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!