Post 3- Errands Around the City

Today (Saturday) I woke up at 6am, and although I got a pretty good night sleep the jet lag hasn’t quite worn off yet. The ten hour difference from California to Uganda basically turns night into day and my body hasn’t been too quick to catch on. Layla and Greg picked me up along with their sons, Benji and Dino, and we headed to Garden City, a new shopping mall in Kampala. I was feeling quite nauseous from my malaria medication but needed to get an internet hookup from one of the shops. I don’t have any fancy wifi here, instead, people buy a stick that plugs into your computer’s USB port and you charge it up monthly with a certain amount of memory. If you don’t use all your allotted memory, you can use it the next month, kindof like rollover minutes that Cingular Wireless used to brag about back when it existed… Dino excitedly showed me around the huge shopping mall, which consists not only of stores, but also restaurants, a movie theater, and even a bowling alley. After the mall I went grocery shopping with the family and was amazed at the huge selection of fruits the store offered. In Uganda, native oranges are actually green, unless you buy the imported Americanized ones. Another bit of advice: when in Uganda, don’t buy the green bananas because they will never ripen into yellow ones like they do at home. Green bananas are a different variety all together and have a taste more similar to a potato. Layla stocked up on pineapple, pawpaws (in the papaya family) watermelon, and my favorite find of all- jack fruit. Jack fruit is some of the sweetest, most delicious fruit I’ve ever tasted, and it looks like a baby yellow bell pepper. Unfortunately, Layla told me it’s forbidden to bring jack fruit back on airplanes because over time it will stink up the whole cabin with a peppery, garlic-y odor that betrays the delicious taste inside. I have a few extra bedrooms for anyone who wants a try.

After these errands we headed back to Layla and Greg’s house where their cook, Miss Josephine, taught me how to conquer and prepare a giant pineapple. In Kampala, it is expected that every well-to-do family will have hired help, and pretty much every Embassy-employed family has a nanny for the children, a live-in housekeeper, cook, gardener, driver, and gate guard. In the US, these types of help are usually reserved for the extremely wealthy, but in Uganda it is quite commonplace and this is for several reasons. First, not only is it fairly inexpensive here, it’s a form of social welfare. Ugandans that are employed by families make far more money than they would working in the stone quarries, in construction, or in factories. Often, the money they make is used to pay for reputable boarding schools for their children, and to improve their own homes in poorer areas of the country. Second, cooks and housekeepers are necessary for preparing and cooking fruits and vegetables that are not ready-to-eat like they are in the States. Of course when I buy a bag of grapes at home I rinse them under the faucet for a good 5 seconds, but here only fruit that you can peel is safe, and raw vegetables are out of the question. I watched Miss Josephine make a mixture of 1 tablespoon bleach for every 2 liters of water, and after thoroughly washing all the fruits and veggies in the sink they were placed in this mixture to soak for about an hour, rinsed with clean water once again, then boiled. Greg told me that a cook can usually be hired for about $100-$200 per month, and with four interns living at my house and splitting the cost, we should really consider treating ourselves to freshly cut pineapple and a hot meal ready for when we get home. That’d be bizarre to get used to, but don’t get me wrong, it’s tempting…