I stand out like a sore thumb here. Although Jinja is fairly touristy, barring the nun down the road I seem to be the only white person this side of the river. In the small villages we visit children stare at me in either bewilderment or pure excitement. Cries of ‘mzungu, mzungu!’ follow me as I pass though on my boda. There’s even a mzungu song. It’s a great way to connect with the local people and I don’t need to do anything except smile and wave. I do find it a little bemusing though, having grown up in a country where if a child pointed and shouted ‘black man’, their embarrassed parents would quickly tell them to shut up. We like to pretend that skin colour is not a descriptor. Here they’re a bit more honest.
Life is slow here. This is African Time. Appointments are kept at a convenient time rather than the scheduled time. This means lots of sitting around doing nothing for those who were on time. Office productivity is low, a 5 day week would be condensed into one day at home. The UK’s productivity may be in decline but it has a long way to go before it hits African standards (this is, to be fair, not a purely Ugandan phenomenon.) Life is physically slower too. Taxis and bodas move as slowly as the potholes dictate whilst pedestrians plod slowly along the roadside. It is physically challenging to walk so slowly!
Potholes!
Like any country on the equator rain is a part of everyday life. Sometimes It’s a short sharp shower. Other times the thunder crashes overhead, shaking me awake in my bed. There is no wonder that the road infrastructure is near non-existent. Any tarmac that was there has largely been washed away meaning any journey, be it bike, boda or mini-bus taxi, is an assault course around the hundreds of potholes and disintegrated sections. Village roads with no tarmac fare even worse. Ironically, Amin’s roads have lasted. No corruption in his time.
Everybody knows the precautions to take against mosquitos. For someone who seems to be a mosquito’s dream dinner, this is even more true. Yet apart from the odd whining and the relatively modest 15 bites I accumulated in the first few days, the mosquitos have been relatively tolerable. More annoying are the midges with whom I have shared my bed for the last 2 weeks. Hundreds of them squashed on my bedsheets, presumably so small as to sneak through the holes of the mosquito net. Thousands more lie dead on my bedroom floor. Harmless enough but incredibly annoying. My morning physio session is more an exercise in finding a clean bit of floor than exercise per se. A few creatures have managed to make me jump. Coming from a temperate climate, it’s a momentary shock to find a gecko in the toilet. Or the sink. Or a 10cm beetle with even longer antennae coming at you across the bathroom floor. The first one got flushed I’m afraid. The second one I was a little more tolerant of. The third I resorted to Google to determine danger. Only to my self-respect it would seem….