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...