April 2010

The month started with Easter, but no Easter eggs unfortunately as they are an unknown item in Jinja. However there is chocolate around so that has to suffice. Cadbury’s chocolate here is pretty gruesome, I have to say, but being a chocaholic there are times when I have to eat it. The only way I can do that is by buying chocolate with nuts in it to mask the taste. I have now discovered Moro peanut bars and they are much more palatable.

A couple of days ago I had put half a bar of chocolate in my handbag on the couch. I took it out yesterday, and without particularly looking, I broke off a piece and ate it. Then I sat down and put the chocolate bar on the table. After a short while I noticed an ant on the table. Then another one. I looked at the chocolate bar and there was a huge amount of ants swarming out of the wrapper.
I must have eaten some. I must have.
Mind you I believe they are full of protein and a natural source of vitamin B12. Great…
Anyway Jordan, Kira and I went to inspect my handbag, and found a huge trail of ants from the floor, along the length of the couch and going into my bag.

Ants are a big problem here. We are never without them. The kitchen is the worst place. Every day we have hundreds of them around the sink area and I must waste gallons of water swilling them away. Sometimes I use a spray like mortein, but don’t really like spraying poison around the house, and anyway it doesn’t stop them coming again.
One of John Bosco’s jobs is to do the washing up, so we leave the washing up from our evening meal overnight for him to do in the morning. Even though I rinse the plates and dishes, by morning time they are covered with ants, hundreds of them.
You can’t leave any piece of food around, any food in the cat’s dish or even a dead fly around as the ants come out in their thousands.

We have a friend Craig, who recently moved from Jinja to Lira, further north. He is a white American who has adopted three special needs Ugandan children. As he is single, he employs a couple of helpers to look after the children and run the house. Last week they had what they called ‘The Invasion of the White Ants’. They woke up in the morning to find the whole of their large compound (garden) and part of the living room covered in white ants.
Living, as they do, a typically Ugandan life, they collected a big basin full of them, cooked them and had a white ant feast. Apparently they are equally as tasty as grasshoppers…

And seeing as I seem to have started talking about creatures I might as well carry on. Apologies to squeamish people.
(My mother says “Kim, I can’t understand at all how you can live there!” )
Sometimes the cat catches a gecko. Although I know that the gecko’s tail falls off and carries on moving as a defence mechanism, I’d never actually seen it happen until recently. I was amazed at how the tail moves – manically! It twists and turns on the floor at an amazing rate of knots for a long time. Mind you, it obviously didn’t work as a strategy as the cat completely ignored it and carried on with the gecko until Jordan freed it. I saw it the gecko a few hours later in Kira’s room, tail-less.

One nice thing about creatures is the frogs which live nearby. Every evening at around 9pm they seem to break into song simultaneously and sing for hours. It’s very pleasant listening to them.
Fairly often we'll get a – presumably - lost frog wandering around the house. They are very cute!

April is birthday month for Jordan and me. This year he was 14 and had a group of friends around. They had pizza and birthday cake and stayed up watching DVDs till 4am and then all had a sleepover.

Sandy, one of his homeschool tutors, had made him a birthday cake – a Raiders one (American football team). She baked it, decorated it, and left it on the washing machine. Unfortunately someone turned the machine on, it vibrated, and the cake fell onto the floor! She had to salvage it, but it looked pretty good.

My birthday was a few days later. It's hard to believe that the birthday card Kira gave to me saying 'Happy 51st birthday' was actually for me. 51 is the age of your parents, not yourself!

A while ago I was driving through a village when I saw a young boy, aged around eight, running around with a plastic bag on his head. I was horrified.
Life here is different, and so a hundred thoughts ran through my head – shall I stop and tell him? Shall I tell some adults? Will they understand me? Will they appreciate what I say? Is it safe to stop? Will they lynch me?
One of our friends in Kampala has lived in Uganda for many years, and she said to us “Ugandans are…, they are….” she searched for the right word, “they are …. unpredictable.”
This thought ran through my head too. People in the villages think very differently to how we think, and I decided that there was a possibility that they may lynch me, so decided to carry on driving. But I still worried about the young boy.

I was telling Vicky, Kira’s teacher, about the boy we met last year whose family came here from the States to open an orphanage. They took in orphans from one of the villages, only to discover a year later that they were not orphans, but were actually the villagers’ own children and that the villagers felt they were onto a good thing by having their children fed, clothed and educated for free. When the family worked this out, they asked the villagers to take the children back, but the villagers accused them of child trafficking and the boy’s father was put in prison.
Vicky has helped set up an orphanage here, but as she is Ugandan, she understands how things work. If someone tells you a child is an orphan, you can’t necessarily believe it. Women in the villages often have many children – birth control isn’t commonplace – which means many children are unwanted, and the women may be happy for someone else to take on their child.
When Vicky was finding children for the orphanage, she went through a very rigorous process for determining whether they really were orphans. She went to visit the LC1 – first level of local government – the registrar, plus the probation service to check that there were no other family members who could look after them. She even insisted on going to the graves of the parents to check if what people were saying was accurate.
It seems very strange to us, but many people’s lives here are a world away from what we are used to in the western world.
Vicky herself has a sad story – she has seven brothers and sisters, six of whom have died. Two of her sisters died two days apart, from very different illnesses. This means there are quite a lot of orphans in her own family.

And so we still use the library regularly, though it isn’t easy finding books there we want to read. Fortunately there are now a number of new-ish books which have come via Book Aid International, Ranfurly library service which provides books to libraries, hospitals, refugee camps and schools in order to support literacy, education, training and publishing in a number of countries around the world. Given there are no real bookshops in Jinja, we are very grateful for this service!

There is a ‘Book exchange’ though. An English person living here brings in second-hand books donated from the UK. He puts them in cafes, and the way it works is that you take a book along, swap it, and pay 1000/- which goes to a local charity. The range of books is small, and the longer the books are there, the more the English ones are replaced by ones in Dutch, German, Japanese etc, brought in by tourists!

Jon and I have been doing some more painting. He is producing a couple of paintings which will make his big painting into a triptych. Almost finished, I’ll include the photos next time.

Meanwhile I’ve had a few orders for my paintings – seven in total. Three for a friend and four for another friend who wanted them for her children. She will take them back to Reunion Island. My butterfly one is my favourite.

I’m also in the middle of organising a Sports Day for Kira’s homeschool centre. There are now only three children there on a regular basis, which seemed a tad on the small side to hold a sports day.
Mind you, they would all get a placing in every event!
So we’ve opened it up to children from the pre-school, and home-schooled children plus tutors and parents, so it should be a decent sized turnout. Lots of eggs, spoons, sacks and three legs needed!

There are a couple of dogs who live in the compound at the homeschool centre. One of the tenants living there said one of the dogs was howling at night and frothing at the mouth. When we went in in the morning the dog looked perfectly OK, but we called the vet. He doesn’t have a surgery, he visits the animals. I wasn’t there when he came, but accounts differ as to what happened. One says that the dog was showing early signs of rabies. Another says the vet said there was no sign of rabies at all but that he decided to put it down because he didn’t like the dog. Anyway, the dog was put down. The vet gave it poison to eat. This happened at the homeschool centre while the children were there. They were heartbroken.

And on a lighter note, Kira’s friends who are in the Baha’i religion had another celebration recently, Ridvan, which is a twelve day celebration starting on 20th April. We were invited along to the first day. It’s nice to see how different religions operate.
There was a lot of food there - Ugandans are keen on celebrations which include food. I like the Ugandan dishes – matoke (green bananas), sweet potato, rice, spinach, beans, groundnut sauce. All very natural foods, grown locally.

We buy quite a lot of locally grown food from the market. I worked out recently that we must easily buy 100 bananas a month! And that’s just for three of us, as Jordan doesn’t like them. They are very cheap and readily available and make up a large part of our diet.

When I was at the market a couple of weeks ago, it was so hot that I was starting to suffer from dehydration. I staggered out, went to the nearest mini supermarket and bought a carton of juice. That hasn’t really happened before, so it must have been a super hot day.

And talking of things that haven’t happened before – when Kira and I arrive at our house, she often gets out when we reach the gate, jumps on the back of the car and holds onto the spare wheel, while I drive down the driveway. One morning she decided to jump on the back of the car while we went out of the driveway. She hasn’t done this before so I forgot she was there, and went sailing merrily down the lane until I heard a little voice shout “Mummyyyyyy!”

March 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaargh!

No, that doesn’t adequately express how I feel.

AAAAAAARRRRGHHHH!!!!!

That’s better.
Yes, we’ve been dealing with the banks again. I find it so difficult dealing with their way of working, sometimes I can’t cope.
All we wanted to do was open a bank account in another bank. It should be so simple, but despite going in to find out what we needed to provide, spending a few days gathering all the information and going in again with 10 sets of papers, we ended up walking out in frustration at how difficult they made it for us.
Other muzungus have expressed similar frustrations and apparently many have left their banks and have all joined the same bank, so we need to have a look at that one.
Aaarrgggh.

Anyway, Jon has been spending vast amounts of time setting up a new website for Uganda - an online advertising site called Find it in Uganda.
It’s at www.finditinuganda.com
We are aiming for it to be the largest advertising site for the country and are now in the process of marketing it. Someone I know is very impressed with it and has offered to work alongside us to promote the site.
(And so if you, or anyone you know, have anything you would like to advertise that could be sold over here – eg e-books – feel free to place an advert. It’s free, there is no charge.)

And talking of e-books, I wrote a book with some other speakers a few years ago called Successful Woman which we self published and sold. I have now made it into an e-book.

The beginning of the year is the warmest time and we’ve had some very hot days. John Bosco our house helper took a few days off and so I had to do the clothes washing (by hand – we have no washing machine). It was so hot that I would take the washing straight out of the bowl, dripping wet, hang it on the line and it would be dry in 3 hours, even jeans and towels.

Jon struggles a bit with the heat, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be standing out in it for any length of time, but having been following the UK temperatures of -2 degrees and lower, and I’m more than happy to be in an overly hot place.

I’ve been having some swimming lessons. I can already do breaststroke, I can also do backstroke - though tend not to here, as pools are outdoors and I find it the sun too bright when I swim on my back - but I can’t do freestyle/crawl.
I’ve been having lessons with Ronnie, the sports tutor who teaches the children. It’s really nice going for lessons as we go in the morning when the pool is empty, it’s outdoors in beautiful surroundings and it’s nice and warm & sunny.
I do like the easy way of life here – eg if you want a golf, swimming, squash or tennis lesson – Ronnie is available, the pool, course and golf course are usually not busy – you don’t have to book, things aren’t rushed or oversubscribed.
Anyway my swimming is improving – though it would be much easier if I didn’t have to breathe. I can do the swim stroke OK, I just can’t get the breathing right!

Jinja is home to thousands of bats, though they are not here all year round. They came back at the beginning of the year for a few weeks and stayed in the trees in the street next to us. It was lovely listening to them. Unfortunately people from the tribe that eats bats also came along as well. They have slingshots and little balls made from the red earth and they spend hours every day firing the balls at the bats to knock them out of the trees. They pick up the bats, hit them over the head with their slingshot and them put them into sacks. At the end of the afternoon I would see the men going off with their sacks full of dead bats.

There have been a couple of incidents recently.
Firstly my friend in Kampala found that there were a lot of cockroaches coming into his house. He called out the pest control people on 30th January. They came and sprayed the house. He then asked them to put something in the septic tank as he felt that’s where they were originating from. The pest control people took the lid off the septic tank and found a dead body in there.
Apparently the neighbour had killed his girlfriend on Jan 21st and put her body in the tank on Jan 22nd. Just after this the landlord turned up and locked the guy out of the house as he hadn’t paid his rent for 5 months.
My friend called the police on 30th who went into the neighbour’s house and found the crime scene untouched as the man hadn’t been able to get back into his house to clean it up.
Even though the woman’s body had been in the tank for 9 days no one had reported her as missing.
My friend and his family weren’t able to stay in their house and had to go and stay with relatives. He’s now had to move house. It was quite a big deal here and he was featured in the papers and on TV.

Secondly the teacher at Kira’s school told me one day that one of the girls had been picked up half an hour late from school the day before.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because of the incident on the bridge’ she replied.
Apparently a local woman had abducted a girl aged around 9-10 and had planned to kill her and use her as a sacrifice to the God of the Nile. She had taken the girl to the bridge which goes over the river, had tied her hands behind her back and had put a sack over her head. This was about 5pm when it was still light.
People saw this, realised what was happening and went over and beat her up.
Police came in to clear the crowd. They were going to fire shots into the air but the crowd was too large and rowdy so they decided to shoot two people. They shot one in the arm and one in the leg. The crowd dispersed after this.
The girl was physically OK, though was taken for rehab. The woman – very badly beaten up - was taken away by the police.
People involved in child sacrifice don’t use children whose bodies aren’t ‘intact’, and so parents will get their daughters’ ears pierced and have their boys circumcised so they are safe from being sacrificed.

Only a slightly lighter note Jordan has an African friend called Shalom. His mother was out one day and found a tiny baby girl – still with umbilical cord attached – on the grass. She took the baby, informed the hospitals and the police but no one came forward to claim her. Despite her husband having died and having a family of 7 in a tiny, tiny house, she took the baby in and called her Gift. Gift is doing well and is very much a part of their family now.

The craft teacher at Kira’s school has started a craft project for some of the local street children. He found a room – very basic and with no furniture – and set up a project using his own money. He himself is an orphan and was brought up in a large orphanage in the Jinja area. The children have very little, so Kira and I took round some of her and Jordan’s clothes and shoes they have grown out of, to give to them. It was all very exciting and they put the clothes and shoes on straight away!

Kira’s school have been doing some community work each week by going into one of the local orphanages. They felt it was time for a change, so I arranged for them to go into a different orphanage, a much bigger one, which has around 50 babies and small children. They go from 4-5pm once a week and enjoy being with the tiny children.
Whenever I go to pick her up it’s a real overdose of cuteness. The children are so little and sweet. They all swarm around you and they all want to hold your hand or get you to pick them up. Choochie!

We have arranged for music lessons at school, using African instruments, and have found a Ugandan musician who comes in. He can’t always access enough instruments to bring along, so I’ve been out with Vicky the teacher to find some to buy. Each child chose an instrument they want to learn - I’ve bought some pan pipes, some thumb pianos (see photo of Jon trying it out) and a tube fiddle. Kira just loves the tube fiddle (‘endingidi’) which is a ‘1 stringed bowed chordophone from the Baganda people’. It’s a little bit like learning to play a one-stringed violin.

I still teach Kira every morning from 8-10am, and we recently finished a Maths book we have been working on for a year. We decided to have a celebration, take a morning session off and go and have breakfast at a local café. Yum!

We arrange for someone to provide school lunches for the children. The person who was doing it would prepare the meals and bring them in each day. However he became too busy and so we have found another person, a man called Ivan, who doesn’t have a proper kitchen he can prepare the food in. To help him, we bought a charcoal burner and some charcoal, and he comes into school every day with the uncooked food and prepares it outside the back of the school building on the charcoal burner!

I also still homeschool Jordan for about 12 hours a week.
As the boys he’s homeschooled with are American, they all decided to watch the Super Bowl at a friend’s house. Over here it was shown at 3am, so they went to bed at 8.30pm, got up at 1.30am, watched the game and came home at 6am. Jordan went straight to bed, but I made him get up for his Maths lesson with his tutor at 11am, and then do some school work in the afternoon!

A few days ago he said to me ‘If you didn’t dye your hair, you would look as old as your dad’. My Dad is 80.
No offence Dad, but I guess it must be time for me to have a face lift.

Meanwhile, John Bosco was telling me about his mother.
‘She’s very old’ he said, ‘very very old’.
‘How old is she?’ I asked.
‘She’ll be making 45’ he replied.

One day we decided to go round the shops and the market in the evening. We haven’t done it before and it was a really nice experience. Jinja is quite a different place in the evenings. There are different vendors selling their goods on the pavements, and the market looked so lovely. There are no lights in the market and only a small portion of it is open – the part which sells fruit & veg, fish and meat. The vendors sit on the ground with their wares spread out around them, and have small paraffin lamps. It was a lovely sight to see so many stalls lit by lamplight.
There are a number of stalls selling beans, in huge huge sacks. Whenever we buy them, we have to sift through the beans to get rid of any unwanted matter.
The people in the small towns and villages who grown the beans, dry them out at the side of the road. Sometimes they are laid out on sacks, but often they are simply laid out on the road. This means you have to get rid of pieces of gravel, dust, leaves, twigs etc. before you cook them.
A few times I’ve bought lentils from the market, however you have to check those too, as a couple of times they’ve been infested with weevils!

And talking of food, Jordan has been longing for a McDonald’s hamburger. There are no McDonald’s outlets here, so one day, when we had been invited round to some friends’ for a meal, I made a ‘hamburger and fries’ for all the children.
For the hamburger I made some scones, and some round, flat, chocolate crispie cakes. I cut the scones in half, and put the crispie cakes inside.
For the fries I cut up pieces of toast into thin strips, painted them with yellow food colouring, and made a French fries packet by painting some paper bright red, making it into a packet shape and painting a yellow McDonalds’s ‘M’ on it. It looked pretty convincing!

And for some reason I was thinking about pavements recently. Our driveway isn’t paved, and we live in an area of unsealed lanes. Pavements aren’t common in many places in Uganda, so Jon and I were trying to work out where the nearest pavement to us was. It’s probably in the town centre, a 10 minute walk from here.

And finally … In 1992, when I came back from honeymoon in late September, I started a night class in CLAIT - Computer literacy and information technology - at Runshaw college in Leyland (England). I completed the course after a term. Recently I received a note from Runshaw saying my certificate was ready to be collected…

January 2010

Happy New Year!

At the end of December we went on our safari in western Uganda. It was a long, long trip there and back, but it was nice to see more of the countryside and some parts looked quite different to what we are used to.
We took the ‘top road’ on the way there which was fairly slow as they are repairing large portions of it, but mainly the roads were OK. We had had our shock absorbers replaced – they take a bit of a battering here – as I couldn’t face a long trip on bumpy roads with shonky shock absorbers.
We stayed in Kampala with friends the night before as that reduced the journey by two hours, but it still took us eight and a half hours from theirs.
We stopped on the way at a café. On the menu we saw they were selling ‘fruit scorns’.
Anyway we arrived in the evening on 30th, and asked about going on safari the next morning.
“You need to have breakfast at 6am then go on the game drive at 6.30am” they said, “as the animals sleep in the afternoon.”
We were far too tired to get up at 5am the next morning so had a sleep-in, had breakfast, then arrived at the National Park around midday on 31st.
The entry fee was198,300/- , so we gave them 200,000/- in notes. “Don’t you have the correct money?” asked the man.
We took our own car on the safari and managed to find a ranger who accompanied us on a game drive, showed us the best routes to take and explained about the animals and birds we saw. It took three hours to drive round.
Later in the day we also went on a 2-hour boat trip and saw lots more animals. We even saw a hippo doing a barrel roll - it rolls onto its back with its legs up, then rolls onto its front again. Jordan managed to get a shot and is very proud of it. We saw hippos, elephants, lions, kobs (like antelopes), a baboon, crocodiles, buffaloes, warthogs, banded mongoose and lots of birds.
Safari parks talk about the Big Five – hippos, elephants, lions, leopards and rhinos. This park has the Big Four (no rhinos) we saw most but we didn’t get to see the leopards.

There were many, many kobs, and they have a mating ground there. The males stand in a big circle and the females come to look at them. If they don’t think a male kob is good looking enough, they move onto the next one. All the kobs looked exactly the same to us, so I don’t know what criteria the females use!

As the entry fee gave us 24 hour access to the Park, we decided to go again in the morning, so in the evening (New Year’s Eve) we went to bed early, in order to get up at 5am for another game drive. We used the same ranger to show us round, who not only had been celebrating New Year, but also his birthday and hadn’t got to bed till 4am. He was wide awake while we were all too tired to really appreciate it, and the children even slept through a large part of it! Mind you, we actually got to see fewer animals than we did the afternoon before, so it wasn’t too bad.

It was quite different to the safari I did in Kenya many years ago in the Maasai Mara, and Jon and I were a tad disappointed. As we drove around on designated paths it felt a bit like being in a big park in the UK….
The safari lodge we stayed in is new and uses solar power. Unfortunately the weather was uncharacteristically overcast for the week around Xmas, which meant we had no hot water or electricity. Given that the lodge was about 2km from the equator, and January is the hottest month of the year, you would have thought we’d have had a pretty good chance of the solar power working!
There were also no power points in the rooms, so everyone had to charge their cellphone in the dining area (which must have been on mains electricity).

We drove back on the ‘bottom’ road and went through a beautiful area called Ankole. It’s probably the most attractive part of Uganda we have seen.
Fortunately we stayed with friends in Kampala again, which helped us hugely as the trip back took 10 hours this time. We couldn’t have faced a further two hour drive to Jinja.

We crossed the equator twice – once near our safari lodge, and once on the way back. On the way back, a little trading area has built up around the equator, with very nice gift shops and café. An enterprising Ugandan has set up three sink-like bowls, one on the equator, one slightly north and one slightly south, to show the different ways that water goes down the plughole. I would have asked him to demonstrate, but he was charging 10,000/-. Having lived in both the northern and southern hemisphere, I’ve actually done the experiment myself, and it isn’t that exciting!

As we reached the outskirts of Kampala, I texted our friends to say we had reached Kampala. Traffic there is appalling, so after an hour and we hadn’t arrived, they phoned us up and said “Which Kampala did you go to?”

I spent some time looking through the Uganda travel guide to see where else we would like to visit before we leave. There are not many places. A lot of the country is long roads with small towns or villages which offer little for tourists.
One of the more touristy things is a trip across one of the lakes. On one side of the lake is a tiny town with two places you can stay in. As the better of two places to stay costs $1.50 a night including breakfast, we thought we may give it a miss.
For those who want to cross the lake, there is a boat which seems to travel once a day at random times. If you happen to miss the boat and it’s evening time, they recommend you go to Police station and ask to sleep on their floor.

Earlier in the month we were invited to a party where the children had to go in medieval costume. Jordan had made some Crusaders armour out of cardboard and painted red crosses on it. For Kira I designed a top and long skirt, bought some royal blue satin material, and we had it made up by one of the sewing ladies who has a treadle machine on the pavement. I then sewed silver braid on it and made her a pointy hat with a ribbon of material coming down from the top. She loves it. The people hosting the party had made a tree house that looked like a castle; had made some stocks and had got wet sponges to throw at people in the stocks; someone had painted a huge sheet with the family’s coat of arms on it and someone else had painted a huge picture of a dragon. They had made a sword for all the children, and had made a birthday cake in the shape of a castle. Very impressive!
Kira wore the outfit the next day when we went to a restaurant. The owner saw it, was impressed, and so brought some chocolate cake over for everyone at the table.

I went to the shops with Jon as he wanted to buy some new trousers. He found some he liked but they were about an inch too long. The woman in the shop said “I will take them to the tailor” and zoomed out of the shop. She will have taken them to one of the many males who also sit on the pavement with a sewing machine. We wandered around the other shops for a few minutes, came back and they had been shortened. The tailor only charged 1,500/- (48p, $1.10), and he even ironed them as well.

As we were wandering around the shops we spotted one of the Pineapple Men. These are people who sell pineapples from a big wooden wheelbarrow. You can either just buy a pineapple as it is, or you can get him to ‘peel’ it for you. It’s very impressive how they do it – he holds the top of the pineapple, and using a very sharp knife cuts all the peel off. Then he puts 8 slices in it like a cake, from the top down. Then he places the pineapple into a plastic bag, bottom first and as he does this he cuts off the top off which leaves 8 slices of peeled pineapple in the bag for you. Much easier than struggling to peel and cut it yourself.

The children started back at their respective ‘schools’ this month. The boys Jordan is homeschooled with went on a homeschool conference for a week in Kenya. They have worked out some alternative lyrics to the film Highschool Musical and have called it ‘Homeschool Musical’. It’s very funny.

While they were away Jordan had a golf lesson as his weekly sports tutoring. He asked me to join him, so I did. It’s only the second golf lesson I’ve had and I enjoyed it, despite the blistering heat. My shoulders were aching the next day though.

Last year Kira’s school had seven pupils. One has left, we think to go to Italy, and another has been abducted by a family member in another country! This leaves five. Two are overseas until February and one decided to start back in the second week. This meant that in Week One there was only Kira and one other girl.
Not only that but the teacher was on a course, so we had a replacement teacher. This teacher loved everything about the school, and the children liked her, so everyone was happy.

A couple of little boys, Dan and Kennedy, live in the school’s compound with their mother in the ‘boys quarters’ at the back. They are nice children and sometimes I give the older one, Dan, a ‘driving lesson’. They both come in the car. Kennedy sits in the front seat, Dan sits on my knee and I let him steer the car. The roads round there are very quiet and you rarely see another vehicle. He loves it and tells everyone he can drive. I took this photo and showed them it. They both laughed!

I took Kira and her friend Michelle swimming one day. Michelle is Ugandan, and as she watched me putting sunscreen on she said “If I put sunscreen on, my skin turns purple.”

As part of Kira’s homeschooling we have been studying composting, and have now got a compost bin. Our research shows that it needs to be in a shady spot in the garden to keep it from drying out. This has proved - well – impossible, as we have no shady spot in the garden. Amazing, isn’t it, no shady spot. I’ve put it behind the house which has shade for a few hours, and then have to give it a dousing with water every day to keep it moist.

Mind you, it is helpful having a sunny garden when you decide as I did, to have a hangi. A hangi, for you non-New Zealand people, is a traditional Maori way of cooking food – in the ground.
First we dug a hole in the lawn (a hidden bit of the lawn), then put a lattice of small branches near the bottom to support the igneous rocks we had to find. Then we put wood/branches in there and burnt them for one and a half hours to get the rocks hot enough. Then we scraped the ashes off the rocks, put a damp cloth on them and put our food on, in silver foil containers. As this was a trial, we just used potatoes, onions, carrots and sausages. Then we put the soil back on, ensuring no steam escaped and left it all for a couple of hours.
Now, as people have pointed out, it is much easier if you put them in the oven … but where’s the fun in that?
The hardest part was finding enough wood. Many Ugandans use wood for their own cooking, so there wasn’t much around. We did manage to find a bit of what smelt like a pine tree and loaded it in the car. My car boot carpet is now full of tiny pine needles I can’t get out.
Anyway the food was cooked wonderfully. The only small problem was a bit of the silver foil cover buckled under the weight of the soil and some earth got in. Jon and Jordan weren’t bothered and just washed a few sausages and potatoes under the tap and they were fine!

You have to get used to the red earth round here, it gets everywhere. When you go shopping round the Jinja shops your hands get dirty when you pick things up as they have a coating of dust on them. Some supermarkets have a cloth at the till and wipe the products, while one supermarket gives you hand wipes at the checkout.

And talking of cleaning things, I asked John Bosco to give our fridge a clean. I expected he would take the items out and wipe the inside of the fridge. Instead he took the items out, and carried the fridge outside onto the lawn with the help of Geoffrey the gardener and cleaned it there!

And so the squash court here, which was newly refurbished not so long ago isn’t being looked after, and will look quite run down if it’s not maintained. There is usually a collection of creatures in there – the occasional bat, lizard or spider, along with a regular cloud of mosquitoes. It’s hard trying to hit the ball when several mozzies decide to fly in front of your face. We spend as much time swatting the mozzies with the racquets as we do the ball.
There must be leaks in the roof and there are streaks of dried rain down the walls, which have caught a lot of dead mozzies.
At times when there is no electricity, it’s quite hard to play as you can’t see. One time I was playing with Jordan when the power went off. He decided we should play with the door open. The ball hardly ever hits the door, but the first shot we took saw the ball sailing out of the court and onto the grass outside. It went outside a few more times, one time landing in a muddy puddle.

Jordan has got an idea for a version of Monopoly called Uganda Monopoly. Basically you have a board with potholes in it and you drive round the board any way you like, overtaking, going the wrong way or going across the board. Instead of the top hat and the shoe and the dog, you use pieces like a boda boda, a matatu (minibus), a goat, a banana fibre sunhat etc The first few properties are mud huts, moving on to small houses and building up to the posh hotels in Kampala. If you land on the electricity or the water companies, you only have to pay sometimes, as the chances are they won’t be working. I think the game should catch on …

One of the UK people we know here works for the British Forces. He gets sent DVDs of English TV programmes from the BFBS – British Forces Broadcasting Service. He’s lent us a whole wad of them – it’s great, as we don’t watch TV here, the reception is poor and we only get two not-very-interesting Ugandan stations. We feel like we are watching ‘real’ TV. I guess it is also good training for when we move back to Blighty. At least we’ll know some of the programmes.

A Ugandan I met a while back is getting married. Here, people have expensive weddings they can’t afford, so they have a group of people who help them fundraise for the wedding. Each week they have a meeting. Although I don’t really know this person well, and haven’t met the fiancée, I have been invited 14 times to the many pre-wedding meetings. Crikey!

And while I very rarely talk about politics there are a couple of current issues that are getting a lot of coverage. One is the proposed ‘Anti-Homosexual Bill’ that would criminalize homosexuality and institute the death penalty for gay HIV-positive people.
A U.S. news report said that ‘Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the strongest statement yet by an administration official that the United States will not tolerate efforts to criminalize homosexuality among countries that receive U.S. funding to combat HIV/AIDS.’
And secondly ‘The US Congress has directed the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to closely monitor the Uganda Government’s preparation for the 2011 general elections.’ Uganda’s general election is a year away, and Jon and I had decided that if we were still living here then, we would leave the country for a while, while it was going on. It is Africa after all.

Now that we only have a few months left here I do feel a sadness at leaving. I love the sunshine, the relaxed atmosphere, the fact that you don’t have to dress to keep warm, the African-ness of it all. On Saturday mornings I go to the market. I love going there; it’s so ‘African’. I will really miss things like that. I will have to come back…

December 2009

Sekukulu enungi!
Yes, ‘Happy Christmas’ in Luganda. I hope you all had a good time over Winterval / the festive season / or whatever politically correct term we are now supposed to use.

Santa came this year (possibly for the last time, as a certain person will probably be too old next year) and we managed to remain ‘unwoken’ until 7.30am. We opened the presents and then didn’t really see the children for many hours as Jordan played a new computer game and Kira watched several DVDs.
In the afternoon we went round to a house dubbed ‘The Pink Palace’ – a pink house, rented by several people we know. This was the meeting point for many muzungus from Jinja, elsewhere in Uganda, and overseas, who came along for a shared Xmas meal.
We didn’t stay long as we had our Christmas meal with some friends. They are a French family, and they had also invited their neighbour who is English and a friend who is from Chile.
We had a lovely meal of tilapia - a local fish - as two of the people work at the tilapia fish farm. We also had a treasure hunt in the garden which was not only in the dark and involved Jordan climbing onto the roof, but was also in French … mon dieu!

The weather was strangely un-Ugandan on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The sun didn’t shine at all for 2 days - very unusual. People were even wearing cardigans!

John Bosco our house boy has gone home to his family in the village for Christmas. Good grief, we now have to do housework! We’ve divvied up the tasks and I have the job of doing the washing. We don’t have a washing machine so I have to do it all by hand. Crikey!

I was a bit disappointed this year as Jinja seems to have discovered Christmas decorations. The mini supermarkets were selling tinsel, baubles and Christmas trees. Even some stalls in the market were selling decorations. Last year there was no evidence of Christmas at all.
Mind you, by western standards it was very low key, and as we don’t watch TV we had no adverts to sit through either. Christmas next year when we are in the UK will be very different.

Earlier in the month Jordan had a bad dose of malaria. He had been felling unwell, but he has been like this before and has become fine by the next day. I did a malaria test on him and it showed negative, so we left him overnight.
However in the morning he was in a bad way so I took him to the doctor’s surgery which has an on-site hospital and they admitted him straight away.
He had a temperature of 40 degrees, rapid heart beat, vomiting, dehydration and was delirious. They had to sort out all of these before they could start malaria treatment. When delirious he couldn't understand even simple things like 'clench your fist' or 'sit up', and was saying very unusual things. He tried to take the drip out of his hand and tried to get out of bed to leave hospital.
Kira got upset seeing Jordan so ill and was crying so I had to take her to a friend's.
He has never been able to master the skill of swallowing tablets so that made things more challenging. They gave him quinine in a drip but it made his blood pressure drop so they put him on artinam, which they gave by injection.
Jon stayed in hospital with him overnight. He was in for a day and a half then came home and was very weak afterwards. He’s probably recovered now. It’s been two and a half weeks.

As we arrived at the hospital, a strange looking man was crossing the road. As I got near to where he was, he threw himself on the road in a very melodramatic dive and started shouting out in Luganda, as if I had run him over. As I was near the hospital, I parked on the road just a few metres from where he was.
“Oh that’s just great” I thought, “I’m sorting out a very sick child and now someone is trying to claim I ran him over.”
Fortunately a Ugandan man was walking past. He looked at me, looked at the man and raised his eyes.
“Oh good” I thought, “He isn’t going to convince any Ugandans to go and call the police.”
The room Jordan was in looked out onto the road. I could see him from where we were, and he sat in the middle of the road for ages.

Although the room we were in was very basic, I think it’s the best room in the hospital. There are two beds there and when we arrived an old Ugandan lady was in one of the beds. I assumed she would be there for a while as she looked pretty ill. She had quite a few of her family members there who looked like they had camped out on the floor overnight, they had brought some mats to sleep on.
It took a few minutes to get Jordan sorted – to explain what was happening (though he didn’t understand) and to stop him trying to run out of the hospital. When I looked round the old lady and her family had gone. I think they had moved her to a communal ward, because muzungus tend to take preference for the best things …

I have been having Luganda lessons from Vicky, Kira’s teacher. I want to learn some basics so I can communicate with people, and so have been learning how to ask for things like ‘two kilos of potatoes’ from the market, which you translate as ‘potatoes kilos two’, or how to say ‘good morning’, which translates as ‘did you sleep well?’ Luganda is nothing like any other language I’ve learnt and so I can’t work anything out, I just have to learn the words.

Many Ugandans in the towns go home to their family in the villages over Christmas. I asked Vicky if she would be going to her village. She said she wasn’t because she didn’t like to see her Mum and Dad or Granddad. None of them are alive.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Apparently it’s very common to bury your relatives in the garden, and she doesn’t like to stay at her Grandmother’s house, because when she comes out of the front door she can see the graves.

And so the Panto – Aladdin – went very well again this year. Many people from last year were in it again, plus a few new ones. Jon was the pantomime dame again - Widow Twankey – and Jordan and Kira were in the chorus.
Unfortunately Jordan was recovering from malaria at the time of the performances and so wasn’t able to take part. He had been rehearsing for about 3 months, so was very disappointed.
I was due to do the makeup, which was a bit of a challenge, as you can’t really find makeup in Jinja. I had to borrow some foundation, use some of my own makeup and brushes, and make all the eye shadows myself. I used cornflour, body lotion, vegetable oil and food colouring.
Anyway I got everything ready and someone else had to do it instead, as I had to look after Jordan.
Somehow he managed to drag himself along to watch the final performance. He hadn’t eaten for five days, was very thin and weak, and two hours beforehand had been so hot that I had to sponge him with cold water.
Anyway, the performance was great, and the audience loved it.

Our car insurance was due this month. Jon had sorted it last year so I asked where he’d got it from and went along to renew it. The office was closed, so I went back later and it was still closed. Kira and I peeped in through the lock in the door and it appeared to have closed down. We went to another insurance company. Companies produce a certificate for you to stick on the inside of your car window.
“I can’t give you your certificate” the woman said after she’d taken my money “my typewriter is broken.”
So we got in the car and went to another insurance company. They were out at lunch, so we went to yet another one (the fourth one I’d visited). Fortunately the woman there had a typewriter which was working perfectly and I managed to get my car insurance. Then I had to take the woman back to her office.

Some Ugandan ways we find difficult to deal with as they are very different to what we are used to. For example I was standing in the queue at Umeme, the electricity company, to pay my bill. A man was before me getting served. While I was waiting, another man came to the counter and stood next to the man who was being served. As the first man left, the other man pushed in front and gave his bill and payment to the woman behind the counter. I told him I was next, so he moved aside and stood next to (not behind) me. I gave my bill and payment in, and then a woman came in between us and pushed her bill and payment in front of me on the counter for the assistant to deal with.
Another time I was at the bank (aarghh, banks! aarghh) and when I got to the counter the man behind me in the queue came to the counter as well and stood beside me. He was very big and stood so close that I couldn’t actually get to the counter window as he was blocking most of it.
Sometimes if there is a queue Ugandans will go right up to the front and go behind the person working at the desk and get served there in front of others in the queue.
One thing I’d never really thought about until I came here was how men will always let a woman go first through a door. Here it’s vey different, men don’t let women go first, in fact they rush to get to the door before you or push you aside!

It’s very common to have geckos on your wall, both inside and outside the house. They are good to have around as they eat flies and mosquitoes. However, they do leave pooh around the house, and you need to check surfaces in case any has appeared overnight.
One day I decided to make myself pancakes for lunch while Jordan was at home recuperating. I made up the mixture and then popped in to see that Jordan was OK. When I got back a mozzie had landed in the mixture. I threw it away and made up some more. As I was making it, a fly dropped into the mixture. I decided to take a risk by taking the fly out and carrying on. I cooked a pancake and as I turned it over, discovered it had gecko pooh in it. We’d left the frying pan on the cooker overnight and I hadn’t noticed because the base of it is black. Groo!
I guess I wasn’t meant to have pancakes that day…

I’ve been quite creative recently, not only have I been producing some paintings for children which I’m aiming to sell, but have also produced a Haiku e-calendar with a verse for each month and a photo taken by one of us. If you would like a copy which you can print off, go to http://www.successfulspeaking.co.nz/products/

We are off to one of the national parks on 30th for three days. Will let you know how it goes













Jon has finished his masterpiece now – very impressive!

November 2009

At the beginning of the month I was being driven mad by the lack of variety of food here, and had got to the stage where I was hardly eating anything, as I couldn’t face another meal of mince and rice, or corned beef hash yet again. Jinja has much less variety of food than Kampala, added to which I don’t eat wheat, along with the fact that the supermarket food here is expensive.
A small tin of tuna costs 5,000/- (£1.60, $3.70), a biggish box of Kellogg’s cornflakes is 23,000/- (£7.40, $17), 500g of cheese costs 24,000/-, Heinz baked beans cost 3,200/- (£1, $2.40) and a normal sized pot of cottage cheese 16,500/- (£5.30, $12). And bear in mind that Ugandan income is usually lower …

Food from the market is cheap, and while there are many stalls selling fruit and vegetables, they all sell the same goods. There will be stall after stall selling onions, carrots, green peppers, potatoes (which they call ‘Irish’), tomatoes, bananas, mango, paw paw and pineapples. You can get apples and oranges (‘orange’ oranges, not the green Ugandan oranges which are quite bitter) though they are imported, and aren’t cheap.
You can’t however get any berry fruits, grapes, peaches, plums, pears, broccoli, celery or mushrooms here.
To maintain my sanity I decided to learn how to cook a few different meals (eg lentil dahl), and splashed out on some expensive items (eg muesli).

It is, apparently, grasshopper season at the moment. You can buy them at the market either raw (green) or cooked (orange). There are people cooking them in big vats and selling them for 500/- per cupful. I wasn’t tempted, even if it would have made my diet more varied!

As I hold the lofty title of ‘Jinja representative for the British Residents Association’, it was my role to round up the local British people for the Remembrance Sunday event, which this year was held at the Jinja African War Cemetery. I have never actually been to a Remembrance Sunday event, strangely enough, and found that it was a really nice ceremony. The war cemetery is small and beautifully maintained and there was a nice crowd of people attending. It was however very hot, and the area where we had to stand had no shade. A woman fainted with the heat. One of the people attending was THE doctor from Kampala that all white people go to. He took one look at her, said “Lay her down in some shade” and then left her to it! He had presumably seen it many times before, and sure enough she was up and about in a few minutes.
During the two minutes’ silence at 11am, I heard a little boy’s voice shouting “WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?” I turned round to look, and saw that it was the British High Commissioner’s son!

Another thing I have never done is have my hair cut since I’ve been here. I’m wary of using a Ugandan hairdresser as they don’t generally deal with hair like mine, so I usually get Jon to trim it with my dressmaking scissors. When I was back in the UK Jon’s mum (who is a hairdresser) gave me a proper style. Thank you Carol!
However, that was in June and I haven’t had anything done since. A hairdresser from NZ is now working here, though she is quite a way out of town and charges 40,000/- for a cut. One day I was waiting with Jon and Jordan while they had their hair cut by the barber (yes, Jordan finally decided to get his mane cut!), so I had my hair cut there too. It seems to be alright and he only charged 20,000/-.

Jordan’s main homeschool tutor and her family have gone home to the States for a month, so I’ve been teaching Jordan a lot.
Kira’s school term finished on 28th November. As it’s a parent-run homeschool centre, we choose our own dates. We have three terms, and had a short mid-year break so we could finish earlier at the end of the year as two of the children (ie almost 1/3 of the pupils!) were going home to Australia for two months. We had an early school nativity show on 17th with singing and dancing performances, and a school trip to a rainforest on 19th where the children used the swimming pool and had a meal. The local homeschooled children and their families were invited to join, so we had a decent turnout for both events.
It’s all very different to how we lived before.

One day I took a ‘snapshot’ of a morning we were having:
It's 11am, Jordan has just come back from a 2-hour sports lesson. This week it was golf training at the golf course, with the local Ugandan sports tutor Ronnie whose golf handicap is 0. He came back on a boda boda (motorbike taxi), got a drink of water and jumped back on the boda boda to go off for a Maths lesson at his Maths tutor's house. She is a Zimbabwean secondary school Maths teacher who is here for 2 years.
Jordan is very good at sorting out prices with the boda boda drivers - much better than me. “Mum you don’t ask them how much the fare is going to be, you tell them how much you are going to pay!”
Jon is working from home again today as it's the 6th day there has been no electricity at the place where he works. It's a challenge being an IT specialist in a country where there are regular power cuts.
I've been homeschooling Kira from 8-10am, and then took her to the homeschool centre she attends (only seven children there).
I'm about to go to Kampala this afternoon, staying overnight with friends, in readiness for a two-day course there tomorrow.

Jordan has started another carpentry ‘apprenticeship’ with a different Ugandan carpenter. Has made computer desk – very handy – and is now making a ‘geek workbench’ which Jon designed. Both he and Jon are planning to use it in the garage to do and make geeky things.
He’s supposed to be going to carpentry twice a week, but cannot go if it’s raining (not sure why… everything stops here when it rains). It’s the rainy season at the moment, which hampers things a bit. Today he was meant to go but the carpentry workshop has had no electricity for a week, which doesn’t allow him to do the work he needs to next.

Jon and I have finally got round to painting the canvases we bought a few months ago. We had to get the paints from Kampala, and it took us three trips to find the place! We bought just five colours, red, yellow, blue, black and white, and are making all the colours we need from those.
My canvases are 40cm square and are quite simple. I painted the colours to match the sofa, the cushion and the lamp. I want to sew small beads onto each canvas in a pattern that signifies the three parts of the world I’ve lived in: the UK, NZ and Uganda. For NZ I will do a koru shape - ie spiral, which is a shape significant to Maoris. For Uganda I will do the crest of the Crested Crane, the national bird of Uganda. For the UK, I did think of doing the top of the Catholic Cathedral in my home city of Liverpool, though it will look very similar to the bird’s crest, so I’m still thinking about that one. Any suggestions you may have are most welcome.
Mind you, I don’t think you can find any beads here, so it may be a while before I can do it. The craft tutor at Kira’s homeschool centre got some, but he had to ask a friend to bring them from Kenya. Whenever people travel to a different country, they will always have a list of things that people have asked them to bring back.
Jon’s canvas is huge, 1.5m by 1m. He’s drawn a rough sketch and has just started painting it.

We have started to put curtains in our house. The house was newly finished when we moved in and had no curtains at all. We put sheets on the bedroom windows and have managed without curtains in the living and dining rooms. The landlord said he would let us choose and pay for the curtains, and then take the money off the rent. However we have been hoping to buy the house, and if that happened we would put good quality curtains up. We have been asking over a period of months if we can buy the house, but the answer has been ‘no’. I don’t blame him though, I wouldn’t sell it either, it’s in a good area and will increase in price.
So we’ve now started curtaining the place and it’s amazing how different the rooms look with curtains. They’re something you normally take for granted, but it’s been quite an exciting experience for us.
I’ve been mainly using a local curtain shop to buy the material.
There are many, many people here who sit in the market or outside shops with treadle sewing machines (as you don’t need electricity for them) making a variety of items. The curtain material shop has a woman who sits outside with her machine and makes up the curtains. We chose the material and went back an hour later and they were already made.
However, we have had our usual challenges of making ourselves and our ideas understood, and I’ve ended up with not exactly what I asked for, but they are curtains and they are mainly OK.

Today I went to order curtains for the living and dining room. The sewing machine lady was asleep on a mattress at the back of the shop and we had to climb over her to see the material. The average Ugandan working in a shop or market stall, works very, very long hours and it’s very common to see people asleep at their place of work. The Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 mentality is a world away from how most Ugandans live. Their work is virtually their life, and they live and work long hours, in a community setting. Some friends or ours came back from a party at 3.30 in the morning and there were still many roadside stalls open.
There have been times when I haven’t been able to buy things from the market because the owner of the stall has been asleep.

As we can’t buy the house we are living in, we have been looking around for another one to buy. We don’t want to live in it, as we are happy where we are, but want it as a rental property. We have found a nice one, and it happens to be one we looked at (once) last year when we were looking for a house to rent. We met with the owner and asked if we could look round it again. He was surprised “You have already seen it. It has not changed.”
He didn’t arrange for us to have a look at it, but we know the people who are living there and had a look anyway. We are now in the process of getting some reports on it from the electrician and builder.



This billboard poster never fails to amaze me, every time I see it.
I cannot understand why you would be drawn to join a bank which assigns you a GIGANTIC banking consultant who produces a tape measure and measures your boob ….



Jon went to Kampala for an internet conference for a couple of days. I don’t know what it is about him leaving, but things go wrong when he does. Just after he left Jordan used the mixer tap in the kitchen. It had been leaking slightly, but it now started leaking a lot, spraying water everywhere. Jordan had a go with the wrench and almost stopped it, but at this point it broke and the water came shooting out, soaking him, then me and the kitchen. We had to switch the water off at the mains. As it was Sunday evening there was no point calling a plumber, as we needed a new mixer tap for him to be able to fix it.
I called him the next morning. I think he must have been walking past our house as he arrived almost instantly. Anyway he went off into town and got a new mixer tap and fixed it.
“You need a new washer” he said “this one is too hard. It needs to be flexible.” He showed me the old, brittle washer and then showed me the new flexible one he was installing. I thought it unusual that it was red and yellow. Then I looked on the floor. There was half a flipflop / jandal there with a circular hole in it. That’s what he had used to make the new washer out of!

One of the things that I find quite affronting (if that’s a word) is the tone of the wording on the electricity and water bills. Even though I always pay our bills when they come in (we pay by cash or cheque – I wouldn’t trust the banks to sort out APs or DDs) I never feel they really appreciate my custom or willingness to pay promptly:
Water bill: ‘Dear esteemed customer, we would like you to enjoy our services without any inconveniences. We encourage you to urgently settle your water bills to zero upon receipt of this invoice to avoid being disconnected. Please expect no further warning.’
Electricity bill: ‘Thank you for keeping your account up to date. You are however advised to settle the current bill by the payment due date.’ (Why do they need the ‘however’?)

Similarly when I saw the school reports of the three children we sponsor, the wording seemed very old fashioned and harsh. It was like looking at the school report my Nan had shown me. My Nan was born in 1911 and her report was from around 1916. There were no positive words, no words of encouragement on the children’s reports. Just words telling them they weren’t performing well enough. Even the report of the littlest one, aged 5, who came 2nd in class said ‘Try harder next time’.

The people who asked us to look after their dog, Lotte, were due to come back to Uganda in November. However the woman is having a baby and as they are German they are going to go to Germany to have the baby and will return in August next year. This is good timing as that is when we plan to leave, and they would like to have the dog back.
The man, Jens, came back for a week recently and came round to our house. Lotte hadn’t seen him for a year but recognised him as soon as he came near, and was very excited. It was very sweet!

I’ve been doing some presentation skills training in Kampala for the British Council and am fortunate that I can stay with our ex-neighbours Eric and Lindsay, and Lindsay’s teenage twin children. They have 4 dogs, one of which ate a hairy caterpillar recently and came out in a bad rash all over its face. Another one ate a dead rat and as a result got botulism. It has been lying paralysed, unable to move. Over a period of weeks it has started to regain some movement and is now using its front paws in order to drag itself around.

One of the things I like about running presentation skills courses is that people often give interesting speeches. One of the attendees on one of the courses – James - told us about an incident that happened when he was 4 year old. He used to live in a village 260km from Kampala. His father was the village chief and was invited along with some others to go to Kampala. As James was the oldest son, he got to go too. None of the villagers had been to Kampala, though they had all heard that it was a place where it never went dark. Visiting Kampala was such a momentous occasion that the night before the group left, the whole village came out to celebrate.
Early the next day the group walked for 22km to the bus stop. They arrived at 8pm and slept at the bus stop until the bus came at 5am. The bus only seated 35 people, and while the driver allowed 70 people to get on, there were too many people, so one almighty fight broke out to see who would get on the bus. James and his group got on. All the children sat on the floor, and it took them a day and a half to travel. They had a great time in Kampala then had to do the whole trip in reverse. James is now 48, but because it was such a momentous event he remembers all the details very clearly.

Lindsay is one of the committee members for the Caledonian (ie Scottish) Society in Uganda. Every year, to celebrate St Andrew’s night on 30th November, they bring out a Scottish ceilidh band - three people, who play the fiddle, drum and accordion. The Society get funding, this time from a cellphone company, and give the band an all-expenses-paid trip out here. The guys love it. They get to leave the frozen Scottish wastes and come to a wonderfully warm and sunny land. Their flights are paid for, people provide accommodation, and all they have to do is entertain people for a few hours. They party till after dawn and get taken out to barbeques and get-togethers. They do some sightseeing, all of which is paid for. Last year they went on safari. This year they went on a boat trip, a light aircraft flight, a visit to an animal sanctuary, along with a trip to Jinja where they did quad biking. All this to do something they love doing - and they get paid for it as well. I went to the ‘do’ the night after the St Andrew’s day event which was held at the sailing club. We got a boat over there. The scenery is just stunning. Very beautiful.
They were a good group of guys, and they did a good ceilidh.

We plan to be around here over Christmas and then go to Queen Elizabeth National Park (a game reserve) over New Year. We will be staying at Simba Safari camp http://www.ugandalodges.com/photogallerysimba.php We will share the photos with you.