Allow me to say happy New Year to one and all and offer my most sincere prayers and hopes for a great 50^th year for our nation. While I have yet to see signs of the economic boom our leaders are predicting, I have nothing to lose by being optimistic. Good things can and do happen even in bad times. 2011 was a bad time during which a whole lot of great things happened to me.

As I was counting my numerous 2011 blessings I suddenly remembered one obscure but very important one; I failed to get a job at UBC. I applied for a job that I was certain I would get at the beginning of the year but I did not even get called in for an interview. I was mildly offended but look at the great blessing it has turned out to be! Does anyone want a job at UBC right now? I am extremely relieved and happy at the turn of events – and events are always turning. The Bible says we can make our plans but the Lord orders our steps. Sometimes I think the Lord is making fun of me when He orders my steps, but at the end of the day it is always for my own good. Aside from putting me in the path of temptation to steal radio masts, UBC would have kept me from finding a job that absolutely suits me and a husband I adore.

As of today my husband and I will have been married 3 weeks but yesterday someone I know emailed to say he is getting divorced. And this is a guy I get financial tips from, no less. Apparently, he says the marriage is over, but the friendship with his wife is supposedly still strong. What does that even mean? In the months before the wedding, while I explored some avenues for marital counselling and preparation, I found a preacher whose audio tapes seemed to help. That is until I Googled his name and found that he was in the process of suing his estranged wife for accusing him of adultery before church elders. Although his advice was sound, it became difficult for me to take his marriage counselling seriously and I abandoned his audio tapes along the way.

My point is that despite the bad press marriage gets and the permissiveness toward divorce all around, I’m married and enjoying it immensely. In fact, I am challenging myself to be just as happy and feel just as lucky about being married 3 months, 3 years and 3 decades from now. However, one long term relationship I have never been happy about is that with my bank. At one point last year I very very briefly considered deepening the relationship by getting a loan. However, my latent dislike of banks won over the desire for money and once again, thank God, I have been blessed to not have to shoulder the extra burden so many people are being forced to carry. Talk about the law being an ass! How is it even legal to decide to up an interest rate halfway through a payment contract period? And where are the people we have another contract with? The ones we gave our votes for a promise to serve and protect us?

All I can say is that for a little more money over the next 3 or more years a lot of banks are shooting themselves in the foot and ending numerous relationships. We are not going to forgive and forget this betrayal, and my husband and I have resolved to work tooth and nail to ensure that our children and their children’s children never ever have to take a bank loan for anything. If we can figure out how to not use banks at all we will be happy. The message about never trusting banks is going to be encoded in our family’s DNA, along with never cheating on your tithes and never making promises you cannot keep.

If anything, one would think now is a good time for one bank to stand out from the rest and refuse to shaft its customers, thereby grabbing those of us who are fleeing from banks in general – but then again, that is just me. Maybe they really believe it is worth it. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord and make the best of the opportunities 2012 provides. See you on the other side of that oncoming economic boom.

Published on Sunday January 22, 2012

As 2012 rolls around, most of us are hoping that it will be less dry and dire than 2011, especially economically. The shilling is growing stronger, fuel stations are pretending not to know and hovering at the 4,000 shilling per litre mark and I am strongly considering resorting to biogas given the two month cooking gas shortage. Christmas for many was quiet, subdued and inexpensive – as long as the children had a tree, balloons, sweets and gifts, we were content to have a home cooked meal. While many curse the loadshedding, few are prepared for the fact that the cost of power is likely to double, as have the school fees for our children. There are so many things to ponder as the year ends, but I have an even bigger issue on my mind right now.

To kiss or not to kiss; that is the question. Having watched a million and one romantic comedies to assist in my search and research to find the perfectest soul mate, I realise a recurring theme. When the handsome fantastic star of the movie has finally married the woman of his dreams, the officiating clergy, be he/she Orthodox, Catholic or a court Justice, after declaring the couple man and wife, will strongly urge the groom to kiss the bride. Faced with the same instructions, whatever shall become of me and my village ways?

Does one stride confidently into the 21^st Century with highly charged public displays of affection, or does one cling to time honoured cultural norms and leave bedroom behaviour out of public eyes? In any case, the movies make kissing seem so simple, but there are a lot of technicalities involved, including, but not limited to: the state of my breath after keeping quiet for a 2 hour service; my lipstick, which I will have worn for the second time in my life; my teeth, which have an odd way of making their presence felt; whether or not to have practice sessions where the wedding committee lets us know if we are as good to watch as a movie… decisions decisions!

Traditional vs modern is a strongly recurring theme where weddings and marriage are concerned. Do you kneel down to serve your cake, or avoid serving cake to your mother-in-law altogether for fear of the dreaded ‘bukko’? These things have been keeping me awake at night. I know this space appears to have become a bit of a wedding diary, but please forgive me. The planning period has had massive blessing, but also its share of stressful moments. Writing is a large part of the therapy that keeps me from walking around naked with dirty dreadlocks throwing stones at people. I must admit I have done the fairly dirty dreadlocks and once threw a stone in the general direction of policemen during a riot at Makerere University. I apologise to the afandes. Munange when you are young you cannot understand what exactly itches your brain and causes you to behave in such a misguided way. Now that I have a 5 year old son I know the value of a shattered glass window.

Shall my wedding end, as all rom-coms do, with all the guests happily doing a shuffle to R. Kelly’s Step in the Name of Love? I don’t know – all I can hope is that I will be surrounded by goodwill and love and the people I care about. And that perhaps everyone will have had something warm and delicious to eat. Beyond that, what more can I ask of God? Overall I know that more important than the kissing or the shuffle or a wedding day that will be gone in a flash after months of preparation, is the new life that will begin with the new year. There are questions such as the mode of raising children, or whether one can even afford children. I always argue with the Karimjong baby-toting women asking me for sh100 – they should be giving me some money instead if they can afford to be having babies in this economy! On the one hand I have been informed it is my patriotic duty to proceed to fill the nation and provide consumers for all the products the investors are making in Uganda, while on the other hand I am being warned that my brood may be among the thousands who fail to find employment after school. So who do I listen to? Decisions, decisions…

The economy may not improve instantly, but life is so full of blessing that we miss out on while we are busy complaining. So for 2012 there’s one decision that has been easy for me to make: I will try to say and pray only good things about Uganda, about myself and about my situation. I have been making and breaking New Year resolutions for decades and still my bad habits remain. So from now on I am going to trust God for hourly guidance to figure each day out with less complaining and more living and sharing. May your 2012 be different.

Published on Sunday January 1, 2012

Christmas is round the corner and people are buying gifts and planning gigantic feasts, trips and celebrations worthy of the day Jesus Christ came into the world. Christmas is a time we remember and want to be close to family. We will make long trips upcountry, buy each other gifts, make numerous phone calls and send hundreds of text messages all to connect with family this season. Ugandans living abroad will spend hours on the phone till their ears are burning, just to get a sense of being close to family over Christmas. It doesn’t matter if you are a believer or all out heathen, at Christmas you want to be with your family. All the good food in the world would be meaningless if you had to sit down and eat it all yourself.

In thousands of Ugandan homes, babies born this year will be celebrating their first Christmas with their families. Hundreds more children, however, will either spend Christmas on the streets or in an orphanage. For them there will be no excitement, no new Sunday best clothes, no personalised presents from Father Christmas to unwrap and no siblings and cousins to drink soda and play with all day. In 2006, my son celebrated his first Christmas with his family. His presence was the most magnificent gift I could ever have asked for, and I cannot ever repay my family for their overwhelming support and love for him. He has aunts and uncles to visit, cousins to play with and grandparents who spoil him. He is looking forward to this Christmas, when Father Christmas (in the form of one of his doting uncles) will deliver the remote controlled car he has been pestering me for all year.

Next week, 20 Ugandan families will be celebrating their first Christmas with their new child – and all 20 children will have been adopted. Since Child’s i Foundation started a public campaign to get Ugandan babies into Ugandan homes, so many people have been encouraged and have come forward to adopt a baby. And this despite all the stigma and negativity we seem to attach to adoption. Malaika Babies home, through which all these children have been placed, will be so much quieter this Christmas. But it is a good quiet, because the empty beds mean those children will be waking up in a home they can call their own and with parents they can learn to love and trust and be attached to.

I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to the Ugandans who stepped up to offer love and a home and a family to these children. What is Christmas without the love and bustle of family around you? These children will be sharing this wonderful and blessed season with people who love them and consider them family – I have to say thank you to these parents again, because I know that it cannot have been easy.

However, if we keep talking about it, in time all the people who have bad things to say about adoption will be overwhelmed by the number of success stories of children in homes and then maybe they will shut up. And they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves in the first place. A child gets a home and loving parents get a child; only a demon could sit around nitpicking and finding fault with that arrangement. So to all you demons I say shame on you! Children are in loving homes this Christmas and it is all to the glory of God. He sent his Son to be adopted too, you know. When Joseph took on the responsibility of raising Jesus Christ, it was an adoption; and what a successful one it turned out to be! There must have been the inevitable whisperings and pressures of society, but he did the right thing and gave an innocent baby a home.

Unfortunately this is also the season when, for some reason, a lot more children will be abandoned. So while Malaika is quiet, by the New Year, it is anticipated that the beds will be full again. We cannot just sit back and say: 20 is a good number, the rest can stay in orphanages. The cycle of life goes on, and next year there will be more Ugandans who feel the tug on their hearts to give a child a home. We must be there for them, cheering them on and telling them it is okay to do what they are feeling. That it is the best thing for the child and an excellent way for them to give the child a future and make a lasting contribution to our nation.

If you feel you want to give someone the gift of a future in the coming year, of if you need any advice or information about adoption (and how uncomplicated it is!) in Uganda, please make that first step and contact Child’s i Foundation on 0791777319 or visit http://ugandansadopt.ug , or even mail me on angela@angelakintu.com. I can put you in touch with someone who will help. I pray for you all a blessed, peaceful, safe and meaningful Christmas.

Published on Sunday December 18, 2011

There are a lot of things about the Bible that seem thoroughly unfair, like the concept of the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have nots’. It says if you have, more will be added unto you and if you do not have, even the little you have will be taken away from you. It may seem confusing, and there is a spiritually sound explanation for this idea, but in some ways it is true; especially so for the urban poor.

I have mentioned that I have spent the past few months wading through garbage, sewage and related issues.  When you look at the situation of the urban poor in Kampala, you can see how the little they have can be taken away from them. The majority of Kampala’s urban poor live in unplanned congested slum areas in rented one-room structures. There is no garbage collection facility and if there is a toilet, it will be a shared latrine. Many of the slum areas are in swamps and the lack of planning means there is no proper drainage. The absence of a toilet under the circumstances may not initially seem like an issue, but everything eventually comes down to dollars and cents.

If you are a labourer renting a room in a slum in Bwaise, for example, and you have no toilet where you live, chances are that you wait till it is very dark and take a bath on the doorstep or behind your one room. There is no shower, you will have collected this water and stored it away in a couple of jerrycans in your one room. Hopefully, the water collection point is not too far away. If you are in town all day and near a public toilet, you probably fork out anything from 100 to 500 shillings to defecate in the public loo. If you are brazen enough, or if the urge takes you in the middle of the night and it is raining, you will probably do your business in your one basin, or in a kaveera, and toss it out to sail away on the flood water. I don’t think you will waste your meagre earnings on something as fancy as toilet paper, and with scarce water resources you are not going to waste water washing your hands after every loo visit.

If you have a shared latrine in your set of mizigo, someone has to take responsibility for cleaning and then eventually emptying it. You will be truly blessed if you can get your neighbours to agree on a rota system for cleaning without a fight. If there is no latrine and you are willing to incur the cost (at least sh600,000) of building one, you will still have road blocks. For one, you do not own the land on which you are renting the room and there may simply be no space. Secondly, if you are in a swamp area, you must raise the latrine above the ground, which means extra cost. Thirdly, you will most likely not be renting the same room for more than 8 months. A better room will present itself, or you will find a girlfriend, or you will owe someone money and they know where you live and so you have to move. In that event, what will happen to your sh600,000 investment in a toilet?

If you live alone and spend most of your time in the city centre, you can probably get by fairly cleanly. However, if you and that girlfriend live together and now have children, then it is a different and dire ball game. That kaveera of poo you tossed out into the rain? Guess whose children are going to find and be poking that kaveera tomorrow morning? And whose kids are going to be stomping about in the puddles left by the rain water? And whose kids are going to be stunted because they are riddled with worms and constantly hit by diarrhoea and malaria? And who is going to be spending meagre resources taking children to the hospital (or witchdoctor!) So you see, you are in a slum, barely making ends meet and now even the little you have is going to be taken away from you in medical costs. And that is not all that a lack of sanitation costs you. You lose your privacy, your freedom and your dignity. If you are ill then you lose the pay for the days you haven’t worked. It contributes overall to an extremely poor quality of life.

We cannot claim to be making progress if we spend much of our time and budgets solving problems that could have been prevented in the first place. When you consider that every investment in sanitation of just one dollar can realise a benefit of up to 23 dollars, then the ‘Haves’ need to stop building health centres and start spreading toilets and valuable sanitation information.

Published on Sunday December 11, 2011

I have been having a recurring nightmare. In this shade of terrors, I am dressed in a heavy white gown, weighed down by several kilogrammes of netting and underwire. The underwire is itchy and is poking me under the armpits – I keep resisting the urge to scratch my armpits. I am walking into our church and down the aisle. I am carrying something that feels suspiciously like flowers, but smells like a perfume that was popular when I was a child; ‘Gift of Zanzibar’. The organist is playing a solemn hymn – it sounds like Rock of Ages.

I continue walking down the aisle – I want to hurry and sit down in my usual spot but the dress is so heavy I can barely move. I feel as if all eyes are on me and things could not possibly get any worse. But suddenly, they do. As the final notes of Rock of Ages draw to a close, some joker – I cannot identify who – begins to sing the most annoying song of the decade. Something to do with ‘ring ring’ and a woman of a similar name who resides in Nansana… I am generally unable to scream, but I wake up in a cold sweat.

Sometimes I dream my cousin is giving a speech at my wedding, as she has often threatened to do. She starts with the first time she and I stole and tried a cigarette together. It was a disaster! I am asthmatic and her mother had radar like NASA – she smoked us out (pun intended) and pulled our ears thoroughly! My cousin has promised to regale the guests with stories of the last time I wet the bed, my actual age, my snoring and my childhood pastime of setting farts on fire. I think I will soothe the blow by coming clean first.

I am not one of those little girls who grew up with a perfect picture of what my wedding will be like, what flowers I will carry and which shoes will make my perfect dress look even perfecter. I was one of those girls who knew what car I wanted to drive, in what model and at what age. I did, however, at one point firmly believe I would marry Sean Connery when I saw him as James Bond. That was the extent of my early wedding planning.

Overall, in and out of wedding, I have very firm ideas on what I want and do not want. I am discovering that getting married requires that you leave a lot of room for what other people want, which list is inclusive but not limited to opinions of people who do not mean anything to you at all. I have my list of dos and don’ts, wants and dislikes, but I am willing to concede that things may not go exactly according to plan.  Hopefully no one will sing the ‘ring ring’ song as I walk down the aisle – although now that I have mentioned it I may have planted the idea in someone’s head.

In other nightmarish news, I have not had electricity for 2 days. The lack of electricity has affected the water supply, so I am also on rations of one Tumpeco of bath water per day. My kitchen is cold and underused because I have no cooking gas – I imagine they are faking scarcity so they can bump up the festive season prices. Some stations are selling fuel for almost 200 shillings less than others but are still breaking even, which leads me to wonder what puppet master pulls the strings on fuel prices. It also means I cannot fuel my car to go and visit and eat at other people’s houses. We all have that one aunt or uncle we remember who was notorious for turning up at mealtimes. I don’t mind being one of those aunties so my nieces and nephews can have something to laugh about.

The charcoal is unusable because it won’t stop raining long enough for me to dry some for cooking. I find it difficult to believe this is 2011, the year Makerere University put together an electric car and my colleagues are buying telephones that do everything for you except wipe your bottom after you use the loo. I have lots of reasons to look forward to 2012, and I pray we can all survive to see it.

Published on Sunday December 4, 2011

I grew up in sleepy, beautiful, peaceful Jinja and was therefore privileged to learn how to drive on wide, empty actual roads. It was a shock to the system to come to the city and have to drive there. My family says I am an aggressive driver and I am shamelessly going to put the blame solely on the state of Kampala traffic.

If it isn’t taxi drivers testing you because you are a woman, then it is ‘entitled’ ministerial vehicles coming straight at you to push you off the road on their way to build the nation. These selfish drivers are aped by drivers of vehicles from the security companies who imagine they are equally entitled because they wear a uniform. (And we all know those phone numbers to call for bad driving are fake – yes, I have tried one or two of them.) There are unsure young ladies fooling around in decorative cars and young men who drive like they have something to prove.

Then there are the menaces on the road who have learnt to drive using automatic cars. In a world 100 years from now I suppose the manual car will become obsolete, but for now, as long as there is a mix of manual and automatic in traffic, everyone must know how to anticipate the behaviour of each type of vehicle. That is why we have idiots in Toyota Duets riding the bumpers of Hilux pickups on a slope and then being surprised and hooting wildly when the car rolls backward. (I admit, sometimes I amuse myself by rolling back on purpose when the driver behind me is too attached to my rear.)

But that is not all; in my part of Kampala, you have to keep an eye on all these characters as well as a bigger eye out for the killer potholes created by the wet season. The rains have made sure we have as little road as possible left in our potholes. Can anyone testify with me about the Ntinda-Kiwatule cattle track formerly known as a road? Some areas you have to go so slow you could pour yourself a cup of tea and read the paper along that stretch.

So yes, I agree that after a long spell in Kampala I turn into a bit of an aggressive driver, which is probably why one night last week in Ntinda, I refused to let a Land Cruiser bully me into giving him way. There was a long line of traffic with everyone being orderly and this one grey Land Cruiser overtaking like a maniac because, I presume, his evening tea was getting cold more quickly than ours. If you use your indicators to show me your intention and give me time to decide if I want to help you, I will most likely let you pass. If you rev your engine and inch forward and attempt to cut in, I will probably risk collision to ensure that you stay where you are. So when Cruiser appeared out of the blue to inch his way in I made sure he did not. The driver in the car behind me was a more mature Christian and allowed the Land Cruiser to get into line.

Barely a minute later, as if like a bad horror movie, an out of control taxi came rushing down from the opposite end of the road. The taxi rammed one parked taxi and two more vehicles in front of it before a third vehicle managed to stop its progress. The driver promptly jumped out and ran off into the night – which is especially easy to do when whoever has Uganda’s electricity has decided to black out an entire area. If the person behind me had not let the Land Cruiser in, that taxi would have ended up in a head-on collision with him. I thought that perhaps the near miss had given everyone pause for thought. I was wrong. At the next possible opportunity, the Land Cruiser began his impatient overtaking game again.

Imagine my lack of surprise, then, when exactly two nights later I pulled into a Nakawa fuel station to find the driver of the exact same Land Cruiser involved in a shouting and pointing match with the driver of another vehicle. It was obvious who was in the wrong, because the Cruiser was behind the other vehicle. Neither car looked badly damaged, so I suppose it was a matter of egos and an inability to admit one’s error. If Cruiser continues to refuse to learn from his experiences, I estimate at the current rate of incidents it will be about a week until his next, more serious accident. And then a month and a half till someone gets hurt along with the car. Hopefully it will not come to that.

Published on Sunday November 27, 2011

Over the past few months I have been working on a magazine about sanitation. Everyone I announced that to greeted me with a big yawn, but sanitation is not as boring as you imagine. Granted it is full of shit – literally – but interesting nonetheless.

Sanitation sounds like a word only NGOs and sewerage works should be using but it is, in fact, everyone’s business. Sanitation comes down to a cycle: You eat, work and live, you create garbage and excrement and then you dispose of it. Then you look for the next meal, and so on and so forth. Many of the problems Uganda is facing come from the fact that people want to work, eat and live without taking responsibility for where the trash and excrement subsequently ends up. Of course what follows is disease, disorder and disaster. In the urban areas, lack of planning exacerbates things, while laziness, poverty and ignorance affect the rural areas. Overall, pooing is a very private thing, so following it up is tricky.

A large aspect of cleaning up waste involves water; therefore water and sanitation tend to be mentioned together. It is essential to have clean water to drink, cook with, wash and clean our surroundings. However, these twins are hugely affected by favouritism; both the government and NGOs seem to think Water was the prettier twin. Sanitation is treated like the much ignored poor third cousin. Money, attention and priority are very near to zero.

I used to think it was only in my village where people largely ignored the pit latrine in favour of customised poo-holes; ie: meander into the bush, dig a hole, defecate in it and then move on. As embarrassing as it is, it has to be said, otherwise things will not change. I have since discovered that there are places where an entire village is cleaned up to model village status and then as soon as the prizes are awarded and the cameras have stopped flashing, people abandon the model latrine for the time-honoured poo-hole. I do not see any villagers washing their hands. I do see women feeding their babies with their bare hands and then claiming witchcraft when their babies die of dysentery.

There is a lot that needs to be done to change the rural mindset, as well as to make people understand the real price of poor sanitation. It is not just a rural problem – how many of us go to kwanjulas or kafundas where we are content to wash the tips of our fingers in a little water without soap before we dig into food? Do you know if the person who serves you those neatly packaged fruits washed their hands (and the fruit) before cutting it up? Do you know all it takes is for one tiny bit of poo to travel under their fingernails and attach to that juicy bit of ffenne to give you E. Coli? Do you know that 90% of the time, when you have a running stomach, it is because you have eaten faeces?

Trash and excrement does not have to be the enemy; I have found that recycling doesn’t have to be on a super scale. Biogas is not an abstract concept either. A widow in Mukono is using one cow and her own labour to produce enough biogas to cook with and light her home, and enough manure to have a pretty enviable array of food in her garden. I cannot rely on my government to keep the lights on in my home or office space for 8 straight hours, yet this widow in Mukono is a self sufficient power unit. I was inspired and challenged.

There are many layers to the sanitation issue and peeling them back has been a fascinating exercise. For instance, every day there are teenage girls, rural and urban, who are creating a different sort of waste that also needs disposing. Menstruation is an uncomfortable constant, even for someone in my circumstances. Imagine what it does to a girl without the facilities to handle it? The mere fact that many rural schools do not have separate toilets for boys and girls drastically drops school attendance rates for girls.

I learned you can run a latrine as a profitable business venture in many areas of Kampala. I also learnt never to step in flood water in Kampala, because some latrine operators admitted they would cut cesspool emptying costs by letting the flood waters fill up the latrine and wash away their problems! I learnt that at my ripe old age I did not know proper handwashing procedure. If I could learn something new I am sure we all can. We need to do our bit towards cleaner selves and a cleaner environment.

Published on Sunday November 20, 2001

I must say to all the ladies who got married 10 years or more ago: blessed are you among women! You got off so easy you should go back to church and thank the Lord thoroughly for your good fortune.

Conversely I must say to the other ladies getting married now, if they do not already know, things are going to be tight! Wail, gnash your teeth and cover yourself in ashes! You will rue the decade you were born in, you recession/inflation babies. If you turn on local television at any time of the day, there is bound to be a channel showing weddings and introduction ceremonies. And what a show it is! I used to laugh at the ostentatious Nollywood people who are always called ‘chief’ as if every street is a kingdom. I used to laugh, but when I see some Ugandan weddings I have to stop laughing – we are becoming the chiefs of our little kingdom weddings.

Around 10 or more years ago, weddings had ribbons and Christmas lights for decorations, Coca-Cola for the champagne effect, no video coverage, and no buffets. You had a pair of sodas, some samosas and queen cakes, plus a meatball if you were really wealthy. Weddings started and ended on time. Weddings did not have 100 maids and the word groomsmen had not yet been discovered. As for kwanjulas, I was very rarely invited to any, perhaps because I was too young, but more likely because they were still a family and personal matter.

The bride of today has to focus not on marrying the love of her life, but on being a showpiece at her kwanjula. The very important questions like how many changes of gomesi, how many uniformed attendants and what singer is available to entertain on the day must be answered. Who to invite always ends up being a big trap: the more people you have there the more pressure you feel to put on a show that is worthy of the huge attendance. Inevitably, the guests will be dissatisfied with one thing or another and then you will have a multitude complaining that they did not get fried chicken, how they were finally served at 10pm and criticising the way your bum was flat in the gold gomesi.

The wedding ceremony, which should be a beautiful thing conducted in the place of prayer you belong to, will also fall prey to showbiz. Some churches look better in photos than others – it is just the way it is. So even if you have never prayed there and do not ever intend to return there, the meaningless but beautiful picture of you standing outside it will eternally grace your living room wall. And I get really irritated at video coverage people who have no fear of standing on the pulpit in their jeans while the service goes on. When I was growing up, standing on the pulpit even when there was no one in church gave me goose bumps. I imagined the stained glass Jesus was looking down sternly at me!

Weddings are going to have politics whether you like it or not and everyone will have an opinion about what you should do with your ‘special day’. The fact that everyone else wants what they want makes me wonder whose special day it actually is. In fact, I also want something for your day, dear Recession Bride. I want some perspective and realism. Like a good Rotarian, I want you to ask yourself before every wedding decision: Who am I REALLY doing this particular thing for? Can WE afford it? Is it FAIR to everyone concerned?

I love a big choreographed wedding just as much as the next customer and when people have the financial muscle to back their grandiose dreams it is even better. We have a thriving wedding industry and service providers must eat. But can anyone say the word ‘debt’ with me? Say it again a little louder: DEBT. Debt changes lovers – a hard learned fact.

A wedding is not a competition. When you are at a red light on the intersection and the motorist in the car next to you looks over at you and revs their engine twice; THAT is a competition. Charge into traffic like a hound on fire. A wedding, however, is a celebration of love. It is coming before God to give Him thanks for letting you find the person you believe He created for you. It is asking Him to bless you, that person and any resulting offspring, while allowing your two families to meet and interact with each other. Enjoy your dream and colour schemes, but do not let the party favours make you lose sight of the reason you are there.

Published on Sunday November 13, 2011

Every morning, across Kampala, there are men and women who determinedly sweep dust off the roads. They sweep up the dust and then pile it a minimum of 10 inches and a maximum of a metre away from the road. The dust then stays obediently still for about 10 minutes, till the next gust of wind or torrent of rain pushes it right back to where it was swept from.

I used to think there was something wrong with this model of cleaning until I remembered that drainage systems are cleared out in much the same way. Huge piles of soil, muck and kaveera will be laboriously dug out of a drainage system, and then piled a minimum of 10 inches and a maximum of 1 foot away from the open drainage channel. This pile will gradually be pushed back into its rightful place in the drainage channel by passing pedestrians, the wind and of course, the ever reliable rain.

I suppose this repetitive madness is a good thing – it keeps a number of people in the illusion of employment. However, one must wonder about their morale and sense of job satisfaction and accomplishment. Under normal circumstances anyone would grow tired of a job that ultimately never got done. Perhaps they are grateful to have any work at all, so they don’t care what they work at.

The other thing I don’t understand is why the media publish photos and reports of widening cracks and fault lines on Mount Elgon if no one is going to move, plant a tree, change their farming habits or do anything preventive whatsoever. There is usually an official interviewed at the scene who will say the natives have been warned to relocate but they are ‘stubborn’. If we can deploy massively to prevent people from holding unauthorised meetings, surely we can deploy even more massively to prevent almost certain death and destruction.

However, the trophy for repetitive madness this week goes to the Uganda National Examination Board. Every year, without fail, around the time for the national final exams, some poor child and their parent will be interviewed by the press because they paid the exam fees which were then eaten by an unscrupulous headteacher. Every year. Without fail. Come on! Surely by now someone could have worked out a system that protects these children and parents but still gets UNEB its money!

And why is it that people must find out that their money did not get to UNEB the day they are meant to sit the exam? You make these kids register and pay months in advance – surely you could put up a list of exam fee defaulters or even properly registered students at the district headquarters a month in advance so people can find and lynch the dishonest heads in time to allow their children to do the exam. You may say it happens only in isolated incidents in schools no one gives a hoot about, but believe me, nobody’s child is an isolated incident. This should not have to happen to ANYONE EVER.

In an era where you can withdraw money from any bank, send money to mobile phones, bank off your computer, pay your water bill without ever having seen a Water office and get a receipt for even 1,000 shillings worth of airtime, why why why are we still reading about students being conned out of exam fees? Why?! I can assure you the same parents who line up every three months to pay school fees in banks across the country would be happy to line up and pay the registration fees directly into a UNEB account if it meant getting the assurance that their children will sit the exam.

Why trust teachers, some of the most poorly paid and powerless professionals in the country, with stacks of cash? Some of them are running these schools as private businesses but they are not exactly savvy businessmen and women. This has happened every year since as far back as I can remember so it is obvious that the children cannot protect themselves and the headteachers cannot be trusted. It is up to UNEB to help, whether they feel it is their job or not.

UNEB cannot just retain the role of being the bearer of bad news. Instead of coming to tell children to put their lives on hold for a year and parents to go and look for another year of money they don’t have, come and say, this is the problem, but here is the temporary solution. Or at least tell people their head teacher is a thug in advance. Some things should never be allowed to happen more than once.

Published on Sunday November 6, 2011

Ding dong the witch (or wizard) is dead. Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi was killed and all the problems of Libya have been solved. Or perhaps they are just beginning. It is not my place to say whether whatever Gaddaffi did deserved death. In fact, apart from the fact that he ruled for 4 decades and needed to move on, I am not fully clear on when exactly Gaddaffi made the transition from slightly insane despot to full demon. All I know is the way he was killed was uncalled for, shameful and horrifying. If that is the nature of the new Sharia law-abiding leaders of Libya, then I pray for the people. My heart also went out to Gaddaffi’s family, which had to watch videos of him being beaten and sodomised, and then watch him rot on international television and finally be denied the closure of burying him.

I think if the world was more mindful of protecting family a lot of bad things would be avoided. Perhaps in the first place people would not put clinging to power over the safety of their families. Perhaps they would not steal and connive and involve their children in the collective curse of ill-gotten wealth. Perhaps people would treat old men and children the way they would have wanted their fathers and children to be treated in their absence.

Anyway, moving on to my mobile phone providers, who have also been exhibiting shameful behaviour. I have been very loyal and very vocal about my loyalty to my current mobile service provider, especially since my acrimonious split with the previous provider. I even went ahead and purchased internet services from them, and convinced members of my family to get onto the same network. And I have been happy with these providers until very recently. It seems the current pressing economic times are squeezing them into something suspiciously close to fraud.

I am always laughing at Ugandans who fail to go to work when it rains until early this week when it happened to me. A slippery road combined with a headache and the rain to make sure I stayed home to work from there. I had enough airtime to use my Internet modem so I plugged it in and then went off to make myself a cup of tea.  I returned to find a message from the phone company people informing me that they had taken 1,000 shillings to renew a caller tune on my Internet modem!

Now, 3 factors put together made me very angry. 1. The Internet sim card can never be used for phone calls, so this caller tune was hot air. 2. I had exactly 4,000 shillings, just enough to purchase 24 hours of internet, and now I had only 3,000 and it was pouring rain outside, so there was no way to buy any more 3. The company earns money monthly off my regular phone, on which I have a permanent Bob Marley caller tune. Why would they feel the need to fool around with me further?

They have been sneaking caller tunes onto other people’s phones too. One day I rang my mother only to be accosted with ‘Laavu yo yanziba amaaso’ (your love had blinded my eyes). Anyone who knows my mother knows her other approved caller tune, Tukutendereza Yesu, is more in keeping with her character. For my deacon brother they had chosen another bit of local artist love nonsense. I remember the day I put my approved and voluntarily paid for caller tune on the phone. A customer service agent from the phone company called to sell me the idea, explained to me what it cost and offered me a choice of song. The young man was polite and efficient and I tend to respond positively to people who want to make money honestly. I signed up and have never changed it since.

This sneaking around putting stupid songs on our mother’s phones and now our Internet modems and then actually charging us money for it is not clever. I rang customer care, who were very apologetic, unsubscribed me immediately and returned the 1,000 shillings the next day. However, I needed Internet immediately, so I had to send 1,000 shillings to myself from my other phone, which cost me 500 shillings. I was not happy about that. It doesn’t matter whether it is 1 million or 100 shillings – no one likes to be taken for a ride. Ask the taxi conductors of Kampala. So while I admire you for planting a LOUD and colourful clock right outside your competitor’s head office (I am sure heads must have rolled), it is the little things that may eventually lead to another acrimonious split.

Published on Sunday October 30, 2011