I have had nearly
two and a half years living in East Africa now and I can honestly say for much
of that time I have had no idea what is going on around me! There are many reasons for this so I will try
to explain.
Steve will tell you
my hearing is getting worse. I’d say
it’s more that my ability to tune out what doesn’t interest me is
improving. We have a “shouty man” 500m
from us on the Mityana Road who starts up at around quarter to six every
morning and I don’t hear him until Steve points out that he’s started. If I bother to listen I hear him, otherwise I
remain oblivious. There is dance music
broadcast until the early hours most nights and I can successfully tune it
out. But I do find the children here
speak very softly – they are shy and may not be confident about their
understanding of what I am asking so they whisper and I often miss what they
are saying. I do lots of nodding and
smiling. Some of the new teachers are
also very shy but I am sure their confidence will increase and my conversations
with them will be more rewarding.
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| A "shouty man" deafening his chickens. |
There is also the
barrier of language. The medium
preferred by most of my work colleagues is Luganda – understandable as for most
it is mother tongue and they can be more expressive. It would be hard work to have to speak
English just because I am in the room when the discussion is not for me anyway,
but it can still be quite isolating and oftentimes jokes are shared and I miss
out. Learn Luganda
is on my “to do” list but slips down each time I look at the myriad greetings
for different classes of people, times of day, etc. There is no “catch all” greeting like the
Kiswahili “Salama” or “Habari gani”. I usually
can mange a “webale” – thank-you – but currently that’s my limit.
East Africans
consider themselves to be very polite people, hence all the greeting that goes
on. There is also a strict class system
that has women and youngsters bowing and kneeling to those (often men) who
consider themselves to be their betters.
I suspect I often offend as an egalitarian Australian who rejects all
that class nonsense. It’s lucky I’m as
old as I am as that mitigates the offending slightly but I certainly do not
like it when mothers, coming in to pay fees (or explain why they cannot pay
fees yet), kneel on the floor in front of the Head Teacher’s desk. At least finding examples of Gender
Discrimination is easy!
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| Spot the gender socialisation |
As a consequence of
wishing to be polite an East African will want to tell you what you want to
hear even if it means presenting what we now know to be “Alternate Facts”. Yesterday we were told that the second
delivery of bread to Quality Cuts would be there at 11:30, so we thought early
lunch then head home. After a rather
nice steak sandwich we went back to Quality Cuts – still no bread! We were assured the delivery had left Kisimenti
and was on its way – a distance of 2 or 3 kilometres. It finally arrived at about 12:30 and we had
our two sliced seed bread loaves and could head home to Kirimamboga about 1
o’clock. If the shop assistant had said
it wouldn’t be there until 12:30 we could have gone up to Kisimenti ourselves
to pick it up and been home by 12. The
delivery driver must have been side-tracked or stopped somewhere for a
chat. Inconveniencing other people never
enters anyone’s head. (Mostly shown by
inconsiderate – dangerous‼ - drivers and meandering pedestrians, bodaboda
(motorbike taxi) riders, stock and herdsmen.) The bread wait followed a ½ hour
wait in a queue in the bank to pay a deposit on our holiday in June and a 20
minute wait in Shoprite while a committee decided what to do about the lack of
a record on the computer of the bar code on the John West Tuna and, no, knowing
the shelf label said 13,200/= was not sufficient information. (I could actually see steam coming out of
Steve’s ears as he could feel the tuna slipping out of his grasp).
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| The crew at Don's, Lyantonde |
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| Whose are these goats, and why did they come to visit? |
After many weeks of
Askari Richard telling us we would soon have neighbours we finally do. Last weekend we returned from Lake Mburo to
find people in Number 1 and today a family moved in to Number 3. So far we have the only car but if that
changes things will get interesting. I
can imagine the chaos trying to get out in the morning will become if we have 5
or more cars in the compound! And so far
I’m not convinced on the locals’ average driving prowess and powers of
organisation.
The students
returned to school on Monday and have settled in nicely over the week. The new teachers have settled in too. We have had the CEO of School for Life
visiting from Australia for the past fortnight so it’s all been “go”. Time now for me to get some solid M&E
(monitoring and evaluation) strategies in place before we return to Australia
for a visit in March /April. I’ll let
you know how it goes.
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| Doing some teaching |
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| What you must know about a car |
Jenny
