Wet weekend

I have been writing new posts but the the Internet has either been down or I've not been able to get to a computer! This is the weekend, Monday and Tuesday will be up tomorrow.

The weekend (19th - 21st November) was a mixture of rain and music starting with an all day downpour on Friday. Work was halted from 10 till the end of the day, so it was spent relaxing, reading and chatting to local workers, there are 40 of them at Potter's Village. I particularly warmed to Augustine the chap who opens and closes the gate all day long as he has the patience and takes the time to teach me local greetings and common phrases. Sometimes he likes to diverge into animals and masonry designs pointing at bricks and goats alike telling me the Rifumbira equivilent...I ask politely if we can stick to the greetings.

The 40 staff members are split into teams, kitchen, compound (security, gate duty), baby carers, laundry and admin, with a social work area to come next year.

Saturday started with a swarm of locust like creatures flying through Potter's Village, hundreds of insects bouncing off walls and people indiscriminately, not a pleasant experience - needless to say I stayed indoors and when that stopped it started to rain.
The evening consisted of a movie and an American 'breakfast for dinner' experience - choc chip pancakes and French toast.

Sunday I attended church at the cathedral in Kisoro, which is the size of one of our churches in the UK, holding around a 1000 people...except it was packed. The singing was awe inspiring with naturally sung harmonic parts coming from pews all around. Two verses into every hymn the Yamaha keyboard kicked in with a beat a bass riff causing rhythmic clapping and dancing to ensue. The preacher was a teacher from Kabali who spoke with gusto in English, occasionally lapsing to Rifumbira when excited. I really appreciate how passionate and real their faith is to them here and they leave feeling upbeat and ready to face the week in spite of their hardships.

Sunday afternoon I hiked for 3 hours with a small group to a hill overlooking Lake Mutanda in amongst intermittent showers. As we walked, the scenary became ever more breathtaking and the busy town of Kisoro turned into small clumps of houses and farm land. Children started to accumulate quickly and before long we were hearing 'How are you?' in chorus followed by 'Give me money'. Although we understood the broken english we didn't respond as giving to beggars promotes the trade, with children being made into even more convincing beggars, in extreme cases leading to mutilation by desperate parents.

A young girl came and took my hand and walked with me for a 100 yards before running back down the track when it got unfamiliar.


From the top the terracing of the surrounding countryside was quite staggering, like looking over a giant patchwork quilt. Since Uganda is not a great exporter of its produce everything in these fields is sold locally or used by the Villages. The exception is the World Food Program (WFP) who during times of crisis in the Congo and many years ago, Rwanda, buy up lots of this produce to aid the bordering countries. This is surprisingly a problem as they offer a blank cheque book to the locals who instinctively start with high prices. If they can sell a bag of potatoes to the WFP for 5000 shillings when it would actually sell for 1000 shillings, then the locals will start to raise their prices inline or only sell to the WFP, isolating Ugandans who don't own land. Once the crisis has finished, the excess food purchased by the WFP is used elsewhere and the economy in Uganda starts to wobble and itself face shortage. If the food was purchased at competitive prices using local knowledge this problem could be avoided.

Before we headed back to base we went via the towns only ATM machine at Stanmic bank. It's housed in its own room and guarded by a stationed police officer who relayed the news it was broken and would be fixed the following day. I've come to expect that would mean Wednesday earliest as timings out here are seldom accurate and appointments rarely kept...the expression is TIA as taught by my veteren American friends...'This is Africa'.