Happy New Year!

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 …