Me, Ad and Lindsay (hereinafter Muriel) went East together this week to climb a volcano and look at a pretty waterfall, and I got the opportunity to take lots of photos of the sort that make other people jealous, a much abridged gallery of which you may peruse herein.

Working Hours

You could be forgiven for thinking that I seem to be doing more holidaying than working at the moment. However, this holiday’s crowning feature was a magnificently glittering climb to 4321metres, which was so strenuous that it qualifies for inclusion in the present section.

Also adventuring on the great Mount Elgon were some gap-year teenagers. As with so many of their ilk, they were paying some cynical organisation for a year’s worth of warm fuzzy glow helping poor black children (while stealing jobs from poor black adults who could really do with the money). Feeling older and wiser, we were determined not to be upstaged in our ascent by these “what-did-you-get-in-your-A-levels-I-got-four-As-but-a-B-in-General-Studies” young whippersnappers. Me and Ad had our masculine pride at stake, and even Lindsay was to be heard at one point expressing concern at being beaten up a mountain by someone born in the 1990s. In reality, though, there was no major risk to our collective ego as we did in one day what had taken them two, and on our way to the summit the next day we caught them up even though they’d left an hour earlier (OK – it was on the way back down – but we’d still caught them up).

Despite this, as we were in the process of overtaking them, we passed the path to the second highest peak, and me and Ad, as if to cement our victory, started egging each other on to climb that one too. We did this under the pretence of the Adam-and-Nigel tradition of death-by-exercise, as neither of us would have dared admit that we just wanted to reassure ourselves that we really were superior to the nappy parade. However, they must have seen the game we were playing, as when we started up the path to the second summit, they were hot on our heels. Even so, once we’d all done that one, me, Ad and Lindsay still had to descend to the lower camp that same day while they got to nurse their aching quadriceps at the high camp. So there was no real doubt that we were the winners, although the fact we’re becoming paranoid about being beaten by youngsters when we ourselves are merely in our mid twenties is a great testament to the painful awareness we all have of life’s transience in this modern era.

Friendometer

Next stop was Sipi falls, an altogether more relaxing destination whose big draw was a stream which toppled down the mountain in a sequence of three boundless cascades. They got better as you went up, and my guide for the top one was a soldier on leave whose family happened to own the bit of land over which the cataract tumbled (not that the land was much use, being vertical). After he’d shown me their backyard’s ornamental water feature, which would have made any suburban housewife delirious with envy, he offered to take me to taste some of the ‘local brew’ (and he wasn’t talking about brewing tea, nor any other herbal infusion).

When we stepped into the pub (mud hut) I was taken aback – three old ladies with toothless grins were huddled around a rusty old teapot full of steaming brown gunk, from which they were taking it in turns to take deep draughts through the spout. In fact it was just like I’d walked into the village production of Macbeth. The three witches wanted me to take a photo of them, and asked me to give them five hundred shillings for it, which seemed like an economic transaction in reverse to me. And besides, shouldn’t they have been telling me I’d be king one day and then disappearing into the mist? I think their script was missing a page.

The maize-and-sorghum based cocktail tasted uncannily similar to the smell of the beer you find in half-finished cans after teenage house parties. It felt strangely illicit to be sucking it through the spout of an enamel teapot. I drunk enough to convince myself that Uganda’s bottled offerings were superior, and left my soldier counterpart to get tipsy on the rest. At this point, he offered to take me back to his home and show me photos of his circumcision ceremony – a local rite-of-passage conveyed upon Sabine teenage men (at twenty, he’d obviously been putting it off – can’t think why). If I claimed herein to have jumped at the opportunity, I would be bound to cause raised eyebrows amongst my loyal readership, but I can’t deny a certain morbid curiosity. My guide even proposed I take one of the snaps away as a souvenir, but I couldn’t really picture it on my mantelpiece, so I made an excuse about not wanting to deprive him of his memories. How else would he remember the small part of his being that has since probably been tossed perfunctorily into a pit latrine? After all, I doubt he keeps that in the photo album.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

Our mountain guide’s imaginative attire provided a fantastic showcase of mix-and-match accessorising that would go down a storm on the catwalks of Milan:

Chillin' Lakeside

I am now hosting a visit from my old cycling buddy Adam and his girlfriend Lindsay. Adam was the inspiration for my crazy trip across the Andes (which by the way was far less crazy than the things he used to get up to, before he met Lindsay). Lindsay suggested Adam use his artistic skills to paint a Muriel at one of our schools – I think she meant mural, but has now earned herself an endearing (and enduring) sobriquet.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

I caused much embarrassment to Adam and Muriel on their first night in Kampala when I vociferously challenged a minibus driver who attempted to short change my girlfriend by 200 shillings, when he’d already overcharged us by double. It wasn’t much money, but he soon discovered that he wasn’t getting away with stealing it.

There’s a lot of that about in Kampala – underhand theft. Basically, if you’re caught stealing then members of the general public will beat you up and run away with all your clothes. So if you’re the sticky fingered type, or, as is the case with some Kampalans, utterly kleptomanic, the trick is not to get caught. Which is why people do stuff like falsify receipts or bodge jobs or overcharge or, if they’re in government, demand bribes. Instead of stealing, it then becomes ‘cheating’ so is OK. It’s just the way things are done. I cheat you, you cheat him, he cheats me, and the world goes round. Many people don’t really see how honesty would bring about an improvement. Just don’t say the word ‘theft’ or someone’ll lose their pants.

Friendometer

Sunday saw a chilled-out trip to the beach. We left our cossies at home after a tip-off that were we to take a dip, we’d be swimming through a sea of floating turds, and the water would be warm not from the sun but from untreated effluent. Too much time in the company of Kampala’s stinking drains made this description seem utterly plausible. However, when we got there, Lake Vic proved utterly irresistible, just like the eponymous fat little queen must have been to hubbie Al. Adam and I decided we’d just have to plunge in in our boxers and hope nothing fell out.

Once we got in the therapeutically balmy waters, a kid called Maurice challenged us to a game of the thrilling see-how-much-sand-you-can-get-in-your-hands-from-the-bottom-of-the-lake. He went first, and I was disconcerted by the murky green hue of the sample of lakebed that he held in his fists. Maybe swimming hadn’t been such a great idea. Still, I was in now, and seemed churlish not to play the game, especially considering how absurdly easy it would for me to win and make him cry. So down I dived.

I resurfaced seconds later with a pitiful quantity of sand that wasn’t even half of Maurice’s entry, still lying there sloppily in his palms. I had also come back up minus my glasses.

As ideas go, diving whilst wearing spectacles is up there amongst my less inspired moments. After several endless minutes clumsily shuffling around the lake bed with our hands and feet, we started to wonder whether we wouldn’t do better to fly to Cairo and wait for the Nile to bring them to us. But no points for guessing who saved the day: Maurice, you’re a hero!

Cheeky monkey!

The week straddling the turn of the year saw me hosting a visit from my parents, who coped remarkably well with the more adventurous nature of holidaying in a developing country. Predictably, the bulk of my mother’s comments were “what beautiful flowers!” while my father’s revolved around the fact that nothing here quite works properly. Both were delighted by the range of goods and services rendered on the back of bicycles, and Ugandans didn’t disappoint with their efforts in this respect – we saw virtually every home furnishing, including the larger items like three-piece suites, skilfully poised atop the reinforced luggage rack behind the tottering rider.



We paid a visit to the modest Kibale Rainforest. It isn’t quite the Amazon but one thing it does have over that more famous tract of tropical trees is that it hosts an endangered but much-loved species of primate, the chimpanzee. They say chimps share 98% of their DNA with humans, but the remaining 2% must be the important bit because I didn’t really see the similarity, and that’s coming from a man who is unusually hairy. A couple of chimps high in the trees treated us to an amateur sex show but it lasted only four seconds, which I don’t think us lads would get away with in the human world. Still, our lady chimp didn’t seem at all disappointed, and who am I to judge?



Close Encounters of the Parental Kind (My desperation to make sure nothing went wrong during my parent’s visit has left me mercifully bereft of close encounters of the African kind, hence the slight change in emphasis).

I am lucky enough to have truly wonderful parents, but they can also be wonderfully insufferable. I feel licensed to say this by the knowledge that they would say the same about theirs.

As we packed up one morning, I kindly offered to put their suitcase in the van for them. However I was doing it, though, proved utterly unsatisfactory to my Dad – the wrong angle or orientation or off-centre or something – and as the bickering exchange reached a heady crescendo I considered it wiser to step out the way and let him do. But it had dented my patience severely and thus could be considered the precursor to what happened next.

All I did was ask if anyone had a plastic bag for my good shoes so the dust didn’t ruin them, and I set off a chain reaction of events that left me utterly exasperated. My mum suggested I put them in a nearby cardboard box instead, but I told her I thought I’d forget them there. Then my dad (still manipulating the suitcase) managed to produce a plastic bag for me, so I slipped the shoes in and then, out of respect for maternal advice, put them in the box anyway. This is when my mother communicated that she considered that an unnecessary risk now that I had a plastic bag. I sighed – not aggressively, but more of an involuntary exhalation of long-sufferance. I decided instead to tie the handles of the bag to seal it, and just as I began that action, she piped up with “why don’t you just tie the handles?” Patience ebbing, I was tempted to unleash a barrage of vicious sarcasm (“WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M DOING?!?”) but instead opted for a more politely diplomatic “please stop.” I tied the handles once and was about to tie them again to make sure when my mother came in with “once is enough.” My patience ran out. I launched into a lengthy diatribe on the theme of my ability, at an age of a quarter-century, to exercise basic common sense without close parental supervision.

My mother later blamed my request for a plastic bag as the reason for the unprecedented mollycoddling, but I consider this a poor excuse. The fact is parents never stop being parents.

Friendometer

The new year saw me receive an email from a former student of mine:

Alright dude, Mark here, your favourite student, just wondering how things are going down in Africa? Mosquito bites reached a thousand yet? i also hear you are chasing gorillas.. sounds fun. Holla back homie Peace

It may sound like it’s been lifted straight off the streets of Brixton, but that’s pure Salford, that is – prettily laced with irony.

Competition time

OK, OK, when I said misogynist what I meant was misanthropist. Totally deliberate, of course. Thanks Mum. You’re catching up!

Ben 2
Nigel’s Dad 2
Nigel’s Mum 2
Uncle Simon and the Family Hipps 2
Julia 1
Nigel’s Gran 1
Brother David 1
Volunteer Jo 1
Phil 1
Mr Ibbs 1

Some of you may have read Suzanna’s plea for pity points in the comments section. She thinks that as insignificant a gesture of friendship as visiting me is more worthy of points than the correcting the rare errors I’m prone to. Ha! What misguided nonsense.

Culture

Here’s a story that we can all tell. You’re sat on a train. The conductor enters the carriage from behind you, asking to check tickets. You get yours ready. A few seconds later, you hear a commotion from a few rows back. You subtly pause your ipod so you can hear what’s going on, but pretend to keep reading your book. Somebody’s hasn’t paid, and they’re getting angry. You can only hear one side of the discussion because the conductor is keeping his voice respectfully low. You’re dying to have a look. You consider ‘going to the toilet’ so you can walk past but realise this would look too obvious. The customer is getting more and more irate. You can’t wait for the moment when they get up and walk down the carriage so you can at least see what the back of their head looks like.

Here’s a story I can tell. The police stop a coach rammed full of people going for their Christmas holidays in their village. They tell the conductor it’s overloaded and some people have to get off or they’ll fine him. Everybody stands up to get a look and the bus leans heavily to the left as people push to the windows. The conductor, very irate, returns to the bus and tells anyone without a seat to get off. A handful of people do. But one man refuses – after all, he’s paid. An argument begins. Every single passenger joins in, loudly, in a selection of at least three different languages: Luganda, which they speak in Kampala; Luo, which they speak in Lira, the coach’s destination; and English, which they speak everywhere. Proxy arguments begin in other parts of the coach. The conductor grabs the man’s ankle and tries to physically pull him off (which is how they get goats to comply, by the way). Then the driver, so far the only person not to stick his nose in, realises he has ultimate power and drives off, leaving the furious conductor by the side of the road, waving his arms manically, with only the police officer for company. About 200 yards down the road those who got off get on again.

Friendometer

Our brilliant housekeeper, Galvin, is full of hidden surprises. I have recently discovered that her uncle is a king and that she used to own a restaurant. Worried about my state of mind over Christmas, she kindly invited me to spend it with her family in Lira.

The road north was straight as a rod and passed through endless miles of bush, as if God had rolled a giant bowling ball through his lawn. We passed a fair few cheeky monkeys and a torrential cataract on the Nile, and didn’t get attacked by the LRA, which was all rather nice.

I’ve never been to India, but I suspect if I had, it would’ve looked a lot like Lira. It was a dusty outpost full of decidedly South Asian architecture and vast seas of bicycles. One man was carrying his little piggies to market on the back of his when one snorting charge escaped from the rudimentary wooden cage, sparking half the town into a Charlie Chaplin style chase down the middle of the road. Meanwhile, Galvin sent the shopping home with a complete stranger, keeping the cushion off the back of his bike as a retainer. There weren’t really any other muzungus around and everyone seemed refreshingly honest, two ideas which must surely be linked. It was all a very welcome tonic from Kampala’s mayhem.

Galvin’s home was in a village out of town, meaning I was entering a world of no electricity and a pit latrines. The mud hut that I was given to sleep in was carpeted. It was very comfortable. The dead ancestors were buried in the compound. The women used the concrete tombstones as platforms for washing the dishes. The place was full of millions of cousins, some of whom lived there and some of whom were just visiting. Some of them weren’t even cousins. Who knows who they were. Being English I was embarrassed by the special treatment I was getting. I felt guilty about breaking the foil on a new jar of coffee. Meals seemed to be prepared for me alone, but that made no sense at all. I just did I was told.

At least Christmas dinner we had all together – or as good as, because men sat at the table, while women took their place on the ground. All the rules were reversed. What I considered polite was considered rude, and what I considered rude was considered polite. Unlike at home, where the host will serve you, you were to serve yourself. I was the guest so no-one could go until I had gone. Countless pairs of eyes watched me as I went from pot to pot and got a plateful of food. It was a long few seconds. At home, I wouldn’t dream of starting before everyone had got. The host would be vehemently urging me to begin, but it’s still unlikely that I would. But here, I had to start eating while everyone else waited their turn to serve themselves up. It felt very rude. But it wasn’t. Then I made the mistake of finishing what was on my plate. At home, reserving any element of the meal tends to indicate you didn’t like it, and risks causing offence. But here my clean plate implied that I hadn’t had enough. And perhaps my reluctance to take more implied that I hadn’t enjoyed it – I’m not sure. It was only when Galvin threatened to cry if I didn’t keep eating that I suddenly understood what was going on. I was full to bursting but at risk of causing grave offence. So I had to take more and this time remembered to leave a sturdy amount on the plate. And at the end of the meal people belched ostentatiously. No matter how open-minded you are, your manners – those social rules that you learn from a very young age – run very deep.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

I returned to our house in Kampala late on Friday night, in a daze from hours on the road. I was supposed to find a man called Roland there. I’d met him twice and he’d agreed to guard the house over Christmas. But he wasn’t there. Instead, I was confronted by a figure in a long black coat with the hood up, holding a huge spear that reached above his head. This was it – I’d survived six hours on Uganda’s dicey roads in a bus held together by prayers alone, only to meet Death on the doorstep of my home.

I asked Death to unlock the gates so I could get in, but of course, the key was with the guy who hadn’t shown up. This meant I had to do a Dan Dare and jump the gate, dodging a low-hanging power line as I went. This also meant the guy inside must have done the same thing. There is no greater evidence that our ‘guard’ dog is a chocolate teapot: a total stranger jumped the gate and she just sat there impassively. In fact, I bet she wagged her tail and tried to lick his face.

Once I got on the same side of the fence as the sinister figure, I realised that this wasn’t death himself but a poor imitation. The giveaway was that the coat had ‘SECURITY’ written on the back in big white letters. But the question still remained as to who this kid was and who had talked him into the Grim Reaper act.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me. During my four months in the country, I’ve been involved in sacking four people and in chasing down three separate contractors who ripped us off because for one reason or another we didn’t have a written agreement with them. Add to this the countless boda-boda riders and shopkeepers who have tried to charge me five times the price for something (and that’s not an exaggeration) just to see if they can get away with it. Four months in Uganda has taught me to expect people to do the wrong thing if the opportunity is there. I hope that this is healthy cynicism rather than outright misogyny, and in some ways it served me well here: it came as no surprise to me whatsoever that the guy who was supposed to be guarding wasn’t around. I’d even half expected him to use the knowledge that the house was empty to effect an elaborate break-in, at least to enjoy the facilities for a couple of days. But it came as a huge surprise to me to discover that our neighbour’s guard, not wanting to see our place left vulnerable, had got his cousin to come to Kampala from his village in the north as a stand-in. For all my legislating against being cheated, I need to keep the faith.

Office Hours

What are you talking about? It’s Christmas!

Competition time!

The family Hipps receive a point for pointing out a deliberate mistake: "making everyone go to the www.peas.org.uk/gifts website to try and get a definition of PEAS which up till now most people would have thought were spherical, green and edible."

The Police

On Wednesday, I got caught in a radar gun. It irritated me that the Ugandan police even had a radar gun. But it irritated me more that they were wasting their time catching me doing a glacial 15mph when I should have been going an even more glacial 12mph over the precious Owen Falls Dam. What about the coaches haring along at five times that speed through the middle of towns and villages? What about the public minibus drivers overtaking said coaches on blind corners? What about the trucks that are so mechanically deficient they actually move along the road at an angle? Is the speed limit on the bridge really a priority?

The policeman informed me that even if I was only 1mph over the limit there would be a fine of 100,000 Ugandan Shillings. My irritation intensified. “So I give you a receipt and you go to the bank and pay,” he said, looking hard into my eyes. I stared back inscrutably. We stayed locked in this stalemate for a long, long time. It was the point where I was supposed to offer him a bribe, and I wasn’t sticking to the script. Eventually he prompted me: “not so?” I gave him a “what are we waiting for?” face, somewhat insolently, and thus sealed my fate. But I’d already decided I’d rather pay twice as much and let the Uganda Revenue Authority have my money.

Friendometer

Having been adopted as a trophy Muzungu by an ambitious young Ugandan entrepreneur called Charles, I spent most of last week going to various launches and lunches, with the primary purpose, I assume, of smiling and looking white. After one such party – the launch of a new cake business – Charlie took me and another of his pets to the Speke Hotel to see a dance troupe he manages. The troupe were outstanding, but what he had failed to mention was that they were just the filler in another show: a beauty pageant being run by an Indian transvestite, who, by the way, really wasn’t trying hard enough to maintain the illusion. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the place was riddled with prostitutes who would stop at nothing (short of tearing off your trousers) to drum up some business. It was all perfectly not the way I would have chosen to spend a Friday night.

Working Hours

My working hours were lengthened, much to my vexation, by the 5.30am call to prayer emanating from the loudspeaker of the local mosque. Some croaky old crooner got trigger happy on the volume knob and spoilt my sleep three days running. I wanted to get out of bed and go and tell them that God was busy doing other things and shouldn’t be bothered until later, but I don’t think they’d have appreciated the advice.

Close Encounters of the African Kind

We’re coming dangerously close to only being able to open one and half schools, rather than two, in February. We’ve had to take drastic steps to cut expenditure. We’ve decided to reduce the daily delivery of roses to twice-weekly and now we only have champagne on Fridays. Someone told me there was a global financial crisis but I don’t believe them. I would’ve seen it in the papers.

I could abuse my position as a writer of moderately entertaining ramblings and spend a paragraph persuading you that PEAS is a cut above other charities, but I won’t.

Actually, yes I will. The ambition of PEAS is to overhaul the Ugandan secondary education system, and I work with such a talented team of people I truly believe we can do it. Firstly, we can improve its financial efficiency, which is the first step to widening access (enrolment is just 20% of those eligible). Secondly, we can improve its quality through innovation and the import of best practice. We’re a small fish in the Ugandan not-for-profit community but our schools are really just examples for us to show the big fish how it should be done. Perhaps most importantly, we think very, very carefully about even the tiniest expenditure before we approve it. I’m sorry we’ve got such a stupid name but you can’t have everything.

So buy me a Christmas present from this website and I’ll be a very happy man: www.peas.org.uk/gifts

That chicken don’t belong to nobody

The chicken found its way back into the larder the other day, where it flapped around and upset all Galvin’s spices. We concluded it was suicidal and was trying to marinade itself to save Galvin the job. I nearly accepted its plea as it seemed to have stopped laying eggs, until I discovered it’d been hiding them in the storeroom at the back, the devious bird.

Tikka the chicken, as she’s now affectionately known, is very much her own woman. She frequently lets herself into the house and poos on the floor, which tends to culminate in her meeting the hard end of Galvin’s foot. Sweep Dog still makes some half-hearted attempts at intimidation from time to time, but that hen just don’t care. She’ll do what she damn well pleases…

A fun-packed Saturday

Disclaimer – the following story really isn’t funny.

Working Hours

Because I seem not to be able to stop working, I stupidly stitched myself up to do a day’s hard graft last Saturday. I’d volunteered to man the PEAS stall at the pleasingly assonant ‘Mayuge Day’, which was like the County Fair, if you like. Being an efficient soul, I had also arranged a meeting in the same direction at 7pm with a lady called Helen, another NGO volunteer, to discuss the thrilling topic of bricks.

The day got off to a bad start with that common travellers ailment that need not be named, so attending the Mayuge fair was pretty risky – I didn’t anticipate finding many toilets, and I didn’t anticipate any I did find to be the sort you’d want to use. But I decided to attend anyway – after all, what’s immodium for? Thankfully the day passed without any further intestinal crises, but it got past 7pm and I hadn’t yet left Mayuge.

Close Encounters of the African Kind – pride comes before a fall.

I began the ride back under darkening skies along Uganda’s best road, a beautiful stretch of wide, smooth tarmac, through endless fields of sugar cane. I was watched over by the (still prostrate) Orion, the one-eyed Great Bear, and all their friends, plus the slimmest sliver of silvery moon sitting low in an inky sky. I was captivated by the atmosphere and revved up to a decent cruising speed. As I rode I pondered upon what a Uganda veteran I was now. I’d been around for three whole months – I could practically write the guidebook! One thing I had definitely learnt, I smugly reflected, was to expect the unexpected on Uganda’s notorious roads. Yes – as long as you’re ready for anything you’ll be fine. Then I hit a central reservation at 100km/h.

For a few revolutionary seconds I became the first man to achieve completely unaided flight, before inventing a new sport, sledgeless grass sledging. When I came to a standstill I quickly reviewed my state of mortality, decided that I was alive, for the moment, and hastily got to my feet to make sure it stayed that way – I didn’t want my two accolades to be instantly annihilated by making myself a sitting duck for a pursuing vehicle to wipe out. A dizzy look around revealed that I was still in the central reservation, a good ten metres from the bike, which was half in the road and half out. I couldn’t even see as far as the point of impact.

There was a scarcity of passing cars, none of which stopped, probably because they couldn’t see me either. This was a bummer because the bike was wrecked and I couldn’t get it out of the road. I texted Helen and told her I couldn’t make the meeting cos I had a flat tyre.

Eventually two local guys came to the rescue. I planned to leave the bike by the side of the highway and come back when I could see something. But then Helen, who I’d only met once before, and only very briefly, called and offered to pick me up. This was the start of a favour that gradually grew to pretty epic proportions, so she gets a much-coveted Blog shout-out (plus beers for the next few months, no doubt).

She showed up in a mate’s pride and joy, a 1974 Land Rover. As an ex-army girl, she stood back and barked orders while us lads lifted and pushed and pulled and shoved and strained and eventually fitted what was left of the bike into the back of that piece of bombproof British engineering.

We offered to drop the worthy assistants back at the sugar factory, where they worked and lived. This is when our noses told us that the bike was leaking petrol. Fearing that this would cause a catastrophic explosion and a subsequent river of caramel across Eastern Uganda, we stopped on a deserted but refreshingly well-lit roundabout next to the factory entrance, where a guard watched us suspiciously. We asked him for a jerrycan to drain the petrol into: I’d just filled up the tank owing to yet another fuel crisis, so I wasn’t about to pour the precious yellow liquid on the floor. I disconnected the tiny fuel line and eight-and-a-half litres of glittering fuel started trickling lamely into the plastic container.

Realising we’d be there for some time, we settled ourselves down. At this point the guard approached us and perfunctorily requested us to move our car as we were “causing an obstruction.” Well, we were hardly parked on Uganda’s busiest roundabout. We were obstructing a grand total of nothing. “Ur, we don’t really want to start the car until the petrol dries,” we pleaded. “Well you’ll have to,” he countered. “If you don’t move it you will cause an accident.” An accident worse than blowing up your factory?

After several seemingly endless minutes we’d still only collected a fraction of the tank’s volume into the jerrycan, and one of the local guys lost patience. He went to fetch a pipe to siphon the petrol from the top of the tank. Now there’s only one way that I know of to get a siphon started: suck. Which is how he ended up with a mouthful of petrol. That was really beyond the call of duty, but he knew as well as I that such self-sacrificing levels of service significantly increased the value of the subsequent gratuity. And the more he coughed and spluttered and spat, the more those shillings ticked up.

A later, beer-assisted post-mortem of the accident revealed its cause clearly. I was riding through the middle of a sugar plantation on a virtually moonless night. It was really, really dark. Even the bike’s full beam double lamps barely seemed to light the way ahead. Suddenly some drops of very muddy water coming from goodness knows where made a mess of my visor. I attempted to wipe them away with the sleeve of my leather jacket. This had the effect of smearing the mud, thus reducing my visibility even further. Meanwhile, the start of the dual carriageway section lay silently in my path. Against my own advice which I had been smugly intoning in my mind barely thirty seconds earlier, I foolishly neglected to expect not to expect it. In fact, I don’t think I knew it was there until I’d hit it, which shows just how little I could see.

Of course, there was no warning that the road divided, and no lights to light it up. This was simultaneously the cause of my crash and the reason it wasn’t more serious, as there was no bollard or signpost for me to hit. I therefore walked away with little more than a scraped knee. The most unfortunate thing, apart from the damage to the bike, is that by escaping uninjured I must have used up most of my lifetime’s quota of blessings in one go. I was very, very lucky.

Friendometer

The strangest thing about the whole story is that later the same evening I got the chance to give some feedback about the cause of my accident to someone who could actually do something about it. Helen took me for an anaesthetic beer and I found myself sharing a table with a member of the extremely wealthy Ugandan-Indian Madhvani family. They own the plantations, the factory, the surrounding population and the stretch of tarmac where I had my accident, which, as he helpfully pointed out to me, is why it’s Uganda’s best road. But even the best roads can use improvement. I gave him an entry for the Madhvani comment box.

Competition Time

I’m giving a point to Ibbsy, partly because it’s great to hear from him and partly because his caption for the chicken photo had me clucking with delight. We had actually put it in the larder to stop the dog eating it but the smell was fowl. Happy thought it was a poultry creature and wanted to kill it, and Galvin egged him on, but I didn’t feel like chicken tonight. The only thing for it was to sensitise the dog, and you can see the results of that below…

You must be able to come up with some decent captions for some of those, between the lot of you. I’m also still accepting the identifying of deliberate mistakes for anyone who’s still enjoying finding them. Ben’s recent absence of pedantry was due to a broken leg keeping him from the blog, apparently, which is strange, as surely that’s the ideal time for such pointless activities.

It’s nice to be back – bumper issue!

Some people have attributed my reduced blogging frequency to greater workload, rather than greater laziness, which is kind. In fact, neither is true – I was testing you all to see whether you missed it. I wasn’t exactly inundated with objections, suggesting most of you welcomed the respite. Well, tough. I’m back.

Last night Galvin took me, Alex and Chris (the current short-term volunteers) to her cousin’s graduation party. Being the only muzungus there, we were asked by the uncle, who was leading the proceedings, to introduce ourselves over the mic. He gave us a lovely introduction where he explained how we’d sacrificed our income (true) to come and help orphans (less true) including dressing them (OK, we’ve really strayed now). Somewhere in translation my name got changed from Nigel to Bob, perhaps in homage to Geldof, that other great dresser of African orphans.
Still, it was a hoot. I was asked to dance by a gorgeous girl who it was impossible to turn down. Even though she was five, she could still dance twice as well as me.



Close Encounters of the African Kind

I woke up on Thursday morning with a mild hangover, having sunk a brain-rotting two beers whilst playing pool (hopelessly) the night before. When I got to the office, Christine, our new Director of Educational Excellence (yes, that’s really her job title), asked if I’d looked in the mirror this morning. Obviously my malaise had external manifestations.

In fact, the looking glass revealed a forehead littered with the nocturnal mischief of a certain ancient but prolific bug, who after a night of searching had clearly located the hole in the mosquito net and snuck in for the feast of a lifetime. Putting two and two together, I went for a malaria test. This meant confronting two things that I generally make a point of avoiding: needles and medicine. But at least the nurse was pretty. She pricked my finger, smeared my blood all over a microscope slide (how romantic!) and left me waiting in the corridor. Thirty minutes later I received the outcome, handed to me perfunctorily on a slip of paper: positive. Obviously this made me feel the opposite. I wasn’t too surprised though – I haven’t met a Ugandan yet who hasn’t had malaria at least once in their lifetime (although I had hoped to last a little bit longer). At least it meant I wasn’t as much of lightweight as I had thought.

I wasn’t actually feeling all that unwell, and given what people were saying about the side-effects of the drugs, I was tempted to flush them down the bog and let my own immune system do the hard work. Any doctor would tell you that this is choosing the long road – a road reputed to lead to the unassuming but much-feared door of death himself – so for prudency, and because I love my mother, I swallowed the tabs. It remained in the back of my mind that the clinic, privately owned and run, would have had a vested interest in diagnosing me with something or other as soon as I walked in with full pockets, and that perhaps it was an unearned hangover after all, but my cynicism had to stop somewhere.

How interesting that a mosquito, which is essentially just a flying bag with a pipe on the front, is capable of killing something as big and complex as a human being. How vulnerable we are, really.



Friendometer

I’ve got a new best friend in Uganda. She’s silver, with two wheels, two pedals and a chain.




Office Hours


Tuesday, though productive, was possibly the most physically uncomfortable day of my life. Tell me what you think:


1. Ready for a busy day ‘in the field’, I wearily leave the house at 6am, foregoing breakfast in the interests of maximising time in bed.


2. 50km down the road, our Toyota van dramatically overheats and, what with the engine being beneath the front seats, smokes us out. Coughing and spluttering, we abandon it in the middle of nowhere.


3. Without use of a vehicle, we decide to split ourselves up, and I draw the short straw, since my destination requires me to use a ‘boda-boda’ (motorcycle taxi) 26km along a dusty dirt road. When I arrive, someone writes ‘clean me’ with their finger on my forehead.


4. By now much delayed, I don’t have time for lunch, either. Someone points out a distant rumble of thunder but it turns out to be coming from my empty belly.


5. For the return journey along the dirt road, I can cadge a lift in a small hatchback as long as I don’t mind sharing it with seven other grown men and a live chicken. I’m squeezed between the front seats, so releasing the handbrake requires me and the driver to enter into a level of intimacy not commonly exhibited between men – especially not in Uganda.


6. The journey back to Kampala, past our stricken van, is courtesy of some greedy minibus taxi operators who shoehorn about twenty people into a van designed for far fewer.


It’s days like that where taking your shoes off when you get home is a catharsis worthy of few comparisons.



Close Encounters of the African Kind

After my motocross adventures at the Jinja Motor Rally, a man, clearly dazzled by my abilities, approached me in the ‘paddock’ and asked for my autograph. Not really – but I gave it to him anyway. Godfrey is also a fan of everything with wheels, which not only means I’ve got a friend to go on bike rides with, but also that I’ve got someone take me to more events in Uganda’s hectic motorsport calendar. Last Sunday found us in Mukono, watching more dramatic rally action.

The general approach was to get an ordinary Toyota (always a Toyota), drill a hole in the exhaust silencer, paint on some decals, and pretend you were going really fast. The resulting vehicle could best be described as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Despite this, it was proved that it’s possible to overcook a corner even in the slowest car when one guy rolled his onto its roof right in front of us. If I’d been any closer I could’ve read you the chassis number.