December 2008

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