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