Soda

Last weekend I attended a party in honour of the woman who will be the Headmistress of Timothy Girls College when it opens next year. She recently completed her Masters degree, so her friends at Kibaale Community Centre (our sister project) organized a big celebration to mark the occasion. When we drove into the compound, it looked like a wedding reception was about to take place. There were three big marquee tents, tulle arches, artificial flower bouquets, straw hats with festive ribbons atop tulle-and-ribbon-draped pillars and a head table set with bottles of soda.

This last detail is important to note. In Uganda, an event becomes an “occasion” when you are given a bottle of soda to drink. Coke, Sprite and Pepsi are readily available, as are a few local favourites that aren’t sold at home, but a bottle of any carbonated beverage is considered a real treat. So special, in fact, that crates of soda are often listed as one of the many gifts a prospective groom is expected to give to the bride’s father as a dowry. Similarly, when Paul bought a bull for the Timothy Centre workers to slaughter and roast at Christmas as a way to thank them for all their hard work, our security guards were put in charge of the soda crates at the party in order to ensure equitable distribution. (The Ugandans made that decision, not us, incidentally!)

The honour placed on bottles of Coca Cola or Pepsi may be viewed, I suppose, as an example of corporate colonialism; American soft drink companies imposing themselves on other cultures. However, no one here seems to be complaining. Perhaps the old commercial got something right...apparently, giving the world a Coke does keep it company!

The head table at the graduation celebration

The Timothy Girls College administrative team

Olympics

Despite all the technological advances that appear to make the world smaller, we’re all feeling very far from home these days as we hear about all the Olympic fervour happening in Vancouver. It all looks like so much fun from this side of the world, and we feel like we're missing out! Reading Facebook status updates from people in the stands as Canadians win medals at home or seeing photos of my nephews all dressed in red to cheer on the Canadian women’s hockey team at Thunderbird Stadium can make a (slightly!) homesick Canuck just a bit jealous!

We’re not totally cut off though. We can stay on top of the medal count and read about the events online and most importantly a restaurant here in Masaka has satellite TV. We’re eleven hours ahead of Vancouver, so nothing is shown live. However, every day at noon SuperSport 2 shows an hour long highlight program of the previous day’s events in Vancouver. Paul, Megan and I have gone a few times to eat lunch and watch images of our city projected on the wall. We’ve been the only ones there watching, but every once in a while a few curious Ugandans wander in to check it out. Once they see we’re not watching football (and snowboarding, luge and curling mean absolutely nothing to them) they don’t tend to stick around. It's a fun way to spend an hour, and it is so great to see familiar places--we always look for people we know when the cameras pan the crowd, but no luck so far!

Given that we're so far away, here’s what we’ll picture when we look back on our Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics experience:

GO CANADA!!!!!

Obama

Earlier this week we had the opportunity to attend a small function at the US Embassy in Kampala. Our project was chosen to receive a grant from the US Mission and so we were invited, along with the other recipients, to visit the embassy, sign the documents and pose for a few photos. It was an interesting experience having to go through the tight security and then, upon entering the building, feeling like you’d stepped into America.

In the lobby where we waited to be escorted to the meeting room, there were official portraits of Obama, Biden and Clinton. It made a lot of sense that on the wall of an embassy, you’d find the portraits of the Head of State and key government officials of that country. However, regarding this particular Head of State, one sees his image in all kinds of unlikely contexts around Uganda, so it was almost strange to see this portrait hanging in its proper place.

Yes, Obama is very popular here—or at least his image and name are very popular here. I’ve seen an Obama Restaurant and an Obama hair salon; a portrait painter in Kampala has used Obama’s face on the sign outside his shop; people wear Obama t-shirts and sport his image on the all-purpose kanga cloths women use as shawls, baby carriers, and head-coverings; the teachers at Kibaale Secondary School keep track of the date on a calendar poster covered with photos of the First Family. He's everywhere!

I don’t know if Obama has any plans to visit this region, but if he does, he’d be assured of a very warm welcome! People don’t seem to care much about the politics; he’s a US President whose father came from East Africa, and that is enough to have hair salons named in his honour! This t-shirt was hanging in the Kibaale village market. It reads:"Barack Obama: Two centuries ago, a band of patriots signed a document in Philedelphia. Now he's bringing it home."

Kanga cloths for sale

Insects

At one point in the movie The Princess Bride, Buttercup and Wesley have survived two of the three “terrors of the Fire Swamp”—the Flame Spurt and the Lightning Sand, when they are set upon by the vicious third terror--the R.O.U.S’s, or Rodents of Unusual Size. While the rodents here in Uganda generally tend to be of a Fairly Typical Size, we regularly find ourselves faced with the menacing I.O.U.S’s—Insects of Unusual Size.

These six-legged beasts invade our homes, attack our porch lights, lie in wait in dark corners and release powerful biological weapons such as malaria or sleeping sickness. They lay their eggs in our feet, attach themselves to our dogs’ ears and sting us (causing unsightly swelling.) They burrow into our deliciously ripe fruit, infest our rice and drown in our drinks. And how do we defend ourselves? A thin net suspended over our beds and a small bottle of Deep Woods Off. We don’t stand a chance against the sheer numbers of their forces!

Yes, insects are definitely a part of each and every day. Whenever we sweep the house, there are usually tiny ants in the dust pile that we sweep out the door. We go to sleep at night to the sound of the cicadas buzzing outside. Every morning we have to deal with all the lake fly carcasses on the floor beneath the window. Fruit flies are ubiquitous in the kitchen. Slapping mosquitoes is a regular evening activity. But all of these bugs are fairly small. Every once in a while, however, we come across an insect that is just ridiculously large.

There was a beetle in front of Paul and Megan’s house one day that was probably three inches long with a body that was about an inch and a half wide. Fortunately we don’t have them in our new houses, but where we used to live, we’d regularly see two inch cockroaches. And then I came across this one morning on my front porch:

We’ll never defeat them, so we are forced to learn how to co-exist with them. You learn that flip-flops make excellent fly swatters and that it is important to keep a can of Doom (the Ugandan version of Raid) handy at all times. No big deal. As Wesley says about the Fire Swamp, ”It’s not that bad...the trees are actually quite lovely.”

Wildlife

I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited two national parks in the last month and had the opportunity to see lots of African wildlife while on the game drives and boat rides. Here are a few miscellaneous items to share from those experiences:

-The cliché that elephants have good memories is not that far off, apparently. The park ranger we hired to guide us around the park at Murchison Falls told us that the elephants in that park are more aggressive towards humans than the elephants in Queen Elizabeth Park because of the greater incidence of poaching and the longer history of conflict in that region.

-I was awakened around 4:00am one morning by the sound of something very large eating grass and breathing heavily outside the banda (a small cottage) I was staying in. The man at reception when we checked in had told us not to go outside after the generator was turned off for the night and the lights went out, because the cape buffalo come through and graze on the grass in the lodge compound. Cape buffalo are considered to be the most dangerous animal on the savannah in terms of the danger they pose to humans. Needless to say, I was very glad when the generator came back on and the lights encouraged those big fellas to git movin’!

-While on the boat ride up the Nile to see Murchison Falls, we got very close to a male elephant that was eating on the shore. The driver turned the engine off and we watched this guy for a while. It is quite amazing to be close enough to hear the sound of his ears flapping. However, when he turned, looked us square in the eye and made a few threatening lunges in our direction, I didn’t feel the need to hang around!

-A lot of the hippos we saw had huge scars and/or open wounds on their skin. Male hippos are very territorial and they fight each other a lot; their large teeth can do a lot of damage, apparently! Also, I learned that a group of hippos is called a “school.”

-We watched a large baboon in the parking lot of the lodge we were staying in, go over to the garbage can, lift the lid and peer inside to see if there was anything interesting inside. Those animals are quite habituated, obviously!

You see and learn a lot in a couple of days while on safari and it is a truly remarkable experience to see these animals in their natural habitat. It’s a great blend of fun tinged with very real danger. That park ranger we hired as a guide? He had his gun with him in our vehicle....just in case!

Nostalgia

We just spent the afternoon visiting with one of our friends here in Masaka. He is an Indian Ismaili Muslim who was born in Masaka and fled to Canada with his family during the Idi Amin years. He returned to Uganda as soon as it was safe to do so and has since reclaimed his family’s farm and has almost single-handedly worked to rebuild the mosque in town that had been nearly destroyed by neglect during “The Troubles.”

This mosque restoration has been a labour of love for him and he proudly gave us a tour of the building and the gardens that he has spent years working on. He was telling us stories of the way Masaka was when he was younger—perfectly paved streets, beautiful gardens, 900 Ismailis living in the area, operational sugar and coffee factories and a vibrant social life centred at the mosque. He then took us outside of town a ways to his family’s 300 acre farm that used to produce sugar and coffee. There had been a house on the property, but it was destroyed and now the property is basically just a beautiful garden.

Things have really changed in Masaka since the days he remembers. There are only a handful of Ismailis that live in town now, the streets have gaping potholes and those coffee factories are empty and derelict. However, this man remains committed to the community. He cares for two young Ugandan boys and pays for their schooling, he ensures his workers and their children get proper medical attention when they’re sick and he continues to restore the mosque.

I should also mention that he is an absolutely amazing cook, and he frequently drops by our place with some kind of delicious Indian treat for us to enjoy. When he had us over today, he whipped up some kebabs and served them with freshly made mango chutney. It’s people like this that make my experience here so rich and it is so interesting to listen to his stories of another time.

Clinics

So imagine the confidence with which I entered a local clinic seeking treatment for malaria. The sun had just gone down, and as we parked the car outside we saw no lights coming from within—clearly the power had gone out in town. Armed with the feeble flashlights on our cellphones we ducked beneath the ratty beaded curtains hanging in the doorway and entered the lobby. A voice told us we “were welcome” and so we sat down on the benches in what appeared in the dim light to be a waiting room. Several people came over to greet us and shake our hands and finally someone said that they were just going to get more petrol in order to start the generator. Yes, I was feeling pretty good about the kind of medical attention I was to receive!

The lights came on soon after, and to be honest, it might have been better to have been kept in the dark! The lights just showed how grubby a place it was! However, seeing a computer at the registration desk did give me some hope of respectability. The doctor ordered a malaria test and the nurse directed me to the lab (while her cellphone was to her ear)—outside, in the next door, up a dodgy flight of stairs, down a hallway where I was told to wait on a bench. I passed a filthy sink that wasn’t equipped with faucets, sat on the bench outside some rather smelly toilets and waited alone on the bench.

A lab tech came soon after and took me into the lab. I tried to block out most of the scene and just concentrated on where she was taking the needle from; she opened a new package, so I could (almost) ignore the rest of the surroundings as she went about her task. I had the results in about three minutes and went back through the maze to the doctor’s office where he wrote a prescription for malaria medication. The whole process probably took half an hour at the most.

Two days later, I determined that the meds the doctor had given me were only making me sicker so I returned to another clinic for a second opinion. This one is far more reputable, but it’s only open during the day, so we hadn’t been able to go there in the first place. A second doctor’s consultation, some glucose injections, some kind of rehydrating IV drip and a new prescription seemed to make the difference and I’m thankfully feeling much better now.

Say what you like about the waiting lists, the bureaucracy and even the occasional user fees associated with the Canadian Healthcare System, at least the generators are always fuelled up!