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!
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