May & June 2009

The month of May started off with my combined Birthday & Housewarming do, ably abetted by Sandy who baked me another wheat-free birthday cake.
There were about 40 people there and we are very thankful that we have a large garden when there are many children running around!
I’ve now mastered the art of making pizzas and impressed my guests with my culinary expertise.
In 50 years I have never impressed anyone with my baking. Someone even asked me for the recipe … crikey! Unfortunately my family now has to endure pizzas on a regular basis as it’s the only thing I can bake.

We are settled in the house now. I really like it here. Hopefully Henry the electrician likes it here too as he is a regular visitor. In fact he’s been a regular visitor in all 3 houses we’ve live in in Jinja. Although this house is brand new, the electrics are in a poor state – the light switches spark; almost all of them have had to be replaced; there was an explosion at the back of the cooker; lots of electrical things are live and we get shocks when we touch them. One time the vet was here while Henry was repairing the exploding cooker. He happened to be standing by the fuse box outside the house and said “there are lots of sparks coming from that box”. Henry came out to look at it and immediately ran off to town to get circuit breakers. Added to this, our brand new tv aerial is falling apart. We keep finding bits of it in the garden.

And talking of trades people, Jordan did a mini- carpentry ‘apprenticeship’ recently. We found a carpenter, Robert, who had been recommended by a couple of people and asked if he would train Jordan. He agreed and Jordan went for two afternoons a week.
Jon designed a TV cabinet, Jordan drew it up in a 3D package called sketchup, and he worked on the cabinet over a period of several weeks.
He went to the workshop where Robert is based – an amazing place – really ‘African’ in the heart of the ‘tradespeople area’. It is a very, very busy area – lots and lots of people milling around. The workshop is outdoors, is in a small area of many workshops, is very cramped and very basic, the flooring is just bare earth, but they had the woodworking machinery and all the right tools.
I took him a couple of times in the beginning, but after a while he would jump on a boda boda himself and go off, and come back on a boda boda after he’d finished.
Jordan did a great job and we are really pleased with the outcome.

It has been the rainy season, and when it rains it really rains. There is extremely loud thunder and lightning and the rain comes down in absolute torrents. All the brown earth turns to mud. It usually rains at night time, which is very considerate of it. However one time I was in Kampala – manically busy Kampala – when the rain came down. Instantly the city was like a ghost town. I was amazed; I’ve never seen it like that before. I have no idea where everyone went to!
Anyway I needed to get somewhere and so braved the weather – I was absolutely soaking. If I’d stood under the bathroom shower in all my clothes I wouldn’t have been any wetter. The occasional car drove past me and completely showered me with water from the road. The rain was forming rivers down the roads and I had to wade through it, inches deep, to get to the other side.
Within half an hour the rain had stopped and Kampala returned to its sunny and manic state again.
Fortunately I had a spare set of clothes in the car so nipped into the Ladies and got changed into dry clothes – and shoes.

We decided to visit The Rainforest Lodge in rainforest called Mabira, about a 45 minute drive from here. It’s an impressive Lodge set in beautiful surroundings. We went to use the pool, spend an afternoon lounging around, and have lunch. Unfortunately we chose the one cold day that we’ve had in Uganda. It rained heavily and the temperature really dropped. It was such an unusual experience being cold and we weren’t prepared for it.
The lunch menu was pretty expensive so we just ordered chips – they were the most expensive chips I’ve ever had - $10 for a plate of chips!
Anyway, while we were sitting waiting the rain to stop, I was watching the ants that are ever-present, and discovered that if you blow on a group of ants, they stop moving and ‘freeze’ for a short while, then move again. Try it – fascinating!

There are always small creatures around and you get used to it.
One time I went into a toilet at the golf club and was accompanied by a hornet, a lizard and a frog!
And regarding mozzie nets over the bed, one of the things you have to be aware of is to check that there are no creatures inside the net before you get into bed. One night there was a spider at the top on the inside the net – it fell down – onto my side of the bed! It took a lot of courage to get back into bed that night.

There are a couple of dogs at Kira’s homeschool centre, they live in the compound. One of them has just had 6 puppies – really cute. The children have all ‘adopted’ one each and given them names. Unfortunately we are going to have to find homes for them. Kira will be heartbroken if someone takes hers.

And so we are never short of interesting examples of the Ugandan approach to things.
I went to get some documents bound. You can’t assume anything here, so I asked if the binding included a front and back cover as well as the spiral binding.
“Yes” replied the woman “what colour do you want?”
“What colours do you have?” I asked.
“Blue.”

Last year Jon was offered a part-time lecturing position to degree level students on an IT course at the Jinja campus of Kampala University. The money was low, the hours were unsocial, and when he looked through the syllabus, the amount of time the students would spend at a computer was … 0%. He declined the offer. Jordan and I used to drive past the campus on the way to his carpentry sessions. We had to laugh when we the new sign they have had made. I wonder why they struggle for excellence!

Jordan and I managed to find the Jinja library, a now run-down old building housing half a dozen books or so. It would have been very nice when it was first built, and there is a plaque inside it to commemorate its opening. It says “This magnificent building…”
Anyway we very cleverly managed to find a very small number of books that had been published more recently than the 1950’s, one of which was a Star Trek book, filed on a shelf labelled ‘Personal development (Do It Yourself)’.
We ‘joined’ the library – I had to fill in a form. I needed someone to sign it to vouch that I was a citizen of good repute. The woman asked Jordan to sign it.
“I haven’t got a signature” he whispered.
“Yes you have” I whispered back “just write your name”.
Anyway she wrote down the books I was taking out on a torn piece of paper and asked me how long I wanted them for.

One of the books I had decided to get out was on Sikhism. There is a big Indian community here and I felt I should find out about the various religions. The book talks about one of the Sikh gurus who was incredibly generous, and spent his life giving to others. At this point the woman who had been to our house before, crying and asking for money (see end of February blog), turned up again saying she needed money to get back to her village, where her family would look after her. I gave her 20,000/= and immediately regretted it. My gut feeling said she had been lying to me, and when I thought about it afterwards, I had noticed that she was well dressed, didn’t look ill (she is supposed to have HIV), and this time had said she had 3 children instead of the two she told me about last time. When I gave her the money she didn’t look grateful, she just beat a hasty retreat.

We are always being asked for money – constantly. Constantly. Every time we go into town there are street children who beg, there is a woman who comes and stands by the car and just holds her hand out, John Bosco cut his leg and needed money for a tetanus injection, he got malaria and needed money for medication and a stay in hospital. He told us about a woman living nearby who had a baby, she didn’t get transport in time, the baby died, and would we give money to help her.
I have got to the stage where I see a Ugandan approaching me in the street or at our compound gates and I think “No, I don’t want to give money, just leave me alone.”

Anyway John Bosco and Geoffrey have done some good work on the vegetable garden – it’s quite large and they are growing maize, watermelon, onions and cabbages.

John Bosco usually comes into our house about 8.30am, and as we leave after this, we just leave him in the house, doing the housework.
One morning we got a text from him saying “I am in Kampala. Rock the house when you rive.”
We puzzled over this one for a while, and then I realised that in his language the sounds R and L are interchangeable, so he was saying ‘Lock the house when you leave’.
Similarly, Geoffrey usually calls Lotte ‘Rotte'.

I’m still spending quite a bit of time organising things for Kira’s homeschool centre, and am fortunate that the teacher, Vicky, is a Ugandan and can explain various things to me.
It’s also quite an education talking to her as I learn a lot about Ugandan customs.
It’s very normal, for example, for people to have a housemaid, and the one she had did a runner recently, so she asked her extended family if someone could find another for her. One of her relatives in the villages brought a 13 year old girl to be her new housemaid. Apparently by age 13 girls know how to run a house, so her job is to do all the housework and look after the 4 children, the oldest of whom is a 12 year old boy.
At the moment Vicky has no electricity in her house, so they use candles or kerosene lamps; they cook on a charcoal burner and even use a charcoal-filled iron.
Some tribes in the north and west of the country still pay dowries when their daughter gets married. The dowry ‘currency’ is cows, and the more educated you are the more cows you are worth.
Vicky’s housemaid will be worth 3 cows as she hasn’t completed her education. Those who do complete it are worth 5 cows. As Vicky is a qualified teacher she is worth 30 cows. She was a big expense to her family!

My business colleague Aziz got married fairly recently. One of the customs is to have an ‘Introduction’ ceremony before the wedding which is quite an event in itself and very costly. Then the wedding is even more costly as many people are invited, food is provided and it’s usually quite an elaborate do.
He was quite pleased because he managed to keep the costs down and only spent 5.3 million shillings on the introduction and 9 million on the wedding ($11,000 / £4,500). Most people spend a lot more than this. Given that Ugandan wages are low, this is a huge cost for them, so those getting married invite a select group of friends to help them fundraise for this. The group of helpers are expected to contribute a sizeable amount financially and then attend several pre-wedding meetings to help with the fundraising.
I asked how many people were invited to his wedding. “A thousand” he replied. “Did you know all of them?” I asked. “Well, I knew some of them” he said.
When he asked how many were at my wedding and I said 70 for the wedding and another 70 for the evening do, he thought this was highly amusing.


And so we all had plane tickets booked to come back to the UK at the end of June. However it is logistically easier if we go two at a time as then we can stay with people. So in the third week of May I wandered into the Emirates offices in Kampala to see if I could bring my and Kira’s flights forward a bit. We only had one-way tickets booked and I wanted to book a return flight using my air miles.
“To be able to use your air miles, you have to return to Uganda by 8th June at the latest” said the woman.
In order to make the trip worthwhile this meant we pretty much had to go almost straight away, and so a few days later we found ourselves on a plane to the UK, much to the surprise of our family.
We had the flights booked with Emirates and while it is a great airline and an excellent way to go from NZ to the UK, it isn't the best route from Uganda to Manchester. Whereas an airline like British Airways will go direct and take about 9 hours, Emirates goes to Adis Ababa in Ethiopia, then to Dubai (which is in the wrong direction). You have to hang around from midnight to 7am in an overly-cooled air conditioned airport and then have a 7.5 hour trip to Manchester. This takes about 23 hours.
However, the good part is that as there is only 2 hours time difference between the two countries we didn't get any jetlag, and in terms of the world, we feel so much closer to the UK and felt like we were 'popping home' rather than making the long, long journey from NZ.
The two weeks we had at home flew by. We had a lovely time though we didn't get to see everyone this time unfortunately.
It was a nice change being in a first world country, and things that are in reality very ordinary, seemed very novel to us. Like being able to buy a wide range of food at the supermarkets. Like being able to drive on non-potholed roads with drivers who know the road rules and who actually value their life. Driving on the M6 on a Friday rush hour was such a doddle compared to simply driving on roads here at 'normal' time.
I was impressed with how clean England looked. Because there is so much red earth here, seeing pavements made everything seem so clean!

Kira and I left the UK on 8th June and arrived back in Uganda on 9th. It's a 3 hour trip from the airport, so we used a taxi driver called Aaron to pick us up. Aaron is great and the muzungus use him a lot. The Ugandans who have worked out what white people want, and know how to work with them do very well in business here.

When I got back, Jordan's home school tutor and the boys were away so I taught him at home for 3 weeks. I still teach Kira maths every morning.

He has a sports lesson for two hours every Wednesday morning with the boys, and as they were in Kenya, he asked if I'd come to the tennis lesson with him. I haven't played tennis for about a hundred years, but decided to go along. We had changed the lesson to the afternoon that day, and - flipping heck! - it's hot playing tennis in the afternoon sun. I really enjoyed it but was aching all over for the next two days. I was in A Bad Way.
Unfortunately Jon and I went to an evening 'QBP' event (to be explained) the next day where we had to stand up all evening. We very rarely go out in the evenings these days, and when we do, we certainly don't stand up all the time! My legs were aching so much I was just about collapsing at the end of the evening.

Anyway I enjoyed the tennis so have started having lessons with Ronnie, the sports tutor, myself. He seems very good and has competed in the Davis Cup. I'm fairly coordinated and was doing quite well (or so I thought), though am having to re-learn how to play. He thinks it quite funny because I play in an 'old-fashioned' way. It must have been how I was taught at school and apparently the way you play tennis has changed quite a bit since The Old Days.

So, we were invited to a 'QBP' which is a Queen's Birthday Party hosted by the British High Commissioner in Kampala. Only a select group of people are invited to attend and I was invited because I'm the Jinja representative of the British Residents' Association. Jon came along as my 'plus one'. (He doesn't appreciate how lucky he is to be with me...)
We had no idea it was such a big deal to get an invitation, and had even considered not going, but there are some people who have been here for many years and are feeling quite put-out that they haven't had an invite!
The Commissioner invites those who have 'forwarded the aims' of the British High Commission in Uganda, so there were 500 people of all nationalities there, having drinks and nibbles in his garden. The UK had shipped over a couple of Household Cavalrymen (one of the country's most elite military group apparently), complete with impressive red uniform, helmet and spurs … but not the horse.
The invitation said you had to wear business dress or national costume.
I pondered the costume bit for a while, and given that I come from Liverpool, the most likely costume would be a Liverpool Football Club strip. But I didn't think it would go down very well at the do.

As we were driving over to Kampala for the event, we were flagged down by a policeman.
“Oh here we go again” I thought. The Police seem to go through phases of stopping you and checking your documentation.
I was driving, Jon was in the passenger seat, and Jordan was in the back (Kira stayed in Jinja with her friends).
Jon wound down the window.
“You are going to Kampala?” said the policeman
“Yes” said Jon.
“Can you give me a lift?” he asks.
So, Jordan gets in the front, and Jon and the policeman get in the back. Jon had a good chat with him, and as a result the policeman keeps phoning him up!

The day after we got back from the UK, I was driving along one of the main roads when we saw a woman lying face down on the road. She had just been knocked over by a motorbike a few seconds before. The motorbike was lying in the road, broken. Some people picked her up and laid her face down on the pavement. She didn't move, I thought she was dead. Pretty soon a group of Ugandans gathered around. None of them had a vehicle and I'm not sure how the ambulance service works here, but people weren't really doing anything for her. Fortunately Vicky was in the car with me and I asked if she would talk to the people and see if we could take the woman to hospital. People are wary of taking someone to hospital as it will mean that they are financially responsible for the treatment.
She went and spoke to the policeman who told her to wait, as he was taking a statement from the motorbike driver. We decided to take the woman anyway.
Her forehead was bleeding, she had hurt various parts of her body, and was quite dazed, but looked like she was going to be OK. A couple of people who knew her and happened to be around at that time came in the car with us. They carried her into the back of the car where she lay sideways, and then they got in with her. They didn't all fit, so we drove with the car door open. Kira and the dog were there too and they sat in the boot.
Vicky and the 3 people were talking in the Luganda. The woman was crying, apparently saying “my baby my baby”, but they didn't know where her baby was.
I took the woman to Jinja hospital.
You really wouldn't want to be in need of 'proper' medical care over here – the hospital looked very basic. We have joined the British Residents' Association as their main reason for existing is to help 'Brits in distress'. If anything happens they medivac you out of the country.
I assumed the woman must have been very poor as she had been carrying a basket of nuts and seeds on her head to sell – that will have been her 'job'. There are many women here carrying baskets on their head, usually holding bananas or nuts which they sell cheaply.
As the nurse came over to take her in a wheelchair, I gave her all the money I had on me – 15,000/= ($12, £4.50). Vicky said that would pay for quite a bit of treatment.
When we got home, Kira was very upset. She was in mild shock. She was crying and saying “I don't want Daddy to go on a boda boda again.” Jon gets a boda boda to and from work, but I told her I would make sure he was safe.
Vicky found out a week or so later that the woman's baby had died.

And so it was Kira's 9th birthday on 20th June. One of her friends, Naomi, shares the same birthday and is the same age. Naomi's mum had been trying to contact me to see if we could have a joint party, but I was in the UK and hadn't got her messages. Another girl here, Simran, has a birthday the day after, so they both had a party that weekend. Naomi's mum (who has 11 children) owns a beautiful resort here, and held the party there. The children went swimming in the pool then had the party food sitting in a lovely grassy area amongst the avocado trees. She had ordered 4 cakes – one for Naomi, one for Simran, one for one of her sons who had a birthday the same month and one for Kira.
The children drank a fruit juice cocktail out of scooped-out whole pineapples.

We decided to have Kira's party the weekend after, especially as that was the weekend that Jon and Jordan left to go to the UK for a month. It gave her something to look forward to.
We had the party at our house and had planned to play a range of party games in the garden.
It very rarely rains here during the day, even in the rainy season, but an hour before her party the heavens opened, there was the loudest thunder I have ever heard, and the driveway became a mud-bath. We had planned to have lots of water games and had asked the children to bring spare clothes, but hadn't planned for it to be quite so watery!
Anyway the weather cleared up for about an hour, so we went out and played the games, and the kids got suitably wet and messy - as did the house!
Sandy had made Kira an impressive High School Musical cake, and I had tried my hand at making scones. Amazingly they turned out well, and people liked them! Crikey, two culinary successes in a short space of time...
So all in all, a good time for birthday parties.

Jon and Jordan left for the UK at the end of June and will be there till the end of July.

And of course, how can I write a blog entry without some 'Uganda life' snippets ...`
There are times when we just can't make people understand us. For example my Mum and Dad have been using an incorrect PO Box number for us. Instead of 1204, they have been using the number 51209 (my PO Box in NZ). Consequently the mail hasn't been reaching us. Once I realised what was happening, I went to the Jinja sorting office and explained to the man that people had been sending me incorrectly addressed mail and asked where it would be.
“What is your box number?” he asks
“1204”
“What box number have they been using?”
“51209”
“It will not come into your box.”
“I know, where will it go?”
“There is no box with that number.”
“I know, so where will it go?”
“There is no box number like that in Jinja. Maybe in different part of country.”
“They wrote Jinja on the envelope, so I think it may be here.”
“There is no box number like that in Jinja.”
“I know. Where do you put letters with incorrect addresses on them?”
“We do not have that number in Jinja.”
…. and so it went on. There were a couple of young women there who explained to him in Luganda what I was meaning.
“You ask at Kampala Post Office” he said
So I emailed Kampala asking where the letters would be. They replied saying they would ask the postmaster at Jinja.
Aaargh

Then yesterday I parked in town. The parking wardens put a slip on your windscreen, keep a note of your car number and the time you parked, and when you leave you 'pay' by giving them a ticket and they make a note that you have paid.
I drove off, having forgotten to give them a ticket, so went back a bit later to give them one. Unfortunately it had rained and the slip had been ruined.
I explained to the warden that I had parked there an hour before and had forgotten to give a ticket.
“You want to buy tickets?”
“No I want to give you one for when I parked here an hour ago.”
“You did not park here”
“Yes I did, but I can't show you the slip, the rain has ruined it.”
“You want to park here now and want another slip?”
“No I want to give you a ticket for when I parked here.”
“You give me ticket.”
I gave him a ticket and said “Will you mark off that I have paid?”
“You did not park here.”
“I did, I am giving you a ticket for when I parked here. Will you check your notes and see if you have my car details?
“I will not have your details. You want to park here now?”
“No, I parked here an hour ago. I did not give ticket for when I parked. I want to give ticket for the time when I parked.”
“You have given me ticket.”
“Yes I have, but I need to you make a note that I have paid.”
“You did not park here.”
In the end I gave up, took the ticket back and left.


An hour after Jon and Jordan left for the UK, my laptop stopped working.
“Well that's just great” I thought, “what IS the point of marrying an IT person and enduring a lifetime of geekness if he can't be here when you need him??”
So I took it to PC World to be repaired.
“Don't leave your laptop there if there are Ugandans working on it” Vicky had said, “you need to be there while they are repairing it or they will steal parts of your laptop.”
“They are Indians” I said.
“Then it will be OK” she replied.
The shop assistant working there is Ugandan and as she was filling in the form for the repair work to be done (by the honest Indians!), she asked me my name.
Now, Ugandans find my name quite difficult, because the KI in Kim is pronounced 'ch' in their language. So really, they would say Chim and Chira instead of Kim and Kira.
And the CH sound in Chamberlain would be spelt Ki, Ky, Ci, Cy, Cu.
So what I've learned to do is either write my name on the form myself, or else give them one of my business cards and they can copy it themselves.

So the conversation went:
Shop assistant: “What is your name?”
Me (looking through handbag): “Hold on, I've got it written on a card.”
Shop assistant (amazed): “You have forgotten your name?”

April 2009

One of the many things we have to get used to here is how the Ugandans speak English.
For example, the electrician said to me “Could you be having a flash light around?” which means “Can I borrow a torch?”
And when we park the car in the town centre we pay by using parking tickets. You buy them in a strip of five for 1000/-. The only way the parking wardens earn money is by selling tickets, so they are always asking if you want to buy some. I told one of them I already had tickets. “You’re remaining with many?” he asked, which means “You’ve still got a lot left?”
And when we lived in Kampala I used to buy bananas from a woman who owned a little fruit stall. I was back in Kampala recently and went to the stall again.
“You are lost?” she said. “Um…no” I replied. Jon had to explain to me that it means “Long time no see.”
They also use terms of address that we find quite endearing. We get called “Madame Kim”, or “Mr Jon”. Geoffrey our gardener calls me “Mummy”, which is a sign of respect. “Hello Mummy, how are you?” he calls out.

And talking of speaking English, I was on phone to a woman from the UK. “I take it you are from Australia” she said …

Cathy, the woman who asked us for a job, also calls me Mummy. I’ve been looking round for work for her, and fortunately she now has a job in a local factory which makes matches. She came round to see me the day before she started, as she needed some money to photocopy her birth certificate and HIV results and also to get a form from the LCI - the local government official.

Last month John Bosco asked if he could have a room built in our compound for him to live in as it would save him paying rent. We asked the landlord Christopher, who very kindly agreed. Christopher came round to get an advance payment on the rent which he would use to pay the builders. Literally 5 minutes after we gave him the money a truck turned up with the building materials and the men got to work! It’s been quite an interesting experience watching the building going up. It’s only a small room, but it took quite a while to build.
Anyway John Bosco has moved in now and is very happy there. He and Geoffrey sit outside on their bench in the evenings chatting away.

One of his jobs is to do the washing. We don’t have a washing machine, but it’s pretty normal for clothes to be hand washed here. In fact, it’s hard to find packets of washing powder in the supermarkets for use in machines. We have an outside tap in the garden and he takes his many buckets and bowls outside and does the washing there. Even though it’s sunny pretty much all the time, it usually takes two days for the clothes to get dry as he can only hand-wring them out.

We also don’t use a rubbish collection service, as it’s normal to burn your rubbish. John Bosco and Geoffrey have an area in the compound where they burn it all. They must go through our rubbish as sometimes I see stuff we have thrown away turn up in their houses! We haven’t had to buy any new bin bags since we came to this house as he empties the rubbish out then puts the bag back in the bin again!
I was woken up in the middle of the night last night by a sound I couldn’t identify. After a while I wandered round the house to see what it was. It turns out that it’s Geoffrey cutting the grass at 4am in the pitch black. When I asked about it later on, I was told that the grass needs to be cut in the morning!

One of the things I find quite amusing is the way Ugandans seem to want to lock things. They have locks on everything. Every door in our house has a lock in it. There are locks on the wardrobe doors and on the drawers inside the wardrobe. One of our friends even has a fridge with a lock and key on it! Our bedroom has 9 locks and two bolts in the doors and wardrobes, plus 8 bolts on the mosquito screens on the windows. We had some bedside cabinets made. and the man was most surprised when we told him we didn’t want locks on them.

So, things at Kira’s homeschool centre continue to be interesting - and challenging for me as the coordinator.
One of the things Jon and I do is pay people who are involved in the school. Part of the night-guard’s wages is 2 kilos of sugar! Each month I have to go shopping for sugar for him. Ugandans like their sugar. John Bosco goes through a huge amount of ours. We are forever topping up the sugar jar.
Because we use tutors who are not employed as teachers, there are times when they are not available and I have to find a replacement.
Sometimes I can’t – and have ended up teaching French a couple of times when the tutor was on holiday. Sacre bleu! It’s about 30 years since I studied French. Fortunately I have a friend who is French so I can ask her the words I need to use in the lessons. It’s very useful when you need to know words like ‘une balançoire’ and ‘un portail’.
We do employ one teacher, Vicky, a Ugandan, who is very good and very reliable. She teaches two of the children from 9-10am in a room downstairs while I teach Kira Maths at that time in the room upstairs. The other kids join the school around 10.30.
One day Vicky couldn’t be there so the other 2 children came into the classroom with me. One of them is a girl with special needs. Every day since then she says to me “I come upstairs with you today?”
There was a baby snake in Vicky’s classroom one day. It was only small like a silver worm, but a baby snake means a mother snake will be around. Vicky killed it with a stone.
We did an end of term performance just before Easter. It went really well as the 7 children did various performances, and some of the home-schooled children, including Jordan came along and did something too. Jordan recited the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It took him weeks to learn it as the language used is very complex, but he did well.

On Friday Vicky travelled the 2 hour journey to Kampala in a matatu (a minibus driven by lunatic drivers). She said that she usually avoids going in ones with young drivers, but this time was in a hurry so chose the first one that came along. After a few kilometres she realised that he was too dangerous a driver, so got out and waited for the next one. It came a short while afterwards, and when they arrived at the next town, she saw the first matatu she had been in. It had crashed and all the passengers had been killed.

Our friend Lindsay works for a health insurance company. They did eyesight tests on matatu drivers and found 50% of them needed glasses. Very few Ugandans wear glasses. Not only that, but many of them have HIV which can affect both the eyesight and the brain.

One time I was driving along and there was a boda boda behind me. On it was the driver and 2 male passengers, all of whom looked similar. All I could see was the driver and the heads of the two passengers behind him. As I looked in the rear view mirror it looked like a man with 3 heads. I got such a shock!

And – at last - after 6 months Jon has now managed to find a regular boda boda driver to take him to and from work, a nice guy called Kabuye. Although there are many drivers around and they spend most of their day sitting about waiting for customers, none of them was interested in having a regular customer. ‘Surely’ you would think it would be good business sense to have a regular source of income…. The added benefit for Jon is that he doesn’t have to haggle over the price every time he gets a ride.

And ‘surely’ you would think that the postal service, Posta Uganda, would work out that they need stamps of decent sized denominations. A package may cost 30,000 to send and they only seem to produce stamps of small denominations. The last parcel I sent had 24 stamps. That’s a lot of stamps to lick!

Some business things work differently too. Jon went on a training course in Kampala. For morning tea they had sausages and cinnamon cake.
I ran a course for the Hotel Owners Association with a person I co-train with, Aziz. He had hired a data projector for us. It came without a plug, just bare wires. Looking completely unperturbed by this, Aziz gets out a biro and plugs the bare wires into the socket, complete with blue sparks flying out.
I told the others about this and Jordan said “”Oh yes, that’s what it was like when I did the woodwork with Chris. We just had a drill with bare wires too.” Crikey!

Aziz comes from an interesting background. He is a Muslim, and his father has 3 wives and 27 children. I’ve spoken to a few men about this and in the towns and cities at least, there is a move away from having several wives and lots of children as they now feel it’s too expensive.

In Kampala there is a group of home schooled teenagers who meet once a fortnight on a Friday night for a get-together. As we happened to be there one weekend when they were having their meeting, Jordan and I went along. It’s a religious group and the people were very nice. At each meeting they have a ‘speaker’, and the time we were there it was one of the parents. He is from the US and is here as a Bible teacher, writer and counsellor. He gave a great talk, and also explained a bit about himself. He is married to a Kiwi and has two children. He lived in the Ukraine for a while and has 4 adopted Ukrainian children. He now lives in Uganda and has 10 adopted Ugandan children, and expects to adopt more. There are some very interesting people around.

And so Jordan is now a teenager, he was 13 on 6th April. To celebrate his birthday we took a group of his friends to a swimming pool at a sports centre, then came back to ours afterwards. We had planned to feed them all by asking the cook at Kira’s school to make pizzas for them, but she wasn’t around that day. So we decided to get them food at the venue instead. When we arrived we were told that chef was not in that day.
So I ended up going to a dukka (little shop by the roadside) that sells chapattis and rolexes. A rolex is a chapatti with an omelette in it. It is the kind of food that all the guide books tell you that you should completely avoid as you are likely to get an upset stomach due to the lack of hygiene in the food preparation. However, all the kids have been here long enough to get accustomed to it, so they were all fine.
One of the boys, another Jordan, left his clothes and bag in the changing room. When he went back to get them, his wallet and money had been stolen. I stayed by the pool looking after everyone’s stuff while they got changed, while Jon went to inform the manager. The manager’s reaction was to deny it had happened. “I did not see anyone” he said “you must have left the wallet and money at home.” While this was happening one of the children thought he saw the thief, so unbeknown to us the children decided to run after him across the golf course. Six teenage boys, pus Kira!
We wandered around wondering where they had all gone, and ended up jumping in the car and driving around to look for them. We couldn’t find them and so came back to the pool. Fortunately they had come back safely at this point – without the thief.
We then all got into the car to go back to ours – all 9 of us! Jon was driving, Kira was on my knee, 4 were squashed in the back seat and two were in the boot. Driving regulations here are very lax, and it’s not uncommon to have many kids in the car, several of whom travel in the boot. Sandy (Jordan’s home school tutor) has a 9-seater minivan. She once had 22 people in there, including her kids lying on the roof, holding onto the roof rack!
Anyway we had some snacks at ours, including a wonderful cake Sandy had made. She is the ‘cake lady’ for Jinja, and makes cakes to suit each person. As Jordan now has an interest in American football she made him a Raiders cake.
The day was topped off by someone spotting a snake under our car. We went out with torches but couldn’t find it, so just left it … it’s presumably still somewhere in the compound!
The other Jordan is from the States and was telling us the sad story of how his family are having to leave Uganda. They came over last year to open an orphanage. They went to one of the local villages, where the people handed over the orphans for them to care for. After a year, they discovered 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. The people said they would have to give the children back, but the villagers then accused the people of child-trafficking and the husband was put in jail. He was released the day before Jordan’s party, and the family left to go home soon afterwards.

And my birthday was a few days later. I was in Kampala most of the day, and got back about 4pm, to find that Jon had arranged for us to have a TV aerial installed as part of my birthday present. We now have two whole TV channels we can watch!
He made us a nice meal, Sandy had made me a wonderful wheat-free chocolate cake, and then we all played Trivial Pursuit in the evening, so it was a nice day.
I’m having a combined birthday and housewarming party this weekend.

The weekend just gone we went to a St. George’s celebration in Kampala organised by the British Resident’s Association. It was a 60’s Night, and almost everyone turned up in 60’s gear. I wore a school uniform and was a ‘child of the 60’s’. It was quite strange because there were 200 Brits there, it was held in a lovely venue, there was a 60’s band called Beatle Juice, a disco, a buffet meal and a tombola. It wasn’t until I walked past the kitchen and saw the Ugandan staff that I realised I was in Africa!
Everything about the event seemed so ‘normal’ that I’d forgotten I was in a third world country.

We stayed with our ex-neighbours, Eric and Lindsay and her two 16 year old twins, Gordon and Tanya. Kira just adores Tanya and glues herself to her when she is there, so we don’t see much of her.
Jordan decided to lock the bathroom door when he went for a shower, something that no one does because there are internal doors for the toilet and shower. Anyway this door has never been locked, and so he discovered that he couldn’t actually open it to get out.
It was quite interesting watching the males’ different approaches to helping Jordan. Because the windows here have bars on them, he couldn’t get out that way, so they had to deal with the door. Jon’s tack was to get a screwdriver and take the lock off and see if he could get it sorted without any damage to the door. Eric kicked the door, put a hole in it, and as it still didn’t open went off to get his pickaxe instead, while 16-year-old Gordon used brute force and just kicked it down regardless. The door isn’t looking too good now! We need t provide a new door methinks.
That’s the second time Jordan has managed to lock himself in a bathroom since we’ve been here. Just be careful if we come and visit you….

March 2009

It’s been a month since the last blog … and we haven’t moved house! Actually I really like our house and am glad we moved here. We had a lot of difficulty finding a suitable place and were disappointed when we couldn’t get other houses we wanted, but it has worked out for the best.

We’ve been spending time buying various household items. You know when you have a boring life when you get excited about buying a colander, or a tea towel that matches the décor of the kitchen. So much for an African adventure when the highlight of your month is buying a lamp! (But it is quite a nice lamp I have to say...)
Still a bit of a way to go regarding furniture. I do, in general, like the minimalist look, though what we have at the moment is pretty minimal.

We are getting used to having John Bosco the houseboy around again. We told him we only needed him part time Monday-Friday, but he seems keen to come every day and stays pretty much full time. I guess if the alternative is spending time in a little room on your own, it’s preferable to be at our house. He gets on really well with Geoffrey the gardener and after he’s finished his house chores he helps in the garden. He’s asked if the landlord will build him a room to live in on the compound, so we are going to sort that out this weekend.
When he first came he kept asking me to buy buckets and plastic bowls for the various jobs he does around the house. I seem to be single-handedly keeping the plastic receptacle industry going. Either that or he’s going to do a runner and set up a bucket & bowl shop!

John Bosco’s English isn’t very easy to understand and Geoffrey speaks very little English. It’s a real pity as we are all here together a lot of the time and I can’t really communicate with them. John Bosco has to act as translator between us and Geoffrey, which if it’s simple, like “Geoffrey needs more OMO to wash the car with” it’s OK, but anything more complex than that and I really don’t understand.

We live next door to a large house whose boy’s quarters back onto our house. A number of Ugandans live there and seem to have quite a menagerie in the compound. I really don’t mind all the goats baa’ing away and the cockerels cock-a-doodle-dooing all day, but they have one goat which makes a very unpleasant sound. It’s a humanoid sound, and to me it sounds like an old lady in distress. Jon keeps hoping they will kill it and eat it…

The children are doing fine.
We met a youngish guy from the UK called Chris who is out here for a short while doing volunteer work. He takes Jordan with him once a week in the afternoon to do various tasks, like repair school playground equipment, or use a jigsaw and cut out wooden signs. He turns up on a motorbike to pick Jordan up, lends him his helmet and bomber jacket and off they go. Jordan absolutely loves it.

Jordan also had a free rafting trip with the boys as a friend’s husband owns a rafting business here. He was in his element! At one point the boys jumped out of the raft and swam down a grade 2 rapid.

He will be 13 next month and has recently acquired the obligatory acne, and has started shaving! One evening Kira was in her bedroom. She was crying because she had had a bad dream and was scared to stay in her bedroom. Jordan went in to help her. He came to see us afterwards and said “I now know what it’s like to be a parent.”

Kira is very fortunate in that there are a number of girls her own age so she often has people to play with. Sometimes we don’t see much of her at weekends as she goes from one sleepover to another.
She keeps a number of soft toys on her bed and this evening she said to me “Do you know, none of my toys are married.” So she got her toys into pairs and married them. “Do you take this awful wedded man to be your husband?”

Her ‘homeschool centre’ is going well. Most parents do some homeschooling at home and send their children in for various lessons taught by parents or people we have hired, eg a sports tutor.

Jon deals with all the finances and I’ve become the coordinator for the centre. Even though there are only 7 children, there’s always quite a bit to do, from paying wages, to buying toilet rolls, buying gumboots for the askari, arranging for plumbers to come in, producing flyers, sorting out the printer, finding an art tutor, etc etc.

The art tutor is a ‘real’ artist who owns a gallery on the main street. Jon and I have decided to do our own artwork for the house and so ordered some blank canvases from him. I’ve got three 40cm x 40cm canvases while Jon ordered an enormous 1m x 1.5m canvas! We will post the photos once we’ve done the work. Watch this space…

And so we are still learning the ways of Uganda.
The pharmacies here use recycled paper to make up paper bags to put people’s prescriptions in. I bought some Calpol for Kira today and it came in a bag made from a ‘cash payment voucher’. When I opened it up, it gave the name of the person, how much cash he had received - 50,000/=, and the reason – to treat his wife who had had a miscarriage.

It’s very much a cash society here, you very rarely use cheques and don’t use cards of any sort as a rule. This means you are forever going to the ATM to draw out money. If you happen to time it badly, like we did the other day, it can take a long, long time. Jon waited an hour and 15 minutes in the queue. I went home and had lunch while he was waiting then came back to pick him up!
The start of term time is a bad time to go as parents are drawing out the school fees, plus once a month parents can go and visit their children in boarding school and that’s a time to avoid too.

There have been a number of buildings collapsing over recent times. In the last 4 years at least 79 people have been killed at nearly a dozen building mishaps within Kampala. The president’s view is “Buildings cannot continue to collapse like that; this is murder and the engineers must be hanged.”

One of the tribes here eats bats. As there are many bats in the trees near us we sometimes see a group of the tribes people here. They look extremely poor. I used to wonder why poor people always seem to wear brown clothes. Then it dawned on me that they probably only have one set of clothes which they don’t wash so they will become brown from the dust from the soil.
Until I came here I had thought that people wearing raggedy trousers, say in a play, to indicate they were poor was just a made up idea, but people here really do wear trousers like that.
Anyway to get the bats they use slingshots and stones to knock them down from the trees. Then they hit them over the head with their slingshot to kill them, then lie them in rows on the ground. I walked past one time and looked at the poor bats. One of them wasn’t quite dead. I felt sick.

And of course, we can always regale you with stories of unbelievable-ness.
So many times we encounter a situation and say “Surely they could have worked out that there is a better way to do that”, but I have now come to the conclusion that you cannot use the word ‘surely’ here, as what seems so obvious to us, obviously isn’t to other people.

Jon went to change internet providers today as the service we have had has been appalling. He decided to pop in and do it on his way to work. He arrived at 8.15am … but didn’t get away until 11.30. He said he got past the point of being angry and frustrated, he just lost the will to live.

In October he arranged for a carpenter to make a door for one of the rooms at work he had converted into a computer room. The carpenter came and measured up the doorway and showed him pictures of different styles and colours he could choose from. He said it would be ready in November. It actually arrived in February, complete with the carpenter demanding his money the day he delivered the door.
Anyway, a couple of people came along to fit the door - who were actually men building a house next door. At this point, there was no door frame; just a door-shaped hole in a wall.

Now you would expect, wouldn't you, that one of the essential skills of being a carpenter is the ability to measure (“surely”). However, experience has taught us that this doesn't seem to be the case.
The builders worked out when they tried to fit the wooden door frame that the door was about ¼” too wide for the doorway. The logical solution – to us –would be to get the carpenter back and ask him to shave ¼” off the door.
But no - their solution (being builders) was to spend 3 hours knocking chunks out of the brick, tile and plaster to make the door-shaped hole wider. As you can imagine, this was very noisy and created a large amount of rubble and dust. Bearing in mind that the computer room had already been commissioned at this point, Jon came back to the office to find dust and chunks of plaster all over the computers and on the floor.
Just to make sure they had maximised the inconvenience, having slapped new plaster into various holes to seal the door into place, they then proceeded to put scaffolding in a criss cross shape to hold the door frame up. Scaffolding here is made of tree branches and nails.
When he came home from work that evening I asked why he had pieces of bark on the back of his shirt. He had had to climb in and out of the scaffolding each time he wanted to go into the room. He also spent the following day removing building rubble from the room and a large amount of dust from inside the computer (and wondering how much the life of the computer had been reduced). You can see now why Ugandan companies offer very little or indeed no warranty on any products they sell!

February 2009

And here we are, in our fourth house in less than 8 months. We took the last house as a temporary measure while we looked for a house back in Jinja. We finally found one and moved in over the weekend. It’s a fairly new 4 bedroom house with a big compound, and is walkable to the town centre.
It’s in quite a nice location as it’s not on a street, but is in a small ‘off-street’ area of several houses, with unsealed lanes. There are goats and chickens wandering around the outside of our compound and around the lanes.
The house is single story, has a nice dining and living room, bathroom, kitchen with a separate food storage room, an integral garage, 2 normal sized bedrooms, one smaller bedroom, and a huge master bedroom with en suite. It also has a veranda out the front. The compound needs a bit of landscaping doing to it, but could be lovely if we get it done. The man who owns it is an agriculturalist and wants to plant coffee in part of the compound. There are a few matoke and paw paw trees already here.
The owner asked if we would keep on the gardener, who lives in a small building on the compound, so he is around spending most of the day working in the garden. In the mornings he cleans the car. He trimmed lots of bushes and trees over the weekend, put the branches in a big pile and – in true Ugandan style – set fire to them. However he did this rather too close to the hedge and set fire to it!
Jon and Jordan kept running over to supply him with buckets of water, and he managed to put it out.
Before we moved in we asked if the landlord would get some work done on the house – we asked for mosquito screens on the windows, for some plumbing work to be done, and also to get a water heater in. The water heater only heats the water in one room, so we had it installed in the main bathroom which now means we can have hot showers. Woopeee!
This does mean though that there is no hot water in the kitchen or our en suite. However it’s a step up from the last house, which had no hot water at all. There are no curtains here yet, and bits and bobs still need doing to the house, but the landlord has been very accommodating and has agreed that if we get work done, he will take the money off the rent.
I was doing some unpacking the day after we moved in and was just about to put all my underwear in one of the wardrobe drawers when I thought I’d better take it out and check if there was anything in it. Good job I did as there was a rather large dead frog in there!
The house is unfurnished and as there is very little furniture available to buy in Jinja we went to Kampala the week before to see a furniture maker. We ordered two sofas (in a rust and gold coloured material), dining table & chairs (with seat covers to match the sofas) and coffee table. We said we needed them for Saturday and we needed them delivered to Jinja. He asked me to go over the day before to sort it all out, which I did (2 hour drive each way), and they weren’t ready. However he assured me they would be finished that day and that he would personally deliver them at “exactly 11 o’clock” the next day.
At 12.00 I called him – very difficult understanding many Ugandans, especially over the phone – but he seemed to be saying that the transport would arrive at theirs at 1pm and they would be at ours between 2 and 3pm. I called again at 4.30pm whereupon they started telling me it was going to cost us 100,000/- to have the furniture delivered. I said we had agreed on 50,000, at which point the price seemed to go up to 150,000/-. Anyway they said it would arrive at 7pm. At 7.10pm we gave up hope of ever seeing our furniture and went out to some friends who had kindly made us a meal. I got a phone call at 8pm (it’s dark by now) saying “I am at de gate”. Jon, Jordan, Rob and his 2 boys all went round as a bit of a heavy mob in case things didn’t go smoothly. After unloading the furniture and refusing to pay any more than 50,000/- for delivery, everything seemed to be sorted out, and we now have some furniture.
We had also ordered 3 beds the week before from a Jinja furniture maker. We said we absolutely needed them on Saturday. “They will be ready” they said. As Ugandans aren’t known for their efficiency or reliability I went in on Thursday to check. “They are not ready” they said. “We need them for Saturday, will they be ready then?” I asked. “Yes” they said. I went down on Saturday to discover they weren’t ready, and not only that but they hadn’t even got the wood to make them from. We are now sleeping on mattresses on the floor!
So, at the moment our furniture comprises 2 sofas, a coffee table and dining table and chairs. In our rather large master bedroom we have a mattress … and that’s it. It looks totally lost. For curtains we have put up a couple of sheets over the windows. Oh the joy of starting out again!
One of the things we will have to do is take down some doors in the house. There are doors everywhere! There are 18 doors altogether excluding the garage doors, and when you open some doors, you block others. I feel like I spend all my time walking round the house opening doors, so we are going to take 3 of them down.
Although the house overall is nice, the quality of workmanship isn’t that wonderful. There are few things in the house that are straight – eg floors, kitchen workbenches, sockets, tap fittings, doors ….
Some of the plumbing has been a real botch job. The day we moved in, the plumber (pronounced plum-ber) who appears never to have actually done any training in plumbing, was in the kitchen with his ‘apprentice’. I wandered in there. The plumber was lying on the floor – relaxing - while his apprentice was making a complete hash of installing a mixer tap over the sink.

Anyway it was really nice to see our neighbours from NZ, Claire and Dave, who came to Jinja for a few days in February as part of some mission work they were doing in Africa with Living Hope Ministries. Not many friends tend to ‘happen to’ come to Jinja, and it was nice to see someone we actually know!

I spoke at a conference in a hotel located between Kampala and Entebbe recently for the Uganda Feminist Forum. They were a good group of people and the venue was wonderful, ranking as one of the best rooms I’ve stayed in, in any country.
The hotel is called Ranch on the Lake and (not surprisingly) has lovely views over Lake Victoria.
It’s interesting to see that even though there is wide scale poverty here, there is still a lot of money around. There are many beautiful hotels and houses here.
The Ranch on the Lake is doing some major building work and will more than double in size, covering a substantial area of land with high quality buildings, golf course, swimming pool etc.

I was reading in the newspaper today that one of the areas in Uganda is so poor – despite the land being rich in gold, marble, uranium etc – that some people walk around naked, and depend on primitive nomadic cattle herding for a livelihood.
There are some very sad newspaper articles here. There was a story about an 8 year old girl who was knocked over by a vehicle while walking on the road. They took her to hospital where she said that her mother had died and she didn’t know her father. The girl also died, and despite officials going to her village, no one turned up to claim her. They assumed she must have lived on her own.
Another story told of how the refrigerator in the mortuary has not worked for 2 years; another of a school with 800 pupils and only 4 teachers; and of a University class of 1000 students, a class number so large that many students don’t fit in the lecture room and have to stand outside.
One article told of a man who committed suicide. He was trying to sell his underage daughter to the 68 year old neighbour as a bride for 1m shillings (approx NZ$1000, 400 pounds) and his wife and children wouldn’t allow it.
There are regular stories about witchdoctors. A young boy was kidnapped and found dead with body parts missing; there are human sacrifices where people kill children or bury them alive, as witchcraft says it will bring money. They claim that Jesus was human sacrifice, which in some way they see as justification for their actions.

Jon has started back at the organisation he was with last year and has a 6 month part time contract with them. When he got a boda home from work last week, there was a herd of cows on the road. The boda driver decided to drive through them rather than round them, and ended up hitting one of the cows. The motorbike turned over and both Jon and the driver fell off. Fortunately they were both OK. Jon had a few cuts and scrapes, but he’s fine, as is the laptop he was carrying! He always wears a jacket and helmet when he’s on a boda, unlike the vast majority of people who use them, and they proved to be very useful.

I’ve had a couple of magazine articles published this month, both of them on public speaking. One in a Ugandan women’s glossy called ‘Flair for Her’, and another in an East African women’s glossy called ‘African Woman’.
I’m aiming to get some children’s books published too.

A couple of days ago I went to a dukka (a tiny little wooden shed-like structure that acts as a corner shop). A man was sitting on a bench near the dukka and said “Muzungu how are you?” “I’m fine” I replied. “I want to ask you a question” he said. “Yes?” I asked. “You come here” he replied. Hmmm, I thought, but had to walk that way anyway. “Yes?” I asked as I went over. “I want soda, you buy me a soda” he said...

The houseboy we had in Kampala, John Bosco, had asked if he could come and work for us. We were very happy with him as a worker and so agreed. He arrived yesterday via a 9 hour bus trip from the border of Uganda and Rwanda where he has recently been living with his family. His English is hard to understand, and we thought he said he had some accommodation to come to, but when he arrived he said he didn’t. I had to rush around taking him to various places to see if we could find something – and at the right price.
It’s hard seeing the kind of accommodation he will be living in – very basic. Usually just a bare, not very clean room, probably without electricity as that would cost more, maybe with a long drop toilet, and perhaps with a water tap outside or an allowance of several jerry cans of water a day. However, many Ugandans live in that kind of accommodation and to them it is normal.

Another woman has been asking us if she can work for us. Her father died and left the family with little money. She started crying when she told me her mother had recently died. She has no real work and very little income. She is very pleasant and helpful, but we had already promised John Bosco he could work with us. She sent me a couple of phone texts pleading with me to take her on as she is an orphan, and she also turned up with her HIV test results to show me that she tested negative.

Today a woman and small child turned up at our gate. The woman was in tears, as was her little son. She apologised for intruding and told me that she, and one of her two children, has HIV, that she is very sick and unable to work. She has no husband and needs money for the medication. She showed me her HIV test results and the prescription from the hospital.

There are so many needy people here. It’s easy to put the phone down when charities phone you up asking for money for a worthy cause. It’s not at all easy dealing with the issue when it stares you in the face, when people are standing in front of you crying, and pleading for help…

Happy New Year!

For those of you who have been hanging on the edge of your seats wondering if we really did have to wander the streets carrying our worldly goods in a handkerchief tied onto a stick – well, we do have a roof over our heads at the moment, though of course, this is Uganda and things work in their own way. Our date for moving out was 5th January, and we found a lovely house in a place called Njeru overlooking the Nile which we’d arranged to move into. However a few days before we were due to move, the landlady phoned us up to tell us she had rented it out to someone else. We rushed around and found another nice house. It’s in an area called Bukaya which we like, though it’s over 12km into Jinja and we often have to travel in and out several times a day, so it’s not very convenient. We are house hunting again, aiming to move back to the metropolis of Jinja.

For Christmas we went to a lovely remote holiday island called ‘Hairy Lemon’ owned by some friends of ours, Erin and Rob. http://www.hairylemonuganda.com/.
Before we went away, we thought we had better get some protection for the house as all the day time staff were away, and there have been some break ins on that road. We hired a guard from a security company who turned up in blue/grey uniform complete with rifle. I have to say he didn’t look very menacing though, as he sat around on a chair in the garden looking really quite bored.

Hairy Lemon is about an hour from here and is very beautiful. Erin and Rob decided several years ago to move onto the island. It covers an area of about 4 acres, was completely overgrown and had absolutely nothing there. They cleared a space and started setting up home – well tent - and it grew from there. It’s amazing what they have done.
It is very fortunate for them that it’s positioned near to one of very few permanent ‘standing waves’ in the world. Wikipedia describes a standing wave as "a wave that remains in a constant ‘standing’ position". This therefore, as of course you would no doubt expect, makes it a desirable destination for kayakers.
When we were there we were twice as old as everyone else until a very welcome group of Ugandans came, as the island was populated by 20 year old kayakers. I couldn’t believe that they called us Mr & Mrs Chamberlain. No one calls me Mrs Chamberlain!
Anyway it is an absolutely idyllic location, with a lagoon we could swim in and play water volleyball in (at least until the Ugandans lost the ball downstream!). Not only that but Santa even managed to find his way there.

The road to the island is a bit of an experience in itself. Generally, other than main roads, most driving is what – in western countries- you would call off-road driving. Here, because the roads are so bad, it’s just called ‘driving’. The main road towards Hairy Lemon is fine, but once you come off onto the side roads, even we were amazed at how bad they were. There were ravines in the road. At one point I was worried that the car would actually tip over. I am constantly grateful for the fact that we bought a 4x4 car.
As we were driving though the villages, kids would wave and smile and call out to us. One tiny child was SO excited at seeing muzungus go past that she almost fainted!

We were supposed to stay on Xmas night but for some reason I felt we should go home. Fortunately we did because Kira was unwell the next morning. I took her to the doctor who said she had suspected malaria and that she should stay in their on-site hospital. I stayed with her, sleeping there overnight. They treated her well and she recovered very quickly, which probably indicates that it wasn’t malaria (Jordan had the same symptoms a few weeks later, and that wasn’t malaria). The hospital was very basic and from a practical point of view provided very little – a bed and a sheet. At one point, although Kira was very hot, she felt very cold so they got another sheet for her. It must have just come out of the wash as it was still damp.

We had to take our own pillows, blankets, soap, toilet paper, food and drinking water. They provided the medication but not any water to take the tablets with. I got no sleep at all that night as the hospital is in the town centre and there was extremely loud music playing until 2.30 in the morning, along with the mosque next door calling people to prayer, as well as being bitten by mosquitoes because there were no nets over the beds.
While Kira recovered well, I felt much worse by the time we left the next morning!

For those of you who braved the Ugandan postal system to send us a Xmas card, thank you very much. Because the post, when it works, is so slow, many cards arrive in the new year. One of the English people here keeps these cards and puts them up the following Christmas …

So, the house we are living in in Bukaya is a new one. It’s owned by a Ugandan woman who had it built and has been living here with her 5 children, aged around 20. They have moved into the boy’s quarters, which are literally a few feet away and is as big as the house. She owns a ‘special hire’ (what we would call a ‘taxi’) service in Kampala and so doesn’t have to work. She goes to Kampala once a week to collect the money.
I think we are the first people to move in and so she is using the rent money to upgrade the property and compound, including having a wall built round the compound. Getting building work done here operates differently as people tend to hire a lot of people to do the job. She hired 20 builders to build the wall, so it was done in no time. They use red brick made from the earth, plus cement. They leave vertical splits in the wall every so often to allow for expansion. To strengthen it, they put barbed wire in the cement along the length of the wall every few rows.
I had to laugh when I saw one of the builders using a brown paper cement bag as a hat. I couldn’t imagine a builder in the UK or NZ wearing a paper bag on their head…

Anyway the house is in a nice peaceful area and we have a lovely view over Lake Victoria. We can see the sun rise and set over the lake from our bedroom. We’ve bought some wicker chairs and like to sit out on the front porch and look over the views.
The house is on a dirt track and further down the lane are houses owned by muzungus. However we hardly ever see them and so everyone we see here is Ugandan. I take Lotte for a walk every day and it’s really nice to walk around here as it feels more ‘African’ than where we were staying before.
For example I’ll see lots of goats and hens around, along with a few guinea fowl. There may be a Ugandan person tilling their land, and a cowherd slowly walking their herd along the lane. Some of the cowherds have Ankole cows (the ones with the huge horns) and while Lotte isn’t too keen, they just amble along like the other ones. I saw a little boy who was wondering around his compound wearing only a singlet and some over-sized flip flops. There was a boy rolling a tyre along with a stick.
There are many Ugandans living beside the main road. I always have a range of adults and kids saying hello and waving to me. It’s a bit like being the Queen when you are a muzungu, everyone wants you to wave to them and greet them. Little children always shout out “Muzungu! ‘ow aare yooo?” I usually reply “I’m fine how are you?” One boy who looks about 10 years old mimicked my accent, to the delight of his friend and they both laughed. When I walked back he asked me again how I was. I replied “I’m fine how are you?” At this point the two boys held onto each other and laughed until they nearly fell over!

We have no staff working for us here, which is unusual for white people, however we are a low-maintenance family and don’t need much. We pay one of the girls next door to hand wash our clothes for us a few times a week and to clean the house once a week. They also burn our rubbish for us.
We rented the house partly furnished – all there was were bed frames, dining table & chairs, and a 3 piece suite. As we had no cooker they lent us theirs, while they cook in traditional Ugandan way on charcoal-filled pots.
We had to buy 3 mattresses and 4 pillows the day we moved in. We’ve brought very little household stuff with us – some bedding, plates, bowls & cutlery and a few towels. Although we have a house-worth of furniture and goods in storage in NZ, it doesn’t seem worth the effort of bringing them over. This means we have to completely re-furnish and equip a house from scratch. It’s amazing the amount of things you need to get for a house – eg waste paper bins, mirrors, desks, pans, kettle, dust pan and brush, mop etc. as well as the more obvious bigger items.
We managed the first few days with no fridge, and one pan which had to do everything – cook meals and boil water for cups of tea!
There is no hot water in the house at all. We do the washing up in cold water and even have to get cold showers! The water isn’t completely cold as it comes from a water tank outside on which the sun usually graces its presence, but it certainly isn’t warm water. Jon quite likes it, he finds it quite invigorating, a bit like jumping into a swimming pool and gradually getting used to the temperature. The rest of us, however, think he’s weird and refuse to stand under the shower. We stand away from the water and give ourselves a wash. Sometimes Kira and I go in together and stand there screeching about how cold it is!
It’s a real pity though as Jon and I have a lovely big en suite with a nice bath. Other than boiling the kettle 100 times and filling the bath up that way, I can’t imagine how I would ever use it. We never thought to ask if there was hot water before we moved in, but have asked in all the houses we’ve looked at subsequently. You’d be surprised at how many houses don’t have hot water.

Because we live near the Lake we get a lot of lake flies around. The house hasn’t had any mozzie screens fitted to the windows yet and we made the inexcusable mistake of putting the lights on in the house one evening. Good grief, we were overrun with flies, thousands of them, all making a kind of humming noise. They don’t live very long and were dropping like – well – flies. Jon had a cup of tea on the table. It wasn’t long before he had a tasty coating of dead flies on the top. Our mozzie net over the bed and my laptop had an attractive sprinkling of them too. The next morning we had a carpet of dead flies which we had to sweep out (once we’d bought a brush of course). Now, I can well imagine how you’re feeling – envious. “How lucky the Chamberlains are to be having such wonderful experiences” I can hear you say.
Anyway, we have now worked out how to deal with this – we have stuffed up the open grills on the windows with newspaper and we put on the outside light in the evenings so that the flies stay in the porch area. Problem solving is a very useful skill to have in Uganda.

Kira likes it round here as one of the neighbours has hens and goats. She is forever going round and playing with the goats. She was also playing skipping today with the woman who owns the house.

You certainly get to meet some interesting people here. For example there is Frank. He lives in Germany 11 months a year, and spends a month here. He has bought 10 plots of land in Bukaya next to us and comes over to have houses built on them. Currently he is having 3 houses built simultaneously. While he is away he employs someone to look after his houses, and then before he arrives back he gets this man to find 30-40 builders who all work seven days a week for a month building the next part of the houses. Then he leaves for another 11 months until he can come back and get the next phase of the building work done. Frank has 3 children, all different colours – a white child in Germany he had with his ex-wife a brown child he has had with his Ugandan girlfriend, as well as her black child.
Then there is Sven who was staying in the boys quarters here, also a German who has married a Ugandan woman and who does something similar. They have just bought 2 plots of land, though Sven didn’t see them until after they were bought. White people often get charged more for things than black people, so his wife did the negotiations and he only go to see the plots after the deal was signed.

One of the local Jinja personalities, a great guy called John who is from the UK and in his 70’s, is a friend of Sven’s and asked Sven to buy him a laptop, as he felt it was high time he entered the world of technology. So Sven buys a laptop and brings it over from Germany, but the keyboard is in German (it’s a QWERTX not a QWERTY) as are all the commands. It’s hard enough getting into technology in your 70’s when things are in your own language, let alone when it’s in German. Anyway they brought the laptop round for Jon to fix, which he did. As a ‘danke’ gift, John brought over a mini fridge of beer and soft drinks, and left it all here for us.

The day we left the last house, Bonnie, one of the house girls had her 4th baby. We went to visit her at her home the next day. The baby was really sweet and was surprisingly pale – her arms were the same colour as Kira’s even though she looked Ugandan. Bonnie, her husband and her 4 children live in a very Ugandan house –small, dark and basic. The main (and possibly only) room was about 3m2. It contained their double bed, a bunk bed, a mattress on the floor, a couch, a chair, a TV, and all their possessions. They cook outside as there didn’t seem to be a kitchen inside.

One of the women we know saw a poster in Kampala saying “Have a small family, one that fits into a taxi.” A ‘taxi’ is a Ugandan word for a 14-seater minibus…

So, Kira’s school closed down at the end of last term, and a group of 6 children are now being schooled on the school’s premises by me, another mother and a Ugandan teacher in the mornings. We are using a UK homeschool package.
In the afternoons we have arranged a variety of activities for the children - tennis, swimming, cookery, gardening, French and drama. We’ve been doing this for 2 weeks and it's going well.
For the first week I taught ‘projects’, and the children wanted to do a project on animals. Being a conference speaker I’m used to giving high-energy presentations, and so was teaching in the same mode. However I realised that children haven’t leant how to control this energy, and during one particularly fun and energetic session, the kids were so excited they ran out of the classroom! I decided to make the sessions a bit lower energy after that.

And of course, no blog entry would be complete without mention of the odd frustration or two.
How, might I ask, are you supposed to phone Uganda Telecom, for example, when the phone book only goes up to the letter S?
And how are you supposed to contact one of the other phone companies – MTN - when the phone number listed for them in the phone book is incorrect?

And getting petrol is always an interesting experience as it’s not uncommon for petrol stations to have no petrol. Our usual tack is to drive in, wind down the window and shout out “Do you have petrol?” Mind you, at least Uganda has finally followed the rest of the world and has brought prices down a bit. We watched other countries reducing their price while ours went up to over $3 a litre.

And finally, a few snippets from our trip into the metropolis of Jinja today:
In general Ugandans are scared of dogs and you rarely see people walking one. We took Lotte into town today. It’s quite an amazing experience as many people give you a wide berth, some freeze in their tracks looking concerned, and some even jump up in fright. It feels a bit like walking a lion, not a dog…

While we were driving around we saw a man sitting by the side of the road with a pair of underpants on his head.

We had lunch in a ‘muzungu’ café. I had roast vegetable salad, Jordan had home made sausage rolls and Jon had chicken salad sandwich on brown bread (Kira was at a friend’s). While we were there, there was a Ugandan man sitting in a rubbish skip opposite, rooting through the rubbish and eating what he could find.

Life here is different …