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Hello my chicks. I am attempting to write a blog about work to prove to some of you who think I’m here on some sort of extended holiday that I am gainfully employed. However I am not happy with it - it is either very dull and accountanty or a bit too scurrilous and libellous for publication on the internet. I shall persevere but I promise you I am working hard ... I am at my desk or in meetings all day from 8ish to 5ish and some days I don’t even have my full hour lunch break. This sounds like a bit of a part time job compared to my working life in London but with the heat (some afternoons my brain starts to boil) and the challenges of doing simple things like printing, photocopying or sometimes just saving a spreadsheet the days seem a lot longer.
Anyway onto the more interesting stuff of what I’ve been up to recently. One of the highlights of the last month was my first Ugandan wedding which was a bit of an eye-opener. It was the wedding of Muhame and Sukhey - he is one of the doctors at the hospital and
sunrise over the nile
This means I was up at 6.30 on a sunday!she is a lawyer. It was a very posh do at the Speke resort on Lake Victoria and was the biggest wedding I’ve been to - at least 300 people at peak attendance. Our household divided and conquered in order to provide representation at both the ceremony and the reception - Jon, Gemma and Jo went to the wedding ceremony and Duncan, Jo and I went to the reception. We timed arrival at the reception pretty well - suitably late to avoid the initial speech and only 45 minutes before food was served. Unlike British weddings where it would be very rude to arrive late at the reception and leave before formalities were over people seemed to arrive and leave as suited them - I think that a minimum attendance of an hour is required by etiquette. One man sat and read the newspaper for the whole time that he was there and I spotted at least one person with a laptop taking advantage of the wireless broadband. When we arrived the room was about a third full but at peak time a lot of people were standing. I know you’ll be interested to know about the food - mercifully
no coronation chicken but the dreaded matoke did make an appearance. We had the requisite 4 forms of carbohydrate (rice, matoke, irish potatoes and pasta), fried chicken, goat, tilapia fish and lovely salads. Also millet bread and something which looked like crème fraiche but so wasn’t - apparently it tasted like liquid tobacco.
The whole wedding was a bit of a multi-media extravaganza with 2 big screens behind the top table and a camera crew roaming around filming everything that moved - including the queue for the buffet. There was even a muzungu roadie type person complete with a hairstyle that time forgot and a snout tucked behind one ear. It was slightly off-putting having really bright lights in your eyes and at one stage Duncan hissed at me to sit with my legs together as he was concerned about camera angles! The other main feature of the reception was the speeches - oh my god the speeches. They went on for about 4 hours but fortunately were punctuated by breaks and we were allowed to eat and drink while we listened. Some of them were entertaining - Muhame’s sister was a highlight as she told lots of funny
stories about him and you could tell that his lovely personality was at least partly to do with coming from a family of feisty women. His mother spoke for over an hour - I don’t think his father got a word in edgeways which is at it should be (queue daddy McShane senior!) She had a whole booklet for her speech and started with her primary school years ... we were at bit concerned when half an hour later she’d only got to the Idi Amin era (1970’s). And then things got slightly surreal when she broke into song and little pockets of the audience joined in. I think the heft of her speech was partly due to an obligation to thank and recognise lots of important people at the reception - including the Health Minister. She had absolutely no shame though, despite her husband visibly wringing his hands behind her, and even made a joke at the end about how Ian Clarke (our big boss) would probably be complaining about her verbosity in his next newspaper column. The other speeches were just long and dull - some in Luganda so I had no hope of following - and one
man dragged up Muhame’s deep dark secret of being an International Mathematics Champion which would have put me off marrying somebody. The lovely thing that they did, which is quite fashionable in Uganda, was have a video with family and friends talking about the bride and groom - my favourite was one of Muhame’s sisters who apologised that she couldn’t be there because she’d be busy ‘pushing out a baby’! I think that Sukhey and Muhame are going to quite a modern Ugandan couple, ie she won’t be chained into domestic servitude for the rest of her married life, because she didn’t kneel to feed him cake (they both stood) and she made a speech before him and talked for longer. So hurrah for female emancipation - despite the many comments about her working in ‘a man’s world’!
After a week of working far too hard last week Jo, Duncan, Michelle (who is here doing PhD research)and I escaped dirty Kampala for a bit of R & R at a place called ‘The Haven’ which is on the banks of the Nile east of Kampala near a town called Jinja. The journey there in trusty blue Byron was a
bit traumatic as it rained very heavily on the way and the road there is particularly horrible. There are loads of big lorries which use this route to get to Kenya and transport sugar cane to the big factories and as there are a lots of big long hills there are often two of them crawling up side by side. On the journey to Jinja we passed two lorries which had come of the road and turned over into the deep ditch which runs alongside the road. We passed through really small villages on a track to the Haven and arrived in this beautiful oasis - it’s high up above the Nile and there is a beautiful view of the rapids from the verandah bar. We did very little when we were there except a bit of sun-bathing (or rather sitting in the shade for old pasty-faced yours truly) until it started raining when we retreated to Jo and Duncan’s banda which had the biggest bed I’ve ever seen and watched Sex and the City on DVD while drinking wine. We also did quite a lot of observing people doing white water rafting down the rapids - Jo & Michelle
had done it before and wouldn’t do it again and Duncan & I are in the ‘I’d rather chew off my right arm’ category when it comes to ‘adrenaline sports’. On Sunday morning we had the best breakfast I’ve had yet in Kampala - fresh fruit, homemade bread, cold meats and cheese, scrambled egg and bacon and pancakes with nutella/jam etc and lovely fresh coffee. Then a bit of sitting looking at the river go by, a bit of shopping in Jinja market and then the death ride home again. Jo got very very car-sick and by the time we got back to Kampala she was feeling really terrible - I think it’s worse when you’re just trundling along at 20 mph with lots of smelly fumes. I don’t know how Duncan copes with driving here - I’d be a sobbing wreck after about 5 minutes. In fact driving here is the original adrenaline sport - I’m surprised that some mad Australian or New Zealander hasn’t set up ‘Dice with Death on the roads of Uganda’ driving tours yet. Speaking of dicing with death I am still a boda virgin but I think it’s only a matter of time before
I have to board one.
The one brave thing that I’ve done since being here is giving blood - I had meant to do it just before I left England but my blood was too full of vaccinations to be of any use to anyone. According to the posters in the hospital the session would start at 10am so I trotted along to get it over with early ... due to Africa time they didn’t get going until about 12 so I had a lot of time to build up some anxiety. The worst bit of it is usually when they staple your finger to get a blood sample - the lady doing it was very kind and gentle but still made me watch my blood go into the bottle of blue stuff which is used to test for anaemia. Mine sank like a stone which meant it was fine - I was hoping for a bit of bobbing around which would have given me a gold star for effort but no nasty needle business. Instead I was put on a sort of sun lounger under a canopy and a huge needle (about the width of a nail) was put into my arm. The Clinical Officer who was doing the blood-letting started showing me the whole apparatus (partly to show me that everything was completely sterile and brand new) until I told him I feared needles and would rather he just got on with it. It really did hurt when he stuck it in my arm but I was very brave ... and the bag thing filled up in record time! I wasn’t allowed to get up for a bit and was made to lie right back to the blood could get back to my brain - would this make any difference??? This made me feel very dizzy and whirly - similar to the combination of 4 martinis and a tube ride. I don’t think I achieved much that afternoon other than making the rest of Finance laugh when I put my comedy ‘reward’ baseball cap on ... the best comment was ‘You look a bid mad’. Anita tried to instill some order by telling me to stop being over-dramatic (I was describing the nail they used to extract blood). Once Byron (the only boy in Finance) realised that giving blood resulted in getting lots of attention, a free soda and a baseball cap he set about claiming that he’d given blood - Beatrice closed him down very rapidly with something curt in Luganda. But undaunted he disappeared off somewhere and came back sporting two plasters in cross on his arm and a baseball cap - I think he’d had a malaria test or persuaded somebody to make it look like he’d given blood. Of course Beatrice, who was cross that she'd been rejected due to recent vaccinations was having none of it and gave him a good verbal battering in Luganda and English.
Time to go and go back to Sunday stuff - am at round 2 of conference for projects which are getting Civil Society Funding. This might give me something interesting to write about on the work blog. Definitely good for people watching!
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Alisom Lay
non-member comment
Languages og Uganda
Hi Helen, wasn't there any dancing at the wedding, and could you please give us the run-down on the languages they speak/use in Uganda. Is Luganda widely spoken or is it a class/political thing? Read recently that Swahili is the lingua franca - or is that Kenya? As I'm so good at languages (shouts of derision in the distance) I'd really like to know more. Love from Copenhagen (Stephanie is on a school trip to Salzburg in Austria, have told her to avoid going into people's cellars)