Daily Life

Monkeys surrounding the bathroom. Occasional earthquakes. Frequent power outages. Even more frequent thunderstorms. Enormous elephant footprints all around our compound. Those are just a few of the surprises that it has taken us awhile to adjust to here in Uganda. But we’re happy to have settled into our work and lives and now we would like to tell you a little bit about them.

Our 3-room, cinderblock duplex is beginning to feel like a home we could stand to live in for a few more months, especially thanks to Jess’s recent strategic negotiations to acquire art and furniture from a departing colleague. The dark walk to the pit toilet is still somewhat threatening, although it occasionally has added intrigue depending on what interesting types of moths and katydids are attracted to the single florescent lightbulb outside. The kitchen has been much better than expected, with Andrew returning to his daily egg-and-toast breakfast expertise, followed by more skillfully crafted lunches and dinner leftovers compliments of our hired local ladies, Florence and Margret, who work for us and our duplex neighbors. They provide amazing (and very rich by Ugandan standards) meals that include things like eggplant stew, pumpkin stew, tomato stew, cauliflower stew.... The second, non-stew food group includes fried things, like samosas, sweet mendazis and delicious (and ubiquitous!) chapattis, which are like pitas, but moister and better. (Probably because of all the oil it’s fried in). Beans and rice, cabbage salad, and fresh fruit like pineapple, avocado, and papaya provide the finishing touch for diverse vegetarian meals. I’m pretty sure that without Florence and Margret we would have no idea what to do with local produce and would be eating pasta every night, like we did for much of the time in Iquitos. However, we are not the only ones who enjoy their cooking, so we still have to be careful about leaving food outside of cupboards and metal containers, as the mouse population in the kitchen has gotten high enough to inspire nightly hunts by the men of the duplex (this seriously involves two guys with sharp sticks and a pan). Florence and Margaret also wash our clothes, bless their hearts. They said that Andrew is like a baby because he is all the time playing in the mud and getting his clothes really dirty (Fortunately they can’t tell the difference between Jess’s clothes and Andrews.) They also iron the clothes to kill the mango fly larvae that would otherwise burrow into the unwitting wearer and begin to grow beneath the skin. Distressingly, Jess is having some trouble with elastic parts of certain clothing items not being ironed well enough.

As for local wildlife (beyond the backyard baboons), we have discovered that geckos are very good house companions, both because they absorb a lot of Jess’s affection for salamander-y things, and because they eat bugs (which we have a lot of). Unfortunately, they eat so many bugs that they also defecate all over the place. So do elephants. We haven’t yet seen any real live elephants, but we see their poo and footprints all the time, both around the station and in the farm fields where we work. These footprints are over a foot and a half in diameter and often several inches deep. It’s hard not to imagine a dinosaur. You would think that we would see something this big running around our camp, but they are actually very sneaky and move mostly at night. That’s fine by me, I’m not sure I want to meet one too close.

After our workdays tromping through local people’s fields to measure their crops and wildlife damage, we return home and try to take a quick, refreshing (cold) shower while it’s still light outside. It gets down in the 50’s when it is dark and when the clouds aren’t out, you can see your breath, so it’s good to give yourself time to warm up again before bedtime. I saw a recent “health” article in the local Ugandan paper that warned that showering with warm water could be a harmful shock to the nerves. Which made me wonder, how many years off my life have the shocks of cold water here and in Peru already taken? (Also, how low are the requirements for writing newspaper articles? Other examples: “Health Benefits of Drinking Urine” and “Police Chief Encourages Motorcycle-Taxi Drivers to Practice Better Hygiene”). When Jess is feeling truly extravagant, she heats a couple kettles of water in the electric boiler for a soothing bucketbath. The kettle also works for making tea and sanitizing water, and, if the country runs out of propane (which it seems to be on the way to doing), it may also be our only means of cooking that does not involve locally produced charcoal.

So that’s the current state of our life here. Now that we’ve got the hang of things and have provided a bit of an overview of our setup, we can write a little more about our impressions of other events and issues going on around us. We get internet in certain spots in the yard and phone signal up the hill a ways, so when the power is on and it isn’t raining, we can be pretty well connected. But a lot of the time those things don’t converge, which is why we’ve been a little slow to get this blog up and running. But we’ve posted some new photos and are hoping to write at least one entry every week, so stay tuned for more communications from the bush!