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 la
rge 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 arr
ived 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!
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