Christmas preperation photos and silly thoughts.....

Is life easier?

There are so many things here in Uganda that you have almost never thought about, which is most often a result of the westernised community. Let me remind you of some...

Were do our endless piles of wrappers, cans and other garbage go to? isnt there a blackhole somewhere in space that swallows all our garbage? For Uganda there isn't. The trash piles up everywhere, even where its visable to us "mzungus"! Can you believe it? There are no garbage guys which remove the trash from us and allow us not to think anymore about where it goes etc. What a shame...

From what is KFC made? To be honest I have never thought a great deal about chicken in general, all I knew was that KFC was just too good, whatever it was made from. Yes yes, little cute chicken possibly, but wtf... Now it happens to be that our hen, who is called Heny, is laying eggs. 12 of them! Everybody in our small family, including our azkari (watchman), are so exited. 12 new cute family members running around the compound with Heny. How lovely! And what a possibility! With all these chicken we sure can open a KFC in soroti!

How does a washing mashine work? Well, I genuinly thought that you put in your clothes and some washing powder, press start, the mashine shakes for an hour and then kaboom, your clothes are ready and clean! But no..., it just must be a little bit more complicated, because no matter how much i try to look for a start button on the washing basin or how much washing powder i put in there, my clothes just dont get clean! the other day i even tried to shake the basin for an hour with no results...

Well, enough of these reminders, it's Christmas time and here are some photos of our Holiday preperations:


I made heavinly beef on Sunday and it was delicius! We have finally managed to pick out the best pieces from the meat, after having been chewing on necks, liver or feet for the past 3 months.

We also had some redwine for the first time in almost 3 months! It was the cheapest wine in the store in Kampala but we are certain it is the best wine we have ever tasted... hmmmm... maybe our standards are getting a little bit too low...

Christmas tree!!!

And even Chrstimas lights we bought... oh yes...

Do they know its Christmastime at all?

From the pen of Vignir:

A mechanical person greeted me at the supermarket the other day. A feeling of uneasiness came over me; the mechanical person was somewhat sinister and eerie in appearance. He had a disturbing laugh and a smile which seemed to hold many unsetteling secrets. This was of course Santa Claus, christmas time is coming!

Of all places in the world Soroti is one of the last place where I'd expect to see one of these abominations. But the spirit of the season is here, although the climate would indicate that it is now the middle of summer and christmas is months away.

We will of course do our part in making the holidays festive. Harpa has already bought red and blue lightbulbs, although the red one gives the appearance that we're running some sort ofbackstreet business... None of that sort, we're celebrating christmas a time for cheer.

We'll be going to Kampala to stock up on decorations and food supplies. Including a duck. We will be going completely "native" when it comes to the duck. We'll be travelling on the bus with an alive and kicking duck.

Happy holidays everybody.

Vignir and Harpa

Time, is not on my side

Busy busy we are. After 2 weeks from now, 4 December, there will be a big exhibition in Lalle Primary school. We will be presenting the kids art works from the Art group, the kids music piece, which is Neil Young's "Helpless" in an African arrangement, from the Music group and finishing with an exciting quiz between 4 teams!

The Art exhibition will consist of art work made from colour pencils, water colours , Coals, clip art, art forms and callicraphy. We will have around 300 art pieces

The preperation has begun for this exciting event! We got the kids to make flyers and posters and after having made 40 flyers and 4 posters we proudly marched to the market to distribute them. Afterwards one 12 year old came up to me and asked me sincerely if 4 November hadn't already passed?

Oops....

Has time really gone past so fast???

Well, if you look closely at this photo you can see a 12 year old doing his flyer conscientiously, following closely my directions on putting 4 November as the date of the event...

Here we are practising "Helpelss"

And practising the chorus. The

Our lovely P6 class

Here is were we often buy our breakfast, lunch and dinner...mmmm.....

Until next time,

Harps

Snapshots of our lives

Our neighbour bought us a new chicken, and here you can see the results. Notice the "nest" which was a gift from our friends in Iceland. This chicken is less vouyeuristic than our previous one. We were courteously invited to a mass the other day, where the locals showed us some moves.

The sermon was on the longer side, and in the local language to boot, so we took a break outside.

Then the fun continued.

Others were equally tired.

They were very excited to see their performance on video.

And of course they gave us a chicken, now we have two!

The kids playing badminton for the first time.

Me, the chicken farmer.

Motorcycle diaries

We went back to chaotic Kampala the other day, we used the visit to stock up on some nessecities, bacon, burgers, sausages, cheese, BBQ sauce and such and such.

But the main purpose was however so that Harpa could participate in a Boccia tournament!

Well, not only to play Boccia, there was an event called Nordic Sports day, where all the hundreds of Swedes, Danes, Norwegians and 10 Icelanders stationed in Uganda competed in various events.

The Icelandic population in Uganda couldn't very well put together a whole soccer team, only one brought a swimsuit, we weren't invited to play in the volleyball game, the Danes had been practicing for weeks for the running and even though Harpa showed excellent prospects in Boccia we failed to bring a win home there as well.

The tug-of-war was our home ground, however, we put in all our efforts and won almost everybody, except the Danes! A bitter defeat, given that the Danes cheated. But we did however win one event: the warm-up!

(For those of you who don't know how to win in a warm-up, it is calculated this way: the percentage of those registered who participate in the warm-up. 9 out of 10 Icelanders did, which gave us a 90% score!)

A typical day in Lalle Primary: the younger kids so very curious about what we are doing that they flock together around the windows, the doors and wherever they can catch a glimpse of us.

We went to a new site, where some farmers are interested in growing chili.

They greeted us with mandarins, which was all fine and well, but their second offering was harder to refuse...

They had puppies and they offered to give us one, we don't even know if we can keep a dog in our house... they're only two weeks old anyways, so we couldn't take them anyway, but we sure hope we'll be able to...

They were three all together, but one of them possessed unique serenity and tranquility, which is something to look for in a dog...

We decided to take a trip to Serere, which is a small town of some 3o.000 people. When we went to look for a restaurant, there wasn't much to be seen. So we stopped some people and asked around and wouldn't you know it, one of them owned a restaurant.

He was very proud of his establishment and commented especially that the sanitary issues were up to date, as can be seen by these pictures of the "toilet..."

...and the "kitchen."

The food was however decent enough, stewed goat meat, rice and some beans. But the chef had a special spice mix, a secret sauce if you will, which was delicious. We even got him to sell us some of it to take home (I think Harpa is going to try to steal his recipie.)

On the way back I persuaded Harpa to climb a hill, which was beside the road. She was somewhat reluctant, claiming snakes were around and what not. "Pish, posh" I said, "Snakes, brakes." We climed and didn't find any snakes, but a beutiful view we did find.

On the way back, however, we almost drove over a snake on the road!

The sky is blue, trees are green, smiles on faces, road is wide, Africa sure is great.
Harpa doing a great job driving, while I'm fooling around with the camera.

Power out!

From our trip to Mbale, which is a big city 100 km away from Soroti. We went there to get our visa extended, but the immigration officer was nowhere to be seen. A whole day wasted, but at least we got some Indian food. And we bought an enormous beef fillet (more on that later).

Harpa is unbelivable excited about growing our own crops like the locals, mostly spices and foreign stuff. But first we have to cultivate the land. Our next door neighbours were so surprised to see a white man doing this kind of labour, that they stopped whatever they were doing just to see the Mzungu work!

We are teaching the teachers how to use a computer in Lalle (even though there is no electricity there.) This can be quite challenging given the fact that most of them have never used a computer before.

Here you can see the pizza mentioned in the previous post.

We brought some water colors for art class the other day, the kids were ecstatic. We only had three sets so they just piled up on top of each other to see what was going on.

The next generation of Ugandan artists.

There is an album by the age old post-punk band Wire (a personal favourite) which is called "Chairs Missing" Now we know why.

Harpa preparing for class.

The classrooms in Lalle can be quite crowded, some 130 kids in one class is not uncommon.

The power has been out in Soroti town for almost a week, which was pretty bad considering that we just bought an enourmous slab of beef in Mbale, to be saved for a special occasion. We had been trying to save it until the power came back, but were eating all the meat we could. Spaghetti bolognese for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch, an then when dinner time came there was no other option than bringing out the barbeque. We used literally everything we had in the fridge 2 kilos of meat, enourmous amounts of cheese, cream potatoes, vegetables, and it was delicious. But as fate would have it, the power came back on when we had just started eating.