April 2009

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….