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 :)