Peace and Prossy, two of the children staying with us during the school holidays, are currently bouncing around the room singing ‘Happy Birthday Emily’. Never mind that my birthday was yesterday, and my name’s not Emily. After a few weeks of trying to convince them that my name is Amy I’ve just given up and got used to it. So depending on who’s speaking to me, I can be Amy, Emily, Bilungi or Biochemist!
Last weekend was very exciting as I traveled up to Kampala. On Saturday the URF organised a ‘leadership symposium’ with various talks relevant to young professionals or university students. Although some of them were things I’ve heard to death, like how to write a CV, there were some interesting differences between the UK and here. For example, the woman speaking about the CV writing was adamant that you should write your tribe, marital status, religion and so on in the personal details section. When somebody asked whether that would make an employer biased, she said that it would be better for them to find out in the CV than in the interview – a fair point, but I’m sure that in the UK it’s illegal to ask in the interview as well. The speaker then proceeded to give a list of possible interview questions. There were at least 100 of them, and she read all of them out slowly with a short explanation, but without elaborating too much on good ways of answering them, so that got a bit tedious! Another speaker talked about general career guidance. His main point was that people should discover their ‘career personality’ early so that they can choose a suitable career. Very good advice, but he insisted that parents should aim to find out their child’s career personality by the age of six, because that’s when David Beckham decided he wanted to be a footballer, or something like that. I don’t think most people can possibly know their career personality at that age, because the next few years have such an impact on your personality and interests!
The third talk was… engaging, but I hated it. It was based in some way on the book ‘The Cash Flow Quadrant’ by R. Kiyasaki, which I haven’t read and now never want to. The idea in general was ‘leveraging’ of time. In other words, if you employ people, the eight hours a day that they work goes into your ‘time bank account’, so if you have thousands of employees you can ‘live several years in one day’. The speakers were very charismatic so everyone was shouting along and afterwards said that they had learned a lot and gained a lot, but really all they said was that you have to work hard, aim high, and employ people. Unfortunately, they also kept coming back to the URF motto of ‘Belief that a better life is possible’, which in the examples they were giving is true for the few people at the top of the pile who are controlling the businesses, but not for the tens of thousands of people who are working however many hours per day in their tea plantations and so on. Anyway, maybe I’m just too left-wing or something.
After this came the talks that, in my opinion, were the most useful. One was about basic Ugandan legal information when starting up a company or charity, as well as some more general anecdotes about the law. The speaker talked about the constitution for a bit, and then everyone laughed at the idea that the UK doesn’t even have a written constitution and operates on ‘common law, which is kind of like common sense, mostly’. Next was a very very interesting talk about ‘The importance of gender mainstreaming in the project cycle’. Gender is something that I would have considered to some extent when planning my own project, but this talk made me realise how much deeper the issue is than I would have assumed. The speaker gave a wonderful anecdote about the time when she was doing her PhD research into sleeping sickness (the same thing I’m studying for my Masters next year!). Her team were trying a new method of controlling the disease by setting out traps for tsetse flies, which carry the disease-causing parasite. The traps were made of a lovely blue and black fabric to attract the flies. They put out 2000 traps, and told the local chiefs what they were doing. The chiefs agreed that they would look after the traps and not remove them. When the team came back a month later to review how many flies had been caught, they found only 50 of the 2000 traps still there! The chiefs insisted they hadn’t touched them… but they soon found out that women had been removing them to make their traditional dresses because they liked the look of the fabric! The moral of the story being that you have to consider all stakeholders in a project, not just the ‘obvious’ ones.
The final talk was about how to source for project funds, including how to write a good project proposal. It’s not a topic I knew very much about, so hopefully it will increase my chances of getting good funding for my project! Again he emphasised the need to involve the whole community in a project rather than just those directly being targeted. I’ve been planning to interview teachers about my ideas, and I’d also considered interviewing students, but I hadn’t really thought about interviewing parents or local authorities as well.
After the meeting I went to stay with Ivan, a member of the URF Kampala chapter, first year law student at Makerere University (the Cambridge of Uganda) and the future president of Uganda. Since the lecturers of the university are all on strike, his roommate had gone home, leaving a free bed in his room. I discovered that the only thing that gets more stares than being a mzungu in Uganda is being a female mzungu wearing only a towel walking across an all-boys dormitory in Uganda J. It was really lovely to stay at the university and it felt very much like being at home. It seems that boys in Uganda have the same sense of humour as those in the UK… I will put the pictures up on facebook when I get home to show what I mean by that! On Sunday morning I wanted to go to a good, lively church in Kampala so Ivan suggested Watoto Church, a Pentecostal church set up by an American several years ago. It has five sites in Kampala because it’s expanded so much! We headed to the central site as it was closest, but there was a sign up saying that instead of the usual services there would be a ‘Festival of Hope’ at Watoto West. They were providing transport there so we headed over… and I was so overjoyed at what we found. They had a huge stage in a huge field, with thousands of people there to worship. On the stage were a massive children’s choir and a band with guitars and drums and singers. They were serving food in tents and had bouncy castles for the children. The music was so lively, with everyone dancing and jumping and being undignified :D. I was thinking about how much it reminded me of Greenbelt festival, which I was very sad to be missing… and then it became even more like Greenbelt when the heavens opened! The rain here is really quite impressive when it comes – even under the marquees the water was running over the top of my shoes, and the noise was deafening.
Since it was a festival rather than a service, there wasn’t really a sermon, but everyone went to split up into their cell groups for discussions. Since we didn’t want to stay all day, we hitched a lift with someone else who was leaving and who very kindly dropped us exactly where we wanted to go in the city! In his car he had a CD of worship music playing and it was just the kind of songs we have at HT. I almost didn’t want to get out of the car! However, we were being dropped off at Garden City which is a big Western-style shopping arcade which has a cinema, and my excitement about watching Harry Potter outweighed my love of the music. We eventually found the cinema (though I got distracted by nearly every shop in the arcade, like a child in a sweet shop, because after six weeks of seeing mostly the same things in shops (bread, flour, soap, skin lightening cream, paper etc) seeing all these shiny things was just too exciting)… only to find out that they stopped showing Harry Potter last week. GRRR. I didn’t stay sad for too long though, because I discovered ‘Pizza Hot’ in the arcade! It has just the same logo as Pizza Hut, but sadly it doesn’t offer the same all-you-can-eat lunchtime buffet. Anyway, the vegetarian pizza was delicious.
In the afternoon and evening we wandered around chatting and then watched the Manchester United vs Arsenal football match. We were watching it in a bar and I ordered a pot of tea, which turned out to be enough hot water to make five cups of tea! I was very happy about that, especially as someone knocked over my cup of tea at the church festival by dancing very enthusiastically. People here can’t believe that I don’t support any football team, so I decided to support Arsenal during the game just to go against the flow. Ivan and I decided to bet a bottle of soda on the result. Definitely a mistake! Everyone else in the bar (apart from a few people who mostly kept quiet) supported ManU so they were jumping around and shouting and cheering for the whole match. For those of you who didn’t watch it, the score was 8-2 which is one of the highest scoring matches ever or something like that. After the match we ate rolexes and samosas and then stayed up talking until the early hours of the morning. It felt just like being at home.
On Monday we had a meeting with a supplier of laboratory equipment and chemicals in the centre of Kampala. He’s a friend of the headmaster at Hope so we will probably buy the supplies for the school from there. We chatted for a while about the joys of science, and then he gave me the price list, saying ‘but you know, it’s not like the Ten Commandments, you bring me the prices you want… we’ll talk about it… I want to build up loyal customers, y’know? So really, just tell me what you want…’. We liked him a lot. He also implied that if we made a big order he would donate a model skeleton to the school, and they are expensive!
We ate a late lunch of cheeseburgers, which were seriously amazing. Ivan had never eaten a burger before! Then we went back to the university and hung out with his friends for the afternoon. His roommate came back and we had a long discussion about gay marriage, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and many other things. It was interesting to hear that in Uganda those shows are watched just as much by men as by women – there’s certainly no stigma when men watch them like there might be at home. Since the roommate wanted to use his own bed, I went to stay with Caro, a friend of Ivan’s. She’s the most westernised person I’ve met here, I think – we listened to rock music and watched American films together. She has a huge gas stove in her room, which isn’t allowed at all, but she bribed the porters of her halls to let her bring it in!
On Tuesday morning I had a really exciting meeting. The woman who gave the gender talk at the symposium, Dr Elizabeth Kyewalabye, agreed to come into Kampala to talk to me, even though she didn’t know what I wanted to talk about. I was really keen to see what she would think about my project idea, because she’s got so much experience that would be useful: she was only the third woman in Uganda to qualify as a vet, she did her PhD research on something I’m interested in, she’s been a lecturer at three universities and deputy vice chancellor of another, she’s president of the YMCA Uganda chapter, and she started her own NGO for women and youth in development. So basically the perfect person to be involved in an NGO focused on science, youth and development. When I talked to her about it, it took about five minutes for her to go from asking ‘How would you do X?’ to ‘How can we do Y?’. So I now have a co-director! I thought the meeting would last about half an hour or an hour, but we ended up talking for well over three hours. She even invited her friend, a lawyer/consultant, to come and discuss the practical legal issues with us. So we’ve now drafted a concept paper and hopefully within the next couple of weeks we’ll be registered as a CBO! Then we can pass a resolution to open a bank account, which is apparently very easy… and then I have to come back to the UK. Bother. But I think the plan is to begin offering the services at the start of the 2013 school year, which gives me a few months after I graduate to get everything in order, to get sponsors for the project and so on. It’s all kind of overwhelming, but I’m so passionate about this idea and everyone I’ve spoken to has said it would be a practical, sensible way of tackling a real problem in this country. The thought of living in Uganda for a very long time (a few years) is also pretty scary, but I’ve made some really good friends here and with the internet connection improving all the time, I’d be able to keep in touch with everyone at home OK. And you are all invited to come and visit me at some time! I don’t think I would even miss western food that much – in Kampala, after two days of eating the pizza and cheeseburger, I was craving rice and beans and avocado and chapatti. I would just have to make sure I got hold of plenty of vegetables!
I was sad to leave Kampala on Tuesday but the journey home was very smooth and I made it back in under 3 hours – a record I think! Knowing that the city is so close is quite comforting, it would even be feasible to do a day trip there if I needed to, which makes this rural area seem far less remote, even though it is to most of the people who live here. I spent Wednesday compiling the order for all the science equipment and chemicals. I’ve bought three practical-focused textbooks and used them to select a range of experiments that illustrate most of the important points in physics, chemistry and biology, but use the minimum amount of equipment and chemicals possible, or at least use the same equipment as many other experiments. The total cost, based on the price list, comes to 2.5 million (about £500 at current exchange rates) but I reckon I can get that down to about 1.5 million. Still more than the 400 000ish that we have, but I think that amount will go up in the next few days so it should all be well.
And the most exciting thing: yesterday was my 21st birthday! I woke up in the morning to find a ‘parcel’ by my bed – some fresh chapatti and a rolex with egg and tomato and avocado from David. I spent the morning relaxing, drinking tea and playing the guitar. In the afternoon, the plan was to go to Masaka for dinner at Ten Tables, a very reasonably priced western-style restaurant which supports the charity AidChild. Only Katie and I could go from the URF, but I also wanted to take my friend Christine who’s in S2. She’s staying in Mbiriizi at the moment, which is just down the road. I phoned her and she told us to meet her at ‘the police’ in Mbiriizi, which we took to mean the police station. We got there… she wasn’t there. Called her up, and her grandparents (who own the phone) said she was already there. There was a long period of confusion, where we couldn’t leave the police station to go and search for her because the rain was the heaviest I have ever seen and we were surrounded by a very fast-flowing river. We kept asking if this was the only police station and the officers were saying yes, they think so… and it took a full hour before someone pointed out that although this was the only police station, they have barracks at the other end of town. One phone call to a colleague there established that Christine was waiting there. So by this point it was too late to travel to Masaka, especially as the rain was making the roads very dangerous and we wouldn’t want to get stuck there. So we waded through the rivers of rain until we found a chapatti stand still bravely cooking, and we bought more rolexes! By the time we’d also bought sodas the rain had stopped and we sat outside on a bench, eating and drinking and chatting. Then we ate samosas and played pool, which always amuses the locals. Christine had never played it before but she was pretty good for the first time so we’ll have to practise some more in Kyetume. I gave her my present (an O-level biology revision guide) and she was really excited. Honestly, it was better than getting a present.
When we came back to the house we were going to put on music but, typically, the power was off. So we sang and played the guitar, blew up all the balloons (which all popped because they were only from Poundland), lit up the glowsticks and played games with them, including skipping, and had a very lovely evening even if it wasn’t the one I had planned! Very African, and I went to sleep very happy.
Now, as always, the power is about to run out…
