yet, and bits and bobs still need doing to the house, but the landlord has been very accommodating and has agreed that if we get work done, he will take the money off the rent.
I was doing some unpacking the day after we moved in and was just about to put all my underwear in one of the wardrobe drawers when I thought I’d better take it out and check if there was anything in it. Good job I did as there was a rather large dead frog in there!
The house is unfurnished and as there is very little furniture available to buy in Jinja we went to Kampala the week before to see a furniture maker. We ordered two sofas (in a rust and gold coloured material), dining table & chairs (with seat covers to match the sofas) and coffee table. We said we needed them for Saturday and we needed them delivered to Jinja. He asked me to go over the day before to sort it all out, which I did (2 hour drive each way), and they weren’t ready. However he assured me they would be finished that day and that he would personally deliver them at “exactly 11 o’clock” the next day.
At 12.00 I called him – very difficult understanding many Ugandans, especially over the phone – but he seemed to be saying that the transport would arrive at theirs at 1pm and they would be at ours between 2 and 3pm. I called again at 4.30pm whereupon they started telling me it was going to cost us 100,000/- to have the furniture delivered. I said we had agreed on 50,000, at which point the price seemed to go up to 150,000/-. Anyway they said it would arrive at 7pm. At 7.10pm we gave up hope of ever seeing our furniture and went out to some friends who had kindly made us a meal. I got a phone call at 8pm (it’s dark by now) saying “I am at de gate”. Jon, Jordan, Rob and his 2 boys all went round as a bit of a heavy mob in case things didn’t go smoothly. After unloading the furniture and refusing to pay any more than 50,000/- for delivery, everything seemed to be sorted out, and we now have some furniture.
We had also ordered 3 beds the week before from a Jinja furniture maker. We said we absolutely needed them on Saturday. “They will be ready” they said. As Ugandans aren’t known for their efficiency or reliability I went in on Thursday to check. “They are not ready” they said. “We need them for Saturday, will they be ready then?” I asked. “Yes” they said. I went down on Saturday to discover they weren’t ready, and not only that but they hadn’t even got the wood to make them from. We are now sleeping on mattresses on the floor!
So, at the moment our furniture comprises 2 sofas, a coffee table and dining table and chairs. In our rather large master bedroom we have a mattress … and that’s it. It looks totally lost. For curtains we have put up a couple of sheets over the windows. Oh the joy of starting out again!
One of the things we will have to do is take down some doors in the house. There are doors everywhere! There are 18 doors altogether excluding the garage doors, and when you open some doors, you block others. I feel like I spend all my time walking round the house opening doors, so we are going to take 3 of them down.
Although the house overall is nice, the quality of workmanship isn’t that wonderful. There are few things in the house that are straight – eg floors, kitchen workbenches, sockets, tap fittings, doors ….
Some of the plumbing has been a real botch job. The day we moved in, the plumber (pronounced plum-ber) who appears never to have actually done any training in plumbing, was in the kitchen with his ‘apprentice’. I wandered in there. The plumber was lying on the floor – relaxing - while his apprentice was making a complete hash of installing a mixer tap over the sink.

Anyway it was really nice to see our neighbours from NZ, Claire and Dave, who came to Jinja for a few days in February as part of some mission work they were doing in Africa with Living Hope Ministries. Not many friends tend to ‘happen to’ come to Jinja, and it was nice to see someone we actually know!

I spoke at a conference in a hotel located between Kampala and Entebbe recently for the Uganda Feminist Forum. They were a good group of people and the venue was wonderful, ranking as one of the best rooms I’ve stayed in, in any country.
The hotel is called Ranch on the Lake and (not surprisingly) has lovely views over Lake Victoria.
It’s interesting to see that even though there is wide scale poverty here, there is still a lot of money around. There are many beautiful hotels and houses here.
The Ranch on the Lake is doing some major building work and will more than double in size, covering a substantial area of land with high quality buildings, golf course, swimming pool etc.

I was reading in the newspaper today that one of the areas in Uganda is so poor – despite the land being rich in gold, marble, uranium etc – that some people walk around naked, and depend on primitive nomadic cattle herding for a livelihood.
There are some very sad newspaper articles here. There was a story about an 8 year old girl who was knocked over by a vehicle while walking on the road. They took her to hospital where she said that her mother had died and she didn’t know her father. The girl also died, and despite officials going to her village, no one turned up to claim her. They assumed she must have lived on her own.
Another story told of how the refrigerator in the mortuary has not worked for 2 years; another of a school with 800 pupils and only 4 teachers; and of a University class of 1000 students, a class number so large that many students don’t fit in the lecture room and have to stand outside.
One article told of a man who committed suicide. He was trying to sell his underage daughter to the 68 year old neighbour as a bride for 1m shillings (approx NZ$1000, 400 pounds) and his wife and children wouldn’t allow it.
There are regular stories about witchdoctors. A young boy was kidnapped and found dead with body parts missing; there are human sacrifices where people kill children or bury them alive, as witchcraft says it will bring money. They claim that Jesus was human sacrifice, which in some way they see as justification for their actions.

Jon has started back at the organisation he was with last year and has a 6 month part time contract with them. When he got a boda home from work last week, there was a herd of cows on the road. The boda driver decided to drive through them rather than round them, and ended up hitting one of the cows. The motorbike turned over and both Jon and the driver fell off. Fortunately they were both OK. Jon had a few cuts and scrapes, but he’s fine, as is the laptop he was carrying! He always wears a jacket and helmet when he’s on a boda, unlike the vast majority of people who use them, and they proved to be very useful.

I’ve had a couple of magazine articles published this month, both of them on public speaking. One in a Ugandan women’s glossy called ‘Flair for Her’, and another in an East African women’s glossy called ‘African Woman’.
I’m aiming to get some children’s books published too.

A couple of days ago I went to a dukka (a tiny little wooden shed-like structure that acts as a corner shop). A man was sitting on a bench near the dukka and said “Muzungu how are you?” “I’m fine” I replied. “I want to ask you a question” he said. “Yes?” I asked. “You come here” he replied. Hmmm, I thought, but had to walk that way anyway. “Yes?” I asked as I went over. “I want soda, you buy me a soda” he said...

The houseboy we had in Kampala, John Bosco, had asked if he could come and work for us. We were very happy with him as a worker and so agreed. He arrived yesterday via a 9 hour bus trip from the border of Uganda and Rwanda where he has recently been living with his family. His English is hard to understand, and we thought he said he had some accommodation to come to, but when he arrived he said he didn’t. I had to rush around taking him to various places to see if we could find something – and at the right price.
It’s hard seeing the kind of accommodation he will be living in – very basic. Usually just a bare, not very clean room, probably without electricity as that would cost more, maybe with a long drop toilet, and perhaps with a water tap outside or an allowance of several jerry cans of water a day. However, many Ugandans live in that kind of accommodation and to them it is normal.

Another woman has been asking us if she can work for us. Her father died and left the family with little money. She started crying when she told me her mother had recently died. She has no real work and very little income. She is very pleasant and helpful, but we had already promised John Bosco he could work with us. She sent me a couple of phone texts pleading with me to take her on as she is an orphan, and she also turned up with her HIV test results to show me that she tested negative.

Today a woman and small child turned up at our gate. The woman was in tears, as was her little son. She apologised for intruding and told me that she, and one of her two children, has HIV, that she is very sick and unable to work. She has no husband and needs money for the medication. She showed me her HIV test results and the prescription from the hospital.

There are so many needy people here. It’s easy to put the phone down when charities phone you up asking for money for a worthy cause. It’s not at all easy dealing with the issue when it stares you in the face, when people are standing in front of you crying, and pleading for help…

Happy New Year!

2009-01-25T05:39:00.006-08:00

For those of you who have been hanging on the edge of your seats wondering if we really did have to wander the streets carrying our worldly goods in a handkerchief tied onto a stick – well, we do have a roof over our heads at the moment, though of course, this is Uganda and things work in their own way. Our date for moving out was 5th January, and we found a lovely house in a place called Njeru overlooking the Nile which we’d arranged to move into. However a few days before we were due to move, the landlady phoned us up to tell us she had rented it out to someone else. We rushed around and found another nice house. It’s in an area called Bukaya which we like, though it’s over 12km into Jinja and we often have to travel in and out several times a day, so it’s not very convenient. We are house hunting again, aiming to move back to the metropolis of Jinja.

For Christmas we went to a lovely remote holiday island called ‘Hairy Lemon’ owned by some friends of ours, Erin and Rob. http://www.hairylemonuganda.com/.
Before we went away, we thought we had better get some protection for the house as all the day time staff were away, and there have been some break ins on that road. We hired a guard from a security company who turned up in blue/grey uniform complete with rifle. I have to say he didn’t look very menacing though, as he sat around on a chair in the garden looking really quite bored.

Hairy Lemon is about an hour from here and is very beautiful. Erin and Rob decided several years ago to move onto the island. It covers an area of about 4 acres, was completely overgrown and had absolutely nothing there. They cleared a space and started setting up home – well tent - and it grew from there. It’s amazing what they have done.
It is very fortunate for them that it’s positioned near to one of very few permanent ‘standing waves’ in the world. Wikipedia describes a standing wave as "a wave that remains in a constant ‘standing’ position". This therefore, as of course you would no doubt expect, makes it a desirable destination for kayakers.
When we were there we were twice as old as everyone else until a very welcome group of Ugandans came, as the island was populated by 20 year old kayakers. I couldn’t believe that they called us Mr & Mrs Chamberlain. No one calls me Mrs Chamberlain!
Anyway it is an absolutely idyllic location, with a lagoon we could swim in and play water volleyball in (at least until the Ugandans lost the ball downstream!). Not only that but Santa even managed to find his way there.

The road to the island is a bit of an experience in itself. Generally, other than main roads, most driving is what – in western countries- you would call off-road driving. Here, because the roads are so bad, it’s just called ‘driving’. The main road towards Hairy Lemon is fine, but once you come off onto the side roads, even we were amazed at how bad they were. There were ravines in the road. At one point I was worried that the car would actually tip over. I am constantly grateful for the fact that we bought a 4x4 car.
As we were driving though the villages, kids would wave and smile and call out to us. One tiny child was SO excited at seeing muzungus go past that she almost fainted!

We were supposed to stay on Xmas night but for some reason I felt we should go home. Fortunately we did because Kira was unwell the next morning. I took her to the doctor who said she had suspected malaria and that she should stay in their on-site hospital. I stayed with her, sleeping there overnight. They treated her well and she recovered very quickly, which probably indicates that it wasn’t malaria (Jordan had the same symptoms a few weeks later, and that wasn’t malaria). The hospital was very basic and from a practical point of view provided very little – a bed and a sheet. At one point, although Kira was very hot, she felt very cold so they got another sheet for her. It must have just come out of the wash as it was still damp.

We had to take our own pillows, blankets, soap, toilet paper, food and drinking water. They provided the medication but not any water to take the tablets with. I got no sleep at all that night as the hospital is in the town centre and there was extremely loud music playing until 2.30 in the morning, along with the mosque next door calling people to prayer, as well as being bitten by mosquitoes because there were no nets over the beds.
While Kira recovered well, I felt much worse by the time we left the next morning!

For those of you who braved the Ugandan postal system to send us a Xmas card, thank you very much. Because the post, when it works, is so slow, many cards arrive in the new year. One of the English people here keeps these cards and puts them up the following Christmas …

So, the house we are living in in Bukaya is a new one. It’s owned by a Ugandan woman who had it built and has been living here with her 5 children, aged around 20. They have moved into the boy’s quarters, which are literally a few feet away and is as big as the house. She owns a ‘special hire’ (what we would call a ‘taxi’) service in Kampala and so doesn’t have to work. She goes to Kampala once a week to collect the money.
I think we are the first people to move in and so she is using the rent money to upgrade the property and compound, including having a wall built round the compound. Getting building work done here operates differently as people tend to hire a lot of people to do the job. She hired 20 builders to build the wall, so it was done in no time. They use red brick made from the earth, plus cement. They leave vertical splits in the wall every so often to allow for expansion. To strengthen it, they put barbed wire in the cement along the length of the wall every few rows.
I had to laugh when I saw one of the builders using a brown paper cement bag as a hat. I couldn’t imagine a builder in the UK or NZ wearing a paper bag on their head…

Anyway the house is in a nice peaceful area and we have a lovely view over Lake Victoria. We can see the sun rise and set over the lake from our bedroom. We’ve bought some wicker chairs and like to sit out on the front porch and look over the views.
The house is on a dirt track and further down the lane are houses owned by muzungus. However we hardly ever see them and so everyone we see here is Ugandan. I take Lotte for a walk every day and it’s really nice to walk around here as it feels more ‘African’ than where we were staying before.
For example I’ll see lots of goats and hens around, along with a few guinea fowl. There may be a Ugandan person tilling their land, and a cowherd slowly walking their herd along the lane. Some of the cowherds have Ankole cows (the ones with the huge horns) and while Lotte isn’t too keen, they just amble along like the other ones. I saw a little boy who was wondering around his compound wearing only a singlet and some over-sized flip flops. There was a boy rolling a tyre along with a stick.
There are many Ugandans living beside the main road. I always have a range of adults and kids saying hello and waving to me. It’s a bit like being the Queen when you are a muzungu, everyone wants you to wave to them and greet them. Little children always shout out “Muzungu! ‘ow aare yooo?” I usually reply “I’m fine how are you?” One boy who looks about 10 years old mimicked my accent, to the delight of his friend and they both laughed. When I walked back he asked me again how I was. I replied “I’m fine how are you?” At this point the two boys held onto each other and laughed until they nearly fell over!

We have no staff working for us here, which is unusual for white people, however we are a low-maintenance family and don’t need much. We pay one of the girls next door to hand wash our clothes for us a few times a week and to clean the house once a week. They also burn our rubbish for us.
We rented the house partly furnished – all there was were bed frames, dining table & chairs, and a 3 piece suite. As we had no cooker they lent us theirs, while they cook in traditional Ugandan way on charcoal-filled pots.
We had to buy 3 mattresses and 4 pillows the day we moved in. We’ve brought very little household stuff with us – some bedding, plates, bowls & cutlery and a few towels. Although we have a house-worth of furniture and goods in storage in NZ, it doesn’t seem worth the effort of bringing them over. This means we have to completely re-furnish and equip a house from scratch. It’s amazing the amount of things you need to get for a house – eg waste paper bins, mirrors, desks, pans, kettle, dust pan and brush, mop etc. as well as the more obvious bigger items.
We managed the first few days with no fridge, and one pan which had to do everything – cook meals and boil water for cups of tea!
There is no hot water in the house at all. We do the washing up in cold water and even have to get cold showers! The water isn’t completely cold as it comes from a water tank outside on which the sun usually graces its presence, but it certainly isn’t warm water. Jon quite likes it, he finds it quite invigorating, a bit like jumping into a swimming pool and gradually getting used to the temperature. The rest of us, however, think he’s weird and refuse to stand under the shower. We stand away from the water and give ourselves a wash. Sometimes Kira and I go in together and stand there screeching about how cold it is!
It’s a real pity though as Jon and I have a lovely big en suite with a nice bath. Other than boiling the kettle 100 times and filling the bath up that way, I can’t imagine how I would ever use it. We never thought to ask if there was hot water before we moved in, but have asked in all the houses we’ve looked at subsequently. You’d be surprised at how many houses don’t have hot water.

Because we live near the Lake we get a lot of lake flies around. The house hasn’t had any mozzie screens fitted to the windows yet and we made the inexcusable mistake of putting the lights on in the house one evening. Good grief, we were overrun with flies, thousands of them, all making a kind of humming noise. They don’t live very long and were dropping like – well – flies. Jon had a cup of tea on the table. It wasn’t long before he had a tasty coating of dead flies on the top. Our mozzie net over the bed and my laptop had an attractive sprinkling of them too. The next morning we had a carpet of dead flies which we had to sweep out (once we’d bought a brush of course). Now, I can well imagine how you’re feeling – envious. “How lucky the Chamberlains are to be having such wonderful experiences” I can hear you say.
Anyway, we have now worked out how to deal with this – we have stuffed up the open grills on the windows with newspaper and we put on the outside light in the evenings so that the flies stay in the porch area. Problem solving is a very useful skill to have in Uganda.

Kira likes it round here as one of the neighbours has hens and goats. She is forever going round and playing with the goats. She was also playing skipping today with the woman who owns the house.

You certainly get to meet some interesting people here. For example there is Frank. He lives in Germany 11 months a year, and spends a month here. He has bought 10 plots of land in Bukaya next to us and comes over to have houses built on them. Currently he is having 3 houses built simultaneously. While he is away he employs someone to look after his houses, and then before he arrives back he gets this man to find 30-40 builders who all work seven days a week for a month building the next part of the houses. Then he leaves for another 11 months until he can come back and get the next phase of the building work done. Frank has 3 children, all different colours – a white child in Germany he had with his ex-wife a brown child he has had with his Ugandan girlfriend, as well as her black child.
Then there is Sven who was staying in the boys quarters here, also a German who has married a Ugandan woman and who does something similar. They have just bought 2 plots of land, though Sven didn’t see them until after they were bought. White people often get charged more for things than black people, so his wife did the negotiations and he only go to see the plots after the deal was signed.

One of the local Jinja personalities, a great guy called John who is from the UK and in his 70’s, is a friend of Sven’s and asked Sven to buy him a laptop, as he felt it was high time he entered the world of technology. So Sven buys a laptop and brings it over from Germany, but the keyboard is in German (it’s a QWERTX not a QWERTY) as are all the commands. It’s hard enough getting into technology in your 70’s when things are in your own language, let alone when it’s in German. Anyway they brought the laptop round for Jon to fix, which he did. As a ‘danke’ gift, John brought over a mini fridge of beer and soft drinks, and left it all here for us.

The day we left the last house, Bonnie, one of the house girls had her 4th baby. We went to visit her at her home the next day. The baby was really sweet and was surprisingly pale – her arms were the same colour as Kira’s even though she looked Ugandan. Bonnie, her husband and her 4 children live in a very Ugandan house –small, dark and basic. The main (and possibly only) room was about 3m2. It contained their double bed, a bunk bed, a mattress on the floor, a couch, a chair, a TV, and all their possessions. They cook outside as there didn’t seem to be a kitchen inside.

One of the women we know saw a poster in Kampala saying “Have a small family, one that fits into a taxi.” A ‘taxi’ is a Ugandan word for a 14-seater minibus…

So, Kira’s school closed down at the end of last term, and a group of 6 children are now being schooled on the school’s premises by me, another mother and a Ugandan teacher in the mornings. We are using a UK homeschool package.
In the afternoons we have arranged a variety of activities for the children - tennis, swimming, cookery, gardening, French and drama. We’ve been doing this for 2 weeks and it's going well.
For the first week I taught ‘projects’, and the children wanted to do a project on animals. Being a conference speaker I’m used to giving high-energy presentations, and so was teaching in the same mode. However I realised that children haven’t leant how to control this energy, and during one particularly fun and energetic session, the kids were so excited they ran out of the classroom! I decided to make the sessions a bit lower energy after that.

And of course, no blog entry would be complete without mention of the odd frustration or two.
How, might I ask, are you supposed to phone Uganda Telecom, for example, when the phone book only goes up to the letter S?
And how are you supposed to contact one of the other phone companies – MTN - when the phone number listed for them in the phone book is incorrect?

And getting petrol is always an interesting experience as it’s not uncommon for petrol stations to have no petrol. Our usual tack is to drive in, wind down the window and shout out “Do you have petrol?” Mind you, at least Uganda has finally followed the rest of the world and has brought prices down a bit. We watched other countries reducing their price while ours went up to over $3 a litre.

And finally, a few snippets from our trip into the metropolis of Jinja today:
In general Ugandans are scared of dogs and you rarely see people walking one. We took Lotte into town today. It’s quite an amazing experience as many people give you a wide berth, some freeze in their tracks looking concerned, and some even jump up in fright. It feels a bit like walking a lion, not a dog…

While we were driving around we saw a man sitting by the side of the road with a pair of underpants on his head.

We had lunch in a ‘muzungu’ café. I had roast vegetable salad, Jordan had home made sausage rolls and Jon had chicken salad sandwich on brown bread (Kira was at a friend’s). While we were there, there was a Ugandan man sitting in a rubbish skip opposite, rooting through the rubbish and eating what he could find.

Life here is different …

December 2008

2008-12-23T03:53:00.000-08:00

It’s been 6 months!
I don’t regret for a minute coming here, despite the sleepless nights worrying over how we are going to deal with our next challenge - eg actually having somewhere to live. The people whose house we are staying in come back in less than 2 weeks and we have nowhere to stay. I wonder if there are any empty stables with mangers around at this time of year? The experiences we are having are worth the odd challenge or two .. or three.. or four ….well OK, a hundred.

Anyway the Cinderella panto went really well (“oh no it didn’t” - “oh yes it did”) and was deemed to be a complete success by all. Jon looked suitably gruesome as Ravishing Rita, one of the Ugly Sisters, the children had a great time as the singing and dancing chorus, and Jordan played the part of a ghost really well. I ended up being the prompter, though why I bothered I don’t know, as I had to sit at the side in the wings and noone could hear me!
Jinja has never experienced anything like it before. The Ugandans were in culture shock (“poor Cinderella, those sisters are just too horrible, they ripped her dress and she will never go to the ball”), while the white people were amazed that anything so ‘professional’ could happen here. “Look, you’ve got curtains on the stage! …… and they open!” “Look, you’ve got music …. and lights… and a backdrop!” “Look, the performers are wearing costumes!”
Most muzungus came on both the Friday and Saturday nights of the performance - either because it was so good or because nothing else happens in Jinja.
Only English people really knew how to join in with the panto (“he’s behind you”) but they shouted their hearts out to make up for the other 95% of the audience who hadn’t quite worked it out.

Another bit of good news is that we finally got a car. Woohoo, we can actually go to places now without being ripped off by boda boda & taxi drivers, or having to walk for an hour. A German couple who live in our street (that is, the street we are living in now until we become homeless and have to wander the streets of Jinja) have gone to Switzerland for a year and we bought their car the day before they left. It’s a Suzuki Escudo 4X4, which is the kind of car you need to have to be able to cope with the roads round here.
Wakoli George, our night watchman, offered to clean it one morning at 7.30 after he had finished his duty. He asked if I was going to use it that morning. I said I wasn’t, but wondered why he’d asked as it was still only early. Anyway four hours later he finished cleaning it. It was absolutely spotless inside and out, but as soon as you drive anywhere, even out of the driveway it’s covered in red dust.

The car seemed to come with a free dog, so we now have a part-ridgeback dog called Lotte who only understands commands in German. This is a bit unfortunate as I only know one sentence in German “das ist eine banane” and she doesn’t seem to understand it.
There is also a manic stray dog that lives outside the gate. It arrived before we came and the children whose house it is named her ‘Angel’ as they thought she was a guardian angel. She was malnourished and desperate for affection. I’ve been feeding her daily, though because she was presumably abandoned at an early age, she hasn’t learned the skills of how to be around humans. She jumps on you, scratches you and wees on you. Getting in and out of the house is a bit of an episode. It would be nice to just walk in and out but Angel seems to target me.

I’m going to be doing some training in January for women in agriculture, so have been going with Jami, a volunteer worker, to the local villages to meet some of the farmers. It’s certainly been an experience – we go to the village on a boda boda which takes about 30 mins over rough ground. I discovered you have to keep your mouth slightly open when you go over the many speed bumps otherwise your teeth bang together. The first time we went to meet with a farmer’s group there was an agriculture trainer due to turn up at 8am. We all turned up at 8am, though discovered he operates on Ugandan time. He turned up at 10.30.
The farmers needed the group leader to interpret for us as Jami is English too. It is amazing how long it takes to interpret something simple. One sentence Jami said was 4 words long. It took over 3 minutes to translate it.
The group seemed to feel it important to know how old I was. “How old do you think I am?” I asked. They had a bit of a conflab and replied “28”. I like the Ugandan people.

The next week we went to see a different group. Jami phoned them at 1.45pm to see if they would be there for a 2.30pm meeting. Yes they replied, so we got our boda bodas and arrived at 2.30 only to be told it was a public holiday (World Aids Day on 1st Dec) and that noone would be turning up.
After I got back from one of these trips I went into a café. I used the white serviette to wipe my face and it turned completely brown from all the dust.

The red dust here permeates everything. The house staff wash the floors every day to get rid of it. People don’t have carpets as they would get filthy. Because our washing machine is broken Harriet hand-washes the clothes in the bath. Even though most clothes don’t look particularly dirty, the water turns a very muddy brown. One of the women who lives in a more rural area has a small baby. I remarked that the baby had red hair. “She doesn’t actually” she replied “it’s just the dust from when we drive down the lanes”.

And talking of villages and babies, Rob - the other Ugly Sister and also the husband of Sandy who home schools Jordan - is a missionary who goes to work in the villages. One of the women in the village, who had presumably had many children, had very long droopy boobs. While she was sitting on the ground, her small child comes up behind her and asks for some milk, so she throws her boob over her shoulder and lets him drink.

It’s very common for African women to have many children. Sometimes if they have had enough and their husband asks them for more children they tell him to get another wife. Bonnie, one of the housegirls, was saying she recently went to the funeral of her uncle-in-law. He had 3 wives and 17 children.
Some Ugandan males only count boys as their children and only send boys to school. Bonnie has 3 children, two girls and a boy. Her husband will tell people he has one child.

We are always learning of the different ways over here.
It’s not uncommon for tradesmen turn up without tools and then ask to borrow some. The computer cable installer turned up at Jon’s work possessing only a screwdriver, a hammer and an old nail. “Do you have a drill?” he asked
The plumber turned up and asked “Do you have a wrench?”
The electrician asked “Can you give me money for a boda boda so I can go into town and get a part for the fridge?”

One of the women Jon knows is getting married. Apparently it’s the norm that you give out list of how much everything is going to cost - the flowers, the dress, the reception, the cake, the spray snow(!) etc - and then ask people give you a donation to pay for it.

It’s also normal for Ugandan women from the villages to kneel to greet people. Wakoli George’s brothers-in-law came to our house. Harriet knelt down at the gate to greet them and said a formal greeting in Lusoga, which sounded like a prayer.
Sometimes greetings can take a long time as they have to ask you how you are and how each member of your family is, perhaps several times over.
A common expression people use instead of ‘How are you?’ is “How is here?”
And every time we return to the house, the staff say “Welcome back” even if we’ve only popped down to the shops for 30 minutes.

I was reading recently that Uganda has the lowest car ownership per capita in the world, though proportionately it has 10 times more accidents than London or New York.

One of the lovely things about being here is that there is no evidence of Christmas in Jinja town centre. No hype at all. In fact if you weren’t paying attention you could miss Christmas entirely.
We have been to a couple of Xmas events though. Kira’s end of year Xmas show at the school was a lovely affair which included carols in Luganda (Kira can now sing songs in 3 languages!) and was marred only by the fact that someone nicked the decorations off the Xmas tree….. We also went to a Xmas nativity show (complete with Joseph saying to Mary while she was in labour and trudging to the stable “don’t push”) followed by a light show of 3,600 lights on the banks of the river. It was a beautiful balmy African evening which made it very special.

Kira’s school has now closed down as it wasn’t financially viable, which is a real shame as it was such a lovely school. However a group of people are interested in joint home schooling on the school’s premises so we will arrange that for the New Year.

And, of course, we have the usual tales of incredible levels of inefficiency. I could write an entire book on it.
Generally we find that doing business with Indians is very easy. They are fast and efficient. Doing business with Ugandans is a tad different.
For example we have been house hunting and have contacted a range of agents (the Uganda ones are called ‘blockers’ here).
One of the Indian agents told us he had a house available for rent. I turned up at his office, he took me in his car to see the house then brought me back. It took about 20 minutes, which included having a good look round the house.
A Ugandan blocker told me he had a house available. We usually have to pay blockers to take us to see houses so we always have to start off by haggling over the price. Anyway, I met him outside a hotel – where I have to pay car park charges. He doesn’t have a car, so before we bought our car we would have to hire a taxi. This time however I had the car with me, along with both children.
We get in the car and he phones someone he knows to see where the house is. We then drive around to find this person. We find him on the street but then he goes off somewhere. We sit around until he comes back – more car park charges – and he has someone else with him. They both squeeze into the car. There are not enough seats so Kira has to sit on Jordan’s knee.
We arrive at the house, which is about a minute’s walk from where I am currently staying. When we get there the 2 guys say they don’t have the key and that they need to phone the owner to let us in. They don’t want to use their phone so they use mine. The owner isn’t answering his phone. I’m not sure what the guy has done with my phone but it is now constantly vibrating, so I have to switch it off. Someone from the house next door, which looks similar, comes out. The blocker asks if we can look round his house to get an idea of what the one next door looks like. The man is appalled at the idea and won’t let us in.
We drive off so that the 2 guys can get a key for another house. They get back to their ‘office’ and say that that house is now not available, so we leave them there. They tell the blocker about another house, so we drive to the other side of Jinja to look at it. When we get there it is next to a scruffy, dilapidated old building. A group of Ugandan children crowd around us and one of them throws a pen at the car. The blocker goes to speak to the house girl who says the house isn’t for rent at all. At this point we give up and I take him back to where I’d met him.
In all, this takes almost 2 hours of driving around, paying parking charges, picking up people … and not actually getting to see a house at all.

However, worse than that – much worse - is going to a bank and trying to get something done. One day I had to go to the bank 3 times. When you are a westerner and are used to western ways, then going to a bank in Uganda - at all - is a challenge, but having to go three times in a day to sort out various issues is beyond the limit that anyone should have to experience.
The first thing I had to sort out was getting a cheque book. We opened a business account and ordered a cheque book in September and have not yet received it. So I reordered it several weeks later. Then this month I went in to see if it had arrived. Ha ha. It hadn’t, so I re-reordered it for the third time. To do this you have to provide ID. I gave the man my driving license which he had to photocopy – for the third time.
Now, generally Ugandans operate at a slower pace than us. However the speed at which this man operated was beyond belief. I watched him walk to the photocopier.
Imagine, if you will, someone walking incredibly, incredibly slowly. Now imagine them walking 5 times slower than that. That was about the speed he was moving at. I was transfixed.
However at the point where he was overtaken by a snail on his way to the photocopier I couldn’t bear to watch any longer. He came back many minutes later and showed me the photocopy which he said hadn’t come out well enough. He suggested I go home to get my passport instead. I said “not on your nelly” and looked at the photocopy. It looked absolutely fine to me. However he decided to go off and photocopy it again.
Many, many minutes later he came back and then had to knock on the office door to get one of the staff to let him back in to get behind the counter. He knocked and knocked and knocked. Noone answered for a long, long time.
While this was happening Jon was at a different counter trying to withdraw some money. “You can’t withdraw money without a chequebook” they said. “My wife” said Jon as calmly as he could, “is over there ordering a chequebook from you for the third time. How do we withdraw money if you won’t provide a chequebook?”
Anyway things carried on in this vein for a lot longer. In all I was in the bank for this particular episode for 2 hours and suffice it to say I was murderous by the time I came out.
I can completely understand why the TV ‘endurance’ programmes only include easy challenges, like eating boiled goats’ testicles or having tarantulas crawl on your face. Including the challenge of ‘Going to a bank in Uganda 3 times in a day’ is beyond the level of human endurance.

But … there are some good things going on too. As the family who homeschool Jordan are American we are having an American as well as a Ugandan experience.
We went to our first Thanksgiving meal at their house recently. I had my first taste of pumpkin pie.
I was homeschooling the 3 boys there one morning when the oldest boy, Ethan, decided to kill one of the chickens in readiness for the meal. So we stopped the maths lesson and had a ‘food preparation’ lesson instead.
Being a city girl, I’d never seen a chicken being killed. For those of you who may be the same, this is what he had to do. Firstly he had to tie its legs to stop it running away while he got a knife. Then he had to shoo away the other chicken that was after a cock fight. Then he had to untie its legs and stand on them, at the same time standing on its wings. He held its head, and then cut it off with the knife.
This poor creature then ran around the garden like …. well … a headless chicken.
When it stopped, he plunged it into boiling water, and then had to pluck the feathers off.
The turkey was next, but Jordan and I had seen enough by this time … the maths lesson seemed a whole heap more appealing at this point.
(Apologies to squeamish people and vegetarians!)

Anyway, this is the final blog for 2008. Tune in next year in order to get your dose of Ugandan life! Merry Christmas

2008-11-16T11:32:00.000-08:00

So, even though we’ve been in Uganda over 4 months now and are getting used to life here, there are still things which seem strange, or different, or completely unbelievable, or simply just interesting.

Like the postal service. My Mum sent me a couple of letters in July when we were staying n Kampala. One of them arrived a week ago. It had gone via Vanuatu in the Pacific Islands. The other one is yet to arrive. We have had similar experiences with other items of mail.
In NZ I loved going to the Post Shop and went most days as it had a great energy to it. It was busy, interesting, bright and cheery.
The Post Office in Jinja was built, by all appearances, in the 1920’s, and hasn’t had any work at all done to it since. There is rarely anyone there and the woman working there eats her lunch while sitting at the counter. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if one day a man arrived at the Post Office on a donkey bringing the mail from the next village in a brown sack. And Jinja is one of the biggest places in Uganda.
I also wonder how - or even if - people get mail. Mail is only delivered to PO Boxes not houses, and given there are around 250,000 people in the Jinja district, there are less than 3000 PO Boxes. Perhaps several thousand people club together to rent a PO Box…?

Sometimes we forget how complex the Ugandans like to make procedures, and go about life as if it were ‘normal’. We got a slip in our PO Box saying there was a parcel for us. I took it to the counter and handed it in, expecting the woman to go and get the parcel and give it to me. How silly of me. That is way too simple. “You have to take the slip to the counter in the room next door” she said. My heart sank. I knew it was going to take a looong time.
In all the times I have been to the Post Office, the counter in the room next door has been completely devoid of anyone, either staff or customers. In fact the room itself is always completely devoid of any life form at all. Kira and I went to the room. There is a little bicycle bell on the counter. I rang it… Nothing. Kira rang it… Nothing. I rang it again and eventually a man who looked to be about 150 years old staggered to the counter and asked us to come in. We went into the mail sorting room. I was aghast. There were bags of mail strewn all over the floor, letters and parcels were in piles all over the place. We could see the backs of the PO Boxes and some of them looked like they were full of years’ worth of unclaimed mail. I can’t imagine how any letter ever reaches its destination.
The 150 year old man disappeared. There was another man in the sorting room, working through a pile of yellow slips, I told him we’d come to collect a parcel. He pointed to a desk which had 2 chairs by it and told us to wait there. Kira and I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. I wondered where the person whose desk it was had gone to and when they would be back. We waited. Eventually the man finished with the pile of yellow slips and came over to us. Apparently it was his desk. And apparently he felt it was OK to keep us waiting – and waiting - while he sorted through his yellow slips. He finally got us the parcel. We have to pay to get parcels released, so we were charged 2000 shillings. Maybe the money goes towards refurbishing the seats we sat on.They must get worn out pretty quickly….

Jon has similar frustrations with boda boda drivers. He uses one to get to and from work. There are many, many, many, many boda boda drivers around. Mostly they sit together in groups waiting for customers. Most of the time they don’t seem to have any customers. You can’t walk more than a few yards before they will approach you and ask “We go?”. It’s a 10-15 minute walk into the town centre from where we live and it’s not unusual to be asked 5 times on the way if you want a ride. Jon has tried to get a driver who will take him on a regular basis to work, but even though they are always looking for custom, no one seems to be able to offer a regular service. The first time he asked a driver to come and pick him up in the morning, the driver said “I pick you up at 8.30?” “Yes” “I good at telling time. I know when 8.30 is. I be here exactly at 8.30. I pick you up in morning.” He didn’t arrive. So Jon tried someone else. He didn’t arrive either. After a while Jon gave up. So what he does now is walk to the end of the road. There is a group of them about 20 yards away and he flags them down. About 3 drivers then all race to him to see if they can get the ride.

However it’s not all bad. Jinja is a lovely place with some really beautiful scenery. We know a number of people who have houses overlooking the Nile. The views are stunning.

There is also a good community here as the ex-pats feel the need to stick together. There are more white people around than I thought and they all seem to turn up when something happens. When you hold a child’s birthday party here, then you would invite a lot of the community as well as it’s a good excuse for people to get together.

People here are generally different to those in Kampala. As a big generalisation, the ex-pats in Kampala are there for jobs, eg their company has transferred them or they are working for a NGO (aid agency), whereas the people in Jinja have specifically chosen to be here and often decide to set up a business. As Jinja is known as a tourist centre, lots of ex-pats have set up businesses aimed at tourists, eg kayaking, horse riding, cafes, restaurants.

It’s interesting to see some of the businesses Ugandans set up. They may for example have a little BBQ-type grill at the side of the road and they sell grilled corn on the cob. Or they may have a ‘toenail’ business. Some of them have a bowl of water where they wash people’s feet and then cut their toenails. Or they have a basket of nail polishes and paint women’s toenails while they sit on a little stool on the pavement. This even happens in Kampala city centre.

It’s a regular occurrence that children in the town centre crowd around you and ask for money. It’s also a regular occurrence that people turn up at the house either asking for a job or asking for money. We usually talk to them at the gate.
One day a man called Apollo turned up. I didn’t know him but apparently he had met Jon in the street one day, had told him his story and Jon had given him some money. So he came to me, telling me he knew Jon. He had his younger brother with him who has syphilis. The boy was covered in sores. He shook my hand. I tried to avoid the bit with the open sore on it. Apollo told me his employer had died, so he had not only lost his job but also his home as he couldn’t afford the rent. He had been in hospital and showed me the bandage on his side along with the prescription for the medicine he needed to buy. He then said it was his sister’s funeral the next day and he needed to be able to pay for transport to get back to the village. And he needed to get the bus at 5pm that day. All of this was going to cost him 40,000 shillings (a lot for a Ugandan to ask for) and could I give it to him. When we give the children pocket money we ask them to tithe, so they had saved 10% of their money for a worthy cause. I went into the house and told them Apollo’s story and they were both happy to give him their money, so all three of us went out to see him. I explained that the children had saved some of their pocket money and were happy to give it to him. It was about 6000 shillings. Kira gave it to him. He looked at it and said “It’s not enough.”
He told me he was going to wait till Jon got back and would ask him for more. He waited till 6.30pm (presumably had missed his bus) but Jon said we’d given him all we were going to give.
Then he came to see me again a couple of weeks later. This time he had several packets of seeds with him. He said that he needed money to get transport to the village so he could plant the seeds, grow vegetables and earn a livelihood. He also told me he had no family (not sure what had happened to his ‘brother’ then), and still needed medicine. He showed me the prescription again. I said I wasn’t going to give him any more money. At this point Jordan had come out of the house to see I was OK and stayed with me. Apollo asked if I could give him some food as he hadn’t eaten all day. Jordan and I went to get some bread for him and gave him about half a loaf. He wasn’t impressed.

We used to give money freely in the beginning, but there are so many people needing and looking for money that it’s a mammoth task and one that is never, never ending.

A few days later a man came to the house asking to speak to Moses or Wakoli George or Bonnie (the people who work here). I asked him in and he spoke to Bonnie, one of the house girls. She ushered me into the bedroom and whispered to me that he used to work here, then went to work at the school, but was a convicted rapist and wasn’t allowed into the compound, so she escorted him out. He was followed an hour later by someone asking for work. I told him there were no jobs available here. He went away then came back a few seconds later and asked if he could live here for 3 days while he looked for work. I said no. Bonnie said he looked too well dressed to be looking for work and would have just wanted to case the joint.
Good grief, as if snakes, earthquakes, bribes and electrocution weren’t bad enough!

And then there is Moses, one of the gardeners here, who is always entertaining and a bit of a wide boy. He asked Jon if we want to buy a cow. He said it would only cost us 200,000 shillings, then all we needed to do is pay someone 30,000 to look after it till Xmas, then we could have it slaughtered and we would make 150,000. “Thanks for the offer” said Jon “but perhaps not.”

And then there are the ants! Uganda must have half of the world’s population of ants. If you look around they are all over the place. We have to go around the house and spray it with insecticide otherwise you would share your house with millions of unwanted little pets. I think the country should be called Ug-ant-a. We have a couple of washing lines here and the ants use one of them as a major thoroughfare to get from the wall of the house to the tree. You have to take the clothes off the line and then shake them to get the insects off or else you really would have ants in your pants.

Anyway the children are both happy. Kira has a number of friends and spends a lot of time with them. We hardly see her! She loves school and likes being with her friends. She does drama once a week after school and is involved in the panto. She still misses NZ and her friends, and even though she has a lovely time here, still wants to go back.

Jordan is more settled. He gets on really well with the 2 boys he’s homeschooled with (which is just as well as there are very few other muzungus his age around!). He started African drum lessons recently. He did ‘normal’ drum lessons in NZ. Here they use 3 drums, one of which has a skin made from monitor lizard skin, while the others are made of cow hide.

Recently the 2 boys organised an American Football ‘exhibition match’ for parents to watch– they got 2 teams together The Wildcats and The Warriors, got the uniforms, bought lime and made up the pitch at their home, got the refreshments and got 3 girls (including Kira) to be the cheerleaders. It went really well.

Over the weekend we went to a children’s birthday party. It was an army party and the children had to get dressed up in army clothes and paint their faces with camouflage paint. They had ‘basic training’ by one of the adults, then had to do an assault course – including being doused with flour and crawling through a very muddy pit – then stopped for rations, and then rescued one of the adults who had been captured and tied up by the enemies. They loved it!

On Friday Jordan and I went on a homeschool field trip. We went with Sandy who homeschools him, her husband Rob, the 2 boys Ethan and Seth plus another couple of children. We went to a place called Mabira Forest about 30 minutes from here, and did a 3 hour walk. We managed to see some monkeys, lots of safari ants (to be avoided!) and some beautiful butterflies. The photo shows butterflies at rest. When Jordan walked through them they flew into the air and he was surrounded by a multi-coloured cloud of butterflies. It looked amazing.

We came out on the main Jinja-to-Kampala road at a place that is the Ugandan equivalent of a motorway service station. When cars and matatus (ie minibus taxis driven by lunatic 'who-cares-about-safety-let’s-go-as-fast-as-we-can' drivers) pull over, people selling food and drink rush over to them and thrust their wares in through the window in a desperate attempt to sell whatever they can.

Sandy and Rob bought some ‘chicken on a stick’, but I decided to give it a miss. If you look at the photo, it shows the chicken before it’s cooked. It was out in the full force of the sun and covered in flies….

Anyway, more to come in the next blog!

You can now leave comments!

2008-11-14T00:03:00.000-08:00

Several visitors to the blog have told us they have tried to leave comments but have been discouraged by the lengthy and complex registration process.

Just to let you know, we have now changed the security settings on the blog such that you can now leave comments *without* having to register.

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