Our neighbour’s child loves to sing. This in itself isn’t a problem. The problem is that she insists on doing it loudly, horrendously out of tune and at the most anti-social hours. Even now, well into January when for most people Christmas is already a distant memory, I am still being awoken by the screeching of ‘Joy to the World’. I can assure you that when rudely awoken by what can only be described as a noise akin to the murder of several cats when the use of a mangle is the murder weapon of choice, I do not feel at all joyful. If anything I feel tired, hugely irritable and an overwhelming urge to remove the offender’s vocal chords.
Talented people, perhaps they can give the neighbours some lessons.
She is not entirely to blame however; other local children have now followed her ‘musical’ lead, unfortunately they have roughly the same amount of talent. When not singing unrecognizable songs (I am yet to work out if this is because I don’t know the originals, or that they are just being butchered beyond recognition), their instrument of choice is makeshift drum. Essentially they bang erratic rhythms out on jerry cans and because almost anything can be made into a drum – fences, jerry cans, knees – the noise accumulates until it reaches fever pitch. There have been several times when I have resisted the urge to stagger from my bed fling open the door and ask/beg/plead/shout at them to stop. However, I think the sight of me with wild hair, barely opened eyes and dust lined pyjama bottoms might just spur them on. That, or they might be scared to death and depsite the horrific din they create I don't want to actually kill them.
Roll on February when the little blighters go back to school, then I'll just have the barking dogs and next door's baby to contend with... relative bliss.
One of the most irritating things about living in a developing country is power and water, well rather the lack of it. This may sound flippant, that I value amenities above human rights, the plight of refugees, wide spread poverty etc. But I’m human, and more to the point a human that has grown up in Britain, a country in which power and water are largely taken for granted.*
Officially these black outs are referred to as ‘load shedding’, it’s just a shame that it seems the further from Kampala you are the more you have to suffer the burden of darkness. So living in Kabale, in the very south west of the country means it’s dark rather a lot of the time. It’s not just that when there’s no electricity gone are the lights, computers, ability to charge your phone, but when the power goes off so does the water. Perhaps this is just something that happens here, I’m not sure if this is country-wide. It wouldn’t even be so bad that when the power returned, voila, so did the water, but this also doesn’t happen. It can be hours even days sometimes before water returns. Somewhere along the line the system has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
In the run up to Christmas we had a total of about 24 hours of power in just over a week. Sadly the water situation was even worse; we perhaps had an hour of water spread out over the course of a week. Of course we resorted to getting jerry cans of water but tossing water down the toilet is not a viable alternative to flushing it and trying to wash your hair in freezing water a couple of inches deep does not leave you with hair you want to whip about the place whilst proudly announcing that you’re worth it.
If I were eligible to vote in the upcoming elections it would be the person promising me fewer blackouts that would get my vote. Yes, health care, infrastructure and a commitment to tackling corruption are important, but after a good shower don’t you feel much more inclined to take on the world and its problems? I know I do.
* and of course I care about these things too, I'm not entirely heartless
I am not frequently ill but when I am, all too often it is with some weird and wonderful disease. No common cold or straight forward food poisoning for me oh no. When it comes to being ill I think my body thinks it’s in some extreme sickness competition. I’ve had tropical diseases like Malaria, antiquated ones like Quinsy, suffered from gastroenteritis so severe that I had a temperature of 104 and lay in bed hallucinating for 4 days (and, perhaps worst of all, missed out on a holiday to Cyprus), and currently I’m suffering from Brucellosis. If you’ve never heard of it before, join the club. Perhaps it’s because it is a disease that mainly affects live stock. Basically I’m ill with something that cows rather humans can more readily sympathise with.
One of the things about having an illness that you’ve literally never heard of is that you’re just not sure if it’s socially acceptable to talk about it. For most illnesses you know who, where and under what circumstances you can talk about them, but with this I have no guidelines. This put me in a bit of a tricky situation when I was walking about town with my medicine in a see through carrier bag. This was not because I was seeking sympathy, but rather it was the only bag I could manage to get my hands on and I had to get some food from town before being able to take the medicine given and head home to bed. However, having medicine visibly on show obviously led people to ask me what the matter was. Their first question is always whether or not you have malaria. When you answer “no” their interest is immediately increased.
The associated joys of having Brucellosis
I tried the non-committal answer tactic but evasion doesn’t really work all that well when people start listing illnesses in the hope of working out what you’ve got. Frankly after a while (well, in fact almost immediately when you’re ill and your tolerance levels are at an all time low) the game gets a bit old so I just ended up saying that I had Brucellosis. Thankfully no-one looked all that horrified, in fact one former- Brucellosis sufferer even started shouting questions and sympathy across an internet café, so much for patient confidentiality!
Perhaps there’s just no such thing as socially unacceptable diseases here, maybe I have made a huge gaff by stating that I’ve got Brucellosis but people were being too polite to look at me aghast, of course it could be that I’ve got something that’s just as acceptable as malaria, flu or the common cold. I’m not sure, but thankfully in 3 weeks time I’ll be Brucellosis free and will no longer need to concern myself with such matters.
