March 2010

We are very much in the rainy season now, with lots of spectacular storms and very heavy downpours.
At the beginning of the month I was caught in a flash flood while driving back to Jinja from Kampala. All of a sudden the main road turned into a raging muddy river. You would have thought that the Nile had broken its banks, the amount of water rushing along the roads, with the huge storm drains unable to contain the vast deluge.
Amazingly I was able to drive along - very slowly – though the people on their pushbikes were struggling a bit! They were up to their knees in it.
A man on a boda boda was holding onto the back of a truck and getting through it by being pulled along.

However whenever it rains things seem to stop working and we now have almost daily power cuts. You get very blasé about power cuts after a while, and if we are, say, eating our evening meal and it goes pitch black, we just carry on regardless.
I had to smile when reading about what people throughout the world were doing for Earth Hour (where people switch off non-essential lights for an hour once a year). We decided not to participate …

Not only do we have power cuts, the power we do get is what Jon calls ‘dirty electricity’. We get lots of power fluctuations and it is very common for electrical items to be damaged or even destroyed. I’ve lost my laptop because of it. Jon’s laptop battery now holds no charge; I have to charge my cellphone every day; the TV now only shows pictures in blue and pink (we watched a black and white movie on it last week – it now shows in ‘colour’!) and the other day the modem stopped working. We decided to buy a new modem and switch internet providers at the same time. Orange has recently entered the Uganda market for cellphones and internet, so we are now with them.

Kira’s friends are in the Baha’i religion, and they recently celebrated their new year (Naw Ruz) on March 21st with a party that Kira went to. Their year consists of 19 months, each having 19 days and they are now up to the year 166.

We have some friends who come from Reunion Island, a small island to the east of Madagascar. They have recently been home for a visit and will be leaving here in June to move back there. They bought us a lovely book showing photos of the island and have invited us over there. It looks very beautiful, and we look forward to going.
We’ll have to brush up on our French though!

Recently I gave Moses, Kira’s craft teacher, a lift into town. He wanted to get a boda boda there. He made me park round the corner so the boda drivers couldn’t see me. If he had been seen with a muzungu they would have charged him more.
Moses has been running a project for a few street kids, teaching them crafts in a tiny, dark building. He has now managed to rent a large house in big grounds and will be able to house and organise education for 22 street kids. I asked him how he had managed to make such a big move. He said he had met a group of young adult volunteers from the UK who have rich parents! One parent provided 6,000,000/- (about £2000, $4000) to pay for 6 months’ rent of the building, while another parent held a coffee morning and raised the equivalent of 3,000,000/-
Some of the street kids are orphans, while some of them have parents, but once they reach a certain age (around 11/12), their parents throw them out and leave them to live on the streets.

There are many, many organisations helping people here. Uganda has the largest number of NGOs (non governmental organisations, i.e. Aid Agencies) per capita in the world. Every year millions of dollars, euros and pounds flow into the country. Yet despite that, there is still a lot of ‘need’ here.
International help, NGOs, charities etc are a double edged sword. While on the one hand they provide a lot of help, there is a huge amount of ‘learnt helplessness’ amongst the Ugandan people, an expectation that people will come along and help them, rather than working out ways to help themselves.
Jordan and I read a book about the Black Death as part of his home-schooling. The Black Death occurred in the 1300’s and part of the book described how people in the villages in England lived at the time. It’s how Ugandans in villages live now. It took me aback a bit to think that in 700 years many people here haven’t moved on.

One of Jon’s suggestions is that a great way to help Ugandans would be to have people come over and teach people driving skills, and how to be safe on the roads. The standard of driving here is very scary.

Anyway, I continue to write. A magazine I used to write for asked me to submit some articles, and I’ll be having four published in their next editions. A bit of an eclectic mix: Using Failure as a stepping stone to success; Do you want a job, career, or vocation? Women in business – how to juggle life’s demands; Marriage is a mathematical relationship.

I’ve also made one of my books into an e-book: Better Speaking Better Thinking. I never run out of ideas for books to write.

Kira had a friend stay over last night. In the morning they got up early and made breakfast for us all. Jordan will be having his 14th birthday party on Easter Sunday, and will have friends sleep over. At the last sleepover they stayed up watching movies till 6am. Jon has told them he’ll expect them to prepare breakfast in the morning too …