Fare thee well, Uganda

As I write this, I am sitting in a cafe in Mombasa, Kenya. Where did 6 months go?? Let me bring you up to speed with my final week in Mbale…

Spent one night with the lovely Grace K, her husband Julian and their adorable baby, Isaac. The day before I arrived, their electricity had finally been connected after over one year of waiting! They were very excited. Stayed in the spare room which Grace had set up all nicely for me, and had my first shower/bath in a bedroom! Felt a bit weird washing myself standing in a plastic tub in the middle of a bedroom, but hey, I’m getting used to weird in Africa. Had a late dinner, prayed together and went to bed ready to drop off. The next morning I opted to use the outside shower, which is really just a concrete area around the corner from the toilet, with no door or roof! Grace promised me no one would come and poke their head around the corner, so I washed myself with a jug of water while looking up at the blue sky and the palm-like fronds of matooke swaying above the wall – how’s the serenity? My stay was short but sweet and I promised Grace & Julian that if I return to Mbale, I will stay longer next time!

After work on Tuesday, I headed to my final destination – Namabasa. I arrived as the sun was setting and Debbie made me a cup of tea, that I drank outside, perched on a small wooden table that doubles as a stool. Ahhhhh. Spent the week at the office, finishing up bits and pieces that I have been working on over the past few months, while my nights were spent either at Sam & Debbie’s or catching up with Jenga people for goodbye dinners. 

The week passed very quickly, and before I knew it, it was the weekend. On Saturday I did some washing the Ugandan way – just a tub of water, a bar of soap and your hands! I then headed to my final Ugandan wedding (thank the Lord!) which was supposed to start at 11am…I arrived at 11:30am to find people still setting up…the groom & his guys arrived around 12:30pm and the bride maybe an hour after that! The reception was supposed to start at 2pm, but thanks to “African time” and a preacher that gave a long-winded sermon about unmarried women coming home pregnant and causing their father shame…so bizarre!!… we didn’t reach the reception place til around 4:45pm and it was supposed to be all done by 6pm! Clearly that was not going to be the case. Debbie and I basically snuck out after “lunch” was served just after 5pm. I think the novelty of an African wedding has worn off. Grace’s daughter, Priety, was a flower girl though and she looked very cute indeed!

Sunday morning, Sam and I headed to a church up in the mountains that Debbie’s mum, Margaret, pastors. It’s only a dozen or so adults and a few kids, meeting together in a small brick church in a fairly rural community, and Sam managed to con me into preaching! I spoke about love and the importance of not only loving God, but loving people and taking Jesus’ teachings seriously – praying for your enemies, blessing those who curse you, turning the other cheek etc etc. I also highlighted 1 Corinthians where it says you can have amazing faith, or miraculously heal people or give away all your possessions to the poor, but if love is not the motivation behind it all, then you gain nothing. The listened attentively and were very encouraging at the end of the service. I think I survived my first preaching engagement…

On Monday I went and visited the school that Sam set up in the local area, called Divine Care. Debbie is the receptionist there and they have almost 150 students at the moment but are hoping to expand once their new buildings are complete – they’re building bit by bit as funding allows. It’s school holidays in Uganda at the moment, so I didn’t see the kids, but it was cool to see the classrooms (where around 40 kids cram into at the moment!) and hear Sam’s future dreams for the school. They already have a large plot of land growing maize & ground nuts next to the school, but Sam hopes that one day they will be completely self-sustainable (i.e. have cows on the property for milk and grow additional crops. There are two swings and a metal merry-go-round (which recently broke!) that serve as the only play equipment for all 140+ kids! They don’t even have balls or skipping ropes to play with, but somehow African kids just learn to make do with what they have. 

Monday afternoon I said my goodbyes to Debbie and Caleb (their 3 year old son) and took my final picky ride back to where I had been living before my adventures into real African life! Made Mexican for dinner with Nat, Manna and Tiff and ate it by candlelight – what would my final night in Mbale be without a power failure? I awoke in the early hours of the morning with a very upset stomach, that had me getting up a couple more times before the sun did. So on my final day in Uganda, with a 15 hour bus ride ahead of me, I had an unpleasant situation in front of me. I think you know what I mean! Thankfully, I had some tablets left over from my last brush with a stomach upset, so I downed them and prayed for the best. Sam came and picked me up from the house, so I said goodbye to our house girl Anna, our gardener Peter and the four dogs (George had already been taken to live at the school with his new friends) and off we went! Dropped by the office to say goodbye to all the Jenga staff, and before I knew it, it was 11am and time to get going to Malaba. I still wasn’t feeling 100% and was a little bit worried about the long trip ahead of me. Leah & our friend Brenda had planned to come to Malaba to see me off, but Leah had to stay back to work , so it was just me, Sam and Brenda in the end. We headed off on our 2 hour journey to the border on a scorching hot day – not unlike the one in which I first arrived in the country. We got to the border with no troubles and passed through Ugandan immigration before trekking over to Kenyan immigration, swapping all my Ugandan shillings for Kenyan ones along the way. Sam and Brenda kindly carried by bags, so I didn’t have to plod along like a pregnant snail, with my large pack on my back and my small one on my front! Sam kindly negotiated an exchange of Kenyan shillings to American dollars with some money peddlers for my visa payment, which apparently can’t be paid in local currency as I had presumed. We hurried off to the office of Modern Coast bus company, as we had called them upon arrival at the border to confirm that we were on our way and they told us they didn’t have my booking and that the bus was filling up. Great. So we arrive all sweaty at the office, only to find that there’s still plenty of seats on the bus and they have no idea who told us the previous information – that’s Uganda for you! So I got to pick my seat and I chose #1 – a “VIP” seat right up the front, on the other side to the driver with plenty of leg room and an uninterrupted view of the road ahead. Bought my ticket and had an hour to kill before boarding, so shouted Sam and Brenda lunch as a thankyou for escorting me all the way to the Kenyan side of the border and making sure I was okay – I would have been very frazzled without them! It was Brenda’s first time out of Uganda. Said goodbye to my last two friends and suddenly I was on the bus, about to head off to Mombasa.

The trip passed remarkably quickly (aided by loud Arabic dance music and remixes of everything from Lady Gaga to Enrique Inglesias and a whole myriad of early 90’s songs)and luckily I didn’t need any emergency toilet stops!! I started to regret my uninterrupted view of the road however, as ignorance is usually bliss with African roads and the interesting styles of driving here! There were a couple of close calls, but thankfully no accidents. Arrived in Mombasa this morning at 6:20am and was picked up by Adele’s taxi-driver friend, Davies. Arrived at Adele’s apartment and chatted with her about life in Kenya before she had to head off to work. So now I’m across the road from her place at a cafe with free wi-fi, trying to get my head around a new country and a new chapter of my adventures abroad!

I will add some photos soon, but given my limited battery time here, I will leave it for another day. Will write again when I have something more interesting to report!! Signing off from Kenya…

Lou :)     

Slumming It

So a lot has happened this past week, so I’m going to have to do some more posting to keep you all up to date! As you know, my time staying with Leah has come to an end and I am approaching my final week in Mbale. Sad face.

 Last Thursday, I travelled in a 4WD to Amuria, a village further up north. The first Jenga storehouse had been built there, but is still not in operation as the people haven’t been trained. So myself, Moses, Nancy (one of the training facilitators) and Richard (a Jenga trustee and our human link to Amuria) headed off on our long journey with our trusty driver. It can take anything from 4-6 hours to get to Amuria from Mbale, depending on the condition of the roads – not as in traffic, but the literal condition of the roads! We had to stop in Soroti on the way to print something out, which in typical Ugandan style took forever and a day. We had some tea and a chapatti and were on the road again. We arrived in Amuria with no hitches, but when we got to the storehouse, we found that none of the people involved with the store – including the pastor overseeing it – were in the area. The village was quite remote and even if any of them had owned a mobile phone, there was no network out there anyway! If you want to talk to these people, you literally have to go talk to them in person. We took some photos of the storehouse and talked to some of the local women and arranged for the pastor to travel to Mbale on Monday to meet with Moses and Richard and go through some things before he goes back to Amuria to organise dates for training. I obviously won’t be around for it, but Moses and the others will have to trek out there again soon for training and stay for a few days to get things going. It was a little disappointing to see something with so much potential not being utilised to benefit the people – the grass and weeds had been allowed to grow tall all around the building and inside of the storehouse is still incomplete – but it’s a good lesson for Jenga and also for me in terms of thinking about development and how to go about effecting lasting change in poor communities. There’s no point giving people something they don’t know how to use! Not that Jenga just built the storehouse and said, here you go, but given the distance between our office in Mbale and the community in Amuria, communication has been a bit haphazard and we haven’t been able to mobilise people for training as easily as we have in nearby in Namabasa. But Moses and Richard are meeting with the pastor from Amuria as I type this, so we’re well on our way!

 On the way home, we took a different road to the one we had taken in, because there was a lot of mud after some recent heavy rains, and we had even had to drive through a chunk of road that had been completely flooded by the nearby river. The locals told us the best road to take, and off we went. We were going along well and making good time, and I lay down across the back seats to rest while I listened to my ipod. Suddenly my head was much lower than my feet and the car came to a stop. I sat up to find that we were stuck in a ditch on a 45 degree angle! There were workers repairing the road and they had come with a truck full of soil and just dumped it in the middle of the road, forcing any passing traffic to use the very sides of the road that not only sloped downwards, but were caked in thick, slippery mud. We all got out of the car and the driver made several unsuccessful attempts to get the vehicle out of the ditch. They tried all sorts of things, but the wheels just kept spinning. By now there was a queue of maybe four cars that had approached from the opposite direction, and a couple more that had been following the same way as us. Another car tried to go around us and almost ended up in the same situation, but they managed to get it on the road somehow. Eventually the workers shovelled the massive pile of soil out around the car, and about an hour later, with the help of about 12 men pushing and pulling and yelling out instructions, we were finally free! It was kind of amusing at the time, but in the back of my head I was also wondering what the heck we were going to do if we were stranded there in the middle of nowhere! Thankfully it never came to that. (I wanted to take a photo of the car in the ditch but i felt bad taking photos while everyone else worked hard to get it out!)   
 
So onto the topic that forms the title of this post. From Friday to Sunday just past, I stayed with Rose in Namatala which is the biggest slum area in Mbale. I say slum, but it’s actually quite decent in some areas where people have electricity and neat compounds, but then again, other areas are stinky, rubbish-infested and overcrowded. So we’ll stick with slum for now. I was lucky enough to not only have my own bed, but my own room – quite the rarity in a Ugandan family home! Rose had kindly kicked one of the older boys out of his room for the weekend and passed it along to me. It was quite the lively weekend! Apart from there being over a dozen people living on their small property, the toilet and shower room had recently been knocked down by the local council who are in the process of bulldozing people and their homes off their land to build roads for all the thousands of car owners in Namatala – note the sarcasm here. The road had originally been planned to cut through the next block across, leaving Rose’s home intact, but the people on that plot had their land surveyed, which in Ugandan terms means that the council can’t come and touch it. So what should have been a straight road through their block is now a winding path following a trail of corruption and bribery that is all too common in this country. Those who can afford to pay their way through the ordeal will survive, but those who cannot afford to, are at the mercy of the local council where there little mercy to be found. 

Rose has been surprisingly calm about it all and says that it’s in God’s hands and if the council plan to build a road over her house, then that’s what will happen and God will provide for them. I would like to say I have that kind of faith, but I’m not sure that I do! 

So we had to “borrow” the toilet from the neighbours behind us, who kindly gave us the key every time we wanted to use it. The kids normally just go outside and don’t even bother with a toilet, but I was very grateful for the use of a pit latrine with a door on it! The boys constructed a makeshift shower at the back of one of the houses so the adults could bathe – the kids just do it out in the open. When I say shower, I really mean a small construction of three ‘walls’ and a tarpaulin as an entrance where you take a tub of water and pour it on yourself. It felt a bit weird at first, having a shower outside as you can hear kids walking past and just praying that none of them would come and pull on the precious tarpaulin that was all that was separating me from public humiliation! Thankfully, they kept their distance. On Saturday we were out for the whole day with the final round of food storage training in Namabasa, where we presented the trainees with their certificates of attendance that they were very happy to receive! That evening we had chicken for dinner – my gift from the village had laid down its life for us. Poor chicken. I think one of the highlights from the weekend was when Rose was down on her hands and knees, looking under all the couches and chairs and I asked her what she was doing. She replied “I’m looking for my coq”. I had to stifle a smirk.

Sunday morning we did some washing – yes, much to the astonishment of all the locals, white people actually know how to do housework! – which was quite the process. Everything basically has to be washed twice and then rinsed…all by hand. It takes forever!! And all they use is soap and their hands. It’s quite a workout. We went to church around 10am for the second service, but caught the end of the first one and stayed around for the next…which in typical Ugandan fashion, didn’t end til after 1pm. I’m getting used to sitting for long periods of time here. The girls at the house had made lunch (they do everything, they are amazing!), which was beans, greens, potatoes and cassava bread. The land surveyors came while Rose was still meeting with some people at church, and told the others that they were going to have to knock down the building that has the kitchen and one of the girls’ bedrooms, as well as the room I was sleeping in and the room behind that. Not good news. The local council may come and say something different though, and as time goes on and people either have their land surveyed or bribe the right people, the road plans continue to change. Frustrating!!

I played with the kids while Rose did some work and generally tried to keep them out of her hair, which is no easy feat! There’s 4 younger kids, 3 of which are Roses’, and the youngest, Max who is a nephew that they are currently looking after. He is by far the quietest of the lot! They are aged 1 to 6 and all had runny noses and a cough – I was sneezed and coughed upon several times. They are very lively and have very little to play with, so they just go crazy on each other or whatever things are lying around the house. Jonathan, the youngest of Rose’s kids at two years old, has a habit of urinating wherever he happens to be when he needs to go – regardless of whether that’s inside or outside! Luckily the floor is concrete, not carpet, but it still makes for an interesting living environment! The kids would also wipe their snotty noses on their clothes, as they didn’t have tissues and often couldn’t be bothered going to get toilet paper to clean themselves up. I would often pick up the kids or have them on my lap and have no idea whether the dampness on their clothes was from playing with water or something else. I prayed it was water. But I survived a weekend of grubby, runny-nosed, coughing mud-loving, urinating children and came out okay! They’re good kids in the end and just want to play like any other kids anywhere else in the world – it just happens that instead of a backyard and toys, these kids have a muddy road and whatever bits and pieces they can find. We love to sterilise everything in the west – I’m not saying we should all throw our kids in the mud and let them wee everywhere, but I think there’s a happy medium somewhere between that and having kids who aren’t allowed to touch mummy’s best table cloth and whose greatest sin in life is entering the house without first taking off their shoes! I’m a big fan of proper hygiene, but I also think there’s room for mud pies and running around barefoot too.

On Sunday afternoon, I walked over to Grace N’s house which is only a few minutes away. She’d had typhoid the previous week, and then had two teeth taken out on top of that! Poor woman. She is on the mend though and she was looking better than the last time I had visited her. She got her daughter Priety (pronounced ‘pretty’) to put the kettle on the charcoal stove, and she just got up and did what she was told without a word. She’s only 6 and is extremely bright and extremely well behaved. She always helps around the house and never grumbles when she’s asked to do something, she just does it. She has a maturity way beyond her years. She was playing with a bunch of kids next door when I first arrived, and when she saw me she ran over with arms outstretched and gave me a big hug. She’s such a cutie. She is going to be a flower girl in a wedding on Saturday that will mark my final Ugandan wedding for this trip – phew! 

On Sunday night, I bought some food as a thank you to the family for having me and we feasted on beans, rice, cabbage, chapatti and cassava chips. Mmmm. We ate dinner around 9-9:30pm each night, which was a new concept to someone raised with a 6:30pm dinner time! They take tea and a snack around 5pm though, which helps tie you over from lunch. I actually wasn’t even that hungry by the time dinner arrived – I was normally ready for sleep! 

Today I am back in the office and we have said goodbye to two more volunteers – Joel and Rozzie. This week will be mine and Megan’s last week in the office. I still can’t believe I’m leaving so soon – the time went much quicker than I thought and it’s a little bit unsettling leaving this now familiar place to enter into unknown territory, so to speak. Tonight I am staying at Grace K’s house, which is also where one of the cutest babies in the world lives! Oh little Isaac. He is so smiley and happy and hardly ever cries or makes a sound. Grace brings him to work with her everyday and he just sleeps on a little portable baby mat thing by her feet. All the volunteers fight over who gets to hold him when he’s awake! I’m just there for one night, then I will be at Sam & Debbie’s house in Namabasa, not far from the storehouse. I really love that area, it’s much more spacious than most others around Mbale, and people have enough land to grow their own food and it’s just nice and green and lovely. Debbie’s mum, Margaret, has been one of the trainees for the food storage program and is also a pastor out in “the village” (wherever hers may be!). She invited me to visit her church on Sunday, so I think we will all head over there for my final Sunday in Uganda.

For those who are curious about curious George – he is still living at the house I was living in, but he is also still going to be taken to Nat’s school. Nat is now living that house, and I have to organise a day I can officially hand him over and also finally see the school where Nat works. The other dogs are all fine as far as I know, but I haven’t seen them in over a week. I’m going to miss those crazy girls. Especially Korah. Oh my little puppy head who’s not so little anymore.

So there you go, I think we’re all up to speed for the moment. I will write again about life in Namabasa and hopefully have some nice pics for you too. Until then, I’m off!

Lou :) 

More weddings, sleeping in the middle of nowhere and moving out of Maluku

Hey hey hey, it's fat Albert! No, actually it's just me again. Soooo, I promised I would bring some updates from the weekend and introduce Leah to you and seeing as I am a woman of my word, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

 Well last week in a nutshell goes a little something like this: had a food storage meeting with Robby and Moses, visited a school in Musoto to take some photos, had the fifth and supposedly final day of food storage training in Namabasa (but a 6th day has now been scheduled in), had dinner at the Munyosi's and thoroughly enjoyed Grace's culinary skills, said goodbye to Robby who is now on a 6 month sabatical and went to a village wedding. So, more about the wedding...

 I had arranged to meet Rose at the clock tower (centre of town - it's pink too) at 8am, but at 7 something, she called to say that we would meet at 9:30am instead, as there was no water at her place which throws a bit of a spanner in the works of cooking, bathing etc for the morning. So I had breakfast with Leah and took my time getting ready and trying on the traditional outfits Grace had kindly lent me for the occassion. I settled on a purple, white and pinkish patterned one and headed into town where I met Grace, her husband, two of her kids and two of her relatives (nieces I think). We all piled into a taxi...I think there was 17 of us in a 12-seater mini van...and we were on our way to "the village", also known as Amago. Got out at the designated spot about 40 minutes later and spent some time price-haggling with pickies, before jumping on and being driven about 15 minutes off the main road to where the wedding was. We had arrived a little early because Rose had generously made the bride a 'changing dress' for after the ceremony, because she knew the couple didn't have money for such things that would normally come with a Ugandan wedding. The church was just a bunch of tarpaulins attached to large sticks that had been tied together to form a basic support structure. They had tied bunches of yellow flowers to the vertical sticks, as well as the plants lining the path leading to the church, creating an aisle of sorts.

 When we arrived, the only people there were the women who were catering for the lunch – they were sitting on the ground sorting stones and what not out of the rice they were about to cook – and a few random helpers. We wandered around the village for a bit to kill time and Rose passed the dress along to the bride. As the time passed, more and more guests arrived…and then chairs….and then more people….and then the band….and then more people. Eventually there was quite a crowd gathered but still no bridal party! The festivities started anyhow, and the band (made up of locally made instruments) entertained the guests with some songs and a couple of choirs also sang some tunes and danced around. Eventually, the bride and groom arrived maybe around 1pm and I naively thought the ceremony was about to be under way. Well it was….but African style! It literally took at least 10 minutes for the bride and groom to walk down the aisle, inch by inch they made their way to their seats (aka a couch carried in from who knows where). A large choir sang a song that went something like “happy, happy, happy- happy –happy wedding dayyyy” as they walked down the aisle. 

Then everyone was seated and there was some more music from the band…and more songs from choirs and small singing groups…and then some more songs with a bit of dancing…and then introducing ALL the relatives and special friends of the bride and groom (you can only imagine how long that took), which included me having to stand up and greet the entire crowd of probably 400+ people…then there were some more songs….and some more songs…and some talking…and some more songs…and then a sermon…and some more songs and then FINALLY the part where the bride and groom are actually wed! 

 It was probably about 5:30pm by this point. I was a tad hungry. So then they exchange rings and are pronounced husband and wife and are prayed for. They couldn’t afford cake for everyone, so they had a loaf of bread instead, which had a knife ceremoniously stuck into it before being cut up into small pieces and handed around to all the seated guests (you always get a whole heap of people coming to weddings who aren’t officially invited but they come to join in on the occasion…and the free food!). So it was a bit of a long day, but I’m getting pretty used to African time by now. Lunch was served around 6:30pm, so we took off pretty much as soon as we finished eating. 

                                                                                  Some of the wedding gifts!

 By now dusk was upon us and the sun was disappearing. I had come prepared to stay the night in the village in case it ran late, which was obviously the case! Rose asked if I minded walking to her relatives’ place about 1km away or whether I wanted to get a picky, but I said it was fine. So we set off on foot in the dwindling last light of day along a narrow track leading through spacious bushlands dotted by the occasional Banda – the traditional round hut with a pointed thatched roof. As we walked further into the middle of nowhere, it got darker to the point where everything became shadowy silhouettes, lit only by the moon high above our heads. Luckily, I had brought my head torch with me, which helped to light the way as we weaved our way along, with Grace holding my hand. We arrived at our destination and even in the relative darkness, I could feel the stares of the children and even the adults at the arrival of a strange white-skinned person at their home. I asked Rose if they had had another mzungu visit their place before and she said no. There’s a first time for everything, hey?

 I was pretty spent by this time and we went into our banda to set up for the night. Rose kindly gave me the only mattress in there, and had brought a mosquito net with her, which she tied to the walls so it covered the bed. She set up a mat for her and her mum to sleep on, also with a net, and assured me that they had grown up sleeping on mats and weren’t being put out at all. I still felt a bit bad. I offered to have Grace in with me to give Rose and her mum a bit more room. James (Rose’s husband) and their son Shedrack were sleeping in another banda. I was resting on my bed, playing with Grace and feeling like I was ready to go to sleep, when some of Rose’s relatives brought in food – they had kindly made dinner for us! I was still fairly satisfied from our very late lunch, but I knew I would be hungry early in the morning if I didn’t eat, plus it would be quite rude after all the trouble they had gone to. So we had rice, cassava ‘bread’ (which is more like dough than bread!) and probably the most delicious stew I have had in Uganda to date. It was pork and was amazingly good. Mmmm. I’m feeling hungry now just thinking about it. After dinner we went to bed and I think I slept pretty well considering I was sleeping on a foam mattress in a relatively tight-fitting African outfit, using my skirt for the next day as a pillow! 

 We got up maybe around 7am and Rose had kindly prepared a shower for me, which was a tub of cold water placed at the back of the banda, facing into the bush, and a large piece of cloth for a towel. I was a little too shy to fully strip off in the open air, so I partially washed myself to the best of my ability. We had planned to head off early because Rose’s house back in Namatala was under threat due to the construction of a new road in the area and the people were due to arrive and start clearing the way that morning. Not fun. We took tea inside the banda after packing up our beds, which we had with dry bread – a typical Ugandan breakfast. 

We had to wait for the picky drivers to arrive, so I took some photos around the place before our transportation arrived and we said goodbye to everyone. One of Rose’s family with good English skills – possibly a nephew – came and presented me with a parting gift…a live chicken! I was very touched by their generosity but had some difficulty taking the gift from the guy’s hands, which they found rather entertaining. They wanted me to take the chicken by the feet, but I didn’t want the thing to flap about (I’m my mother’s daughter!), so I insisted on holding it around its body, with its wings firmly pressed against down. Rose and I were sharing a picky back to the main road, so she took the chicken on her lap, saving me the awkwardness of trying to hold a live bird and keep myself on a jolting motorbike simultaneously. We arrived safely at the main road and managed to get a lift back to Mbale in a passing school bus that was on its way back to Kampala from some sort of camp or something. I got to sit in the very front, in between a driver who had a fondness for speeding over large potholes and a young guy who wanted my email address so we could keep in contact. I politely declined.

 So that was the end of my brush with a village wedding and rural African life. Just so you know, the road workers told Rose that they were going to come to an arrangement with the placement of the road and reach a reasonable agreement…then they came and knocked down her toilet and part of their veranda. The house is okay for now, but as the road continues to be laid, there is a chance they will lose more or even all of their house. This is one of those times where you want to pull your hair out at the ridiculousness of this country. So Rose and the 14 or so people that live with here could possibly lose their house and be left homeless, with no money and no savings to rely on. I can only imagine how long it must have taken Rose to save up to buy their house, and now there’s a chance they could lose everything. They have had to get someone in to dig another toilet, which costs 80,000 shillings just for the hole, then on top of that, they have to pay for the concrete slab around the hole and the structure around the whole thing. Rose earns around 6,000 shillings a day. It’s a heart-breaking situation, but as usual, Rose is just soldiering on and not letting her external situation get to her. We had a girls bonfire at Leah’s last night and Rose was there, laughing and talking and eating and enjoying herself like nothing was wrong – not in a fake kind of way, but honestly just rising above her situation and getting on with life. Again, Rose is amazing.

 So the lovely Miss Leah. Where do I begin? Firstly, she is hilarious! Secondly, she’s not your typical Ugandan woman – she’s in her early 30’s, single, no kids, lives alone, is well-educated, is very straightforward and doesn’t beat around the bush. She’s a great cook and singer, an endless source of entertainment and can shake her booty with the best of them! She loves making new friends and is a most hospitable host – she made me breakfast every morning I stayed with her, washed my clothes, attended to my burn dutifully, washed my feet, gave me a pedicure, prayed with me, shared her friends with me and was just an all-round legend. I call her my sister, but we pronounce it “sistor”. Wherever Leah is, laughter follows! I can imagine Leah fitting in easily in Australia or any other Western country, although she has never left this part of Africa. Hopefully one day she will be able to come visit me in my homeland!

 I have more updates for you, so may have to do some back to back entries! Stay tuned faithful readers…

Lou :)