My Home in Uganda
18th August 2006
This page is all about where I will living for the next six months.
Update contact details - including a contact phone number - can be found here.
This is the house itself. The
second floor of the building is the volunteer guest house. There
are some stairs at the back of the building
that access the second floor.
There are three bedrooms and eight beds. At the moment their
are only four of us living there. There is myself, Lee and Ciarra
and Esther. Esther is from Uganda. She has her own room and takes care of all the
cooking and housework. Kinda like Jen-Jen
in the Philippines. There is also a
guy called Brian who rents a small hut just outside the house and shares meals with us.
I suspect the numbers a little low at the moment because of the North
American students returning home after their summer
breaks. I am looking forward to December when all the New
Zealand students are on their breaks and will - hopefully - invade
Uganda.
The house has electricity, but no running water. Uganda is
going through a power crisis at the moment. Most areas are on a
day-on/day-off system. This has reeked havoc on inflation and the
price of consumables has skyrocketed. The cost of living in Uganda
is about five times that of Ghana.
The views outside the house are ten-times
better than the views from my home
in Ghana. Mind you, that's not saying much. The view
from my home in Ghana was of the next door neighbor's house.
The house is quite a social place too.
For a start we have about several kids who come and go as if they were
family. Volunteers based in the villages also use it as a place to
hang out. The community feel of the place is great.
Rooms in the House
My Bedroom
At the moment, I am lucky enough to have my own bedroom, pictures
of which can be found here. My bedroom
has two beds. I enjoyed sharing a
room with Nicholas in
Ghana, but is nice to have a space that is completely my own.
I'm not sure how long it will last
though. More volunteers will inevitably come and the guest house
will fill up.
The bed is similar to
the one in Guest House One, in that it has a foam mattress on top
of wooden slats, but it is way more comfortable. The wooden
slats actually stay in place when you sleep and there are enough of
them to provide support. I will happily sleep on this bed for
six months.
The room is decorated sparsely at the
moment. The only effort I have made so far is to put up my New
Zealand flag. I'm tempted to go out and buy some Africa
rugs and art to liven up the place.
The Toilet
and Shower
The toilet at the house
I stayed in the Philippines was just about the same as you'd find
in any western house. The flushing mechanism was busted though,
so you had to flush it with a bucket of water.
The
toilet at Guest House One
on the Buduburum Refugee camp was another step down. It smelled
terrible and wasn't the cleanest thing in the world. It clogged
up completely for the last two weeks that I was on camp. Every time
we flushed it, the sewage would leak into a neighbors house. We
had to use an even more smelly toilet nearby.
The toilet at my home in
Uganda is another step down again. To get to it, you have to go
outside, head down the stairs and then into
the nearby toilet block. There you'll
be greeted by a hole in the ground masquerading
as a toilet. The toilet is buzzing with flies during the
heat of the day.
There are some bad places in the world to be
constipated. Balancing over a hole in the ground while flies
buzz around you is amongst the worst.
The
shower is - mercifully - inside. It is of the
bucket-over-head variety, not dissimilar to the
one at Guest House One. The buckets showers are okay.
I never really feel clean after one. I feel cleaner, but
not clean. I would settle for a cold, running shower any day of
the week.
The living room
I'm liking the living room. It
is filled with my comfy chairs and even has a fridge.
*gasp*. The fridge, of course, only works when the power is on -
which is about half the time.
The living room is the social area of the
house. I like it that people are coming and going from it all
the time. It really adds to the community feel of the place.
The coolest thing about the
living room is the walls. They are
covered with messages from past volunteers. This
one is my favorite. It is from Dr.
Robin, with whom I volunteered in the Philippines. A nice
link to the past.
Other rooms
There is a long corridor running down the center where kids
regularly throttle up and down.
There is also a kitchen
where the lovely Esther prepares all our meals and does our
dishes. A gas stove is used to cook the
meals as the power is too unreliable.
I like the home I am living in. It has a
nice feel to it.
Questions? Comments? Try contacting
me.
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(c)
2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to
link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you
want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.
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