Notes from the Field

Top 10 Reasons You Don’t Have Power

1. The power company neglected to record your payments and is punishing you
2. Someone stole all the electrical cables from Masaka to Bwanda
3. A lightning bolt wiped out the transformer
4. A driver hit the pole with the transformer
5. A storm took out three electric poles
6. Someone stole the electric poles
7. They are selling your power to Kenya
8. There isn't enough water left in Lake Victoria to keep two dams running
9. The man at the main switch is gone
10. You had power yesterday. What do you expect?

And by the way, the rates for electricity are going up 30% next month.

Ruth Leacock, July, 2006

Bullets and Bugs

Bullets

In a convoy to Adjumani we passed a mama momba (Africa’s version of a tank), a baby momba (think RAV 4 with a turret), truckloads of soldiers with rocket launchers and AK-47s, sporting the latest solid-bullet stoles. They were all going the other way. Is that good or bad?

Arriving in Adjumani: I’ve taken a liking to beer. Couldn’t drink the stuff at home, but the green-bottle Tusker brew is really, really, really good. I downed a whole bottle.

In the Jesuit Community in Adjumani: Fr. Frido tells me they have a 90-year-old, mostly blind cat for a watchdog. It keeps out rats and mice and, unable to do much else, makes a whole lot of racket when it finds a cobra.

Sleeping in Adjumani: Had a 6-inch, dark green, striped lizard trapped under the bed by a ceiling-to-floor mosquito net. When I got into bed, (naked as a jaybird cuz it was hotter than hell) the thing panicked and frantically wiggled up the net into bed with me. I jolted, pulled up the netting, "Jimmmanyed!" and "Shoooooooood!" the thing out. The lizard scurried to the corner (he’s no dummy) and stayed put. I never heard the bats which left doo-doo all over the clothes in my open suitcase.

Traveling in Adjumani: Herbert likes to roll his ‘r’s as in, "Can I borrow some soap? It’s day three and I’m starting to rrrrrot."

Rainy Season Bugs

Wings widespread, a score of 2" desiccated white ants are permanently sandwiched between two layers of screening on the living room windows. Tim says to think of them as modern art.

I was spooked at 3:00am by a ‘man’ walking near the front door. Whaddaya know. It was a 5’ whirling dervish of hundreds of flying white ants. Tim killed the entry light, and the dervish zipped right up into a ball and whirled off across the compound. Just like a sci-fi movie.

It’s impossible to pray by candlelight some nights. Every 20 seconds you have to slap the Holy Bible because white ants (attracted to the candle) are walking across the pages. If they aren’t strolling the Good Word, they’re up, under and all over your clothing, into blouse gaps, sleeves, pant legs…

The Kamikaze bugs (also in rainy season) are big, thick, flying insects—Tim calls them B-52s. Totally crazy. They are brown, with curled, segmented, 1 ¼ inch bodies. They slam against the doors and windows until they find a way inside. Inside, they bash around the room, circling the light, smashing into walls and ceiling, absolutely witless, impervious to pain. Finally, they knock themselves completely out, slide down a wall to the floor, twitch for an hour, and crawl under the sofa to die the great AMEN.

Then there are the teeny-tiny bugs. Tens of thousands of them stucco the ceiling and walls of our veranda overnight. In the morning I stick my hand through the outside door, spray Doom, and then sweep the heap so the birds don’t swoop in to eat them. Herbert simply uses his back door 'ti 3:00pm after which most of the bugs have moved on. He likes "having a whole eco system" on his front porch.

By the way, in the USA you kill bugs with insecticide. Here you "punish" them with "medicine."

Ruth Leacock, Spring, 2006

Smoke’n the Toilet

Herbert begged off work today to "smoke his toilet." Then he went to set the methane gas beneath the concrete slab (the one with the hole in it you straddle) in his pit latrine on fire. He assured me, "No, the thing just won’t explode, Ruth. And it smells much better this way."

Our former landlady accused us of "using excessive force" on a broken plastic toilet handle. We refused payment denying we strong-armed the porcelain-god.

On the first day of gym classes, the boys at the local orphanage tumbled all over the yard for niece Stephanie. And neither boy was embarrassed when the pants on two of them split down the middle and little brown butts came popping out. Class and "a whole lot of mooning" went on. Tim’s polio legs were aching so he stopped at a Chinese herbal store. They sold him Wing Long Red Flower Oil." The box says, "Effective relief for cardiac and abdominal pains, rheumatic pains, aching back, quadriplegia, sprains, and bruises, injuries from falls, contusions, strains, cuts, burns, bleeding, stings, bites, and deep-rooted ulcers. A must in your safety kit…" Two of the ingredients are turpentine and kerosene.

The road to Louise’s house is narrow, crammed, slow, curvy and way past where you want to be. Tim says it’s like driving down someone’s colon.

John’s cousin is a spy. "Uhuh," I say. "You aren’t supposed to know who the spies are." He laughs. "Nooooooo. Not in Uganda! These guys are very PROOOOUD of their government jobs! You just say, ‘Hey, man, how come you always have money but nobody sees you going to work?’ They’ll tell you all about being a spy."

Heavy ash from burning trash and dry grass fell again today. "Gehenna season" has returned.

New store signs: Martyr’s Hardware Parlor; Dry cleaning and Battery Charging.

Herbert: "Let’s see, in 2004 a 2kVA generator cost $600US, or 1,065,000 Uganda Shillings at an exchange rate of 1,775. And this place was the cheapest. So if it's $530US at today’s rate of 1,875 shillings, that’s a good deal." And what’s Ruth thinking? "Let’s see, if its 2006 and I was born in 1951, how old am I again?" Jimmany Christmas! Some days I feel really dumb.

Ruth Leacock, Spring, 2006

Moses and the Ugandan Mountain

If Moses went up a Ugandan mountain, he’d come down and say, "God said come back next Tuesday."

And this is the TRUE log of my trying to e-mail a single document to Sr. Betty for a meeting.

• (Mar 7) On the road, Ruth drives around rural Mbale. The internet cafe’s only available computer can’t find the internet.
• The only available computer in second internet cafe is in a 4-foot-wide, unstable, swaying, plywood balcony. The keyboard sticks. She types fast and misspells "bukululagirls" in the e-mail address.
• Message of "failed delivery" is discovered two days later after Ruth drives home. The message is resent.
• The message arrives three days after Ruth’s return. Power has been out at Sr. Betty’s. A transformer was down.
• Sr. Betty receives the message but can’t print it. She asks Scovia, the computer teacher, to fix the problem. Scovia wants to call Herbert at CFA for help but her phone is out of airtime. So is Sr. Betty’s. They buy airtime at the store the next day.
• Scovia does connect to Herbert, but the conversation is disconnected. The battery on Herbert’s phone needs charging but there is now no power at his place.
• Herbert gets his phone recharged and tries to call Scovia back. But there is no network connection at Scovia’s place.
• Herbert calls again the next day and gets Scovia. They work together on the problem but can’t yet solve it.
• Herbert calls Scovia the next day and they DO solve the problem, but just as they go to print, power fails again.
• (Mar. 17) I call Sr. Betty to see if I should go ahead with the program described in the document. She tells me she is just now driving to the nearest town (with a floppy) to print the document. Could I wait a few more days for the answer?

We’re in our 3rd month of trying to get a refund from our Internet provider. Things we’ve been told so far:

1. "Tomorrow we will send our special courier to your house with the check!"
2. "We have a check ready for you, downtown." (It bounced 10 days later for insufficient funds.)
3. "We’ll deposit the cash directly into your bank account." (never made it)
4. "We will write our own accountant a check. He will deposit the money into his PERSONAL account. After it clears, he will withdraw the cash and deposit it into YOUR account."

And if you believe that…

Ruth Leacock, March 2006

This Ain’t Kansas

Serious termite craters appeared in the back yard this month. The little buggers are plumping up for building a mound. They ate three ladders over the weekend.

Only Zaida will eat the cinnamon swirl roll I brought home from the deli yesterday. The dark brown "cinnamon" swirls have the texture of finely ground tree bark and taste like smoked pork.

We got all worked up the other night hearing the blast of a gun at 3:00am. Turns out the armed guard next door shot himself in the foot.

Half the delays here can be explained with one sentence, "The man with the key has gone."

We showed up for Mass the other Sunday and found the door locked, people milling around and no notice of explanation, prompting Tim to sum up the situation: "The man with the priest has gone."

We returned from 5 weeks in the USA and, within 30 minutes, knew we were not in Kansas anymore:

• The light switch in the dining room had come unwired.
• The outlet strip in the kitchen was dead as a door nail (blown fuse).
• Tom had hooked up a "TV" for us—a Macintosh computer with all-French interface.
• The video cable for the CD player was missing (lodged in a box at Herbert’s house).
• The adapter for the speakers was gone (transplanted to Tom’s).
• And the DVD player was toast. (Arthur plugged it into a 240V socket without a converter and fried it.)

We bought two more cans of tuna today because the tins are perfect for replacing the stove feet which are falling off.

It’s hard to kill cockroaches with flip flops no matter how hard you smack ‘em.

Tim dropped a jar of pickles at the Shoprite exit as he was heading to the parking lot. The store associate, stationed at that point, insisted he take the bag—leaking pickle juice and broken glass—back into the store to the customer service desk. Tim says there was no reasoning with the woman, so he just walked off without his refund or his pickles.

When he wants to watch T.V., Tom makes himself into a human antenna. He stands on the third rung of a tree-ladder outside his little room holding up a broom with a wire on top. Then he sticks his head through the window and watches the single available channel on his Mac computer. We have no TV. We just watch Tom.

"Golf Course Road," says Timothy, comes complete with 18 holes. They tie flags to the antennas of all the cars at the bottom.

You can see anything in a traffic jam here: Boda-Boda (motor-skooter) passengers holding huge sheets of plate glass, lorries with 60 armed guards jammed in the back, lost cows, taxies with dead fish on the bumper or squawking chickens hanging out the windows, bicycles with 5-foot high stacks of raw eggs or 14-foot lengths of lumber, hawkers selling imitation gold watches and/or chicken on a stick, adolescents on skateboards, beggars with elephantitis, soldiers with AK47s… All is lost from sight in tropical downpours, blackouts from trucks belching black clouds of diesel exhaust, or the jolt of your axel dropping into a Marianna trench dug by the Department of Water and Power.

The 30-pack of CDs Tim bought here was only good 10 deep. The rest were junk we turned into fine looking Christmas ornaments.

Merry Christmas and Peace from Kampala, Uganda

Ruth and Tim Leacock, December 2005

Granola and Smoked Fish

Vanilla, all granola cereal, and killer roach motels disappeared from stores 3 months ago. However, cherry Jello has made a debut and baking soda is back in one store along with do-it-yourself wills.

Sunday, April 17—Never heard the Agnus Dei set to African polka music before.

Monday, April 11—3 reasons why the CFA staff was late to work:

• Housekeeper, Zaida, was in the slammer along with perp who decked her for allegedly knocking clothes off neighborhood laundry lines.
• Herbert was up all night because the neighbors were swarming all over the white ants that were swarming all over his house. He says if you pull the feathers (wings) off the ants, they fry up really good.
• Ruth didn't sleep well thinking too much about where the mother-of-all snakes was who the day before lost a baby snake in our bedroom.

Staying in the convent in Bukulula—First, to take a shower: mix water from the geri-can with hot water from the coffee pot. Dump same over your head. Second, to go to the toilet: lift door off floor, unlock double lock on second door, step over cat, walk past chickens on yet-to-be-washed dishes, pass big gecko in the loo, shoo the giant spider off the toilet paper and watch dragonflies bash their heads against the wall while you do your business. It helps to imagine yourself in a nature movie.

The sisters and I watched part of a soccer game after supper. At half time one said the funeral she attended that day didn’t go so well. A rope broke when they were lowering the coffin. Somebody didn’t nail down the lid and the body, wrapped in bark cloth, rolled out. The mourners had to jump into the hole and sort the whole thing out. Back to the show... Well, No. The TV station decided not to air the second half of the game.

No incense or icons at local Mass. However, we had... The smell of sewage wafting in from nearby latrines. A Last Supper painting, hung many moons ago, plastered to the wall at -20 degrees, bats flying in and out, cows mooing, roosters crowing, a student body that got up at 4:00 am stumbling in, each with a chair on her head...

We returned home to find the electric company had turned off the power (Tom had to wrestle with them to get it back on), the gas stove was out of propane, one electric burner was toast, and the water was off for the day. But the internet was up.

Then Herbert unwrapped the smoked fish he bought on the way back from Bukulula. Holy Saints in Heaven did that smell strong. Then he says, "Be sure tomorrow to cook it in the oven for 20 minutes on low so no maggots form." O maaaaan, I just couldn’t deal with it. The fish spent the night in the garage. Zaida seared it in the oven for 2 hours the next day with a turbo fan blowing out the kitchen the whole while. It wasn’t bad in peanut sauce. Gravel is good in peanut sauce.

Gotta love the language here, like: "Had a close call today. The car almost got knocked up by a boda-boda carrying a long, steel pipe."

Description of kasava posho: Translucent, semi-impervious, with the texture of half set, rubber cement. Good with peanut sauce.

The big three—cockroaches, sweet ants, and big black grease ants—seem to have an agreement over whose turn it is to own the kitchen. I really hate it when big dead ants get caught in my teeth sipping coffee... I reeeeally hate it...

Some little kid asked our parish priest if they were growing beans IN church—the potholes in the church floor are THAT big. Church collection had a bushel of cabbages and a bag of cement.

Ruth Leacock, April & July, 2005

Yesu Kabaka Pork Joint

A letter from Gehenna...

We’ve had 3 weeks of Ash Wednesday. If you sit on the veranda, a steady flow of charcoal flakes settles on your clothes. By the end of the day you can write your name in the ash smear on an outside table. We hope the burning stops by Good Friday.

Sign along the road: YESU KABAKA PORK JOINT. (Jesus the King Pork Joint).

The Black Death has moved in on all the furniture in the office. A fungus, or oxidation or something is eating all the table legs streaking them with a brown/black/white/green powder. I hope it isn’t alive.

The toaster is on the same circuit as the new computer lab. You can run one or the other, but not both.

After four days the internet guy finally arrived to fix the net. Then the power went out.

The ingredients on the back of the chips bag are printed in 18 languages.

The cereal box says that if there is a product complaint it will be addressed. The info goes from Africa to Malaysia to Switzerland, to the joint corporate offices of Nestle and General Mills in America. That otta fix it.

In Masaka we had to pay $300US to NOT get the electric poles we didn’t really need. Then $100US to get the electric wire (we already paid for) actually hooked up to the schools. If you don’t pay the bribe to the little guy, you’ll pay twice as much to his boss. You don’t get receipts for bribes.

Yesterday Tom picked up my driver’s license... from a woman in the parking lot of the Uganda Revenue Authority. "I give Dorine a little something," he explains, "and we don’t stand in line. It’s her job to help people, make them happy." Inside, plastered all over the walls are signs saying, "If you pay to have faster service, you are part of corruption." O, dear.

Tom drove us to church and declared he would wait under the tree and would "Make his own ‘mess.’" Very confusing. Ah... Herbert says ‘Mahs,’ Tom says ‘Mess,’ We say ‘Mass.’ That cleared that up.

Mr. Kivumbi fixed the electrical problem at the Sacred Heart convent. He poured kerosene on the snake in the doorbell electrical box. Everyone felt better until the snake quietly slipped away when they were laughing.

Ruth Leacock, March 20, 2005

Matches, Kerosene and Keys

Near Herbert’s home town, Mbale, the big baboons lay in the middle of the road and wait for cars. Drivers have to get out and throw bananas at them to make them move. They get reeeeally ticked off if you don’t pay the toll.

Adjustable lighting: the knot in the cord (with a bare bulb) hanging from the ceiling.

The paint rollers we bought were really bad. Tim says they’re like painting with a dead cat.

It’s really strange sitting in a Chinese restaurant, hearing an African musician play the Tennessee Waltz at Christmas.

Our African friend Eugene, father of 6: "The kids are out of school. They are driving me crazy. They play the radio and the TV at the same time in a little room. We’ve decided to lock up the TV in a cabinet and only turn it on a few hours at night."

Only every 4th match here stays lit long enough to light something else.

You can have power, water, or internet. If you get all three on the same day, that’s a Vegas jackpot.

The insurance company seriously informed us that they will not replace a car windshield more than two times a year.

ALL glass on a car needs to be duly etched with the license plate number of the car or it will be stolen and resold to you later at the repair shop.

Every day is an adventure here, or in the case of bureaucracy, waiting for the adventure.

Tubs and showers here have no shower curtains. I kept trying in vain to keep the water from running all over the bathroom. Herbert thought that was funny. Says you just mop up afterward with a towel. What’s the big deal?

There are potholes everywhere. Even in Church.

Tom told me you could stop ants by putting paraffin around the door. When I asked him where you got liquid paraffin, he said, "The petrol station." That seemed strange. He thought it was more strange to put paraffin on top of home-made jelly. Paraffin, it turns out, is kerosene.

Vegetables here are purely organic. However, potatoes and carrots go back to God—they grow black fungus and white worms in 4 days if not refrigerated.

Tom survived genocide and 6 months in African prison but insisted I remove the ant-poison from the kitchen or it was going to take us all out.

African cakes are dense constructs with lovely, HARD icing that feels like Correlle. Tim says you eat the cake and keep the frosting for a bowl.

Every door in Africa has a key. (We have 18 different keys for our place.) Communion comes to a standstill when the man with the tabernacle key has gone.

Last week’s Mass collection included money, 3 heads of cabbage, a flat of eggs, and a case of Coka-Cola.

It’s a big deal if you get served the gizzard of a chicken. It means they killed the bird for you.

Termites chewed off Herbert’s fence posts. The neighbors burned the wood for cooking and left the barbed wire neatly in place on the ground.

Ruth Leacock, January, 2005