Our little house

I wrote this blog about 2 weeks ago but my (usually very good and user-friendly) blogger app had a bit of a strop and it’s stuck in the process of publishing it, so I’ve had to re-write it. Now I back everything up before I press ‘publish’!

I feel it’s about time I described where we live a bit better. We are staying in a big compound across the road from the hospital. The compound is massive and we’ve only seen a tiny bit of it. It houses the nursing school and their accommodation and also most of the staff of the hospital and their families. It’s on a hill so the walk to work is downhill all the way but it’s a very steep trudge back home! The compound has locked gates with a security guard. Apparently there’s a curfew in this part of the country of 10 o’clock and I met a student who’d got back from playing badminton too late and spent the night in a police cell! It’s strange because we’re basically in the middle of nowhere apart from one village so it doesn’t feel very dangerous but I guess it’s nice to know we’re safe.

They gave us a choice of living in the doctor’s guesthouse or a house. It’s so nice to have a house. It’s basically a bungalow in a little garden just off the main path through the compound. Rita’s house is next door. There’s a concrete area between the 2 houses and the side doors come off this so there’s about 2 metres between our door and Rita’s. The main door is round the front with a covered porch. The garden has a few plants, a hedge, a lawn and a big coconut tree, as well as a washing line. We used to have 2 but random people have been chopping down one of our trees for wood and they broke one. We don’t really sit outside much because the lawn is on a steep slope and there are lots of things that bite in the grass!

The main room at the front has a sofa, 2 armchairs and a rocking chair and some pretty hangings on the walls. We spend almost all our time in here, reading books, sewing, writing blogs etc. I don’t think either of us have read so many books in such a short time before, I must be on over 30! Off the sitting room is a dining area and then off this to the right is the kitchen. We have a fridge-freezer, 2 hobs, a sink and a big dresser. The kitchen’s very well-equipped thanks to the many people who have lived here over the years. The bathroom’s small. We’re meant to have hot water but it’s broken and it’s hard enough to get the engineers to sort out the big problems so we’ve decided it’s not a battle worth fighting! In a country where lots of people walk for miles to collect water, our running water is enough of a luxury. After a big rainstorm the water sometimes turns a nasty brown colour because it picks up mud. It’s ok to shower in but slightly disconcerting for washing clothes or when we boil it for drinking water! Emma’s bedroom is off the same corridor and mine is off the sitting room. I have a queen-size bed which is nice but the mattress is broken down the middle so I have to sleep diagonally. My room has a washing line too so we can dry our clothes there when it rains. I often have puddles on the concrete floor afterwards and you can see which way it slopes!

The ‘rubbish bin’ is a hole in the ground just up the path from our garden. Apparently they burn the rubbish when it gets full but it never seems to get any fuller because the birds and animals get in and spread the rubbish around. It definitely doesn’t feel like the tidiest or most hygienic solution but I guess it’s hard without rubbish collectors. People burn stuff a lot here on bonfires. They always smell awful and we can’t close our windows so the smoke sometimes gets in  the house.

Our electricity comes from a company in Kasese and we have a card which we have to top up in town and then we put into a little box outside our house to get more power. It’s usually pretty cheap but we’ve had a problem with ours and it uses way more than normal (like 5 times more). We think it’s either the fridge or a loose connection but the electricians came and didn’t get anywhere. It’s still only about £5 a week but it does mean we have to plan ahead so we don’t run out! We have a lot of power-cuts here, at the moment there seems to be about one a day. There’s a generator we can use when the power goes off. We turn a handle in our house and then wait until the generator has been started. It runs on oil and apparently once during an operation there was a power-cut and they were out of oil so they had to send someone to buy some whilst keeping the patient breathing manually without the usual machines! Sometimes it takes a while for the generator to be turned on so candles and head-torches come in useful. Because of our electricity problems though we quite like being on the generator because it’s free. We also have a special box which we use to charge tablets and laptops so they don’t get fried by the power surge when the electricity comes back on!

As I mentioned before, most of our cooking is done on gas and a few weeks ago we ran out and had a tough couple of days before we got more. All these things make you realise how easy life is back home, although we’re very aware that our lives here are much easier than most people’s in Africa. Our house definitely has its quirks though. The other day after a power-cut, the power came on but not enough for any of the lights except the bathroom light. Now they’re all working again but the bathroom light has stopped working, so we have to shower by the light of a head-torch!

We’ve had various house-guests/pets whilst we’ve been here. We always have a few geckoes, 3 of whom we named Tom, Dick and Harry but we’ve forgotten which ones they were! For a while we had a praying mantus who lived on our door called Rupert but he’s long gone. One night when I was ill Emma woke me up asking for help because she’d seen the biggest spider. It was literally the size of our fists and was very hairy. We’d heard strange noises earlier in the evening and I’d searched my room before I went to bed thinking it was coming from there. I definitely think an added bonus of a mosquito net is to keep out other bigger wildlife too! Emma tried to pick the spider up using a cup but it reared up at her so she swept it out with the broom. We’ve also had to sweep out frogs, cockroaches, loads of beetles and worms and other creepy-crawlies we can’t identify! The most dangerous animal in Africa is definitely the mosquito and all our windows are covered in netting so most of the time they don’t get into the house. Lots of people keep chickens and goats in the compound and there are quite a few cats that wander around and fight at night. In the evening the crickets all come out and make a racket so all in all it can get quite noisy! The other day there was a swarm of grasshoppers that arrived in a rather biblical fashion overnight and the next day all the Ugandans were frying and eating them. Apparently they’re a delicacy and normally quite expensive but I chickened out of trying one.

We’ve been very lucky to have had such a nice place to live and I’ll definitely miss it. However I don’t think I could live in a compound like this for a long time and daily life is definitely easier (and quieter) in the UK.