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

A map of Uganda

My first week in Uganda has been such a richly woven network of experiences it would be impossible to navigate without the aid of an A-Z, which is why I’ve written one. Brace yourselves.

A is for Another guy’s bike, something you ride on the back of to get around Kampala. They are known as boda-bodas, and are particularly useful in traffic (see T).

B is for Birds. There are lots of them, many large and decidedly more interesting than pigeons. The day I arrived there was an eagle in the garden.

C is for Colleagues: Edward, Martin, Mike, Sylvia and Harriet – all Ugandan, as you can tell. See also ‘Office Hours’ below.

D is for Dust – fortunately a highly attractive rust colour since it gets absolutely everywhere.

E is for Eager to lick your face, which is what Sweep, the dog, is. In a backwards kind of way this makes her a highly effective guard dog.

F is for Freecell, an addictive computer card game that I have got our guard (see H) hooked on (oops).

G is for Galvin, our cook, who can, extremely well.

H is for Happy, our guard, who is.

I is for It tastes better than it looks, a universal truth of Ugandan food, which looks like it was intended for the dog but tastes very, very nice.

J is for Job (see Office Hours below).

L is for Luganda, which I can’t speak.

M is for Motorcycle. After two laps of the garden they let me loose in Kampala city centre (see T for traffic). I can’t work out whether the admiring looks from passersby are because it’s a marginally less knackered machine than most of the ones you see on the road, or whether it’s just the novelty of seeing a Mzungu on a bike.

N is for Not really knowing what’s going on – a direct result of ‘L’.

O is for Online, something it is very hard to be in Uganda.

P is for Passionfruit juice, freshly squeezed every day and every bit as good as it looks.

Q is for Questionable advertising, which has to been seen / heard to be fully appreciated.

R is for Rain. When I first arrived I wondered why none of the buildings had guttering. I now realise, one rainstorm later, that no guttering system in the world could deal with such a volume of water.

S is for Silent but deadly, an accurate description of Uganda’s mosquitoes. They quietly suck your blood, leaving no inflammation, no itch, just malaria.

T is for Traffic. I got stuck in total gridlock on three separate occasions in the city centre, and in the end followed all the other motorcyclists and boda-bodas onto the pavement to get round it.

U is for Uphill, the direction I had to push a minibus last night to get it started. This was done in a very African way with lots of shouting but sadly proved ineffective.

V is for Very hot, which it isn’t, really.

W is for Who turned out the lights? You don’t notice it getting dark – it just suddenly is.

X is for X-girlfriends – specifically my predecessor’s trying to get in touch with him. Cf. A is for awkward.

Y is for You don’t need to be white to be a Mzungu. This transpired as I dropped a black volunteer at the airport the other day. Despite being half Ugandan, he was fooling nobody.

Z is for Zeros, which sums of money in Ugandan Shilllings contain a lot of.

Friendometer

I’ve lost count already.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

I’ll certainly have plenty of these if I’m not careful with the 250cc of Honda-powered fun available at the flick of a wrist.

Office Hours

A far later (and kinder) start than in teaching. The guys in the office are highly enthusiastic and switched on, and will be great to work with. This week I’ve mainly been designing recruitment advertising and making a Ganntt chart, whatever one of them is.

And finally… Competition Time!

The winner last time was the supposedly dyslexic Julia Kilner, who spotted that Lamas have only one L in their name (my second lama-related mistake in one lifetime!). This was pretty good going from my point of view since I didn’t even think I’d put a mistake in the first entry.

Nigel in Uganda

Welcome to Nigel in Uganda, the one and only place for news and gossip about my time away from the UK, especially since I'm not on Facebook. Several of you were foolhardy enough to encourage me to relate my experiences in a blog, just as I did for my South American cycling trip (click here if you missed out). This means that you will now be inflicted with not two months but and entire year of my ramblings, but you only have yourselves to blame for that.

Those of you who followed my South America blog will remember with fondness the statistical feast that followed each entry, where you could read about how many metres were in the gravity bank, the status of my burgeoning facial hair, and the most useful Spanish word learnt. I'm not one to let pointless traditions die, so here's what you can look forward to this time round:

Friendometer
Ugandans are rumoured to be amongst the friendliest folk you'll find - see how many new friends I've made on the friendometer.

Close Encounters of the African Kind
No trip to Africa is complete without being disproportionately terrified by some fearsome insect. May also include lucky escapes from gorillas, bad driving and insidious expats.

Office Hours
How hard am I actually working? An opportunity for me to show off about either how much or how little I'm doing.


And finally... competition time!
There were those who took great pleasure in correcting errors of fact in my South American blog, such as the difference between camels and llamas, and the history of amphitheatres. To cater for the more pedantic among you, I will run an ongoing 'spot the deliberate mistake' competition. This is mainly to protect my pride in the aftermath of the genuine mistakes that I will inevitably make. Each blog entry I will publish a league table of results, with a grand prize for the overall winner.