A day in the life

Let me introduce you to Lucy. She is our house help and works here each day from 9.30am till about 2pm. She has six children of whom the oldest is married and the youngest, Henry, is four and joins her here at our house after a morning at the hospital kindergarten. Lucy never fails to smile and say ‘Yes, I can do’ to any requests we might make. Mostly she washes clothes, irons them, shops, cleans the house and generally tidies up after us. Washing is done by hand outside in a big bowl, with hot water boiled on a charcoal stove, and a jar of ‘Omo’. The drying is no problem at all in this hot season. Then the ironing is done on the dining room table with a rather eccentric electric iron that frightens Henry with its hissing and spluttering. Even the socks get ironed.

Cleaning involves much brushing and shaking of mats, and once a week a wash of all the cement floors – bent double and using a floor cloth, Lucy spurns any sort of labour saving devices.
She has not spurned our electric breadmaker, however. After only a couple of lessons she had mastered this device, despite never having encountered such a thing before. She has also learned to make very respectable flapjack, currant buns and ginger biscuits in our somewhat temperamental electric oven.

At lunchtime she makes a meal for herself and Henry, if he is here, and on Fridays for us too. She is an expert at ‘enya’ – the local staple food made from cassava flour which will never capture the hearts of expatriates here. The photo shows her in full flow, stirring the sticky paste over the charcoal stove in temperatures somewhere above 30 degrees. She also makes excellent beans, rice, fish stew, and, our favourite, chapattis.

Then there is Michael – he comes once a week on a Friday to help us with the garden. At the moment he is sowing seeds which will, we hope, supply us with vegetables from our own back yard. In the full sun, and barefoot, he has dug the plot, made trenches, sown seeds and then made custom built rush mats with which to protect them from the sun until they germinate once the rains begin. Michael speaks little English but Lucy acts as an able translator. He also has a ready smile and never complains.

Occasionally Lucy collects the proceeds of any tree chopping that has been going on – and then carries the booty home on her head for firewood. Home is one hour’s walk away.

We think that, given different circumstances, Lucy would have made a pretty good president of Uganda.