My Arrival in Uganda

Dry-mouthed and anxious just about sums up how I felt about coming away.  I thought I was doing a rather good job of casually hiding it until we were in the shuttle bus in Dubai about to board the plane to Entebbe and a young man said that I looked worried… and he could see it, despite my protestations.  Maybe that’s just it, in a nutshell:  I am scared of the unknown and whilst I still push myself to experience it, I don’t really like it or trust change easily.  So I had a whole flight ahead to try to change my frame of mind, to let go of the need to control and know what’s coming next, and to somehow convey all that on my face to the world around me.

I decided on the Cheshire-cat look when I got off the plane in Entebbe, Uganda.   I just wanted to hide my anxieties and smiling seemed to work.  Everybody smiled back and was open to talk with me.  My contacts met me.  It was really warming to feel their generous welcome.  And then came the overwhelming chaos of new impressions as the car bumped and swerved along the rust-red road.  Sellers lining the streets, fruit stalls, wooden bedframes, tyres, motorbikes carrying up to four people at a time, wooden bedframes, feral dogs with distended teats, bedraggled chickens and goats, dust, open drains, wooden bedframes, plantain, sugarcane, tea, fig trees, colour.. saturated and luscious, and I am sad to say that there is poverty here… worse than I have ever before encountered, even in Bolivia.  But, Lucy, this is a Third World Country... so get used to it!

It was a long journey back to Kampala and we talked about family life, politics and Uganda’s need for more money to be pumped into Education, Health and Roads.  Currently, the money goes to reinforce the number of soldiers in the Ugandan army.  And the army is precisely what suppresses the civilians and ensures that there isn’t a public uprising against the government.  It sounds very corrupt and I sense the frustrations of the first two Ugandans I have met.

The lady I stayed with last night has three children.  A little 1 year old called Amy.  And two boys of 5 and 6.  They go to a Private School near Kampala.  I went to collect them at the end of the day and got to have a little look around.  I was also introduced to their class and I spoke with them briefly.  When their teacher asked them who had been to the UK, half a class of about 50 children raised their hands.  Did I mention it was a Private school?  Still, the poverty and limitation of facilities run deep.  And I realise more and more that the school I will be working in from tomorrow will be incredibly basic and probably quite a shock for me.

On the way home I ate a bag of dried and salted crickets.  Yes… crickets.

After the boys had finished their homework, unbeknownst to me, they went through my suitcase and dug out what they liked, namely oil pastels.  I didn’t really like this.  They also took my entire bottle of hand-sanitiser and emptied it into the jam jar of roses that had been put beside my bed.  Now I have no sanitiser left and the roses aren’t likely to make it through the night.  I only just noticed what they’d done when I came to bed.  They’d earlier remarked upon the pretty blue of the glass jar, pointing it out to me, and I’d agreed that it looked lovely.  They must think I am the most stupid flipping idiot of a foreigner to have stepped foot in their Country.  All I know is that I don’t feel as though I have any right to feel upset.  I am the outsider.  I am the one who appears to have come with plenty.  They are the ones (who have relatively little) hosting me.  And so I feel I must endure whatever happens to me, in a strange sort of way.  Please, may it not be too difficult.