Reverse Culture Shock

I was a bit surprised today to notice reverse culture shock. I was going for a jog (enjoying the cool mornings), listening to a podcast discussion on the value of democracy and found myself infuriated by the triviality of it all. There are many people without water, electricity, food or healthcare all over the world and yet someone has made a podcast in which they discuss why more young Britons don’t vote. It’s so unimportant! They would vote if they wanted to. The fact probably is that they live in comfortable enough societies and don’t really care.

The other thing that annoys me now is when people on the news complain about things like state pensions or school provisions. These are amazing things already! A free education – that’s a wonderful thing!! And yet what gets reported on the news is people complaining that they didn’t get their choice of school. They should try an exchange program to see what it’s like sending a child to school in Uganda. There they can watch their child do 12 years of schooling, paying money to send them to go to a government school, and still emerge unable to speak English (the country’s official language). Next to that our problems seem pretty small. If we’re going to live in a world where there are massive inequalities, the privileged half ought at least to appreciate it!

As I was thinking this I notice that someone (presumably the local council) had put down a new path in the field I was running in. I decided to follow it. It was very nice but potentially also a little unnecessary. Maybe someone could have taken that money and donated it to send 30 Ugandan children to school.

I trust this reverse culture shock will wear off soon. It doesn’t do to be so anxty.

My Ugandan Transformation and 'the Introduction'

Today at 7:30 am, my neighbour came round, flanked by my host mum and brother to see me put on a Gomez. I should at this point introduce the Gomez: it’s a traditional dress worn by women in East Africa. I actually think it predates the existence of Uganda as a country. It is long, has pointy shoulders, and a big bow around the waist. Although this sounds horrible, they are at least made from very nice material. I had blue one that felt like silk. When I was shown the neighbour's family collection and invited to choose one I couldn’t help but feel a little baffled as to how they got funded since the dresses are absolutely exquisite and the neighbour was of more modest means.

The reason We were planning to go to ‘an introduction’ later that day at which I would need to wear the Gomez but this early morning affair seemed to be more of a trial run, to see what happened. In all fairness, I’d tried on one yesterday too, so I kind of knew the drill. What was more troubling was the shoes that went with it. I seemed to be a little on the short side and so the most towering heals were dug out. In the end I settled on a pair of platforms. They seemed to be the best fit and they gave me the height, but at the same time I’ve never worn a pair of platforms outside a shoe shop before on the basis that I’m not safely mobile in them (let alone when there’s a long dress to trip over and an uneven road surface).

At this point in the day I actually had no idea what ‘an introduction’ entailed (so I won’t spoil the story for you by getting ahead of myself) but what I did know was that it was the time that the bridegroom met the bride’s parents for the first time. I figured it was pretty important that they get on.

Anyway, back to the day. I had planned to do a couple of jobs in town – I did ask if I was allowed to take the Gomez off in order to ride a bike in and this didn’t seem to be any problem at all provided I was back at 10am to get dressed. I therefore assumed, quite wrongly, that an introduction would be a lunch affair.

When I did dutifully present myself at just past the hour to visit Peace (my beautiful 23-year-old neighbour) we went out to make an advance payment on some transport to take us to the ceremony (this was fair enough as I wasn’t walking anywhere in the shoes that’d been lined up). At least, this was where I thought we were going but we actually ended up in a salon (the sort of salon with bare brick inside, bare mud outside, a corrugated roof and shoes removed on entry) where the owner greeted me with a disproportionate quantity of joy. There were laughter and hugs before I was seated and oil was worked through my hair by Peace, so that it was very soft, but also quite greasy. Then it was brushed, I gave them money for transport and I was sent on my way. It’s an odd sort of deal where a bus journey comes with an inclusive salon trip, but there we go.

Next stop was home where I was asked to retrieve my nail varnishes so that my nails could be done. By this time it was gone 12 and I was quite convinced that we were missing the ceremony. My host mum has a little shop outside our house and she often sits outside it on a wooden bench making mats. It often has the feel of a ‘women’s club’ as any number of local ladies can be found there, aged from 2-92. I’ve never seen a man sat there though, not even a toddler. Anyway, we joined the ladies on the benches, I took off my shoe, rested my foot on a convenient piece of brick and Peace painted my hands and toes. Then she sent me off to bathe (which was slightly impractical as the varnish hadn’t dried yet; also I’d already bathed once that day, but in a country where most people see deodorant as…well, a great unknown, such formalities must be observed). So I dutifully went off to get a shower, and tootled back down the track to Peace’s house to get dressed. I took with me my greatest asset: my mirror. We’ve bought it in the market and the ladies are always excited by it. Peace and her sisters were no exception and soon her eldest female sibling, Viola, was putting on my excessively pale foundation in the mirror while Peace’s mother (who is in her early 40s) was helping me get into my Gomez. Underneath the Gomez goes a large blanket, folded double, wrapped around the wearer, tied at the waist, and then folded down so that the waist has twice thickness of padding. This, I hoped, would give me a bit more of an African derriere. Next the Gomez goes over the top. It’s like a short-sleeved Japanese kaftan, but it fastens with just 2 buttons on the left breast. At this point there is about 2 meters of excess fabric that is pleated and held against the wearer with the help of an enormous belt which is tied to resemble a comedically sized bow which has come undone. I hope I’m describing all this well enough for you to imagine it.

After I was dressed up, it was the turn of the other girls. Peace put on a lovely yellow Gomez. It was a mild yellow with brighter detailing and looked gorgeous against her dark skin. Her younger sister (aged 20, not as beautiful as Peace, but with all the personality and more) put on a bright pink one. I enjoyed the fact that we were all in very different colours. It was very sweet seeing their mother help to dress them with the same love and affection she had shown me. It was Viola’s first time to wear a Gomez too, so she was quite excited. I really enjoyed the ‘girls are getting ready’ atmosphere and shared my make up around just as we did when we were 14. Peace put a French plait in my hair (which is still in now as it’s not something I get to model every day!) I felt like every aspect of my appearance had been spruced up ready for this ceremony. My dress, my shoes, my nails, my hair texture, my hair style, my makeup and my overall cleanliness. Eventually we were ready to go, so I put the shoes on and tried to negotiate the steps outside the bedroom door. Now, I should explain that these shoes were my host mama, she must have been a bit of a diva back in the day because they were silver spangly 1 inch platforms, with a suitably high heel to go with them. It’s the type of shoe I’ve never bought because when I’ve tried them on in shoe shops I’ve had to hold on to the shelving to stay upright. To don them now and have to walk down very steep steps (the first one is at least 2ft higher than the second) was challenging. Then, at the bottom of the steps was sun-baked hard mud; a difficult terrain because it’s shaped when the mud is wet and squishy and then sets hard in a lumpy pattern; a far cry from the shoe shop floor!

As we walked down the street we attracted a lot of attention. I only noticed it a shade or 2 more than usual, but the 2 sisters with me felt like A list celebrities (and well they should, when a girl’s spent the entire day getting ready, she deserves such a feeling). We sat ourselves down in a local house and waited for the car to come and pick us up. It was a mud floored but brick walled establishment. More and more women arrived, astonishingly no 2 were wearing the same colours and when the rainbow had been exhausted some polkadots showed up. I can only assume that this is simply fantastic coincidence, but it amazed me. Every woman who arrived remarked on how smart I looked in their traditional dress. I found it a bit hard to interact with the crowd since they were all speaking their local language (I’m not even sure which one – there are two locally!) but I had greater problems to worry about because (as I had predicted from the start) my current body temperature was somewhat hotter than the sun.

Eventually, after we’d sat in the house for the best part of an hour, a bus came to pick us up. It took us as far as a village water pump, where we got off, met more colourful women, and were presently assigned a new bus. It transpired that the reason for all the waiting and the reshuffling was that everyone had to be able to travel together so we would all arrive at once. The busses were gender segregated and just before we arrived, we all stopped again to wait for the latter vehicles to catch up. It sounds quite simple written down, but owing to the language barrier I had no idea what was going on at any point. When we arrived two queues were made, behind a decorative arch that would lead into the venue (which I shall introduce as a make-shift verandah lined courtyard. The verandah was made by gazebos filled with plastic chairs, they were arranged in a square shape so that there was clearing in the middle). The queues were sorted male and female, and much to my alarm the female queue was formed behind me. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do with it, lead a conga? Then someone came to stand at the head of the 2 queues, I think he was fulfilling a compare role and presently Peace (who was standing directly behind me) whispered that he was telling the crowd I had come from the UK (true) and been in written correspondence with the family to ask if I could attend the ceremony (not true). After the speech I led the ladies to their seats (actually a very simple procedure) and was directed myself to sit down right next to the parents of the bride, a location I don’t think I very well deserved but at least I was on a plastic seat while they were on a sofa, which made things slightly better.

We watched a procession of people dance into the square, kneel in front of the parents of the bride, make some speeches (which I couldn’t understand a word of) and then dance off again. In between these, there were 2 men on opposite sides of the make-shift courtyard, each with microphones acting as compares. I think there was one representative from each family. I was perfectly happy not knowing what was going on until Peace lent over and whispered, “next they’re going to get you to talk”, I was a bit alarmed but sure I could manage to say the right words so I asked what sort of thing they wanted me to say. In response Peace just told me to try and keep calm, which unfortunately had the opposite effect, because I feared I would be required to give a speech to a couple of hundred people on an unknown subject. In the end I was passed the microphone but the compare closest to me and the other guy asked me a question in Luganda (or at least that’s the language I think it was in), Peace whispered an appropriate response in my ear, but since I didn’t know what either of them had said, I simply assumed he’d asked me how I was (it sounded a bit like he might have) and so I responded “wrunji” (I’m fine) and it must have been a good answer because he asked me another unintelligible question. To which I answered in English and told him I didn’t know what he was saying, which strangely enough amused the audience tremendously.

In the midst of all this there was a huge rainstorm. The show went on but someone held an umbrella over the bride and kept dabbing her dry with a tissue. Everyone sat watching was ok, as there were gazebos, unless they were in the front row or struggling to walk in platform heels in deep mud. Either of those scenarios could be problematic.

Just as I was sat back and beginning to think I could enjoy the show I was told that I’d be next required to go up and present the bride with a basket of flowers & fruit. I should tell her that they were from her husband-to-be and tell her what all the items in the basket represented. The problem is that it was expected that I would talk about the symbolism and colours of the items but I’m perfectly aware that colour imagery varies from country to country (in India they wear white at funerals). I had about 5 minutes to gaze and the basket and prepare this. When we went up, I took the microphone and explained that the flowers represented the way their love would grow and bloom, the Fanta was because her husband thought she was sweet, and the bananas were symbolic of the way that their marriage would bring fourth fruit in time. It seemed to go down well enough and, as Peace reminded me, only half the audience could understand me anyway.

Next we brought in the dowry items on our heads in baskets. The groom had everything delivered outside, including a soggy sofa set tied to the roof of a truck. I must have done 3 trips to and fro to pick these up from outside and lay them down in front of the bride’s family. I was worried that everyone would balance these baskets skillfully on their heads and I’d be the idiot holding on to the basket, but not so. Everyone was steadying their baskets with hands. It was a tricky task because there were low hanging power lines overhead, which were exactly the right height to knock off my basket, at least one hand was required to keep my long dress out of the mud, and if I’d had a 3^rd hand I’d have used it for balance as I was wearing the most challenging footwear of my life, while it was quite slippery underfoot.

With that the ceremony was over and we joined the queue for food. I was actually told on several occasions not to queue but to go to the front. Now I can see why I would get special treatment during the service: these people have rarely met a foreigner and here is one wearing their traditional dress; but there’s no need to get special treatment when it comes to queuing for food. I said as much and indeed repeated myself several times at intermittent stages because no one seemed to be able to fully comprehend my willingness to wait in line to eat, even though I did have white skin.

In time we were all given small mountains of food. We sat down on the arms of the sofa set (because the seats were too wet) and tucked in. The challenge was that there was no cutlery. I copied Viola who was quite skillfully eating it with her fingers. However, I didn’t feel equally skilled; it’s the transfer from hand to mouth that’s tricky and I felt a bit like a human vacuum cleaner inhaling it off my hands, simply hoping that my hands were clean (an abject impossibility, I hadn’t washed them since my midday shower and I had greeted countless people since then). Fortunately though I had a bit of flat bone on my plate that had come with some meat. I soon turned this into a makeshift spoon and was feeling rather pleased with myself until I heard a snatch of gleeful English over the loudspeakers “I like the way the muzungu eats”.

Next was the cutting and distribution of the cake. At this point I was shamelessly exploited by Viola to get extra cake. Every time a distributor came near she would wave and say that I hadn’t had any yet. In this way Viola and I both consumed 5 pieces each (luckily no piece is larger than 3cm squared and so that’s not gluttonous) and I hadn’t the heart to refuse (as I was holding out for a piece with icing – a rare treat if you chop an ordinary cake into enough small bits). It’s amazing what seems like a good idea when you’ve been missing all sorts of sweet treats for 6 weeks.

The HUGE party that wasn't

With a couple of weeks to go to our departure my host dad announced that he would hold a party in our honour, for all the volunteers and their host parents to say goodbye to us all.

As the time drew nearer his plans got ever more elaborate and I greatly doubted them. Apparently there was to be a priest to bless our air travel and a local council member. All of this in our dusty  back yard, I couldn’t imagine it.

On the day itself I turned up at 5pm and was absolutely amazed to find that there were a couple of hundred people in a marquee in my back yard. Where had they all come from?! I only live in a little village! They were all sat patiently on white plastic chairs, presumably awaiting my arrival. I hurried across the ‘stage’ in order to get to my bedroom door and put my bags down. Apparently everyone else had been told that the party would start at 2pm and so by their reckoning I was quite late, but not as late as my fellow volunteers, most of whom hadn’t arrived yet. No sooner had this message been conveyed than it started to rain. Heavily. Before I knew it ‘the party that wasn’t’ became ‘the party that was, in my bedroom’ as 100s of people scrambled to find somewhere to shelter – the marquee wouldn’t take all of them.

It was a bit awkward, hosting so many unknown people our bedroom, slightly wondering if anything would get stolen and cooking alive with the heat of so many bodies in so little space.

After about an hour of this the rain subsided, it was decided that there would be no more party, blessings, speeches, presents or dancing, just food. I helped to distribute this in a generally chaotic way (not chaotic due to my presence you understand, it just was). My host sister’s bedroom had been converted into a kitchen and it was like a Mary Poppins’ larder – I had no idea what we had available, but the food kept coming and I kept putting it on plates (my host dad was absolutely delighted that HIS white person would lower herself to the standard of a woman by helping to serve). When the plates ran out we reused those from people who had finished eating. It was a feast by anyone’s reckoning.

Once fed, the crowd melted away.

It was humbling to think that they would wait 5 hours and brave a rainstorm all for a free dinner.

The Markets of Kampala

When the volunteers had graduated from my care, I was left to my own devices and so I decided to visit the city of Kampala. It doesn’t particularly feel like a capital city. Key landmarks include the museum, a tiny national theatre, the hotel where the Queen once stayed and a big statue celebrating freedom that a man with a gun, clearly not sympathetic to Uganda’s young tourist trade, sternly told me not to take a photo of.

What really stands out in Kampala are the markets. The markets are amazing. It’s like every other marketplace in the world is trying to be more like Kampala. All the clothes there are second hand and so no two pieces are alike (imagine that Camden!) but store holders specialise so that one person will only stock shoes, their neighbor stocks trousers etc; in this way browsing is easy. Prices are cheep. There are also slightly indoor parts so that when it rains browsers can stay dry; you feel like you’re in a tall clothes-lined tunnel with shops coming off it, but it’s not like the slightly frightening catacombs of some marketplaces I’ve been to. If you ever get the chance, go! It’s like nowhere else I know!

Turns out my volunteers also spent 2 days in Kampala after leaving the placement…but they only saw nightclubs. #TravelFail

A Crash Course in Traditional Culture

On Saturday we went to a village where a ‘famous’ group of musicians lived. We sat in a big semi-circle on plastic chairs and they made a great entrance by entering from 3 corners of the field we were in – a new surround sound experience. Their music sounded a bit like that of a very collectivist community, whereby they all played their respective at once, at the expense of any kind of tune. If I were a less respectful and cultured individual I might be tempted to use the word ‘cocoffany’, but alas I can’t spell it.

As the ‘chief’ of the group I was required to come up and do some African dancing. The trouble was that this particular community had a traditional dance involving a lot of hip shaking. They can move their hips amazingly, very fast, in every direction and I can only move hips as though they are attached to two legs and a back.

At the end I was called up again out of my plastic seat, this time to receive a gift on behalf of the group. I was given a little whistle, which looked like a recorder (until it’s taken out of the player’s mouth and then you can see it has no mouth piece) and is referred to as a flute. I courteously blew it and made no noise at all. 

Happy Stories from Uganda: Eric the Vet

There was another one, a vet, that used to be like every other vet. In fact I remember his group of volunteers coming to a team brainstorm a few weeks back saying that they had no ideas; they couldn’t see how they would innovate this business to make it different from others. It's important to us that we don't simply promote copycat businesses but vets make sick animals well, you can’t change that fact (at least not without losing customers!) It was quite a challenge.

 At the time I remember comparing the traditional model of vets to private healthcare (i.e. you pay on a case by case basis when you get ill) and I suggested they try a more NHS-ish style business model whereby the customers pay a retainer to the vet every month, who receives money whether or not the animals are sick but then also comes out to the farm when needed and also does checkups so that preventative healthcare is possible. I didn’t hear any more from the group on this subject and, if I'm honest, I forgot all about it.

I was therefore fantastically surprised when one of the other pitching panels told me yesterday that the most impressive entrepreneur they’d seen was a vet called Eric who had secured 6 contracts with farms, doing checkups etc, making sure that animals didn't get sick, rather than just treating them once it was too late. He wanted money to buy new stocks of drugs for the animals and we decided to give him the full amount that he asked for.

Happy Stories from Uganda: Musa the Scale Maker

One guy we funded was a scales manufacturer (amusingly he wrote ‘made in Kenya’ on every scale so that he could sell it at a higher price). His workshop is in his mother’s house and he spends 15,000 shillings on hiring a drill for every set of scales that he makes but if we buy him one at 150,000 he’ll have broken even within 10 scales. He’s certainly not a wealthy man at the moment. I’ve had a look at his financial records; there’s a lot of money coming in and a lot of money going out. Ultimately though he wants to save up to go to university and study law. I’m not actually convinced that this is for the greater good because his business will take a hit and he almost certainly won’t utilise the qualification once he gets it (says the geography graduate!) I met a logistics student the other day who was planning to become a baker once she graduated – this isn’t an uncommon story. Quite the opposite. However, education is the key here - who knows what he may have the potential to go on and do. Also, he already employs a couple of other people and we hope that he'll be able to continue to provide more and more employment to other people here.

A workout at the Borehole

Today I had plans to visit the borehole. There hasn’t been water in our house for a week and all the Gerry cans are empty. I was quite looking forwards to this and set my alarm for 5:45am to be ready to go. Unfortunately my alarm clock decided (exercising more autonomy than the average machine should) to go off silently, and did this for at least half an hour before I noticed it. But it didn’t matter because the water was restored to our house overnight. Of all the timings! It’s ok though, I still got my trip. The thing about bore holes, as I soon learnt, is that you have to work incredibly hard to bring the water out of them. This didn’t register with me until I was half way through filling my first Gerry can. The guy who had been pumping water smiled at me and said I was doing it well but too slowly. He then took back control but when I saw the pace he set I wanted another go.  It is exhausting! With all this activity I may soon have the core strength of an oak tree! Happily after 3 cans filled (2 of which were half size ones) the locals were suitably impressed and I was sent on my way. This is a relief as I couldn’t have gone on for much longer.

Shower in a gerry can

As I write this I am terribly hot and sweaty. I could see my shiny reflection in my laptop screen while it booted – it’s a terrible sight! Emma and I have taken to going for pre breakfast runs on a morning (which, to be fair, necessitate a pre pre breakfast snack because neither of us can run on an empty stomach) hence the hot and sweaty sight. Today when we came back from our run, I jumped into the shower, only to find that there was no water there to accompany me. This was a terrible moment! It was only 8am but I’d already managed to work up a sweat and it was currently running off me in a rather disgusting fashion. Just as I was half way through a ‘baby wipe shower’ I was presented with a plastic basin and a Gerry can full of water. (I’m not 100% sure what the basin was for as I've been told that I'm supposed simply to tip the cold Gerry can full of water all over me). The most difficult part is washing your face, because I can’t lift the can with 1 hand (it's too big), there can be no dainty splashing of water onto the temples, instead there’s just a torrent poured straight into your face. I'd like to be the hardened traveller by now but I did let out an involuntary shriek when the cold water first washed over me, which amused the girls next door.

Goodbye Claude

Possibly you've noticed that it's been a while since we had an update from Claude. Well, that's because Uganda's most forgetful volunteer has gone home!

This came as rather a surprise to me because he forgot to tell anyone that he was planning to leave the program early. It turns out that as part of his degree he is doing a term in Hong Kong...he then forgot to accept his place on the program and so lost it, but the fact remains that he still had flights home booked on the initial assumption that he would be going.

I was a bit worried that he wouldn't leave, primarily because he had decided to book his own transport and I thought he might, you know, forget. But all went off without a hitch and he has gone to cause chaos elsewhere.

I've always wanted to Milk a Cow

This morning I went to visit my neighbour, Peace. She’s a beautiful young lady with a sweet personality. She’s 23 years old and has a 7-year-old child. She lives with her mother, uncle, 3 brothers, 3 sisters, her own daughter and nephew. Anyway, I was there because she had promised me last night when we went round for dinner that I could come today and milk her cow. It was quite a different experience to milking a cow in England. For a start the cow’s back legs were tied up to stop it kicking over the bucket, there was no milking stool, we just squatted next to it, the calf was invited in to start proceedings (thereby making it easier for the human milkers) and then shooed away. When I tried milking a cow in the new forest, its udders were so big that the calf couldn’t get down low enough to drink from them! The next part was much more similar to home – I was invited in, shown how to do things, then I took over and milked diddly squat. Actually, to be fair on me, I would have been exceptionally pleased with myself if it wasn’t for the clear indication from Martin, my teacher, that he didn’t consider my efforts to be very fruitful. He kept frustratedly showing me the technique again and so I gathered that I wasn’t quite meeting his standard. It’s all a case of perception! It’s a mystery to me how some people have a natural aptitude for milking. It will take me a long time! One of these naturally good people was Emma, who showed up some way into proceedings (having been absent thus far due to her early morning run, which I had forsaken due to the cow), took a few photos and turned her hand to milking. The jets of milk coming from the cow with Emma in charge pleased Martin very much. I was impressed too. We finished proceedings with a mug of fresh milk each. It didn’t taste like normal whole milk, possibly a bit sourer, but maybe that was because it wasn’t refrigerated. After all, it’s very rare for a Brit to taste room temperature milk.

Some people will use any excuse to stop running...

Yesterday morning Emma and I went for a run before breakfast (although to be fair, we do claim that this necessitates a small pre-breakfast-breakfast so we fuelled up on bananas). As we ran some of the local children decided to run with us, one of them took my hand, which made me feel a little lopsided. It’s not easy to run while holding onto someone’s hand, at least not if you’re as unfit as me. The first interesting thing we came across was a black line across the path that on closer inspection turned out to be the most enormous trail of ants who had built up sandy barricades either side of their road to make some sort of ant-esque superhighway. As we went on I felt a sting on my leg. You guessed it, as I observed them, one of them had decided to have a closer observation of me and got inside my trousers. The child very helpfully assisted in the killing of this rather mangled ant.

The second interesting thing that we came across was some men in a field standing amongst big piles of stone. If I’m honest, it was partly because I wanted an exercise break that I suggested we go over to see if they could tell us what they were up to. They could; their level of English was pretty good; they were mining stone. There was a child in the pit throwing up slabs, and a man sat on a pile of little stones with a hammer who was smashing up the big stones to aid in the proliferation of little stones. After watching for a bit, I realised that there were spare hammers and so I asked if I could have a go. The men were tickled pink that a white woman would try her hand at their work (of course, it’s easy for me, I can stop when I’ve had enough, so I don’t see it as arduous at all). I picked up a big stone, was surprised to realise it was solid granite, took a hammer in hand and handed another one to Emma (who had introduced herself to everyone as Anna as we find this new name catches on better). I hit the stone hard a few times and succeeded in nothing more than making some white marks on it, then all at once it fell apart. Not quite into pieces as small as I needed but all the same I was very pleased and kept up my hammering. As the person in charge of the health and safety of all the volunteers I was glad it was me, rather than anyone else, engaging in this extremely risky activity. Incredibly, the men were working while wearing flip flops and no eye protection, so I felt that at least my running shoes and glasses were a step in the right direction. It was probably no coincidence that most of them had missing teeth and so I reminded Emma not to smile while hitting the rock. Before leaving I looked down into the pit, and as if my mind were being read, it was suggested that maybe I’d like to climb into the mine to have a go at chipping off a bigger piece of rock. Yes, I thought that would be fun. So I lowered myself in (it was only about 8ft or so with lots of good footholds on the way) and climbed from bolder to bolder to the exposed rock face (it was quite flat, it looked like an enormous grey half-carved ham – very easy to see where you start) the footing wasn’t the best and I marvelled at the way anyone could do it in flip flops. When I was ready I planted my feet firmly each on a flat rock and was passed an enormous hammer. To be honest, this was my undoing. I could lift it easily, but wield it, not at all! I did give it a good go, but the effect of waving a weight of that magnitude unbalanced me on my feet and I struck the rock with all the force of a doctor tapping a patient’s knee to test their reflexes. I did have a couple more goes but must admit that I was not equal to the task, not by a long way. I wasn’t keen to stay in the mine as another man had started proper work some distance from me; his granite chips were flying over and able to deliver  a nasty sting when they struck me so I scampered out. Happily for my duty of care, Emma didn’t follow my example and remained the contented spectator.

When we got home I tried to act out to our host mother and aunt what we’d been up to. I’m pretty sure they thought I’d been using an overarm technique to hoe a field but they were suitably impressed.

Custard and Beans

Due to a communications error this evening there was no food at dinner time. Our host home thought we’d be cooking, we thought they’d be cooking and we’d be making pudding (something that’s nearly impossible to communicate because the concept of pudding doesn’t exist for most people in East Africa). Our host brother said that he was happy to go to bed without eating because he was used to it (which is surprising but maybe he had a tough childhood) but that he was worried about us. Frankly, so was I. Not least because the whole family might be about to go to bed hungry because of our miscommunications and that’s more than anyone’s conscience should have to bear.

I set about bringing together everything we had to hand and we put on a ‘supper of snacks’. (You have to be specific about things such as this here as even hearty foods like samosas or chapattis count as snacks). We prepared everything in the dark because someone has removed the light bulb from the kitchen (I don’t know where it’s gone but I’d question whether its destination could possibly be more critical) and eventually served hopelessly unripe avocado, Ugandan porridge, Heinz baked beans, cake, custard and 2 cups of English-style tea. The highlight of the meal were the beans, custard and cake. We struggled to persuade our hosts to separate out the sweet from savoury. It’s hard to justify the intrinsic truth that one should finish their baked beans before adding custard to the plate – that’s just the way it is. It was commented that custard is the sort of food that would make a Ugandan want to visit London, which is by way of the highest compliment around – our English food is not always much appreciated here and we’ve had a few unsuccessful introductions to it. The tea is a good example – I had put milk in it but no sugar and it was deemed undrinkable by our host mum. I considered this to be just as well because when I made the tea I had thought it was to be mine.

Schaffer's Glasses

One other interesting thing that’s happened recently was 2 nights ago, I went to see my host sister, Schaffer, at her boarding school. She’s 9 years old and before she went back to school she was the female that spoke the best English in our household (we can usually communicate simple things to her aunt and mother, but it’s not the same). She’s had a lot of problems at school because she has terrible eyesight. She had some glasses that enabled her to see the blackboard, but the other children thought she was being too showy, too ostentatious with her posh eyewear and so they smashed them. This is why she had to come home and how we came to meet her. She couldn’t stay forever though, blind or otherwise and so eventually she was sent back on the basis that she could still listen to the teacher even if she couldn’t see. There is a New Zealander who came to visit here in 2007. He still has very good relations with the household and funds Schaffer’s glasses. He doesn’t mind how many times she needs new ones and magnanimously replaces them as long as she gets to continue her education. As we were missing Schaffer at home, we went along to join her father as he delivered the glasses. It was a very nice task. Of course there was much excitement that 3 white ladies had shown up at the school and Schaffer was extremely shy. I felt that maybe I shouldn’t have come because the eyes of the school are more attention than any 9 year old should have to bear (particularly given that being a show off is the reason her glasses were smashed in the first place). Anyway, my moral worries aside, it was nice to be shown the classroom. It was dimly lit and there was a big blackboard. The desks, benches and floor were all made of wood; it was typical of the schools I’ve seen in Kenya and Fiji. Schaffer sat down in her usual place: the centre of the front row. She put her glasses on and we all watched as she started to read the board aloud, very slowly. The audience was big, it was composed of her father, teacher, us volunteers and then most of the children of the school, amassed in a semicircular crowd. Watching her able to read again was a very touching moment (in hindsight I’m surprised that I didn’t find it more emotional). Then I crouched down next to her, so my eyeline was the same as hers; I took my glasses off and tried to read the board. I couldn’t do it. As is often the way for people with eyes like mine, one or two words jumped out at me while others remained totally illegible. It was therefore rather unfortunate that the only thing I could read aloud to everyone was “Vomiting. Severe vomiting”. Although this was quite funny I also found it quite moving. I wondered how many children there are in this country who can’t see the board in their classroom. I’m lucky enough to be quite accomplished academically speaking, but had I been born in Uganda I certainly would have been a disaster. Probably an illiterate disaster. I’d quite like to support a charity that helps children to be able to see well enough to learn. I’ll have to look into it and see what my options are. But then at the same time, perhaps there are bigger fish to fry, like getting more children into schools at all. I’ll have to think about this… I know what my problem is – I can’t commit to any idea!

Claude in Trouble

Claude (the somewhat hapless volunteer) received his first formal warning last night (there's a 3 stage disciplinary program here: verbal warning, written warning, volunteer sent home). The trouble with him is that he has no idea what the rules are on this placement because he wasn’t paying attention when they were taught to him. He’s rarely paying attention any of the time. The key thing that he’s in trouble for, is deciding to sleep at a hotel with his new girlfriend (a relationship that sadly lasted less than a week as she had to go back to America. This is not necessarily a great loss as Claude does have another girlfriend back at home in France) without having permission to do so (the organisation are fairly strict on this - the volunteers do need to come home each night in order for us to keep them safe). While we're at it he’s also in trouble for not making an effort to fit in with cultural norms here. Specifically, he has decided that the standard of his host home’s toilet does not satisfy him and it transpires that he has regularly opted instead to defecate in his neighbour's field. Can you believe it?! We're all quite shocked but Claude can't understand why. I dread to think what would happen if he were caught and I hope to goodness that he doesn't pollute the groundwater supplying the local well. He’s also been caught riding on a motorbike as the 3^rd passenger. The trouble is that not only can he not remember the rule saying that 3 people is too many for 1 motorbike, but he can’t even remember doing it. His memory is that bad!!!!

A Baby and Breakfast

This morning for breakfast I was brought some watermelon, some tea, 2 samosas and a baby! The baby was a beautiful African child, about 2 days old. I don’t know what made it intrinsically beautiful, it certainly wasn’t its face, but it slept peacefully in my arms for a bit until I was quite unsure what to do with it. Emma had rushed off to meet her first entrepreneur and Emily, having overcome her initial insomniatic tendencies, is still fast asleep. It amazes me that any mother would let her newborn child be taken away by a neighbor to be deposited on the lap of a total stranger. In our culture babies are rather like phones: we like to keep an eye on them to make sure they aren’t being stolen (having already accidentally stolen one in Kenya,  I didn't want to repeat the crime!)

At long last someone came to clear away the breakfast plates and I managed to pass the baby on.

Moses' Karaoke Bus

My team here think it’s very funny that I allow them to get into over full cars. Yesterday we had 10 of us in a 7-seater car (which I don’t think of as a particularly remarkable event, though it was a very tight squeeze). For my part, I’m just pleased that I have a chance to prove to them that I’m not always beating them over the head with a rule book. We have a favourite driver called Moses, who is sweet, if not a little bit over keen on the girls. He drove us home last night after our Mexican meal. For some reason Ibrahim (a very chirpy volunteer from Palestine. He loves to chat and is always smiling) managed to convince him to sing to us because there was no radio. The whole bus was quieted while we listened to Moses sing to us in Arabic. From the back where I was sat, it was hard to hear him over the sound of the tires hitting the potholes. When he’d finished he requested that the girls in the bus should now sing to him but Ibra informed him that we were all married and we weren't allowed to sing. What’s more, no one had fewer than 5 children. 

Never before has male ownership seemed so funny.

One Great Grumble - Leadership can be Hard!

I’m currently in a mildly hungover state. I would be very relaxed if I couldn’t hear my team planning things on the other side of the room. I don’t like it when I can hear this. It nearly always means they’re about to complain about the plans they’ve made, the plans I’ve made, or Balloon’s health and safety restrictions (it’s very easy to say that safety regulations are unnecessary when you are perfectly safe; but they look pretty sensible retrospectively once you’ve been mugged or fallen off a motorbike.)

The hangover is related to the fact that we stayed up late last night drinking African Smirnoff Vodka, which I suspect is different to English Smirnoff Vodka and gives worse hangovers. It was really nice to bond with my team at last. I’ve spent all week being infuriated by them (they’re very hard to organise and appear to be consistently disinterested in any activities that Balloon would encourage) and so it was lovely to change this. Importantly they were inside a hotel and so there was no curfew (one less rule to break), I didn’t have to worry about where any of them were (provided they were still on the premises) and I had a stack of waiver forms in my bag so that I could be disassociated with any of them at short notice if I needed to. We spent much of the evening playing a drinking game called ‘I have never’ which involves one person saying something they have never done (e.g. I have never smoked a cigarette) and anyone who has done the thing has to take a drink. As more and more alcohol was consumed the tone of conversation was lower and lower. In the end someone came up with “since coming to Uganda, I have never waited for my roommate to fall asleep so I can masturbate”. I learnt significantly more about my volunteers than I ever wanted to know last night! (Worse still, it was one of my room mates!)

Breakfast in the hostel here is a slightly spectacular affair, well worthy of a mention. I sat on a long bench, high on a hillside, looking out over the beautiful Nile River. It’s very wide at this stage (and looks a little like a lake); there’s lush vegetation on the banks and occasionally we see some spectacular bird life.  I had a huge plate of homemade nachos topped with homemade guacamole, salsa and cheese. It was glorious!

I should explain that this is not at all typical of my days here. We are currently on a weekend away. My volunteers are very keen on being tourists at the weekend, which is a big source of tension between them and Balloon because we would rather they kept to a sensible budget (which allows the whole group to be included) and we’d like them to show more interest in the local community. Integration is something that seemed so effortless on my Kenyan trip and is proving more difficult to achieve here. If I had my own way I would have been at home today with my host parents, I would have been to see some traditional tribal wrestling (whatever that entails!); I’d have a chapatti making lesson and I’d seek out a local bar to watch the Ugandan Olympian compete in the swimming this afternoon. Still, you can’t have it all. I have to remind myself that it’s my job to tail these guys wherever they want to go at the weekend, at least within reason.

I appreciate that I sound quite grumpy! This is not really true. I have been struggling a lot this week with the team and it’s fair to say we’ve been fighting over where to go this weekend. The social committee wanted to take Friday off work in order to spend 11h travelling to some luxurious islands that are the other side of the country. They would then spend an extortionate amount of money on hotels there and break the balloon rule that bans volunteers from swimming in open water; they would be able to spend Saturday on the island but then leave at 8am on Sunday and spend 11h travelling back home again. Because of the expense involved, no volunteer could afford to do this on their weekly allowance alone and 1 didn’t have the personal savings for it either. As you can see, there are a great many good reasons I didn’t want to let them do this trip (and even when I was tempted to give in to their fury at my refusal to allow it, one of the key motivators was my own reluctance to spend 22 hours in transit!) So a compromise was allowed. They left on Friday afternoon after work to come to the tourist town of Jinja (it’s on the Nile and so a much more popular traveller destination than Kampala, the capital, because of the range of activities available). In all fairness it's a lovely location and the level of relaxation has really helped to heal the wounds of the week. In particular, drinking together in the evenings has helped to prove to the volunteers that I’m perfectly capable of being friendly and having fun. My fears that I was being made to pay money to spend a weekend trailing after people I don’t like have turned out to be totally wrong too. I’ve very much enjoyed hanging out with the team this weekend. At least most of the time (try to organise anything and it causes chaos again – we went to a Mexican restaurant last night: 1 volunteer didn’t turn up, 1 went to a chicken shop down the road, 1 didn’t eat, 2 shared a meal, 2 decided to leave but then reappeared a little while later because they didn’t have a room key, 1 got a meal then didn’t eat it. Only 3 people ate a meal in a normal and uncomplicated fashion and one of them was me! The funny thing was that it was generally agreed by almost everyone who ate there (and in one form or another 8 of us did) that the meal was the best thing we’d tasted in Uganda. If that’s a successful mealtime I live in fear of organising anything to an average standard!)

It’s fair to say that being a team leader is not easy. It was much easier to be a volunteer, that way I could always complain to my team leader when things were happening that I didn’t like. I’ve also noticed that people ask their team leader questions that they don’t know the answer to, even when I am no more likely than them to know the answer. The most common enquiry of this nature is ‘how long does it take to drive to…?’ or timings like ‘at what time does the hotel bar shut?’ While I don’t blame myself for being unable to answer these silly questions, I do worry about the other things. For instance, when my team is angry or lazy (or both, since these are adjectives that I would use to describe the majority of them more than 50% of the time) I do tend to blame myself. I worry that if I had managed them differently they wouldn’t be sat in the western style cafés at 11am on a Wednesday drinking avocado smoothies and complaining about their pillows. Making people act or feel in a certain way is a timeless problem (and the central premise to almost every romantic novel ever written) but it was something I thought would be easier. However, I joined a call on Thursday morning in which some very experienced staff members in Kenya reported having exactly the same problems, one of the founders of Balloon was on the line and he also reported that this was a really common problem on the fellowship programs. I am really pleased not to be alone in facing such challenging team dynamics!

Claude visits a Doctor

Although Claude stories have been a source of great amusement, he has actually been quite ill this week and so I took him to see a doctor so he could air his complaints of chest pain. (This is not a typical Ugandan experience because we're lucky enough to have access to private healthcare. Illness is no time for authenticity!)

We chatted in the waiting room for a bit (until I worked out that there are no queues, you just take your turn when you feel ready) and I was very alarmed when he told me that he derived much sexual pleasure from working with his entrepreneurs...it turns out that Claude has been reading the works of Freud (but not very critically!).

When we got into the examination room, Claude sat down, was asked what the problem was, and informed the doctor that he had a stone in his lung. The doctor took this information in his stride and despite Claude's best efforts, did manage to come up with a positive diagnosis: a chest infection and excess stomach acid. Claude was prescribed a rigorous schedule of drugs and syrups, which I was very concerned about him remembering to take. The doctor had different concerns, firstly he told Claude to stop smoking. Secondly he told Claude that if he ever had cause to cry in the night again then he (the doctor) should be notified. On hearing this Claude (who had no idea what was going on) assumed that the doctor was trying to treat him for homesickness and so refused.

It seems that the many medicines Claude has been prescribed have been doing the trick. Things have got better this week (although he did initially tell everyone that he had TB, so that wasn't a great start). Having said that, yesterday I found him smoking (an odd decision all things considered). I expressed my surprise but he assured me that in order to ensure he could smoke over the weekend he had stopped taking his medication so that it would be ok…I cannot even begin to imagine the logic that informed this decision! 

Claude Misplaces an Heirloom

Claude (the world's most forgetful volunteer) is currently wondering around topless (his preferred state) and although I generally advise that this is not good etiquette in Uganda, it’s actually a very good thing today because when he was wearing a shirt, it was his favourite one, the one with naked women on it.

We're currently on a weekend away and as you would expect, he’s losing things around the hotel. I was joking with the barman yesterday and advising that he didn’t give the room key to Claude since they only have 1 key for a dorm with 6 beds. I explained that if they found any items lost around the complex, it probably belonged to Claude. By way of an opportunistic response the barman cheekily pointed to some towels he had found abandoned. I recognised Claude's instantly. When I next saw him I told him where it was. This morning at breakfast Claude came to me, having totally forgotten the conversation, to tell me that his towel was lost…

Last weekend he misplaced something substantially more valuable: his watch. It is a very expensive model, went out of production 50 years ago and is a family heirloom (I didn't even bother to ask why he thought it was a good idea to bring this to Uganda). Considering that Claude's family are members of the French aristocracy, I dread to think how much it was worth! He thinks he lost it when we went to visit a swimming pool. The trouble is that it's taken him a full 4 days to notice that he doesn't have it and so he could have lost it anywhere! Nevertheless Claude decided that he would go back to the hotel where we'd been swimming and speak to the cleaners (who would have long since fenced the watch if they had ever had it) as well as offering a monetary reward on the local radio station to anyone who could return it. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone here who listens to the radio yet.

As you would imagine, the watch has not yet been recovered...

Learning to be a biker

So, Motorbikes. This is something that I’ve had to get used to. Everyone gets about here on motorbikes called boda bodas. At first I was very nervous about getting on one. Betty (my much-loved Ugandan colleague) explained to the driver that it was my first journey and he was nice and steady – despite the fact that I had wedged the ice cold bottle of water I’d just purchased between my thighs and his back, so as to have both hands free to hold on. As we travelled from supermarket to home, there were many moments where I couldn’t look – the roads here are busy and sometimes it was easier to shut my eyes than see him pulling out inadvisably at junctions. Equally, with my eyes open I could see potholes coming and be full of fear that he’d drive into one, allowing me to simply bounce off the back. While I seemed to see many inescapable holes coming with my eyes open, the anticipated bumps never came, which suggests that his judgement was always better than mine.

The next boda boda journey I did was on an untarmacked road, it was much more bumpy (which wreaked havoc with metrics of the pedometer that I  was wearing). Going downhill was reminiscent of a roller coaster and we got faster and faster. Without the water bottle in front of me this time, I had to keep remembering not to grip the driver with my thighs whenever I was scared. I was acutely aware that there’s a special term British motorbikers use to describe those who chose to ride without leathers. I can’t remember what the exact phrase is but it roughly translates as ‘he who wants to die painfully’.

Despite this, the more I ride the more relaxed I feel. We’re taught to be selective about who we get on a bike with – riders with number plates, wing mirrors and helmets are held to be more responsible than those without. I've come to realise that no one uses their wing mirrors, but those who haven't knocked them off tend to be better drivers. I’ve got my own helmet too which I take everywhere with me, the brand is ‘Care’ so I have adapted it using masking tape and pen to read ‘Clare’.

Now I've moved into my host home, bikes are the only way to get to and from town (another upset for the pedometer) and so I've had to learn to be a good passenger. We ride each day through a deep ditch created by railway tracks and despite the need to lean forwards/backwards I rarely bump the drivers head with my own (with about a 90% success rate) and mostly no longer hold on to the bike (like a local). I dread to think what my mother would say but I feel like a success!

Claude and the 20,000 Shilling Challenge

No month would be complete without a Claude update... All the volunteers were doing a ’20,000 shilling challenge’ last week as part of their training. They were given 20,000 shillings along with 24 hours and they had to pretend to be entrepreneurs, be innovative and make a profit. At the end of the challenge they must give back the 20k, but could keep the rest. The scenario that Claude's group were given was that they had to innovate a salon. They didn’t know the first thing about African beauty, not even what different hair styles were so they decided to make bracelets out of braided synthetic hair. Unsurprisingly they were having trouble selling this innovative new product. It’s particularly hard to do when you have only 12 hours and no shop front from which to sell from - all the volunteers went out on the streets to try and catch passers by. With time running out they needed a new sales strategy and so they approached a friendly music shop owner, who put on some tunes and the whole team started dancing. None more ferociously than Claude. A large crowd very quickly gathered to see the white people dancing (in fact I was passing on a motorbike and it was pointed out to my by my driver. Knowing that a white person causing a scene was likely to have something to do with my team, I ran over to see what was going on, swelling the ranks of onlookers further). The team used this opportunity to sell bracelets to the crowd, who struggled to comprehend that a white person would be dancing for business...They didn’t actually make a profit at the end of all this, but they made less of a loss than they would have otherwise made.

Flowers and Finance

One night I came home to find Yusuf, my 31-year-old host great uncle with a stack of papers. He very happily told me that he’d been working with 2 of my volunteers and they’d shown him how to record the finances in his shop. He showed me everything he’d been taught (which was actually quite long winded because there were a lot of examples which were not of particular interest at all). Through doing his finances properly for the first time he’d learnt that he was losing money on sales of oil (something he didn’t seem too upset about) and he was waiting until 9:30pm for the shop to shut so he could work out what had made him the most money in the first financial day on record.

We took him to the pub to help make his waiting easier. The establishment was so small that when we asked for 5 beers they didn’t have enough in the fridge. As it turns out the place was actually a brothel so perhaps beer wasn’t their primary focus (it’s only a small village, we haven’t many drinking establishments to choose from!)

When I spoke to his volunteers about this shortly afterwards they said that he had been some sort of financial records before we arrived…but that he’d drawn flowers all over them so that you could no longer see the numbers. Clearly the value wasn’t fully understood.

It makes me so happy to see someone gain the skills they need to steer them well through their business life.

A lesson in Western culture: Marshmallow toasting

One of the first things that the volunteers do with their entrepreneurs is the ‘marshmallow challenge’ (in which they learn to embrace failure and to put their customer (marshmallow) at the centre of their business). So yesterday I’ve been distributing marshmallows…and yesterday evening I introduced my host family to marshmallow toasting. We all crowded into the little dark outhouse that is a kitchen, even the men (although they didn’t pass the threshold by too far - men don't do kitchens here!) and toasted them on forks over the charcoal stove. While I was very pleased with the toasting, these guys hadn’t ever tasted a raw marshmallow before, so they didn’t fully appreciate the beautiful transformation that occurs when the foamy sweet turns soft, hot and gooey with that sugar crisp shell. My host sisters kept trying to store the finished article in a mug, which doesn’t work; if you eat cold toasted marshmallow it just tastes like burnt caramel.  Nevertheless, it brought the whole family together which was lovely. I’ve been asked to save a little bit of marshmallow for the youngest child who wasn’t present, which I’ve taken to be a very good sign.

An introduction to my Ugandan family

So now I’ve moved into my host home and while this isn't story-worthy in itself, it probably is worth describing so that you can imagine my whereabouts: Mama is a domestic servant and Papa is an esteemed business man. Luckily for me I’m treated like a guest here and so no one expects me to spend my days in the kitchen. I’m reluctant to change this status because for the women here, domestic labour is their life and I don’t have time for that.

I’m here with 2 other female volunteers: Emma and Emily. Our rooms adjoin, I get my own one with an ensuite, and the girls use my room like a hallway in order to get to and from said bathroom. The key problem with it is that it keeps flooding and my room gets very very wet, which I find rather annoying. (Actually, one of them has taken to going to the bathroom outside in the night, which is even worse as our heavy steel door can’t shut unless you slam it. The bolt also doesn’t slide across smoothly but needs to be noisily jammed up and down in order to move. We will have to talk about this…)

We're in the suburbs of Iganga town, it feels quite rural and we've got a number of chickens in the yard, now all with names (and featuring one called Edwina Curry). Our household is the furthest out of all the volunteer host homes. It's attached to a shop where our host great uncle (aged 30) sells grains along with our host mum.

Right now it’s raining too hard for us to leave the outhouse we live in and get the day started. It’s also raining too hard for the women to make breakfast, so I imagine if we did leave, there wouldn’t be any point anyway. I think that waiting for rain may be one of the key things people do in Uganda. It’s an incredibly lush country, at least it is in the countryside, in the urban areas it’s very very dusty. I was amazed to see rice paddyfields here! Apparently Winston Churchill described Uganda as the ‘pearl of Africa’ because everything that it’s possible to find in Africa can be found here (mountains, swamps, paddyfields, apples…).

I’ve just spotted Emily's underwear hanging from the bars of my window (I'm not imprisoned, but security against the outside world is a top priority here). I must’ve been too absorbed in blog writing to have noticed her hanging it all up. It’s actually bizarre that she hasn't hung these personal items in her own room. This is the kind of thing that you have to accept when you're living with unknown people in an unknown culture: many surprises! I'll add this to my future list of odd confrontations...

Uganda might be OK

When I first arrived at the airport at Entebbe, I thought my journey was over. Little did I know that I had a 6 hour minibus journey ahead of me! The population of the bus was mystifyingly small. There was Betty (not my line manager but my immediate senior – she was my friend and teacher in Kenya before she became Program manager here) and also 2 drivers. This may have been uneconomical but at least it meant I could lie on the back seats and get some rest. I woke up at about 7pm for a pit stop. Do not imagine a service station, rather a toilet block, hidden behind some shops (I had to wonder whose toilet it was?!) and many hawkers selling (amongst other things) baked plantain (savoury bananas) and barbecued chicken. This roadside food really was top notch and I began to think that food in Uganda wouldn’t be so bad after all.

The hotel here isn’t too bad either. There’s hot and cold running water (although in practice there’s rarely any difference between the two advertised temperatures), I’ve got a double bed, and the smooth but unfamiliar flooring material doesn’t appear to be concrete – you can put your possessions on it without having to clean them after.

It's a good start!

Introducing my team...Especially Claude

My team arrived on Saturday last week. This meant that I had a 11 hour round trip in the minibus to pick them up – not the best of days, but it was nice to meet them all. They seem a pretty cool lot. The quality that stands out more than anything is the diversity. One guy is from UK, Thailand and New Zealand. So between the 11 of us we can count 7 nationalities (despite having several bland people like me that only claim one).

While in the most part everyone is well travelled and/or street wise we have one notable exception: Claude. Claude is very posh, French, and turned 19 yesterday. Regardless of what he probably ought to be doing, he can usually be found without his shirt outside the classroom reading a book. His possessions can be found anywhere within a 2 mile radius because he has no idea how valuable they are in this country. So far he sounds a bit lovable and scatty. That was my first impression too. He was a bit of a liability because he kept taking his shirt off at inappropriate times (something shocking to the locals), but otherwise ok. Then, on the second day, the shirt that he chose to put on featured a large photograph of some full frontal female nudity. Plural. There were many nudes on the tshirt. We couldn't believe it! This is a culture in which I can't even wear shorts in order to be socially presentable.

On the third day we briefed the whole team on catching moped taxis but Claude didn’t want to practice. Upon being asked why, he told us wouldn’t feel safe unless he could take the wheel himself. Clearly taxi-ing was going to be a problem.

On the fourth day Claude decided to go for a run first thing in the morning by himself (as he keeps telling us, he likes to “explore Africa alone”). He inevitably got lost and then ended up paying a motorbike driver to bring him back to the hotel. He was so pleased to be back that he didn’t ask the price, but spontaneously gave the driver 10,000 shillings, which incidentally is 10x the going rate here.

Yesterday was Claude's birthday. He had gone to town with the group and they lost him (not surprisingly, as mentioned, he likes to "explore Africa alone" and so gets lost on purpose). To everyone’s surprise he resurfaced having been invited to the ‘stage’ (think roped off square) in a dance pop-up. Turns out Claude has talent and it is dancing. Sensing his opportunity, he immediately took off his shirt (because he had seen someone else in tribal dress without a shirt) and proceeded to amaze everyone. He tells me that he's had the best birthday ever and he has the video to prove it.

Delays and Dubai

My travel to Uganda has not been 100% smooth as my first plane was delayed by so long that I missed my connecting flight in Dubai. When I arrived in Dubai, I had to get a boarding card printed for my next flight by the air Emirates service desk. The chap I had been sat next to on the plane (Jessie, a multi-lingual bleach-blond first-year student, who was planning to revise for his university resits in Thailand) managed to get me to the front of the queue for first class passengers (some people have all the charm!) and I hoped that this swift service might help me get on board in time. Sadly not. So I hugged Jessie goodbye and was sent with a hotel voucher to the Copthorne Airport hotel as the next flight to Uganda isn’t until tomorrow. The man in front of me in the queue for hotel vouchers is migrating to Singapore. All his possessions arrive today in a container, while he will now be arriving tomorrow. This reminded me that my problems are small. The man behind me in the queue was on his way to New Zealand to teach rugby, he was issued a voucher to the same hotel as me so we strolled off together, and were presently allocated rooms on the same floor.

I did my best to send a message ahead to tell the organisation I'm working with about the delay but it was a real struggle because I was fighting to stay awake. Both the rugby teacher and I decided we would take naps until lunch. Although the bedrooms were very standard (I thought everything was done to excess in Dubai?!) the lunch buffet was glorious. The piece de resistance was that there was baklava for pudding (and lots of salad mum, don’t worry). There are lots of restaurants  and bars in the hotel including an English bar called ‘Biggles’ which I was very intrigued by – I’ve always wondered what international people eat at English restaurants. Turns out they eat shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, roast meat and curry. There’s that lifelong mystery cleared up. We had a couple of drinks there and I learnt that my companion (Will) not only went to Hoe Bridge School but lives in Woking and studied at Southampton.

In the afternoon we went for a walk. It would be a shame to be here after all and see no city. However, see no city was what we felt like we did as we couldn’t find anything particularly significant looking to see. Not even a sky scraper (how can a sky scraper hide?! I heard that there was meant to be one a mile high here). Nevertheless, in order to encounter all this nothingness we did have to venture out in the sweltering heat. It wasn’t long before we were both shining with sweat – not a good position to be in without a change of clothes. I dipped my feet into an office water fountain and even the water was warm! Presently we were offered a welcome interlude by the discovery of an ‘Irish village’ which needed some investigating and turned out to be a series of Irish pubs. Rather than being a non-smoking pub, or even a pub with a smoking area, we were seated in a small cordoned off non-smoking area of an otherwise smoke-friendly pub. How odd!

Before dinner there was time for showers.  I was a bit cautious in mine not to wash under my arms in case my deodorant was the type that lasts 48 hours. I can’t remember if it is, but it’s worth a chance. These are desperate times! My deodorant is in my hold luggage and so I won't see it again until I arrive in Uganda.

This evening we’ve been to a pool bar where we were served no drinks but had a lovely chat with the Egyptian bar man. Apparently Dubai offers him a much higher quality of life than Egypt does as there is “100% no corruption here”, one is safe walking in the streets and he is very pleased to have moved – you never hear that side of the story do you? I was always told that Dubai’s many migrants were an abused underclass.

The other interesting thing he told me was that he had a great deal of respect for David Cameron for resigning because in many parts of the world leaders hold on to power for grim death and never recognise that it is time to hand over the reins. That too I found very interesting since the only opinion I’ve heard voiced in the UK is that Cameron (and every other leader who has resigned recently) is abandoning Britain in her time of need. When you look at most other countries around the world the UK isn’t doing so badly really even if it does currently feel like it’s falling to pieces.

I’ve got to be up at 6am in the morning to catch tomorrow’s flight. However, I think this hotel is in league with Emirates airline (I found their logo on one of the doors to lend support to this theory) as breakfast starts at 5:30! They cater to every culture here and so serve dinner (incidentally featuring another type of baklava) until 00:30am just for the night owls. The chef must never sleep.

After the bar I feigned excess tiredness (difficult considering that we were 4h ahead of the UK time zone) and left Will to watch his hotel room TV by himself. But before I went to bed he gave me his number so that once my travels are over I can contact him in the UK and let him know how it all went. How sweet.

The Kenyan Lunchparty

Host parents are encouraged to take their surrogate children to visit other parts of Kenya if the opportunity arises. My mama went to visit her cousins today. She didn’t think to invite me but as if to compensate for her disinterest, Jane and I went to visit her host mum’s parents in the ‘interior’. I do not know where the interior is and there certainly is no ‘exterior’. I think that interior is just a way of referring to rural areas or less wealthy parts – maybe both.

We travelled there in a landrover so old that it still had ash trays built into the doors. However, it did have a full set of working seat belts, which I was impressed by. Our 18km journey seemed to be going very slowly and extremely jerkily. I leant over to Jane in the back seat and pointed out that we were still in 2^nd gear, hence the terrible juddering of the car, it can’t be good for the engine to be driven like this. If only this simple explanation were correct. As we pulled over Jane's uncle explained that someone had been cleaning his engine recently and so the petrol tank was full of water in addition to petrol. The sensation was much the same as driving at 50mph in 2^nd gear but evidently more complicated. It being a Sunday my hopes weren’t high of help, but to my amazement we soon had a team of 5 mechanics gathered around the car. I’m so grateful to them for getting us started again (not that the quality of the drive seemed to have improved much but at least the car was running). We juddered along, right up until the first hill. At this point we established a habit of getting out and walking up every hill to take the weight out of it. This worked well for some time but then inevitably there was a hill that was too steep and we could go no further. So the women abandoned both the car and Jane's uncle to go on foot (we actually wanted to help give it a push, and did make as if to do so, but we forgot that we were women and therefore not allowed to do such things!) There’s an assumption here that white people can do no work and are generally incapable. Jane and I always enjoy surprising people by proving this to be wrong (we’re the only whites that do their own washing for example) and so we delighted in walking the remainder of the journey. Not least because both of us rather like walking and the scenery was amazing. To my amazement the scenery was lush and green, set on steep hillsides. It actually looked like another country, perhaps an Asian-pacific nation. If you saw a photo of it and had to guess where it was taken, you probably wouldn’t guess Africa.

When we arrived we were greeted by Jane's 'host grandparents'. They are 95. Grandmother has had a stroke and it affects her right side but she’s a very plump and smiley lady. Grandfather is slim, walks bent double due to a life of hard labour that has given him back pain (but he can stand straightened when he wants) despite his advanced age and physical state he still digs in the garden on a daily basis. The ‘Shamba’ (farm) on which they live is an acre and they haven’t let their old age stop them from working on it. I was shown a tall tree with no branches and a narrow trunk by his children and told that he’d recently had to be scolded for climbing and pruning it. I was amazed. Aged 24 I couldn’t consider climbing that tree! The children incidentally have told him they’d rather pay a tree surgeon than allow him to swarm up it again, but apparently he always just waits for them to go and then does the jobs he knows they’d disapprove of. Some people here really blow away your expectations away about the life expectancy of ‘poor’ Africans. I don’t think many of us in the UK imagine people living in such harsh circumstances living to be so old (other people have forgotten their birth date – I recently heard of someone claiming to be 203) certainly not in a more spritely state than our own pensioners.

We were joined by 2 of Jane's uncles and one of their wives. The 2 men looked very similar and both spoke good enough English to convey some wicked senses of humour (1 managed to convince me that he had 4 wives). They are actually a family of 10 but many of the siblings weren’t present. Jane and I were given a tour of the farm while lunch was cooked by some ladies (I’m not sure who they were, I’m sure at least one wife was there but there were 2 others I’m less confident of). As neighbours caught sight of ‘muzungus’ (white people) in the site they popped round to visit. One old lady (who didn’t speak a word of English and I would venture, not Swahili either, I think she was chatting away to us in Kikuyu, her tribal language). She had a big bag with her and I was given the chance to carry it Kenyan style. Jane had had a similar experience the weekend before. Jane had been lucky, the bag for her had been quite empty. Mine was full of potatoes! Without realising this she offered to escort the old lady all the way to the main road. Oh my gosh! Happily for me, Jane also offered to take turns with me as we trudged down the little dusty track and the old lady took over before we reached our final destination. The lady (who can’t have been younger than 75) was delighted by all this and found it very funny (probably because it was a white person doing physical labour, which would have been considered to be quite startling) she chatted to us most of the way in fluent Kikuyu and so neither I or Jane (who is better at speaking Swahili than me as she’s got a social host mum who likes to teach her) understood much at all. (I did get one word, ‘gosh’, but it wasn’t much help in putting a sentence together).

When we got back to the house, which I probably ought to describe to you a bit better, it was nearly lunch time. The home is a series of out houses. I understand that it wasn’t always this way but as the family ‘progressed’ (in their words) they learnt that having a firewood stove in the house wasn’t healthy so they moved the kitchen outside. Also the animals no longer sleep in the main house, they sleep in the detached kitchen where there is a wooden pen. There are also outhouses for a corn mill and a couple of bedrooms. The building in which we ate was the biggest, it had 3 rooms, the one I was invited into was large (about the size of our kitchen), had a concrete floor, corrugated iron walls, it was gloomy with windows only on one side of the room, it was lined with an amazing number of chairs and there were 2 tables in the middle (but too many chairs for the seats to correspond to a place at the table). Living room chairs in Kenya are always decorated with cloths that are about the size of napkins and they always have matching sets. Even though this family were less well-off they still adhered to this slightly bemusing tradition. My host mum will change her ‘napkins’ every few weeks. At the moment we have blue ones with white trim, before that we had ones that looked more like woolen doilies, before that it was very big white ones (actually the latter set were more like table cloths than napkins). For lunch we had chapattis, peas and chicken. I was quite pleased about this because it’s a well-balanced meal (something you should never take for granted!) and I haven’t eaten chicken in a very long time. I really shouldn’t have been so pleased. I had served myself 2 pieces of chicken in the gloom. The first turned out to be kidney, or at least that’s what it tasted like, but it was much bigger than a kidney should be (about the size of a 10 year old’s fist), maybe I shall claim it was a lung. The second was a leg or wing, but had no meat on it, just skin. Nevertheless, I’m glad that it wasn’t a head or foot, because both of them were in the cooking pot. Also, I do love chapattis.

When all the plates were cleared, we were encouraged to have seconds. Surprisingly Jane and I weren't very keen to get more 'chicken roulette'. I compromised with a little more chapatti and veg. Then when this still didn't seem to be enough I had thirds. Despite this grand gesture, Jane's mum told everyone we met that her two girls wouldn't eat ANYTHING. Frankly, she feared for us.

I like Jane's mum.