Just got back friday from a 4 day trip to the big city to pick up my dear teammate Ashley Wood. I showed up at Entebbe airport with a smile and a big hug and a vehicle to load her Stateside treasures into, and after quick shower and a bit of protein intake, I whisked her off to the grocery store of all places :) We spent the next 2 days doing a humongous amount of shopping for all of the singles (6 of us - 4 teammates and 2 interns arriving in EBB tomorrow) for the duration of the summer. What a better way to re-enter into African life than spending 2 days shopping and spending money...sheesh...sorry Ash...but you've gotta do what you've gotta do..there's always stories and funnies to follow from such a trip, so here's a few for ya:
- imagine yourself at Crane Bank on Kampala Road...outside there sits a guy taking cell phones and returning them to their owners upon their exit of the bank, you then approach the super spiffy space module looking doors that open, you step inside, the glass doors close behind you and then the doors open to the inside of the bank and you step out into the bank...inside the main floor of the bank looks like any big city American bank a decade or two ago, smells faintly of air conditioning (! gasp !) which is, of course, "not there", and is quite quiet compared to the hustle and bustle of Kampala Road just outside the space module doors. You head to the far end of the floor and down the marble stairs that curve around to the basement with little cubbies built into the marble walls with lit statues of Ganesh and other Hindu deities perched inside. At the bottom of the stairs you find a windowless room with a counter of 5-6 tellers whose job it is to receive large amounts of cash in deposits and count it by hand and then confirm the totals with the little cash shuffling machine. Unfortunately we are not making any large cash deposits :) but we use these tellers to exchange the large bills, (20,000 and 50,000 Ush notes) given to us by the ATM machines which are completely useless to us back in Bundibugyo, for small bills (1,000 and 5,000 Ush notes) which are our means of daily exchange around here. So Ashley and I stand and wait for tellers to become available, and while waiting I was reading the signs posted inside the teller's cubicle..."Please, customers, stop and count your money before leaving the counter. Management" at the top which was then translated into either Luganda or Swahili, I couldn't tell. The second word from the english instruction was translated to "Kastoma" and the second to last english word translated to "Kawunta" :) We both got a good laugh :) Then, I continue to wait for a teller to become available while Ashley is exchanging money, and finally one does at the end next to the door that important people keep coming in and out of. I tell her what I need and she goes off to see if another teller has something of that sort, and so I lean against the counter and look back to where the stairs come down, and there's this guy dragging a big sugar bag across the floor...there's something written in black marker on the bag and I lean forward to see what it is..."EURO'S" in capital letters...this guy is dragging a sugar bag full of Euro's across the bank floor!...and then comes another guy with another bag just like it!...quite an amusing site...Ashley told me later that they had dragged it all the way down the stairs like that..."thud, thud, thud" as he made it down each step :) She and I looked at each other and couldn't help but bust out laughing :)
- Now imagine GAME, the South African chain similar to a Target I guess, floor to ceiling shelves, clean white shiny floors, everything neat and tidy in their plastic packaging, and a mix of ex pats and Ugandans wandering around pushing their shopping carts. A most annoying guy starts hitting on Ashley and she quickly exits the interaction only to be stalked by him around the store...and then in one isle we see a Ugandan young woman wearing jeans and a white t shirt with red type that reads "I think therefore I am single" :) We chuckled. Based on interactions like Ashley's with her GAME stalker, I would agree...sometimes here it's hard to remember that male-female interactions do exist that involve mutual respect and are void of "cat calls" and inappropriate behavior and mistrust.
- Volume: We purchased 4 trunks full of food/supplies for the summer, 4 coolers full of meat/dairy products/produce, and a healthy amount of alcohol :) We visited 5 grocery stores, 3 shopping malls (2 indoor, one strip mall), waited in vain for 2 hours for the most intimidating Ugandan I know (our car mechanic) to show up when dropping off the vehicle for repairs - finally leaving and telling the other staff we couldn't wait any longer, and later in the day spent 1 million Ugandan shillings on repairs when returning to pick up the vehicle (only to learn it needs to return before too long for electrical system repairs which were not complete because the most intimidating Ugandan didn't show for work in a timely fashion). We found fuel present at every fuel station we went to in Kampala (not always the case), we managed to make the 7 hours of driving on the return trip with no music (! gasp !)...I was getting sleepy at points, and that's beyond dangerous on these roads, but God preserved our lives with no problems or close calls for which I am thankful, and of the 3 hours on the Bundibugyo Road from Fort Portal to home, the whole first hour to the top of the mountain is graded and therefore drives like a dream! When you eliminate most of the stress on one third of the time involved in that drive, it makes such a difference!
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