In praise of the BBC

When it comes to a British national election, we’re usually up until 2am or so waiting for a ‘Portillo moment’ or other such excitement before going to bed. This time it promised to be at least as exciting as 1997. But here we are in Northern Uganda, three hours ahead of GMT and in the heart of rural Africa – any chance of following the momentous events?

‘You can listen to the BBC World Service in so many ways...’ the announcer is fond of saying ....’from a satellite receiver to the internet, or even on a radio.....’ Well, yes, we can do all these things, but it depends on the weather, power supplies, speed of downloading, and countless random factors that are a bit like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in chaos theory.

First we have a standard battery operated radio, with short wave capability and a very long antenna. It was Anne’s leaving present from her job at Sheffield University, and an excellent little machine. That gives us the BBC World Service, even on FM, very clearly at certain times of day. It is battery operated so no need for electricity. But without warning it can suddenly produce white sound with no hope of recovery for a few hours at least. Even more annoying, it can lurch into Swahili just as the chimes of Big Ben were signalling a news roundup. Our Swahili is not up to it. Then of course the batteries can run down.......

But we also have a satellite radio, generously donated by a friend who works for the BBC. The hospital electrician, who had never seen such a thing before, patiently attached the aerial to the outside wall of our house in the early weeks after we arrived, and to our amazement there was a good signal. When it works it’s fantastic quality, and always in English. But sometimes, when there is heavy cloud, it develops a serious stutter, so that we miss every third word or so. It’s difficult to make sense of things when such a high proportion of the components never make it from the stratosphere. And the radio needs plugging into the mains, so when Kuluva’s ageing hydroelectricity scheme fails it’s useless.

Lastly we can get the UK radio stations on the internet. The BBC website is a delight, but things are slow here and it often takes 10 minutes or so to start getting the live feed, after the 20 minutes or so it takes to log onto the website. So it pays to plan ahead, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. But it’s nice, when it works, to hear the dulcet tones of familiar voices like Jonathan Dimbleby on Any Questions, or Sandy Toksvig on The News Quiz. And because our laptop has a battery, we can survive for a while even when the power goes.

So did we follow the election? Well actually we went one better than radio and watched it on TV! A South African company, DSTV, provides satellite broadcasting here, for a price, and we can get BBC World News which carried nothing but the election for days. So 4am here on May 7th (2am UK time) saw us up early, sharing a breakfast of tea and toast with a fellow English expat working nearby in the Congo, enjoying the exhausted newscasters’ commentary on the evolving hung parliament. Even the hydro power didn’t let us down this time.

Who says the electronic age has bypassed Africa? And all power to the BBC.

Meet Michael

It is curious how a complete stranger can suddenly take centre stage in your life; the way in which someone you’ve never met before becomes one of the most important people you know. It’s been like that with Michael.

Maybe it was wishful thinking or just plain ignorance which made me think it wouldn’t take long to learn how to walk again. I had returned to Uganda with a sheet of ‘Foot and Ankle Exercises’ from the hospital. ‘Sitting Toe Raise’, Ankle Circles’, ‘Gastroc Stretch’ and ‘Standing Unilateral Heel Rise’ looked easy enough in theory although the sheet did lack any details about how often the exercises should be done.

But a week after taking the cast off my leg I still didn’t recognise the thing at the end of my body as my foot or ankle, and I could only lift the ball of my foot about a nanometre from the floor using the ‘Sitting Heel Raise’.

Progress was painfully slow, literally, and even new exercises from the internet, ‘Plantar Flexion’, ‘Dorsi Flexion’, ‘Inversion’ and ‘Eversion’ didn’t really improve things. What I needed, but had never been told I needed, was a physiotherapist. Enter Michael!

Physiotherapists are like gold dust in Uganda. We had been told there was a qualified ‘physio’ at Arua hospital, but couldn’t get hold of any reliable information about how to contact him. Just as we were resigning ourselves to another 500 km drive to Kampala to get treatment the Principal of the School of Nursing told us about Michael. Four hours later Michael appeared at our door.

He is the son of a Church Teacher, born and bred in West Nile and the same age as David Beckham but with his Achilles tendon still intact! Originally he wanted to train as a pharmacist, but was advised instead to train as a physiotherapist. He was told that as a physiotherapist he would never have to look for work – work would look for him. The advice, it seems, was spot-on. Now Michael works at Arua Hospital four days a week and is living in Ocoko, a village just a couple of kilometres from Kuluva. He rides a motorbike and has a car – so is doing quite well – and always turns up at the right time looking very professional.

Michael is unfailingly cheerful with a very positive outlook. Nevertheless he said that because of my age(!) it would take longer for me to walk properly than a younger patient! So saying, he went to work on my ankle. Each day since then he has come to apply hot compresses to my foot and ankle. He has massaged and manipulated, pushed and pulled, and entered into various competitions with my ankle.... ...I even understand the exercises now.

Last Sunday Michael told me it would probably take another 3 weeks before I could walk without crutches, but yesterday, Friday, less than a week after I first met him, I confounded the prognosis. For the first time in ten weeks I was able to walk without crutches. Michael is delighted at the progress and I am delighted with him. If we hadn’t met him, Anne and I would have been going to Kampala this weekend.

This week Michael has taken centre stage in our life here and Uganda has done it again. A doctor in Kampala performs an operation on my leg 10 minutes after first seeing me, I am treated royally at Entebbe airport (unlike Heathrow), the car gets repaired within 48 hours of being crashed into by a coach, and now successful physiotherapy at home within 4 hours of learning about it. Beat that!

Return to Kuluva - Tyreless Exploits

On Saturday morning we were reunited with our own ‘wheels’, and soon after lunch were able to set off for Kampala where we were going to stay with some friends over the weekend. Nursing a painful ankle over and around the potholes of Kampala is not an experience I would recommend, but after an hour or so we arrived at Matthew and Anna’s home conveniently located near the road which takes us north, back to Kuluva. The only problem with the apartment is that it is located on the second floor. Normally this would be no problem, but 50+ steps on crutches with one leg is not easy!

Sunday and Monday enabled Anne to get some essential bits of business done in Kampala – like taking the car to the mechanic, and buying essential supplies. But 6.30 Tuesday morning and we were up and ready to go on the final leg of our journey home.

The traffic leaving Kampala was fine. We were soon out of the city and on the open road. When we arrived in Uganda 2½ years ago, the first 200km of the road to Arua were truly dreadful. Quite literally there were more potholes than road. Added to this was the periodic hazard of coaches on the Kampala-Arua route. From time to time you would hear the dreadful blast of a horn and see a white monster closing on you at sometimes terrifying speeds, careering all over the road to avoid the potholes. All you could do was to get out of the way, usually by heading for the nearest ditch.

Now, the road is much improved having gone through a wholesale repair programme. Sometimes this has meant that the road had periodic batches of up to 300 speed humps to slow traffic down around the road works. But on this journey, for the very first time, all repairs were complete – no potholes or road humps – and we were able to make good time. Now we can average speeds which compete with the bus services and we are rarely, if ever, overtaken.

The middle part of the journey takes us on a road which borders Murchison Game Park. It’s a long and straight and feels as though it’s on top of the world. It is one of the few places on the journey which has no phone signal. Anne was driving, and we were pleased with the progress we were making when quite suddenly there was a worrying noise and the road suddenly felt very bumpy. Anne slowed down and I looked out of the passenger wing mirror to see bits of tyre flapping around the rear nearside wheel. A tyre had burst.

Anne has never changed a wheel before, and I have never attempted to do such a thing in a plaster-cast with a swollen and painful ankle. But there was no phone signal, and none of the few vehicles which passed (perhaps one every 6-7 minutes) stopped when we tried to flag them down. There was only one solution and the next half hour or so was spent with a one legged-man on crutches and his wife, somehow, jacking up the car and manipulating what are very heavy Land Cruiser wheels until we had managed to change the wheel.

But we were blessed. There was some cloud cover so it wasn’t blazingly hot, neither did it rain. Another blessing, no wild animals, which you sometimes see on the road, came to bother us!

We finally arrived home after a journey of some 7 hours to be greeted by Lucy and the women who work in the houses around our own. Anne and I collapsed onto the bed with a deep sense of thankful relief.

P.S. Just a week later, and as we were turning right into Kuluva hospital, one of the monster buses which ply their trade between Arua and Kampala decided it wanted to overtake us. It was a miracle that we weren’t killed, but the coach driver managed to divert down the same road we were turning into, and just damaged the front offside wing and bumper. Nobody was hurt, but the exchanges between the driver, the bus passengers, and ourselves were not much fun. But God provided us with some good friends who appeared, and after some time and the involvement of the police,the bus company agreed liability and paid for our repairs.

We are looking forward to a healed ankle and a much quieter life if possible.........

Return to Uganda - A Tale of Two Airports

It had been snowing again by the time we left Leicester on our journey south. I was exceptionally careful as I made my way with crutches over the slushy snow to the Jaguar Taxi which was to take us to Heathrow. It was 6.00 am but Steve and Marion who had been our amazingly generous hosts for the previous three weeks were up to wave us goodbye, maybe slightly relieved that we were finally on our way.

Cathy, Anne’s sister, had arranged to meet us at the airport to see us off, which was just as well as Terminal 5’s support for people on crutches was not great. Pushing a wheelchair and a luggage trolley on her own would not have been easy for Anne. In any case, after Cathy left us, I had a pile of hand luggage on me and Anne had to manage everything (including my crutches) through passport and security checks on her own. At the Boarding Gate the British Airways staff were surprised and apologetic that we had been given no help through the airport and had been left to fend for ourselves.

A final push down the tunnel in the wheelchair to the plane, and we were able to settle ourselves in for the 8-hour flight to Uganda. It was a good flight, but we had plenty of time to contemplate how exactly we would disembark at Entebbe. The airport is equipped with tunnels for access to the aircraft, but they never seem to be used. Instead, steps are used for disembarkation, and although my crutch technique had improved over the previous 4-5 weeks I didn’t feel up to that steep descent. If we had as much support at Entebbe as at Heathrow we would have problems!

We were asked to wait until everyone else had left the plane and then made our way to the door where we were greeted by two African airport staff. Between them they had a feeble-looking metal frame chair. It was a bit like a deck chair, but had two handles, one at the foot and one at the back. I was invited to sit in the chair, and with some apprehension did so. Then, one man at the back and the other at the front, they lifted me up and began to walk down the steps. The young man at the front walked backwards and looked as though he had never been expected to do anything quite like this before and was trying to work out the best way of doing it.

The seemingly vertical descent was not really the way I would choose to leave an aircraft, but the spectacle was enjoyed by a number of airport staff. Eventually, after what felt like an age, to my great relief we were finally on the ground where a wheelchair awaited me. Then, with minimum fuss, our two escorts ushered us to the front of the immigration queue, and thence to the carousel to collect our luggage. They loaded up the luggage trolley which they had obtained and moved us swiftly to the airport exit ahead of everyone else. The whole process had been so speedy that the taxi from the Airport Guest House hadn’t yet arrived. But our minders stayed with us, and did so until they could finally deposit us and our luggage in the taxi for the short trip to our home for the night and recovery before the next ‘leg’ of our journey back to Kuluva.

Facilities for the disabled – Heathrow 2, Entebbe 10.

P.S. Sorry there are no pictures for this one. We had other things on our minds during the journey!

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!