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!