Are you sure it’s December?

Despite it being December (and less than 3 weeks until Christmas) I’m finding it a bit tricky getting into the Christmas spirit. I reckon at least half of that is solely from the fact that it’s about 28 degrees here and set to get hotter. The rest is the absence of relentless Christmas marketing, carols, jingles, and the colour red. Plus, it still gets dark at 6:30 every night here so I’m not quite getting the whole winter thing going on. That said, responding to this by linking me to Youtube videos of carols would just be spiteful as the internet here doesn’t really like video streaming very much.

It’s supposed to be the dry season now, but the rains keep coming. This means two bad things: road deterioration and mosquitoes. The latter have been particularly annoying when disrupting my 24 watching over the weekend. I mean, there you are in a comfy chair trying to cheer Jack on and mosquitoes are feasting (on a small scale) on your blood. The roads is more interesting: at one point, I wondered if it was just that I was slowly losing patience with driving here but then I realised that all but two roads I drive on here are visibly worse than when I arrived. On Tuesday, I was acting as an ambulance and had serious issues in getting a very old and frail lady home from the village without jolting her around too much despite generally deducting 20kph off whatever I usually did on each road and successfully remembering most of the hidden gullies that I normally just hit and then apologise.

There's a lorry stuck here every two days.. this is the best so far.

I first thought the road worsening could be an attempt to spite me (and who knows, maybe it is a conspiracy) but then I realised it was the rain relentlessly running restraint-less, rutting (as in causing ruts) and ridging roads and roundabouts. Generally, if I’m on my own and in the pickup, it’s great fun as one can bounce around ridiculously (with some sympathy for the suspension) when one fails to swerve round the potholes (or in the places where there’s literally no way to pass without going into a least one pothole (into rather than over)). However, the absence of tread on the pickup and it’s dead battery made some of Saturday’s journeys pretty entertaining. I jump-started the pickup four times on Saturday, twice on my own (as in pushing then jumping into the car once speed is built up) and three times in front of an appreciative Ugandan audience who seemed to enjoy the spectacle considerably. Thus, when I slid, stopped and then stalled in the middle of a very slippery, muddy and wet patch near the BJH (Boy’s Jenga House), I was a little concerned. Thankfully, the engine roared back into life. Unfortunately, the road was bad enough that I needed the askari and two friends to shove me clear of the hole I was in. We then travelled at an angle up a straight road due to one tyre having more tread than the other… quite an interesting experience.

Work’s been pretty good this week. A few big things are slowly moving forward but lots of the day-to-day stuff is now happily bypassing me which is ideal in some senses but does mean that I have to be more proactive in finding stuff to do. The plus side is that this gives me more spare time to work out how best to pester those in authority who are delaying me (usually unapologetically). Sometimes, my efforts seem to work well. However, I discovered last week that a lady had misunderstood what I was pestering her about and the thing I actually wanted was already done. That said, they haven’t yet confirmed it’s done so I’m now pestering her for written confirmation.

This definitely counts as work

This Sunday, the Dr became the Rev Dr which meant an exciting road trip to Kumi to watch the ordination. We ended up leaving Mbale an hour late (I managed not to make too many complaints about this) and this meant we missed the first hour of a five hour service. Once I’d realised this, I stopped complaining altogether! Anyway, it was a great day. Quite a few people from work also managed to make the hour and a bit journey out there so the Dr was thronged by her devoted staff!

Churches and individuals often give presents to those ordained and the Dr came back with lots of exciting gifts. Among the mugs (which were obviously cool) and other stuff were a turkey  and five chickens! Thankfully, none of them are roosters so I don’t need to fear for my precious sleep.

Hello Christmas!

Other highlights of the week include Skyping some Oxford (and ex-Oxford) friends on Saturday evening (you guys are sweet), Curry Night on Friday, “Games Night” on Tuesday, WATCHING MERLIN excessively on Thursday (that’s right, I found it in a perfectly legal video shop for 60p… ideal!), eating tic-tacs excessively on Saturday, the ideal food after the service yesterday and being told by several people that the Japanese earthquake had changed the angle at which the earth rotates.