DeannaInUganda

occupations

Feels like the weekend today! Why? Cuz I haven't gone to work in two days! Why? Because, starting yesterday, I'm refusing to go to work until I get paid (something that hasn't happened since April), and also because today was declared a public holiday, in honour of the Ugandan crew of a helicopter that crashed last week, killing the crew and its passenger, the Sudanese Vice President. This is the third spontaneously declared public holiday in the past month. I commemorated this solemn day of mourning by going to the pool.

Also, what the fucks up with not getting paid since April? And what the hell is up with declaring holidays at 4pm the day before?? Ah, Uganda!

It occurs to me that I never mentioned on This Here Blog that the 'load shedding' situation has drastically improved. (Load shedding, for those of you who don't know, is the term for the regularly scheduled power outages, necessary since despite having the mighty Nile River coursing through it, the government only generates about 60% of the electricity the country needs, and a good chunk of that gets exported to Kenya.) Anyways, the whole electricity thing was recently privatized, and a company called Umeme now delivers the utility bills. With the canny business sense that comes from the private sector, Umeme set up a bunch of generators or whatnot, and can therefore now give us bigger electricity bills because we now have access to more electricity, which is nice. So while we used to have load shedding every alternate evening, from about 7 pm till about ten or eleven, now we only have load shedding every three days, from anywhere from only 20 minutes to the full three hours. For some reason, having the power go out every three days instead of every second day seems to make a big difference – maybe it’s just the psychological difference between ‘no power every other day’ to ‘no power twice a week.’ (Update: the power just went out, randomly, for about twenty minutes while I was writing this. It’s about midnight, on a ‘power night’. So much for all that predictability.)

Okay, so another random African-health update. I now occasionally break out into the odd hive or two. Any doctors reading this blog? What the hell?

And to change the subject with no smooth segway.

So, I updated my plane ticket, to reflect when I am actually going home. (Previously, I was booked for a random day in September, since that was the latest bookable date when I bought my ticket last year.) I am now leaving Kampala on November 7th, and then I’ll spend a few days hemorrhaging money in London (and visiting friends and sightseeing and stuff), and then I’ll be hopping on another plane a few days later, and I’ll be back in Toronto on the evening of the 10th. Its ridiculous how much I am looking forward to the whole ‘going home process’ – I find myself already thinking about who will take me to the Entebbe airport, and what I’m going to do with all my luggage when I get to London, and where I’ll stay and eat and visit. (Speaking of luggage, any suggestion about the following situation: When I come home, I will have a lot of luggage – I’ve been here a long time, I have lots of stuff. It’s more than I could possibly transport myself – I just don’t have enough hands to drag/carry it all on the tube to my hotel/friends couch, and I don’t have 100 pounds to blow on a cab into the city, and I can’t check my luggage all the way through to Toronto because of my three day stopover, and it costs like a bazillion dollars a day to leave ‘left luggage’ at the airport. Besides, the whole ‘left luggage’ desk seems really sketchy to me – maybe it’s the Africa-dweller in me, but I would just assume that theft would be rampant among left-luggage-desk employees. So, yeah, I don’t know what I’ll do with all my luggage. But its still months away so maybe I should just chill out. Chill out. Chill out? Who says that anymore?

Aside from the fact that the left-luggage issue won’t arise until November, really, I have other things to worry about. I mean, I am months behind on my work. I’d like to think I could get it all done if I rush, but everything around me moves so slowly that it seems impossible. (That’s why I’m behind to begin with.) Also, my parents are coming for a visit in September (yay!) and that will provide me with a whole whack o’ stuff to do and a get excited for before I get excited about my Plane Rides two months later. Also, in a ‘keeping my options open’ move, I’m planning on taking the GMAT here in Kampala sometime in October, and so far the gmat-knowledge-osmosis process that I thought would begin once I had the study book on my bookshelf just isn’t progressing as rapidly as I thought it would. And three different media salespeople are abusing the privilege of being given my business card, and are actively pursuing the Canadian-visa-through-marriage option. So yeah, lots of other stuff to occupy myself with before November.

posted by Deanna @ 1:05 a.m.