The night sky – an appeal

Look to the night sky in Uganda and you will see everyone’s favourite constellation, Orion, lying prone, instead of standing grand and erect like we’re used to, with his sword protruding magnificently from beneath his belt. If I keep going south, does he stand on his head, sword dangling comically? And if I’m in orbit, could I witness him doing cartwheels? He’s needs to watch out or he’ll stab the Great Bear in the eye.

Office Hours - Sherwood Forest comes to Uganda!

The other day, my boss was explaining to me his progress with finding a guard for our site. Getting ones with guns turned out to be prohibitively expensive, so he suggested getting ones with bows and arrows. He didn’t seem to understand what I found so funny.

Friendometer

The source of the world’s longest river, the Nile, is to be found at Jinja, where I spent the weekend. (I’ve thrown a stick into the river for anyone who’s planning a holiday to Egypt and wants to play international Pooh sticks). Jinja is a pretty chilled out place and the people are much more laid back than nearby capital Kampala – a good place, then, to notch up some companions on the friendometer.

Everyone seemed to be called David. David no. 1 was a guy of around my age. He took me all around the rapids where silly people pay hundreds of dollars to float downstream on an overgrown inflatable. He then took me via a load of villages to see where they’re building the new dam, which will put everything I’d just walked through under water when they finish it.

The next day I met David no. 2, a teenager who had cottoned on to the benefits of befriending the prolific Muzungu tourists. He didn’t go anywhere without his trusty stick – once a fishing rod but now a versatile instrument able to perform as a cattle prod, golf club, punchbag, imitation motorbike handlebars, and no doubt several other functions that I wasn’t there long enough to witness.



Close Encounters of the African Kind

As I clambered on the rocks around the mighty Nile, my insatiable curiosity drew me to explore a narrow path leading into some bushes. I met a guy on his way out, who stopped me with the following words: “Don’t go there. They go there to defecate. It is a bad place.” How charmingly he illustrated the importance of seeking local advice.

Special feature – volunteer Jo’s latest Close Encounters.

Since we last heard about volunteer Jo’s unfortunate experiences with weirdos, she has been accosted by a man with a beer bottle down his trousers, and chased down the street with a note detailing a phone number and the words “I am Indian”. My goodness.

Competition time

My uncle Simon is about 2 light years behind everyone else:
"In case nobody rose to the challenge, the letter you missed out of your blog was k which is ironic as it is silent in many words!"
Ironic enough to receive a point, in my opinion. Many of you will have also noticed that the blog has received a comment from my gran. There can’t be many grans who could even tell you what a blog is, whereas mine is so down with the kids that she’s calling things “xxxxxxxxxciting”. Definitely worth a point.

Ben 2
Julia 1
Nigel’s Dad 1
Uncle Simon 1
Nigel’s Gran 1

Despite all this gratuitous dishing out of points for anything and everything, I am actually making some genuine glaring errors of fact that are being completely overlooked. You are all disappointing me. It’s almost as if you’ve got better things to do.

Verbal intrigues

A guy phoned me up the other day and the conversation went something like this:

Him: hello, how are you?
Me: I’m fine, you?
Him: My friend has given me this number to call.
Me: OK, what’s it regarding?
Him: I don’t know, she just told me to call this number.
Me: Did she say what about?
Him: She just gave me the number to call.
Me: Why?
Him: OK, let me find out from her first.

It took all my willpower to turn my back on such a clarion call to sarcasm. I was burning up to say “I’ve got a better idea. Let me guess possible reasons, and you stop me when you think I get to a plausible one”.

In fact, such conversational guesswork is not alien to many Ugandans. It is perfectly normal to provide your interlocutor opportunities to finish your sentences for you, as if to prove they are really listening. Our good friend the District Chairman, of petrol station forecourt fame, was particularly fond of such an approach:
“It is important that the community feel ownership of the what?. Especially when they see people from the United what? They must feel it is their what?”
It’s a bit like verbal tombola. As you guess, several throws inevitably miss, but when you hit the right word, your reward is a spark of connection with the speaker. It’s not quite a bottle of wine, I know, but don’t underestimate its value.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

In the UK, we are not unfamiliar with the speed hump, amongst other traffic calming devices. You could be forgiven for thinking that Uganda has enough potholes to render speed humps unnecessary, and indeed, it doesn’t have them. It has speed mountains. It is not uncommon to find you need to put it in 4-wheel drive and engage the low range gears to negotiate them. Not only this, but you are given absolutely no warning that a mega-hump is imminent, meaning if you don’t know the road, you can get a nasty surprise. And don’t be thinking you can employ common sense to guess where to look out for them, because whoever decides where to put them clearly doesn’t have any. Which is why I got all four wheels of the office Toyota off the ground (and mine and Volunteer Jo’s bums off the seats) a few days ago when some plonker put one at the bottom of a hill in the middle of nowhere. (The close encounter was that of the wheel with the wheel arch upon landing).



Friendometer

Mrs Elizabeth Grant of Lordship Park, London (who else would live at an address like that, really?) wins the prize of a shout in my blog for the most devoted friend, as she was the first to send me a handwritten letter on a selection of beautiful papers (stolen from a selection of beautiful hotels, I might add). Maybe this is something that unemployed wives do – writing letters, I mean, not stealing, unless things get really desperate. This is the second time Mrs Grant has achieved such heady fame: as a Miss she won a shout in my South American blog for pointing out that Dulce de Leche was available in the UK. I should add that Lizzie, though a wife, is not unemployed through choice, and would appreciate a job should any reader wish to provide one. I should also add that the only reason she’s getting a namecheck really is because she’s promised me a Christmas Card in return.

Working Hours

I sent our attempt at a contract to be checked by a professional business consultant known to be a regular correspondent in the comments section of the present publication, and he had the following response:

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘you could drive a coach and horses through it’. I wouldn’t have a problem if I approached with the Exxon Valdez.

The rest makes painful reading.

Competition time ('spot the deliberate mistake', for those joining us late)

Come on people, this competition really isn’t about pointing out every last punctuation error, typo and verbal speck of dust you happen to notice, although I have to admit you’d all make superb proofreaders. You need to look at the bigger picture. You’re missing some glaring errors.

Ben did however notice the mistake of awarding a point to my Mum after I’d told everyone the answer, which means she loses a point and he gets one. This is a terrible thing to do to your own mother, I know, but I don’t want to be accused of nepotism.

My father has entered into the true spirit of the pedant by pointing out the difference between a retainer and a security, although I find his repeated citation of as disreputable a publication as Wikipedia distasteful.

Julia 1
Ben 2
Nigel’s Dad 1
Nigel’s Mum 0 (ooh, harsh)

And finally…

I’m starting to wonder if my parents are the only people reading this blog, given their monopolisation of the comments section. Where are the rest of you? Speak up!

The change game

If you visit Uganda you need to very quickly learn how to play the change game to settle the balance on everyday transactions. Anyone who has visited a developing country will be familiar with it already. These are the rules:
1. Your change is more valuable than the money itself. Don’t let other people get their hands on it if you can possibly help it.
2. When making a purchase, give the largest denomination note you think you can get away with. Which denomination this is depends on a number of factors:
a) The value of the purchase (of course). Don’t try and buy a banana with a 50,000.
b) The wealth differential. Don’t present a high-value note if it would be enough to buy the whole shop – you’ll cause embarrassment.
c) The cheek factor. If the transactee values customer service, they will scour the building to find you the right change no matter what. If they do not, they will look at you like you are crazy.
d) The probability of the seller actually having change. If you misjudge this, you’ll be waiting around while they play the change game with other people so as to be able to settle the balance.
3. Don’t expect to be able to change a note without making a purchase. It is ludicrous that anyone would give up their change for no return.
4. Have a contingency plan for occasions when stalemate is reached. This may include providing some item as a retainer while the change game is played elsewhere. Motorcycle helmets are more useful for this than they are for actually protecting your head.

Office Hours

Thursday was supposed to be a rare treat: a quiet day at the office. Here’s what happened next:

• The District Chairman calls – he has got us a bulldozer for free but we have to make use of it immediately.
• We don’t even know what we’re supposed to be bulldozing yet. The architect is the other side of the country.
• We find an engineer instead but he’s charging an exorbitant rate.
• We spend an hour weighing up the cost of us simply guessing where to deploy the bulldozer and hoping for the best.
• Someone threatens to torch one of our schools. The School Director has gone to Kenya.
• The construction director comes in and turns my precious gannt chart upside down.
• The road outside turns to a river, partly due to the most torrential rain I’ve ever seen, and partly due to the tears I’m crying over the remains of my gannt chart.
• We call the Big Cheese in London about the engineer. He reckons I could do the work using pythagoras’ theorem. I recall from GCSE maths that this has something to do with triangles. He eventually lets us take the engineer on, but with a contract. We’ve never written a contract before.
• The guy who tried ripping us off with the last (unrelated) bulldozer job turns up to make amends. We get him to sign an agreement to finish the work in his own blood.
• We call the engineer, who gets shirty about the proposed terms of the contract.
• The Finance Director and I write the contract anyway in the engineer’s absence and pray that he’ll accept it when he sees it tomorrow. My brain starts to hurt. But the brain is a muscle – the more you use it, the bigger it gets.
• We finish at 9pm and I realise with horror that I am turning into my father. Jo the volunteer (still gleefully attracting weirdos) later reassures me that her father is the same.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

I came dangerously close to exposing my ignorance on Wednesday. We visited the (as yet untouched) site of one of our new schools, and I noticed one sort of bush seemed to dominate, so I asked what it was. This provoked torrents of laughter from my Ugandan colleagues: “you drink coffee every day, yet you have no idea what it looks like!”

Friendometer

The aforementioned site is in a rural area where Jo and I attracted a considerable entourage of local children. Much status was gained in the group by those who dared to come close to the Muzungus – when one came close enough to touch me he provoked considerable admiration amongst his peers. (Rumour has it that East African children are told that if they are naughty, a white person with a big rucksack will come and take them away to Europe).


And finally…

On Wednesday, we met the District Chairman. Given that a district in Uganda is the size of a UK county, and given that he’s in charge of one, he’s a pretty important guy. Strange, then, to have a meeting with him on a petrol station forecourt. However, when we called him to arrange a meeting, that’s where he was, and there’s no time like the present, eh?

…Competition time!
The alphabet was missing K, you silly people! My Mum got there first, so it’s a three-way tie:
Julia 1
Ben 1
Nigel’s Mum 1

There a conspicuous lack of participation from my brother, who I’m sure is just biding his time. Like a tactical marathon runner, he hasn’t forgotten that this is a year-long competition. Expect a late break.

World Exclusive!

It is widely believed that Franz Kafka, the celebrated Czech author of ‘Metamorphosis’ fame, wrote works of fiction. In fact, much of his work was based on his experience of the organs of Ugandan government. The inexplicable bureaucratic processes that ultimately see, for example, Joseph K. of the Trial sentenced to death “without having done anything wrong” have been found to be close replicas of those still being practised in Uganda.

I went to re-register our NGO with the NGO board for the third time on Thursday (a process begun a heady sixth months ago). We had been informed the previous day that our application had been rejected due to a missing ‘Form F’ (we were OK with ‘Chart C’ and ‘Report R’). This was despite us holding a copy of our ‘Form F’ in our filing cabinet. So, clutching the papers tight, I waited patiently in a queue behind a handful of other people for the ugly lady to attend to me. When it came to my place in line, she said (and I quote) “I think I’m rather tired. Go to the office next door. Shut the door behind you.”

Swallowing my bile, I trotted off to the office next door, where I found the even uglier lady who had dealt with us the previous day. My eyes lit up – she would know exactly why I was there! Instead, she looked at me like she’d never seen me before and said “Why are you in here? Can you not see that this is a boardroom? There are chairs and tables! We do not attend to people in here. Go away!”

Which is exactly what I did. Am I being cynical in suggesting that if there had been a few US$$$s subtly protruding from between the leaves of paperwork I may have met a friendlier reception?

Things were even worse when I made a fourth attempt the next day, where I was actually treated like I was invisible. Words cannot express my fury.

This morning I woke up as a beetle.

Office Hours

The fruits of last week’s labour paid off – the Gannt chart is a work of art and the applications for the ‘Director of Educational Excellence’ are pouring in. Office hours were not helped by my first experience of Kampalan nightlife being on a weekday owing to a colleague’s return to the UK. However, this did not preclude the 7.30am meetings both that day and the next. Don’t worry, I really am working!

Close encounters of the African kind

This one’s second hand, I’m afraid. It belongs to Jo, a very capable UK volunteer who is spending a month with us doing research. Jo seems to magnetically attract weirdos. On Wednesday she was followed around by a man with a towel on his head, and on Thursday, as she sat in a café peacefully drinking a fanta, a lady rushed in, grabbed the bottle and poured it all over herself. Form your own judgments (and then write them in the comments section).

Friendometer

In a string of entirely separate incidents, several of you have convinced yourselves that I will find my true love during my time in Uganda. Although I don’t agree, I did meet a man in a bar who promised me that he had five or six friends who would make excellent life partners. Incidentally, he pointed out that he was after a Muzungu wife. Ladies?

And finally… Competition Time!

Let’s face it – even Microsoft Windows can’t spell gganntt, so I’m not letting you have that one. For sheer editorial pedantry, I quite like Ben’s comment about muzungu not requiring a capital, so that gets a point.

I had credited my friends and family with a high level of intelligence, which it seems was a mistake in itself, although not a deliberate one: it would appear none of you even know your alphabet.

Julia 1

Ben 1