Only in Africa

The BBC World Service, Africa network, has recently been running a feature called ‘Only in Africa’. Listeners write in with 400 words describing an incident, funny, tragic or just plain weird that can happen ‘only in Africa’. Passing through Kampala on our return to UK recently, we encountered a suitable entry – though it won’t be committed to the airwaves.

We discovered, to our delight, that our two days in Kampala included a Sunday when Namirembe Cathedral was holding its carol service. Three years ago, coming here in December for a visit, we had happened upon a rehearsal for this service, hearing strains of ‘Once in Royal David’s city’ coming from the open doors of the cathedral as we walked outside in the tropical heat. But we had missed the actual event on that occasion. So now was our chance.

Namirembe has an excellent choir of men, women and boys. They are accomplished in a wide repertoire from classical English church music to rhythmic African songs and visually stunning in traditional red cassocks and white surplices. So we rejoiced in traditional settings of Christmas carols accompanied by excellent organ playing, with the usual nine lessons read between the carols.

It would have rivalled most services of Nine Lessons and Carols in England, almost..... but for the ‘Namirembe Cathedral Media Team’ - four or five men dressed in the fluorescent yellow jackets more usually worn by men repairing roads in England. Of course mending roads is a lost art in Uganda so maybe the gear had been re-designated for use by cathedral staff. Their brief was clearly to capture as much as possible of the event on camera, both still and video. So, throughout the service, members of the Media Team, resplendent in fluorescent yellow, (beautifully counterpointing the choir red) stood directly in front of the singers and readers, pointing camera lenses into people’s faces and shining brilliant arc lights to illuminate the action (“ve have vays of making you sing”!!!). Rarely could we see the choir at all, just the back of three of four men bristling with electronics. They fell over each other and had whispered conversations, wires trailing and lights shining, while the conductor and choir tried to carry on regardless. Whether the choristers could even see each other or their conductor most of the time we doubted – ‘Only in Africa!’

But despite it all, the significance of the event was not lost on us and it was a great service. Here we are in Uganda, temperature around 30°C, brilliant sun illuminating palm trees standing outside the open cathedral doors, joining a full congregation to celebrate the same wondrous events of Christmas we remember in much colder climes. The truth of what we sing and hear is universal throughout time and across cultures, not ‘only in Africa’; although that Media Team was probably unique to this continent.

Come and worship...Christ the newborn King

An Englishman’s Home is.........Part 2

Following our last blog the good news is that the dreaded Chapel tower ‘clock’ chimes have been silenced, and it involved no vandalism on our part, (so no bail required, Simon)!!! Before we had a chance to make our feelings known, others had already decided. Normally a bell (or more accurately, the metal rim of the wheel of a car) sounds to announce a service or a death, or some other significant event. The apparent 15 minute frequency of ‘significant events’ was so disturbing to residents and patients at Kuluva that a unilateral decision was taken (in the absence of the German expatriate) to turn off the chimes. We uttered a prayer of heartfelt thanks.

From time to time we still experience power cuts and the accompanying flying insects. The crickets and spiders also continue to keep us company, but they are not the only visitors to come to our humble home.

The approach of a human visitor is normally accompanied by a call outside the door of ‘ho-di’. It’s a cheery call, but often sotto voce so that you can hardly hear it. Sometimes this means that the owner of the voice can be left standing outside our house for a short time. It depends on the music we’re listening to and whether it is fortissimo or pianissimo at the time. Sometimes the call might be so quiet that even if all else is silent it sounds little more than the far cry of a turtle-dove. Generally these visitors are persistent though, and some are prepared to wait for 5-10 minutes ‘ho-diying’ until they get a positive response.

Many of these visitors are trying to sell something – Tom with his wood carvings, Luke’s table mats, assorted women selling fruit and vegetables or charcoal. Other visitors are keen to encourage you to pay for their children’s school fees, or their own university fees, or hospital fees, or make a contribution to their motor-cycle fund, or..... Our reaction to these requests tends to depend on what sort of day we’re having and whether we are still in bed or not.

Some visitors though are very welcome and a pleasure to share time with. This morning (Saturday), for example, we had two visitors in succession – first the hospital chaplain, then one of the senior laymen from Kuluva Parish Church. They were with us for 2-3 hours in total, but wanted to talk about things of real importance here at Kuluva and in the diocese as a whole. Both are truly spiritual people with much wisdom and great humility. It was refreshing to talk with them and we felt blessed by their presence. Such visits are a joy.

The animal and insect visitors are mostly quieter than their human equivalents. One exception is the monkeys. They enjoy performing gymnastics on our roof first thing in the morning which makes the tiles rattle, and us wonder if they are going to fall into the room. They come to hoover up the insects that have been attracted by our external lights during the night. We lost three fluorescent tubes in very quick succession because of monkeys jumping on to them to retrieve juicy morsels for their breakfast. Fortunately a metal guard seems to have solved that problem.

Geckos are frequently seen scuttling up the wall and into the roof, but we have no idea when a snake visited us to shed its skin. We simply discovered the skin in our living room one morning.........

And although termites leave tell-tale trails up the walls and over the floor if they get into the house, often they leave them discretely behind pieces of furniture. It was with some surprise that we removed a flip-chart from the top of our mahogany chest of drawers only to find a big hole in the top of the chest seething with termites. Some months later we removed a rolled-up flip-chart from the floor to discover it was half eaten and a trail of termites heading for the leg of the bed.......

An Englishman’s home is.......well, here it certainly isn’t his castle. But if it were it wouldn’t be half as entertaining!

P.S. We’ve got a new cooker too!

An Englishman’s Home is.........

8.00 in the evening and we have washed up the dirty plates and saucepans from dinner. Dinner itself is often a technological triumph. The oven in our cooker has ceased to function in the proper way. It insists on going out at regular intervals. But we’ve discovered the solution! A piece of wire wound around the spindle of the oven-knob and tightened to hold it in place once the oven is lit works well, and usually results in a well-cooked meal. So far there have been no explosions, but time is probably not on our side and we think we might need a new cooker.

Of course for washing up there’s no running hot water – and indeed, sometimes there’s no running water at all. In that case we resort to the jerry cans Lucy has (hopefully) filled. But after dinner, provided we remember to put a pan of water on the gas to heat up whilst we’re eating, we can get cleared up pretty quickly and have a couple of hours to relax.

Sometimes one of us might decide to have a ‘pour’ (the local equivalent of a shower), in which case another pan of water has to be heated up. It’s a bathing process you get used to after a while; pouring boiling water into a bowl and mixing with cold water to achieve a reasonable temperature. Then, with the aid of a large margarine tub you can wash your hair and have a general, well, pour... It’s quite effective really, with the only attendant problem being the possibility of spiders or crickets jumping on you (see earlier blog for details).

But more often we’ll settle down to read, or watch a DVD, or listen to an episode of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ (we’re up to 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo), or even (sad people that we are) listen to the latest episode of ‘The Archers’. Sadder still, we have even been known to watch the odd episode of ‘The Weakest Link’, but don’t tell anyone!

It’s usually in the middle of a DVD that the power goes off and the DVD dies. That’s the cue for falling over the furniture in search of our solar lamp. Provided we’ve remembered to charge it we can at least read or do a Sudoku, or chat (we do talk to one another occasionally). At intervals we have to spray the lamp with Doom to annihilate the multitudes of flying insects that tend to colonise it. This results in a mini-graveyard which has to be cleared up after the power has been restored between 15 minutes and an hour later.

Bedtime is usually around 10.00 pm. A cup of tea in bed (old habits die hard) and a half-hours’ read, then the mosquito net is deployed around the bed, we turn off the light and are ready for sleep. Often we go to sleep pretty quickly, unless we’ve used the mozzie-net to trap a mosquito inside to share the night with us. It’s extraordinary the way they manage to discover where your ear is in the dark. They sound like light aircraft when they get that close. Then, it’s on with the head torch to hunt down the little beast, but they usually manage to hide very effectively. And so to sleep – until the water decides to return and we are woken by the sound of a mini-Niagara from the cistern in the roof as it fills up.

One other addition to the Kuluva day and night experience is a bell that has recently (yesterday) been installed in the Chapel clock tower. There’s no clock as such, but every quarter of an hour the bell strikes. Once at a quarter past, twice at half past, three times at a quarter to, then four times on the hour followed by the number of strokes to mark which hour it is. At midnight that’s sixteen strokes of the bell. This new arrival which so wonderfully and accurately marks the passing of time is the gift of a German expatriate – I doubt that he can hear it from his house, and in any case he’ll soon be going back to Germany. I don’t know if the Africans appreciate it, but for myself I may indulge in a little vandalism in due course.

Garden Talk

They say that if you plant a walking stick in Uganda it will sprout and take root. Uganda is, for the most part, blessed with fertile soil, temperatures that are not too hot (this is Africa!) most of the year, and plenty of rain. In many parts the countryside is green and lush all year round with banana groves, tea and coffee plantations, fields of maize and beans.

But our rocky hillside is a little more challenging. The soil is very sandy and doesn’t hold water well on the 1:3 gradient. Its also pretty thin, with bare rock showing through in many places. This year we had a serious drought (see previous blog) when most of the plants turned brown and sickly. We gave some of them up for dead, as we couldn’t justify using precious water to keep them alive when people were watching their crops die for lack of rain.

But now the rains have come, with regular thunderstorms and torrential downpours. When it rains hard the water pours off the roof and rock garden and runs down the hillside outside our house to form a river running into the storm drain and creating a lake on the path below. The land has turned green again – it happens within a day or two of the first good rains.

We’ve now been here two years, and its taken us this long to learn how to create a garden in such conditions. But now its beginning to take shape, though we are still somewhat envious of friends who live in the south of the country, whose garden of tropical luxuriance and abundant bird life blossomed in only a few years. During the first year here we planted a few shrubs in the front garden, to keep company with the one rather sad bougainvillea that was already there when we arrived – it had been pruned to within an inch of its life, but is now resplendent with purple blooms. Then last year we tried growing vegetables in the plot at the side of the house – but the monkeys ate all the groundnuts before they were ripe, and the tomatoes produced only pea-size green fruits that were of no use to man or beast. So we cut our losses and planted some more small shrubs there. At the back, where the soil is thinnest, we made a little rock garden with cuttings from a friend’s established estate.

Some of the plants we used to grow as pot plants in UK are naturals here. Mother-in-laws tongue, and tradescantia (‘wandering sailor’), for instance, and poinsettias that reach shrub-size proportions. Spider plants do very well in pots outside our front door – the single one we started with has produced babies with no regard to family planning! Then we have some small pink flowers that remind us of mesembryanthemums, only coming out when the sun shines – but of course that happens a lot more often here than at home. And succulents are happy here, though they look a bit different from the spiky cacti we are familiar with. Then there are the exotic beauties such as hibiscus and frangipani that wouldn’t stand a chance in a British climate.

So we enjoy walking around our little plot, talking to the plants and encouraging them on. And after the recent drought? We haven’t lost a single plant, they have all sprung up again, though some are still convalescing. That should be a lesson to us to persevere in other ground that may seem unpromising and dry.

Blessings from heaven

When it rains in Uganda, everything is disrupted. Its a bit like snow in England. We awoke this morning to a grey sky which, during the next hour, became blacker until the inevitable happened at 8am, just as we were due to go out for the 9km drive to the Diocesan HQ. Thunder, lightning, deafening rain battering on the roof. Torrents of water cascading down the hillside. A little frog sheltering beside one of our pot plants on the verandah – obviously this was too much even for aquatic creatures such as he.

But Allan was taking the morning devotions at the Diocesan HQ, so we felt we had better make the effort, even though rain in the morning usually means nobody turns up at work until it stops. After all, we have a roof that doesn’t leak, a car that goes, several umbrellas and kagoules – we don’t really have any excuse. Clothes already wet from the short run to the car from our back door, our car felt like a speedboat as we drove to Arua along roads that were all but deserted. The usual crowds around the market areas had vanished, the boda bodas (motorbike taxis) absent from their stands. An occasional lone pedestrian trudged along the road, drenched from head to foot.

Arriving at the Diocesan HQ we parked the car in a small lake and paddled to the office. Amazingly, we found a couple of doors open. Dripping into the office of the Diocesan Education Secretary we discerned four people already assembled in the gloom (the power was off), including the Bishop himself. So we sat and shared the Bible passage from II Corinthians 10, those who were too far from a window using a mobile phone torch to see the words. We considered Paul’s vehement defence of his calling as an apostle, and pondered our own calling on this soggy Ugandan morning. We prayed for those struggling in the weather, and for the Bishop going off to Maracha (usually an hour’s drive away, today rather more) for confirmations this morning. The rain will disrupt that for sure.

But six weeks ago we were suffering from the worst drought for some years, and the prayers were generally of thankfulness for the life-giving provision of rain, today and over the last few weeks. Now people’s beans and cassava will grow strong, and they will have food for the next year. That is much more important than soggy clothes and disrupted work patterns – even confirmation services.

“(S)he had suffered...under the care of many doctors” (Mark 5.26)

.......Well, not that many actually, only about three.

I had first visited the doctor about my leg about four or five ago. Anne has always been keen on extending my life by applying healthy doses of walking, and after particularly strenuous exertion I had begun to feel a dull ache in my right leg. In addition, I noticed a small lump developing around the site of the pain.

The first doctor diagnosed a varicose vein, which was a bit of a shock because I have always associated such things with advancing old age!! She said there was little that could be done at the time, but if things got worse to return.

I did return about 12 months later as the pain had become more frequent, about once a week, and a little more intense. By this time the GP had changed, but the verdict was much the same. Some gentle examination caused a little pain on that occasion, but not enough to complain about.

Just before coming to Uganda, the lump was much more pronounced and the pain more frequent and acute, so I visited our new GP in Leicester. He looked at it, and then proceeded to prod and squeeze the lump with some violence, causing extreme discomfort, nay, agony. He then added insult to injury by informing me there was nothing he could do about it, but maybe some cream applied externally would help........ I limped home from the consultation thinking dark thoughts about doctors in general and this GP in particular.

By July this year, the pain had become considerably worse and was occurring 2-3 times a day for around an hour with each episode. It seemed to be associated neither with extreme activity or standing still for a long time. It would occur at any time, sometimes even in the middle of the night.

Anne made an appointment for me with an expatriate GP in Kampala. I had refused ever to let another medical practitioner near it after my last experience – but Anne insisted, probably because I don't like pain and tend to inflict pain on others when I experience it.

So it was, that on 24th July I found myself in the doctor’s surgery in Kampala explaining how much I dislike doctors who prod me and cause pain without doing anything useful. The doctor looked, prodded (I yelled – but didn’t punch him on the nose), and said “You've got a varicose vein, but it's not that. I can get rid of the real problem.”
“How?” I asked, still aware of the painful throbbing in my leg.
"Just a little operation."
"When?" I enquired.
“Now, if you like. It’ll take about ten minutes.”

Five minutes later I was lying on a bed. The local anaesthetic was a real joy as, gradually, the pain in my leg subsided. I felt nothing as the doctor made his incision and exclaimed, “It’s a glomus body! I came across one of these when I was a student. The book said it was v.painful.”

I agreed.

Ten minutes and three stitches later the procedure was over. I got off the couch and have felt no pain in my leg ever since.

Anne and I reflected on how long such a procedure would have taken in the UK after consultations, scans, waiting lists........

Our conclusion – come to Uganda for an accurate diagnosis and speedy treatment.

Pastors, preaching and Plasmodium

Madi West Nile Anglican diocese is quite big – around 120km north to south, and 80 km across. That doesn’t sound too bad until you remember the state of the roads, and the fact that the River Nile has to be crossed on a dodgy ferry to reach Adjumani , the furthest point from the centre. The diocese is divided into ten archdeaconries, and recently we’ve been visiting each of them with a one day workshop for pastors.

On a typical day we set off about 8am, having loaded up with flipcharts, pens, handouts, water, Bibles, Lugbara hymnbooks and mosquito nets (all will be plain later!), and travel for perhaps two hours on suspension-shaking roads, not always entirely sure just where we are going. But there aren’t so many roads to choose from, and we haven’t got lost yet. We reach the archdeaconry headquarters around 10am, as promised, to meet a delighted archdeacon, who always seems slightly in doubt that we will actually come at all. He has called all his pastors together, usually around 10-20 men, and a sprinkling of women.

The venues are hardly ideal, but actually work pretty well – usually a round, open sided grass thatched hut, sometimes a simple church. Twice we sat outside in the shade, once on a verandah and once under a mango tree – a scene that has all the stereotypical qualities of Africa about it.

But the pastors won’t actually be there yet – over the next hour or more they gradually assemble, arriving on ancient bicycles or on foot, some having travelled for two hours or more to get there. Despite that they all arrive with a big smile and a handshake for everyone who is already there.

Then we begin with introductions, and talking about holistic mission and the appropriateness of combining teaching about spiritual and physical health. Next its Allan’s turn to teach about the vital importance of the preaching and teaching ministry in the Church of Uganda, where the pulpit is all too often given over to any lay person who fancies their chances, and little emphasis is laid on Biblical foundations. He includes some group work, and the pastors sit earnestly working together around a Bible, producing fascinating answers that give us many insights into local culture.

During the morning session we stop for ‘break tea’ around noon, usually bread, nuts, sweet potatoes or rice with a cup of black and sweet tea. Then lunch is around 2pm, or whenever the good ladies of the parish manage to produce it from their basic kitchen facilities. Sometimes the food is pretty unpalatable to us, but for the pastors it’s a feast and an essential part of the day.

In the afternoon Anne takes over with teaching on malaria prevention, and distributes some mosquito nets left over from a previous project. The pastors’ excitement at receiving a high-tech insecticide treated net is perhaps overshadowed by the offer of the packaging materials – particularly the strong metal bands that bind the bales. Excellent building material, we are told.

We finally manage to get away around 5pm, home by 7pm.

Each workshop is different, in ‘feel’ as well as in location, but all have been rewarding and have revealed so much to us about church life in this corner of Uganda. We have been appreciated as if we have been visiting heads of state.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, malaria is caused by a parasite, Plasmodium Falciparum

Timber!

In the grounds of Kuluva Hospital is a marvellous variety of trees. Eucalyptus can be found in quantity throughout this part of Uganda because they grow quickly and provide a sustainable source of timber and fuel. Others can also be found including mahogany, and these hardwoods are usually used for making furniture. Even the most ordinary pieces of furniture, chests of drawers, tables, plain chairs, etc. are usually made of solid mahogany and weigh a ton.

My dad, who was a master cabinet maker, would have loved it here with so much quality timber on hand. When he retired he had two or three garages filled with pieces of timber he was saving for some indeterminate job in the future, but there was nothing in those garages to compare with what is available here in West Nile.

Kuluva Parish is in the process of constructing a new Church building. It is an ambitious project, but the congregation has been working hard on it, and our home parish in Leicester at St Denys has been supporting them in the venture. In the present building the congregation sit on solid cement/mud benches (which are not too good if you suffer from piles!), so they are planning hardwood furniture for the new church.

The present church stands at the entrance to the site of Kuluva Hospital. Behind the church are several rows of terraced houses occupied by hospital staff, and surrounding them many trees, some small and shrubby, but others, truly venerable and majestic.

One night earlier in the year the area was buffeted by high winds. One especially strong gust of wind brought two of the biggest trees crashing to the ground. Miraculously they fell in such a way as to miss both the church and the houses and nobody was hurt. In fact they fell in about the only direction they could have done with causing very significant damage.

The church the following week echoed to songs and prayers of thanks to God for preserving both life and property in what could otherwise have had devastating and possibly tragic consequences. What was more, the church leaders realised that these trees would provide much of the timber they needed to construct the church furniture they required. Jehovah Jireh! Indeed, there was much rejoicing, and the following Saturday a team of church workers cut up the tree into manageable chunks.

They discovered, however, that there was not quite sufficient timber to make all the furniture, and so decided to fell another of the big trees to make up the shortfall. The work was carried out on a Thursday morning, the men cutting away at the base of the trunk, careful to ensure that it fell safely. But just as the tree was about to fall, a small breeze blew (or so I am told) which nudged it slightly to the right causing it to fall elegantly, but very heavily - on to the back of the church, demolishing half of the roof and one corner of the building! Nobody was hurt and the Pastor remained cheerful, but there was a degree of embarrassment at the irony of the situation.

Anne and I went away on a trip the following day wondering what they would do – the church did look pretty bad. But returning a week later, we found the back of the church reconstructed, the newly felled tree cut into pieces, and everything back to normal.

The resilience of these people is truly astounding.

Hunger Season

The cricket season followed the first rains. But they didn’t last. A couple of months of occasional downpours was enough to green up the grass and rejuvenate our struggling garden, but not enough to grow the life-giving crops. Now it is dry again and likely to remain so for a few weeks; hence the hunger season.

A small group of women meet on our verandah on Wednesday mornings for a short informal Bible study. Most of them do domestic work in the houses around here, and others are members of our local parish church. They are uniformly poor, engaging in subsistence farming with their families. In a mixture of Lugbara and English we sing, read a Bible passage, discuss, pray, and finish with a cup of tea – our sugar jar is always empty after Wednesday mornings! One of the women acts as translator both ways, as I have little Lugbara and some of them have little English. It’s always an encouraging experience to share with people who are hungry for some teaching, however brief, and who express a simple but profound faith.

The prayer requests illustrate the difficult lives they live. One woman had a field of cassava uprooted in the night – that represented her family’s bank account. Another said the neighbour’s goats had been eating her crops, and there had been arguments between the families. Another couldn’t find school fees for the orphans who were living with her family. But the biggest problem at the moment is ‘hunger’ and the lack of adequate rain – stalks of maize look fairly healthy, until you discover that they are all leaves, and the cobs that will feed the family are not developing. Groundnuts have withered before anything like a nut appeared. Stores of beans from last year’s harvest are running short. The next planting season is next month (provided it rains), but the harvest won’t be in until October.

So we pray that neighbours will tie up their goats, that fields will be protected, that school fees will be found, and for rain. It hasn’t come yet. But these women never waver in their trust in God. He will see us through, they say. They have seen hardship before. And our passage today? Consider the birds of the air...........your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they? (Matt 6:26)

It’s difficult, when the verandah is outside our little house – TV, computers, books, and a well stocked kitchen. The women never once cast an envious glance. But I am conscious that the loose change in my purse would buy them and their children a few meals. We give, yes, but it can never be enough, or sustainable against future ‘hunger seasons’.

Of course it’s a vicious circle of environmental degradation as well as the usual vagaries of weather and harvest. Trees are being cut down at an unsustainable rate to provide firewood and charcoal, still the commonest sources of fuel for cooking and washing. Land is increasingly scarce, and many people have no rights to the land on which they live, so risk eviction if a landowner is sufficiently unsympathetic. Soil is not enriched with any kind of fertiliser, so crop yield is low. Water sources are often polluted and streams reducing to a muddy trickle.

But the women still meet with a smile, and if we go to their homes we are never allowed to leave without being given some refreshment. “God is testing us”, they say, “but He will provide.”

We pray He does, soon.

We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land
But it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand........

Cricket Season

I can’t play cricket. Anyone who knows me well knows that. At school I was no good with a bat and usually managed to be out first ball which, to be fair, didn’t give me much chance to improve. I also remember the experience of attempting to catch a cricket ball. Instead of nestling neatly in the palms of my hands it hit the end of my index finger. In this way I discovered that cricket balls are dangerously hard, and concluded that they are best avoided. Such cowardice was not an attitude best suited to becoming an effective cricketer.

But even if I can’t play cricket, I do enjoy watching it and remember several sun-soaked days relishing the contest as it played out on the cricket pitch before me. But too often I also recall ominous dark clouds gathering and large spots of rain beginning to fall, such as happened at the Anglican Clergy v. Imams of Leicester match Anne and I attended in Leicester shortly before coming to Uganda. On that occasion, the match was played to its (bitter for the Anglicans) conclusion, but “rain stopped play” becomes the epitaph of too many cricket matches because, for some reason, in Britain, the arrival of the Cricket Season seems to herald the coming of rain.

But if in Britain the coming of the cricket season signifies the coming of rain, here in Uganda it’s the other way round as the welcome sound of thunder and the opening of the floodgates of heaven marks the coming of the crickets.

Crickets are wonderful creatures with shiny, leathery, brown bodies. They come in many different sizes ranging from the size of a pea to just a little smaller than a golf ball. They have the most incredible ability to leap and spring and bound great distances. Their trajectory is hard to predict which can be a little alarming as they explore the living room, but when you get used to them they are strangely endearing.

Unfortunately, my first encounter with a cricket was in the ‘shower’. I was washing my hair (the little of it that I possess), my eyes closed to protect them from the shampoo. Suddenly I felt something jump up my leg. Quickly washing the shampoo suds from my eyes, I looked down, and saw this thing (I didn’t know what it was at the time) clinging on to me for dear life trying to escape the pools of water accumulating on the floor. I have to confess that the shock forced me to consign the poor, harmless creature to a watery grave. Having now grown more fond of them, I feel frequent pangs of guilt as think back to this summary execution.

But crickets aren’t the only creatures that show up with the coming of the rain. Moths, beetles, appear in profusion, as do white ants which emerge from termite mounds in their thousands, and after dark fly around outside our window attracted by the light. By the morning the verandah looks like a graveyard, littered with the wings and bodies of countless ants.

Our Ugandan friends wonder why we don’t collect them, after all they will lie in wait by termite mounds ready to catch them when they emerge. They cook them to eat mixed with beans, or grind them into a sort of paste from which they make ‘cakes’, which actually look a little like meatballs. We have eaten both forms, but there are more appetising delicacies to our taste (like Bendicks Bittermints). However white ants do provide extra protein which the local diet often lacks. Folks here are so fond of them that they preserve termite mounds, even though they are home to the termites which gobble up their houses (quite literally), in order to maintain this source of extra nourishment.
“How many are your works, O Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.” (Ps 104.24)

Indeed, the world is home to a fascinating variety of living creatures, insects, peoples and customs! And what a privilege to be a part of it all!

Bendicks Bonanza and Baboon Bandits - A Bittermint Tale

"A firm fondant very strongly flavoured with peppermint oil, enrobed with intensely bitter chocolate.”

These words scarcely do justice to the amazing experience of eating a Bendicks Bittermint. For many years they have been my (Allan’s) Christmas treat. At times I had been tempted to buy them out of season, but the discipline of keeping them as a luxury limited to only one season, something to be looked forward to with anticipation from year to year, always enhanced the experience of biting into this most exclusive of mints - silky textured and outrageously delicious but with the ‘bite’ of real peppermint.

Coming to Uganda and abandoning Bendicks Bittermints was a sacrifice in itself, but through the kindness of friends and relatives, Christmas 2007 saw two boxes of this exclusive confectionary turn up in Arua Post Office. But Christmas 2008 was another story – not one box appeared.

In desperation we made an appeal to any visitors coming out to see us. At Christmas we may have been bereft, but a whole year without another Bendicks ‘fix’ would have been unthinkable.

A visit to the Post Office in April, however, was rewarded with a parcel, and wonder of wonders, it contained one box of the thick, dark chocolate-covered peppermint bombs. The parcel had been posted in November! The mints were still in excellent condition, a real testimony to their ability to travel thousands of miles in sometimes extreme conditions without adverse effect. Our spirits rose as were able to acknowledge that someone had thought of us.

Just a few days later we travelled to Kampala and Entebbe to meet our visitors. Richard and Helen presented us with two boxes, and Anne’s sisters Cathy and Kathy (don’t ask!) another two. Five boxes in one year was little less than a miracle and we rejoiced!!

Returning to Arua with the two C(K)athys, we stopped off at Paraa Lodge in Murchison Park for a game drive and a Nile River Launch. Because Anne and I had done the river trip several times we saw our visitors off and returned to our room taking with us one box of Bendicks we had retrieved from the Paraa fridge. Our intention was to enjoy them together with our visitors after dinner that evening.

Leaving the box in our room we went downstairs for an afternoon cup of tea and a snack. After a short while Anne went to collect her sisters from their river-trip to the Falls, whilst I returned to the room.

At first sight everything looked normal, unchanged from when we had left it. But then my eyes fell on a quantity of green and gold silver foil lying on the floor. A short distance beyond lay the box of Bendicks Bittermints, its top gouged open by some wild and voracious beast and empty (apart from 3) of its original contents! It lay before the open door to the balcony of our first-floor room.

Then I remembered a previous visit to Paraa when I had chased two opportunistic baboons from the balcony. This time they had returned, but on this occasion with greater success and to their greater benefit. Amazingly, nothing else in the room, laptop, camera binoculars or anything else had been disturbed.

But now, we are looking forward to encountering a new and more classy breed of baboon at Paraa; baboons who have begun to appreciate the finer things of life, and whose eating habits will more reflect the refined character of the food they have now tasted. The alternative, of course, is that they will be driven into a wild frenzy (like me) in their search for more of these glorious mints, very few of which can ever have made their way to Murchison Park, and will rarely ever do so again.

Certainly we will be much more careful in future!