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 J
ordan 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!”
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