August 2010

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

(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

(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

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

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!”