A Winter Break.......

The snow has long since gone from our home in Leicester, replaced by grey skies and a cold dampness which seems to permeate everything. Christmas is a distant memory as is the glorious walk just a few days earlier through the pristine snow in the Rivelin Valley in Sheffield where we had gone to visit Ben, our son, and his wife Bethan.

Anne and I had been looking forward to this Winter break for several months - a chance to go home, to sample seasonal food and drink, spend time with our friends and family and enjoy a ‘real’ English Christmas. We hadn’t expected the snow - that was just an added bonus.

We planned to spend Christmas Day at our house in Leicester. We can’t really call it our home; Anne and I have lived in the house for less than five months and had handed it over to our daughter Jo as her home when we left for Uganda in 2007.

On the Sunday before Christmas we attended the Carol Service at our home church of St Denys, complete with the carols we had sung a continent away just a week earlier. But Midnight Communion at St Denys began our Christmas celebrations proper – ‘good news for all the people - a Saviour, Christ the Lord!’

Christmas morning was cold and icy, but the whole family went to Jo’s church in Knighton for the morning service, returning ‘home’ to open our presents and feast on traditional roast turkey with all the trimmings. It was a great meal - so much better than our Ugandan alternative: a tough chicken accompanied by beans and enya! Jo’s fiancé, John, joined us for an evening game of Monopoly.

New Year 2010 was rung in, once more at St Denys. It’s to be a momentous year for Jo and John, and time was needed to buy clothes, talk about arrangements for the wedding, not to mention helping to make the invitations. But time was passing quickly and soon we were back in Sheffield to visit Ben and Bethan again before our return to Uganda. There had been more snow, but it was starting to melt – and freeze – and melt – and freeze. But it was gradually disappearing.

Sunday 17th January – the morning service at St Thomas’ Crookes. We had planned to go out for a walk in the afternoon, but as we made our way back to Ben and Bethan’s house from church, up one of Sheffield’s many hills, we hit a patch of ice. My ankle twisted under me, I heard a snap, and gently fell to the ground. A visit to Sheffield’s A&E confirmed what I already knew and I left with my leg encased in plaster – a 6-week sentence.

Over the past 4 weeks, I have variously cursed myself for careless stupidity, regretted coming home at all, experienced intense frustration and wondered what I’m meant to learn from all this. Questions multiplied when Jo crashed her car and wrote it off two weeks ago; but thank God she escaped without injury.

We’re going back to Uganda in three days’ time, plaster cast and all. Our Winter Break didn’t turn out quite as we had expected. God moves in mysterious ways. I’m still playing ‘catch-up’, and with a broken ankle that’s not so easy!

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.