Big Year Out - Half Time

So, this is it, the last entry from Uganda, from ‘Part 1’ of my year out – how is it possible?! It only seems like a couple of months have gone by since I set off from blighty to change the world (!) – and yet I have experienced so much, seen so much, learnt so much and, I think, achieved so much!

Ok, before I get all emotional lets update you on the last 5 weeks (it’s been a while since the last entry!)

First up is the visit of my good mate Jez. Jez was over for 10days and it was just quality. It was brilliant to show him around Bajjo, to introduce him to my new friends, to watch his face as he saw small children running around with large machetes for the first time, to put him to work digging the 5-a-side football pitch and to just kick back and laugh, a lot, with a good mate. During his visit we also spent a few days up in Murchison Falls National Park, spying elephants, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles , waking up to giant warthogs sniffing the tent and trekking with Rhinos…and, or course, sampling the night life of Kampala for a bit of well earned party time!! Thanks for coming out mate, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

One thing that I hoped to get invited to while I was here was a local wedding. My wish came true when the brother of Justine (our neighbour) got married last month. We rushed around Kampala the night before buying cheap shirts, ties and trousers and turned up at a gospel church in Kawempe (a slum area just outside Kampala) the next day. Being a gospel church they had a great choir which was definitely the highlight of the day (along with the strange whooping noise that people make when they are celebrating a joyous occasion!..)…waiting 2 hours for the bride to arrive in sweltering heat dressed in thick trousers, shirt and tie was not so fun (I know its tradition for the bride to turn up late…and time has no meaning here…but 2 hours was just taking the piss!) The reception wasn’t quite the crazy, dance fest I had expected…instead it was about 4 hours of speeches from men (only) in the family saying the same thing over and over again, all translated into three languages (‘thank you God for putting these two people together, we have been blessed’….etc…). I did get some booty shaking (and of course pointing!) in at the end, but not enough for my liking! Still it was good day and I’m glad I got the chance to experience it.

On the project side of life we have had a great, if incredibly busy last few weeks (and there I was naively thinking that we would get all our work done early and kick back and enjoy the experience for the last couple of weeks!). In the last 3 weeks we have:

- Built a playground at the school which included; monkey bars, tyre swings, stepping stones, rope ladder climbing frame, parallel bars (for disabled kids) and colourful benches.
- Painted health messages on the school (a requirement in Uganda)
- Attached guttering and bought a huge water tank for the school to ensure the kids have fresh rain water (they currently drink very dirty water from a well close to the school)
- Organized the second village party (a great success with nurses from a local clinic in attendance giving a talk on HIV and providing outreach HIV testing and counseling….along with the ever popular football and netball tournaments)
- Marked out the best football pitch in the district (we have spent the last few months digging a trench to drain a large area of land, which was finally dry enough to be marked and an exhibition match was played at the end of the village party…a game in which my team lost 2-1…after I missed a penalty in front of a capacity crowd…its gonna haunt me months to come!)
- Picked up a wheelchair for a severely disabled kid in the village and took him for his first ride
- Karl completed a week of training with AMREF staff (the whizzkids HIV & lifeskills programme that Karl wrote in South Africa and that we have been running in Bombo is to be used by AMREF as part of their strategy to fight Malaria, TB and HIV in Uganda – a great partnership and one that I feel I can take some satisfaction from having made the introduction between AMREF and Whizzkids following the work I did for AMREF in London earlier this year)
- The ‘Bajjo Craft Makers’ had a day trip to Kampala to meet prospective buyers for their products and were officially formed as a business/organization when they paid their registration fee, signed the group operating rules and received a donation from wannabeamazin to help them with their capital costs (a proud moment for me – its been a struggle, especially with some of the business training I conducted – most of the women in the group hadn’t picked up a pen since they were at school 30 years ago…that’s if they even went to school!!)
- And, finally, we finished writing our wannabeamazin programme manauals for Art, Creative Studies, Junior Academy and Sports. We have printed them and put them together in folders to form a very professional looking set of programmes..and something we are all incredibly proud of.

So, in an ode to my time at Accenture, what were the lessons learnt in the last 6 months:

- Things take a looooooong time to happen in Africa
- Maybe Idi Amin wasn’t all bad
- In a dark bar I look like Michael Schofield (stop laughing)
- Tiny parasites called Jiggers hurt, a lot.
- I can’t live without a shower, toilet or oven indefinitely – 6 months is enough
- Kids in the UK are wrapped up in too much cotton wool – let them play with knives – they’ll soon learn
- Things take a long time to happen in Africa
- Human sacrifice is still performed fairly regularly in Uganda!
- Malaria, TB and HIV really do kill a lot of people every day in Africa (I’ve seen it first hand)
- We really don’t appreciate how many opportunities we have in the UK – we can do anything if we really want to – anyone moaning about their situation needs to just look around at all the possibilities and grasp them
- Kids don’t need expensive toys – a bottle top can keep them amused for hours
- Termites are bloody destructive creatures
- Things take a long time to happen in Africa
- I can happily live without a TV…but I do miss watching major sporting events (still gutted I didn’t see Bolt break the 100 and 200m records at the Olympics…and the recent Joe Calzaghe fight..)
- Experiences are enhanced when shared with a loved one…finding someone that you love, that you truly love, who is in the same place as you (mentally and physically) is a near impossible task
- Fried grasshoppers are really quite nice…fried white ants are not so nice
- I still love travelling and meeting new people – but friends and family are impossible to replace
- Things take a long time to happen in Africa
- Change in Africa has to come from Africans
- Education is key to a countries development – it really can affect the mindset, culture and development of a country
- Working in a culture that has no concept of time is at first interesting, then annoying and ultimately incredibly frustrating!
- Things take a bloody long time to happen in Africa!!
- I can kill a chicken.

I have had a great weekend to finish on - we invited around 40 people to our house on Friday night to have a big Christmas party and gave out presents to many of the people there –seeing the kids faces as Vinny (our local employee) came round the corner dressed up in a Father Christmas outfit was priceless! We followed that with a meal on Saturday at the local chairmans house, and another one yesterday with SPAU (the charity we have ‘officially’ been working under here). I left Bajjo yesterday and it was hard, really hard. I have become so close to the people there, especially our immediate neighbours...I’m not ashamed to say that a tear was shed.

And so, I fly home today. Looking back at the goals I had for my time in Uganda – to have an adventure and to do something ‘good’ – I can say, hand on my heart, that they have been achieved…and I am just so thankful that I have had this opportunity, and that I picked this option over a couple of others that I had. This has been an incredible experience, one that has helped me to develop again as a person, as a human being. And, as I leave Uganda, I know that Uganda and the people of Bajjo will never leave my heart – I’ll be back, that’s for sure.