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...