Aaargh!

No, that doesn’t adequately express how I feel.

AAAAAAARRRRGHHHH!!!!!

That’s better.
Yes, we’ve been dealing with the banks again. I find it so difficult dealing with their way of working, sometimes I can’t cope.
All we wanted to do was open a bank account in another bank. It should be so simple, but despite going in to find out what we needed to provide, spending a few days gathering all the information and going in again with 10 sets of papers, we ended up walking out in frustration at how difficult they made it for us.
Other muzungus have expressed similar frustrations and apparently many have left their banks and have all joined the same bank, so we need to have a look at that one.
Aaarrgggh.

Anyway, Jon has been spending vast amounts of time setting up a new website for Uganda - an online advertising site called Find it in Uganda.
It’s at www.finditinuganda.com
We are aiming for it to be the largest advertising site for the country and are now in the process of marketing it. Someone I know is very impressed with it and has offered to work alongside us to promote the site.
(And so if you, or anyone you know, have anything you would like to advertise that could be sold over here – eg e-books – feel free to place an advert. It’s free, there is no charge.)

And talking of e-books, I wrote a book with some other speakers a few years ago called Successful Woman which we self published and sold. I have now made it into an e-book.

The beginning of the year is the warmest time and we’ve had some very hot days. John Bosco our house helper took a few days off and so I had to do the clothes washing (by hand – we have no washing machine). It was so hot that I would take the washing straight out of the bowl, dripping wet, hang it on the line and it would be dry in 3 hours, even jeans and towels.

Jon struggles a bit with the heat, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be standing out in it for any length of time, but having been following the UK temperatures of -2 degrees and lower, and I’m more than happy to be in an overly hot place.

I’ve been having some swimming lessons. I can already do breaststroke, I can also do backstroke - though tend not to here, as pools are outdoors and I find it the sun too bright when I swim on my back - but I can’t do freestyle/crawl.
I’ve been having lessons with Ronnie, the sports tutor who teaches the children. It’s really nice going for lessons as we go in the morning when the pool is empty, it’s outdoors in beautiful surroundings and it’s nice and warm & sunny.
I do like the easy way of life here – eg if you want a golf, swimming, squash or tennis lesson – Ronnie is available, the pool, course and golf course are usually not busy – you don’t have to book, things aren’t rushed or oversubscribed.
Anyway my swimming is improving – though it would be much easier if I didn’t have to breathe. I can do the swim stroke OK, I just can’t get the breathing right!

Jinja is home to thousands of bats, though they are not here all year round. They came back at the beginning of the year for a few weeks and stayed in the trees in the street next to us. It was lovely listening to them. Unfortunately people from the tribe that eats bats also came along as well. They have slingshots and little balls made from the red earth and they spend hours every day firing the balls at the bats to knock them out of the trees. They pick up the bats, hit them over the head with their slingshot and them put them into sacks. At the end of the afternoon I would see the men going off with their sacks full of dead bats.

There have been a couple of incidents recently.
Firstly my friend in Kampala found that there were a lot of cockroaches coming into his house. He called out the pest control people on 30th January. They came and sprayed the house. He then asked them to put something in the septic tank as he felt that’s where they were originating from. The pest control people took the lid off the septic tank and found a dead body in there.
Apparently the neighbour had killed his girlfriend on Jan 21st and put her body in the tank on Jan 22nd. Just after this the landlord turned up and locked the guy out of the house as he hadn’t paid his rent for 5 months.
My friend called the police on 30th who went into the neighbour’s house and found the crime scene untouched as the man hadn’t been able to get back into his house to clean it up.
Even though the woman’s body had been in the tank for 9 days no one had reported her as missing.
My friend and his family weren’t able to stay in their house and had to go and stay with relatives. He’s now had to move house. It was quite a big deal here and he was featured in the papers and on TV.

Secondly the teacher at Kira’s school told me one day that one of the girls had been picked up half an hour late from school the day before.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because of the incident on the bridge’ she replied.
Apparently a local woman had abducted a girl aged around 9-10 and had planned to kill her and use her as a sacrifice to the God of the Nile. She had taken the girl to the bridge which goes over the river, had tied her hands behind her back and had put a sack over her head. This was about 5pm when it was still light.
People saw this, realised what was happening and went over and beat her up.
Police came in to clear the crowd. They were going to fire shots into the air but the crowd was too large and rowdy so they decided to shoot two people. They shot one in the arm and one in the leg. The crowd dispersed after this.
The girl was physically OK, though was taken for rehab. The woman – very badly beaten up - was taken away by the police.
People involved in child sacrifice don’t use children whose bodies aren’t ‘intact’, and so parents will get their daughters’ ears pierced and have their boys circumcised so they are safe from being sacrificed.

Only a slightly lighter note Jordan has an African friend called Shalom. His mother was out one day and found a tiny baby girl – still with umbilical cord attached – on the grass. She took the baby, informed the hospitals and the police but no one came forward to claim her. Despite her husband having died and having a family of 7 in a tiny, tiny house, she took the baby in and called her Gift. Gift is doing well and is very much a part of their family now.

The craft teacher at Kira’s school has started a craft project for some of the local street children. He found a room – very basic and with no furniture – and set up a project using his own money. He himself is an orphan and was brought up in a large orphanage in the Jinja area. The children have very little, so Kira and I took round some of her and Jordan’s clothes and shoes they have grown out of, to give to them. It was all very exciting and they put the clothes and shoes on straight away!

Kira’s school have been doing some community work each week by going into one of the local orphanages. They felt it was time for a change, so I arranged for them to go into a different orphanage, a much bigger one, which has around 50 babies and small children. They go from 4-5pm once a week and enjoy being with the tiny children.
Whenever I go to pick her up it’s a real overdose of cuteness. The children are so little and sweet. They all swarm around you and they all want to hold your hand or get you to pick them up. Choochie!

We have arranged for music lessons at school, using African instruments, and have found a Ugandan musician who comes in. He can’t always access enough instruments to bring along, so I’ve been out with Vicky the teacher to find some to buy. Each child chose an instrument they want to learn - I’ve bought some pan pipes, some thumb pianos (see photo of Jon trying it out) and a tube fiddle. Kira just loves the tube fiddle (‘endingidi’) which is a ‘1 stringed bowed chordophone from the Baganda people’. It’s a little bit like learning to play a one-stringed violin.

I still teach Kira every morning from 8-10am, and we recently finished a Maths book we have been working on for a year. We decided to have a celebration, take a morning session off and go and have breakfast at a local café. Yum!

We arrange for someone to provide school lunches for the children. The person who was doing it would prepare the meals and bring them in each day. However he became too busy and so we have found another person, a man called Ivan, who doesn’t have a proper kitchen he can prepare the food in. To help him, we bought a charcoal burner and some charcoal, and he comes into school every day with the uncooked food and prepares it outside the back of the school building on the charcoal burner!

I also still homeschool Jordan for about 12 hours a week.
As the boys he’s homeschooled with are American, they all decided to watch the Super Bowl at a friend’s house. Over here it was shown at 3am, so they went to bed at 8.30pm, got up at 1.30am, watched the game and came home at 6am. Jordan went straight to bed, but I made him get up for his Maths lesson with his tutor at 11am, and then do some school work in the afternoon!

A few days ago he said to me ‘If you didn’t dye your hair, you would look as old as your dad’. My Dad is 80.
No offence Dad, but I guess it must be time for me to have a face lift.

Meanwhile, John Bosco was telling me about his mother.
‘She’s very old’ he said, ‘very very old’.
‘How old is she?’ I asked.
‘She’ll be making 45’ he replied.

One day we decided to go round the shops and the market in the evening. We haven’t done it before and it was a really nice experience. Jinja is quite a different place in the evenings. There are different vendors selling their goods on the pavements, and the market looked so lovely. There are no lights in the market and only a small portion of it is open – the part which sells fruit & veg, fish and meat. The vendors sit on the ground with their wares spread out around them, and have small paraffin lamps. It was a lovely sight to see so many stalls lit by lamplight.
There are a number of stalls selling beans, in huge huge sacks. Whenever we buy them, we have to sift through the beans to get rid of any unwanted matter.
The people in the small towns and villages who grown the beans, dry them out at the side of the road. Sometimes they are laid out on sacks, but often they are simply laid out on the road. This means you have to get rid of pieces of gravel, dust, leaves, twigs etc. before you cook them.
A few times I’ve bought lentils from the market, however you have to check those too, as a couple of times they’ve been infested with weevils!

And talking of food, Jordan has been longing for a McDonald’s hamburger. There are no McDonald’s outlets here, so one day, when we had been invited round to some friends’ for a meal, I made a ‘hamburger and fries’ for all the children.
For the hamburger I made some scones, and some round, flat, chocolate crispie cakes. I cut the scones in half, and put the crispie cakes inside.
For the fries I cut up pieces of toast into thin strips, painted them with yellow food colouring, and made a French fries packet by painting some paper bright red, making it into a packet shape and painting a yellow McDonalds’s ‘M’ on it. It looked pretty convincing!

And for some reason I was thinking about pavements recently. Our driveway isn’t paved, and we live in an area of unsealed lanes. Pavements aren’t common in many places in Uganda, so Jon and I were trying to work out where the nearest pavement to us was. It’s probably in the town centre, a 10 minute walk from here.

And finally … In 1992, when I came back from honeymoon in late September, I started a night class in CLAIT - Computer literacy and information technology - at Runshaw college in Leyland (England). I completed the course after a term. Recently I received a note from Runshaw saying my certificate was ready to be collected…