Is it wrong that just now, instead of meeting a Ugandan government minister, I ditched it for a pedicure? I couldn’t help it. All day I’ve been dreading the meeting, because of the extremely complex issue about which we would be meeting: a massive land conflict that has even gotten the attention of very high level government officials. I volunteered myself and a local organization to mediate. Yeah.
But I don’t even think that’s why I ditched. I think I was just exhausted. I can’t really moan about being tired. I slept ok, which for me doesn’t happen always. I think it’s a deep, cumulative exhaustion that comes with the territory of life abroad and challenging work. Almost every exchange I’ve had this week has been awkward and semi-confrontational.
This week began with a journey to Lira to try and get our ducks in a row in advance for the mediation. This means basically holding mini-mediations with each of the various potential stakeholders. Mediation is exhausting, especially for an impatient person such as myself.
The next exhausting phases of the week was the ever predictable torture of bureaucracy. This week’s episode in the battle of the muppets is the pendulum swing from advanced project close out to jockeying for a sudden chance of an extension. Sigh. Although a new potential hero has emerged to help us wade through the dizzying waster of time, space, energy, water, oxygen, taxpayers money, etc. etc. Nevertheless, I remain as always astounded by the inability to outsmart the wiles of, well, a door knob. Damn u waskily door knob!
Most likely, the biggest culprit of the exhaustion is Café Larem. I’ll save the litany of ups and downs for a separate blog. However, I will say that Mollie and I had a show down with a certain member of staff who was basically bullying everyone, including us. Silent treating from my own staff? For no apparent reason? Ich don’t think so. The good news – our new partner Santos road in on his white horse and saved the day and a job.
Gulu ran out of water this week and the power was “dim.”
When I reached Kampala today I met with a grantee and had a sinking feeling after the meeting that my bright idea was not going to be realized with quite the level of brilliance I would have hoped for. A series of exchanges combining frank criticism and avoidance did not allay my fears.
As I left their office and hit the fading, yet still potent heat of the African sun, I hopped on a boda boda, letting the breeze ruffle my just washed and rarely down hair. I thought this was so relaxing…I wanted it to continue.
So here I am ¾ of the way through an awesome pedicure at Sparkles in Garden City. It feels great and after writing this slightly wingy justification, I think I can forgive myself for skipping the minister.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Weekly Round Up
Pets (+) 1 pet added: Okello. Total pets in Gulu: 6 (Dogs: Jeter, Sophie, Issac & Okello) & 2 cats (Nownow & Daisy). Total crazy pet ladies: 1 (Jessica)
Meals (+) 2 new dishes served: Tomato-Pepper Soup & Roasted Eggplant Pasta. The secret ingredient for both was a habanero pepper, which is a super hot and smoky pepper – Yum!
SPRING (~) A battle with the M&E officer & crappy data from an implementing partner cancel out a great Lira mediation visit and an enthusiastic and productive conflict sensitivity mainstreaming implementing partner.
Café (~) Generator installed and running freezer and internet, and Samson and Babu are put to work cancel out failure of manager to come through on very much and slumping sales. (Is it the new café?)
Gulu overall (~) There’s been no power and no water this week which blows, but it’s started raining which means the Arugula won’t die.
Comment: Another interesting week in Gulu. To quote a recent skype comment “I can’t type now, I’m managing a restaurant, a mediation and an exterminator.” I wanted year 3 to be something different, less boring. Well, I’m far from bored. It’s mostly good, but my already minuscule patience is hanging on by a thread. I need to find time to exhale or I may explode.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Food for thought
As a foodie I thought I’d spend a lot more time writing about food in this space. Alas, given my cooking style, I fear not doing so may have cost me some good recipes. I tend to be inspired by a key ingredient at hand or a recipe I can adapt to what’s in the fridge. Apparently this is a genetic predisposition, because my mom cooks the same way. Strangely we also recently discovered when we shared a room at my uncle’s house that neither of us can stand to sleep with our feet covered, no matter the temperature. Weird!
The blessing of cooking this way is that it makes the food interesting and delicious and independent of ingredient circumstances. The curse is that I can usually never duplicate anything and forget what I made almost immediately.
I made a salad the other night that was really good, because I stumbled upon a friend’s amazingly stocked pantry. And by well stocked I mean brimming with such delicacies as limes, cranberries, feta cheese and salmon. Salmon in Gulu? That’s a first I’m sure. My salad had mixed leaves, red pepper, cucumber, feta, cranberries, scallions and pine nuts. The dressing was whole grain mustard and white balsamic. This sounds delicious but not extraordinary. But consider this: not one of those items can be purchased in Gulu or indeed in a 200 mile radius of Gulu. The pantry envy I had was not just in her stock, but also or more so in her skill of importing such exotic items into Gulu. It’s really not that easy.
Transporting Mzungu food to Gulu is exhausting. First of all, while Kampala’s offerings are well above and beyond Gulu’s, it’s still difficult to purchase many items that would be considered staple food at home. To buy cream cheese, bagels and orange juice, for example, is possible (yay!) but involves traveling to three shops (boo!). Multiple supermarket stops are essential, but time consuming. Usually my Kampala trips are a couple of days based on a series of meetings I might stack up. Shopping has to be done in the margins of work and travel schedules. As such, traipsing the average 4 supermarkets per visit usually involves a mad dash around the city.
And then of course, once the items are procured, there is the issue of preservation. It’s a long, hot journey to Gulu. Getting the particularly perishable items such as meat and cheese north involves creative packing. I almost always forget my cooler. Because I’m down for a few days, I try to stay in a place with a fridge to store bought items. (This can get embarrassing at a place like Serena where I’m constantly ferrying in month’s supplies of milk, cereal, etc. I sometimes feel like a hobo sneaking into that grand place.)
Buying ice is only possible about 50% of the time. “The ice is not there,” is usually the response to my question. Why do I continue to ask it? My relatively fail-safe storage method is buying frozen items right before departing Kampala and packing other items requiring refrigeration around them. I tie them tight in a plastic bag, tuck them into a part of the car that I hope the equatorial sunshine will not find and then hope that the spoil rate for say, unrefrigerated butter, is more than the four hours it takes to get to Gulu. (It is by the way.)
Once in Gulu, storing refrigerated items in Gulu is no picnic either. The dodgy power supply means that items may go several hours to days without refrigeration. I used to try to keep a fresh ice pack in the fridge, changing it daily with the hope that its presence would keep the fridge useful a little longer. Now I just kind of guess on the spoilage rate. I’ve also learned to freeze with reckless abandon. I even – wait for it – RE-FREEZE things. Gasp! The horror! I know. I think this and hand washing are the golden rules of hygiene. But I haven’t gotten myself or anyone sick yet...
When I sit down with guests in my lovely outdoor hut at night, it all seems worth it. In the balmy evening breeze, they “ooo” and “ahh” over decadent grilled mushrooms sprinkled with parmesan, chorizo tossed in cilantro and lemon grass, and wheat bread with real butter, not coagulated vegetable oil.
P.S. I just made up that menu since I can never recall my past creations. Maybe I’ll try it this weekend!
The blessing of cooking this way is that it makes the food interesting and delicious and independent of ingredient circumstances. The curse is that I can usually never duplicate anything and forget what I made almost immediately.
I made a salad the other night that was really good, because I stumbled upon a friend’s amazingly stocked pantry. And by well stocked I mean brimming with such delicacies as limes, cranberries, feta cheese and salmon. Salmon in Gulu? That’s a first I’m sure. My salad had mixed leaves, red pepper, cucumber, feta, cranberries, scallions and pine nuts. The dressing was whole grain mustard and white balsamic. This sounds delicious but not extraordinary. But consider this: not one of those items can be purchased in Gulu or indeed in a 200 mile radius of Gulu. The pantry envy I had was not just in her stock, but also or more so in her skill of importing such exotic items into Gulu. It’s really not that easy.
Transporting Mzungu food to Gulu is exhausting. First of all, while Kampala’s offerings are well above and beyond Gulu’s, it’s still difficult to purchase many items that would be considered staple food at home. To buy cream cheese, bagels and orange juice, for example, is possible (yay!) but involves traveling to three shops (boo!). Multiple supermarket stops are essential, but time consuming. Usually my Kampala trips are a couple of days based on a series of meetings I might stack up. Shopping has to be done in the margins of work and travel schedules. As such, traipsing the average 4 supermarkets per visit usually involves a mad dash around the city.
And then of course, once the items are procured, there is the issue of preservation. It’s a long, hot journey to Gulu. Getting the particularly perishable items such as meat and cheese north involves creative packing. I almost always forget my cooler. Because I’m down for a few days, I try to stay in a place with a fridge to store bought items. (This can get embarrassing at a place like Serena where I’m constantly ferrying in month’s supplies of milk, cereal, etc. I sometimes feel like a hobo sneaking into that grand place.)
Buying ice is only possible about 50% of the time. “The ice is not there,” is usually the response to my question. Why do I continue to ask it? My relatively fail-safe storage method is buying frozen items right before departing Kampala and packing other items requiring refrigeration around them. I tie them tight in a plastic bag, tuck them into a part of the car that I hope the equatorial sunshine will not find and then hope that the spoil rate for say, unrefrigerated butter, is more than the four hours it takes to get to Gulu. (It is by the way.)
Once in Gulu, storing refrigerated items in Gulu is no picnic either. The dodgy power supply means that items may go several hours to days without refrigeration. I used to try to keep a fresh ice pack in the fridge, changing it daily with the hope that its presence would keep the fridge useful a little longer. Now I just kind of guess on the spoilage rate. I’ve also learned to freeze with reckless abandon. I even – wait for it – RE-FREEZE things. Gasp! The horror! I know. I think this and hand washing are the golden rules of hygiene. But I haven’t gotten myself or anyone sick yet...
When I sit down with guests in my lovely outdoor hut at night, it all seems worth it. In the balmy evening breeze, they “ooo” and “ahh” over decadent grilled mushrooms sprinkled with parmesan, chorizo tossed in cilantro and lemon grass, and wheat bread with real butter, not coagulated vegetable oil.
P.S. I just made up that menu since I can never recall my past creations. Maybe I’ll try it this weekend!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Ssese Bonding
Last weekend, 14 of us from Gulu and Kampala traveled to the Ssese Island of Kalangala, a three hour ferry journey into the middle of Lake Victoria. Lots of bonding occurred, which got me thinking about group bonding and friendships. I have always perceived my friendship MO as being a person with lots of friends from different groups. It wasn’t until I was 32 that I realized I had a tight-knit “posse.” My Vassar friends and I have been friends since we were 18, yet we didn’t really realize it until one of our friend’s mom became quite sick. I remember the moment well. We gathered on my rooftop in the East Village in the early evening and declared our love for each other. 14 years after our friendship began. Admittedly, my Vassar group of 8 is a bit quirky that way.
For the first time since I arrived in Gulu nearly three years ago, I had a sense of belonging to a clique of friends. I mean this in a good way. As I have written, most ex-pats in Gulu get along pretty well, but the relationships are fairly superficial for no other reason than because the population is quite transient. Last weekend’s journey to Ssese brought some new and old friends together, and we emerged bonded and in love. When we reached the ferry port upon return to Entebbe, we quickly made plans to stay at the same hotel and for those in Kampala to come racing to the hotel just as soon as they dropped their bags so that we could hang together at the pool. As we reluctantly fanned out to board different taxis back to Kampala, desperate hugs were thrown and hasty dinner plans were made.
The island itself was ok. Beautiful, but missing something. Our hotel was kind of basic, but more or less provided acceptable food and enough booze (supplemented by various bottles brought, including the crowd favorite Black Mischief “rum.”) It rained a lot which literally and figuratively dampened things. Also, we couldn’t enter the very tempting waters of Lake Victoria, because of crocodile and bilharzia fears. The town center, up the hill from the coast, was sparsely developed and purchasing even a bottle of water took a lot of time and energy. Although we did meet a charming woman who kept bees and ran the island’s craft shop. And we did stumble upon the island’s Pentecostal church and learned much about the do’s and don’ts of avoiding Satan.
We frolicked, played games and drank heavily, but without too much embarrassment. Secrets were revealed, but without too much drama. We had our favorite guy to tease and to entertain us, Simon, and we had just enough of a gender balance to keep things interesting, but without too much scandal. We talked about serious things regarding life and love and we spent a lot of time laughing.
One never knows how group weekends like this will go. In fact, it could have been a nightmare. Some friends left from Gulu at 5am and we didn’t reach the island until dark the same day, which could have caused some grumpiness. Our hotel claimed it hadn’t received our down payment. Surely these are recipes for short tempers, but none were detected. As I mentioned, some people were meeting for the first time. But I think the commonality of ex-pat life in Uganda was a strong link. It was a very smart group of people who are all fairly successful and hardworking professionals. We could giggle intensely in the grips of Black Mischief and we could speak earnestly about the damage the island’s new palm oil plant will eventually cause.
Six of us drove back to Gulu together on Monday. From what I heard, most of those who remained in Kampala met again on Monday for dinner. We six were about an hour out of Gulu when we passed a sign for a new lodge being built on the Nile. We decided that despite the long travels we wanted to go check it out. Together. As a group. As the splendid structure came into view, we knew we had found a new venue for our group bonding. It was perfect and only about an hour from Gulu. Our Kampala friends wouldn’t mind, because the location was so spectacular and besides, the Gulu-Kampala road is much improved.
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