Thoughts on assimilating back into 'normality'.

In three days it will be 4 years since we landed on Uganda soil and we landed back on UK soil 8 months ago. It would be an interesting study to see how people are affected by their time in Africa. This is my first public analysis of my own case.

There are at least two life-styles to chose between for ex-pats in Uganda: 'ex-pat', and 'integrated'. For ex-pats in good jobs the former means living at or above the lifestyle of the home-country, with the added benfits of the huge difference in buying power in a Developing country. So ... a huge walled-in house in a nice part of town, servants quarters, security guard, membership of a good club, kids at expensive private (predominantly) ex-pat schools, a large 4x4, lots of meals out, and almost all of one's time spent in the company of other ex-pats. Those involved in mission as volunteers or on low incomes easily get sucked into this life but because they don't have the income to sustain it they increasingly look to their supporters for help, without necessarily challenging themselves why, leading to tensions.

The latter, an integrated lifestyle, is one where most of one's friends are locals and thus most of one's time is spent with them. One becomes embroiled in the details and challenges not of other mzungus (foreigners) but of ordinary local Ugandans. The challenge of this lifestyle-choice is that mzungus are assumed by all but the most educated Ugandans to be so incredibly wealthy that they believe our pockets are bottomless. This leads to a daily tension between taking an interest in people and having to build a strong line of defence against being sucked daily into huge unsustainable financial demands.

We felt we should live the latter way. But in fact employing a local person in the home creates a job that can help support an entire family for around £30-£50/month. So nothing is quite as black and white as I set out above. Our total income in the latter two years was around £1250/month with the support element from friends averaging £550/month of this. A teacher in Uganda earns about £150/month if they are lucky but we saw many paid only £50/month or some as low as £25/month; a Ugandan will pay a houseboy/girl around £15/month plus free accommodation and daily food. Boarding school fees are around £80/term/child average; most employed Ugandan parents send their kids to a boarding school because it is cheaper after the transport and food are taken into account than if they were day students.

This gives some financial context. (One can see how tight life is for Ugandans with several children at school!!)

Now for expenditure. Many Ugandans eat only one meat meal a month, albeit in the Lake Victoria area fish may be eaten several times a month. People in our area live off maize flour mixed with water ('posho'), sweet potato, cassava, and other vegetables – with beans providing the main source of protein. Elsewhere g-nut (peanut) becomes the main protein source. They drink a lot of tea. Most Ugandans live off their land, and this may often have become very small through generations of division to successive family members. So around the heavily populated areas average land holdings can be 2-3 acres and it will be worked by the (unpaid) family members, often children whose fathers may resist sending them to school (especially girls who do most of the work!). Its hard to live off such a small patch of land especially with the appalling lack of good seed and poor farming knowledge in most cases.

By the time we left we were heavily involved in the care and financing of about 8 children or families, and hosting a weekly Bible-study/fellowship meeting in our home of about 15 local 17-25 year-olds. I was also managing 18 small business loans that I had arranged and this meant a lot of time and energy in coaching and mentoring people as well as coaxing them to pay up! I had helped set up a small NGO in Karamoja and this was beginning to unravel badly. Then 5 days before leaving I had my essential laptop, camera, records, etc., stolen from my side in the car, including £2,500 on its way to being changed into £GB from Uganda schillings to help us settle into the UK. Then a church leader 'ran off' with another £2,000 loan we made earlier to him and were expecting back.

So we left in a rather stressful climate!

For the first 6 months after returning I felt physically sick every time I thought about Uganda. It was not that I had lost my love for our friends, or failed to feel compassion for the nation, but rather that I felt such a conflict of emotions that my stomach knotted up. Because we were SO involved with so many people in Uganda I suppose it feels like my heart has been wrenched out of position! Over the last two months this feeling has changed to 'detachment'. Now I feel a long way from any community! Living as guests in others homes is a humbling and wonderful privilege but doesn't engender a true sense of 'being rooted'.

After being able to make such a huge difference in people's lives and be involved in transformational activity in Uganda and elsewhere in E Africa, the lifestyle of Welsh self-build and now unemployment – and feeling somewhat 'superfluous' in a very able and high-achieving nation – has left me drained and feeling it was all an unreal dream. Its as if there are parallel universes and I have lived in both ........ and neither!

The thing that has been constant throughout is the love of friends. And the sense of God's presence with us – mostly through the Christian fellowship in practical ways that is the chief evidence of God's transforming love. God reveals Himself through people's changed lives, I realise.

Normality! What is this elusive thing? We have yet to find it. What is clear is that the West has lost the sense of extended family and community ('together-givers', from the Greek) and the Church is the sole vehicle for some sense of this in many places back here. Our search for individual expression is myopic and empty. It leads to a lonely dead end. OK, it may be simpler but rich living comes from interaction and interdependence, not independence.

An extract about 'The Local Church' by Dr. Campbell Morgan

Someone shared this extract with me the other day. What a terrific piece of writing, packed with undeniable truth for our day ....and every age!

“The Church of Christ – take a local Church as indicating the great and ideal application – a local Church, so at the disposal of the Spirit as the Spirit through the Church can flash and flame upon the outside world, so as to amaze, perplex, and raise an enquiry; a local Church, one within its borders in fellowship with Christ, and testifying to Christ invariably a Church in favour with the people. Not that we should seek the patronage of the multitude, but that we are so to reveal Christ as to be centres of attraction to the multitude. The moment we depart from Him, we lose the crowd. The Church of Christ, where the Christ Himself is the supreme revelation made – not only through the individual lives of its members, but in its corporate capacity – where the compassion of Christ and the life of Christ are manifest in the mutual inter-relationship of the souls forming the Christian Church, as to the Church to which the weary and woebegone will turn. That is the true influential Church. How we have degraded that word ‘influential’. We call a Church ‘influential’ now because of the kind of people that attend it, because of the money it raises for philanthropic objects. There was a Church in the olden days that said, “I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing,” and the Master, walking amid the golden candlesticks said: “Thou ……. knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked.” So He would say to day to many Churches which we describe as ‘influential’. The influential Church id the company of loyal souls who “continue steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of bread and the prayers,” who eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, who manifest in their individual lives and corporate capacity the strength, the beauty, the glory, the compassion of Christ. Wherever there is such a Church you will find the Church has favour with the people”.

Latest news: back in ol' blighty

As noted, I am back in the UK, and we spent from May to mid-October at our 'estate' in Ystradfellte, Wales. I was working flat out self-building alongside two wonderful local stonemasons, Paul & Gavin, whilst Sandy was in the caravan earning money with her copy-editing.

The aim was to get the other two barns ('2' & '3') watertight and stable. The walls were already falling over and very unstable when we bought them in 2005, and the last winter had caused significant further damage. In addition they weren't up to the roof profile in any section so a huge amount of rebuilding and repair was required. Not only did we do all this within the budget but 3 weeks ahead of schedule, despite a lot of rain interruptions.

Now the slate roofs are on all the properties, and the walls are finished, apart from a glazed screen to be constructed a spart of the final 'link' element with a grass flat roof, that will tie the whole suite together.

In the last few days I started to open up the floors to establish the slab levels, and discovered the original 17th century floor. This has now for to be recorded and drawn accurately for the archives CADW archives, which is another chore, but quite fun.

Indy, our lovely dog, was reunited with us and loved the life up in the hills! Great walks each day with lots of interesting smells. It was a glorious time in our lives; Red Kites soared above each day along with Buzzards and Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, Redstarts, and Tree Creepers feeding around us. We had two healthy-looking foxes run through, followed minuted later by the local hunt!

Best of all was getting embedded back into local village life: rebuilding links with those we already knew and making new ones. The locals are so incredibly friendly and kind. London seems a million miles away with its rushing, self-absorbed inhabitants! It was so good to have the kids, grandkids and dear friends visit us and share in the excitement of getting the barns finished.

Now we are down in our old haunts of Lewisham. Our dear friends, the Plummers, offered us a share of their home for 6 months, and have been so amazingly generous and kind to us – even accepting a dog into their home for the first time ever!! True friendship! The plan was for me to get the normal consukltancy work in RSL's for 6 months and then, with the dosh earnt, we would move back to Llwyn Onn in May, do some more work, and get into the barns permanently. The work climate is so bad that this is proving a very ambitious plan and today I am still unemployed with funds running very low! So I am applying to a range of full time posts, some of which are very exciting. We may just have to put the barns on ice and spend the money on the barns from a distance as it appears!!

Hmmmm. Sometimes God appears decidedly not aligned with our plans and one has to recognise that He is not there to underwrite our lives but rather to be the greatest friend through the challenges. Life without Him is empty and bland, and being successful is nothing without Him either. So its scratching head time and I'm ruminating and cogitating like a blinking cow! Onwards and upwards!!

Sandy smiles through it all and keeps her head down on the page!

We're back in UK, and the place we live can be viewed at:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=CF44+9JD&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=18.703427,38.276367&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Aberdare,+Mid+Glamorgan+CF44+9JD,+United+Kingdom&ll=51.814051,-3.539427&spn=0.002381,0.004672&t=h&z=18

I am self-building a restoration/conversion of three 18th century stone barns into a home for Sandy and I in one of the most beautiful valleys in the UK, the Mellte Valley, Brecon Becon National Park.

The Ugandan borda borda (or bodaboda)

The borda-borda[1] – feared and detested throughout Uganda but the only transport system able to deliver economical and reliable short-distance door-to-door service – it brings shudders from tourist and Ugandan housewife alike. Responsible for 50% of all deaths on the road, and in most people’s mind causing all the rest and endless road-rage, it is a curse to which the majority are reluctantly resigned.

What is the borda-borda - “What sort of name is that?” most mzungus (foreigners) cry. It is the two-wheeled taxi service, the moped or small motorbike that darts and weaves the road, running the gauntlet of every gap - emerging and disappearing - in the Kampala traffic. It is the life-blood of the Ugandan road system, with thousands of them pouring through the city’s arteries like red blood cells in a particularly disturbing internal body-camera scene from ‘House’. It is the mystery of the universe - how do they do it?! It’s the only way to get from the main road to ‘the village’ or from where you are to ‘not-too-far-away’. It is the platform that screams its defiance to the idea that a moped is designed for two.

The most satisfying myth of the name’s derivation is from the Uganda/Kenyan border. Pedestrians could at one time only cross the no-go zone of some several hundred yards on official mopeds, and thus they were called ‘border to borders’. When these mopeds became available on the open market, the name stuck. Its sound and immediate associations place it in the same genre as ‘barracuda’, ‘kamikaze’, ‘hari-kari’, abracadabra, ‘out of order’, and ‘going under’.

Who travels on a borda-borda? It is a regular sight to see a 100+kg sow, alive but trussed up like some sort of fiendish bondage fetish, balanced precariously across the seat. The other day I saw an 85kg Nile Perch the size of a stout gentleman wiggling frantically, wanting to get off. It could be a ladder, albeit swung at an angle across the back seat to reduce the risk of amputation at the hip to passing pedestrians. Or a man holding in front of him a huge sheet of glass, screaming at the driver in front as the glass bends inexorably in the wind to the point of destruction. Or a family of mother, father and three children, including babe in arms (actually balanced over the petrol tank in front of the driver; the driver looks down occasionally to make her smile and wave at him). Or a set of poles on which are slung, legs tied together and hooked over, 24 or more hens, alive but looking concerned at the loss of feather composure. Or a three-seater settee. Or four stacked crates of Nile beer bottles. Or a set of four 20’ long eucalyptus poles being dragged behind along the road. There is nothing I can see now that will cause me shock, albeit maybe some laughter.

They are the subject of most tourists’ conversation within the opening days of the safari holiday, and the consensus is that these are brain-dead imbeciles, incapable of understanding the word ‘line’ let alone driving along one. For those who risk (for there is little option) the ride – or should I say ‘thrill’ – you get the impression that the driver’s eye-hand co-ordination says more about his libido than his driving skills as he stares at the gorgeous girls in passing cars. For those who get as far as the ride along a terrifying murram village track deep into the country, weaving like a rabid dog on amphetamines between holes in which a car could be lost and rain-filled ravines of uncertain depth, there is now the absolute certainty that a frontal lobotomy is a pre-requisite qualification for drivers.

So …… when I set out on my brand new ‘Max 100R TVS’ (2.3m USh - £770 - including helmet, insurance and road tax) from our house at the very end of one of these tracks to the Entebbe Road, 2 km away, my mind was focussed on how I, as an expert middle-aged English motorcyclist, would put these guys to shame. This typical borda-borda 100cc moped, dressed up to look like a whizzy motorbike, is less than 10% of the engine capacity of my drop dead gorgeous BMW R1100RT that I sold to pay for my air ticket out here. It is so light that I can almost tuck it under my arm and carry it. The tyres were thin enough to have come off a BMX bike.

I failed to notice along my track the glossy path formed by the hundreds of borda-bordas tyres over the days through the constantly shifting sea of mud and treacherous shoals of murram. (Follow that to salvation, like finding Theseus’s thread through the maze.) I failed to register that my endless starting and stopping to tackle the accelerating bumps and craters was straining the engine, shredding my nerves, and making the bike lurch manically as it lost momentum and direction.

I was vaguely conscious (through a rising red mist) that borda-bordas were bombing past me laden with women sitting side-saddle, serenely smartening their make up or chatting to another alongside. It seemed impossible! I, I was the master, not them! Kids were laughing in disbelief “Mzungu, mzungu, bye-ee mzungu!! I accelerated, intent on regaining the lead. The road’s surface suddenly became a caricature of what we would in the UK call ‘a camber’, but with a razor sharp central ridge and slopes each side of Alpine proportions. Across it appeared a road hump so high that Evil Knievel would have been happy to use one to leap the Grand Canyon. In that moment of sheer terror I broke the first rule of my training 20 years earlier and yanked the front brake. A split second later I was sliding along the murram gravel on my forearm, aware vaguely that the subcutaneous tissue was absorbing most of the track.

Pride lost forever, the laughing stock of the entire village, I ruminated upon my misfortune, tucked my tail between my legs and went to look for iodine, tweezers, bandages, and a stiff G & T – in that order. It began to dawn upon me that the skill levels of borda-borda driving were perhaps understated. Over the next few days and weeks my respect for them slid off the scale. However hard I tried to follow the ‘Shining Path’ of each week’s perfect route, I wobbled all over and around it into the surrounding pitfalls. The sheer grace of their smooth and precise dashes through their inch-wide, calculated ‘perfect score’ lines was unbelievable. And I now knew just how hard it was to make it look that easy. I got high blood pressure after 100 yards of every ounce of concentration, but they looked like the Olympic ice skaters who perform obscenely complex manoeuvres with hands behind their back.

Now, months later, I know and can find the perfect route. But they look like Ronaldo and I like a junior league full back. OK. These guys drive us nuts and are maniacs. But don’t dismiss the skill required to carry a whole wriggling family through lethally mud-crusted, slimy, sheet rock. These guys are awesome. Perhaps one of the greatest and most hidden wonders of Uganda. Respect!

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[1] Or ‘bodaboda’

Kajo Keji, South Sudan. November 2008

Surprised by misty blue mountains

Silhouetted against a sun-scorched blue –

Dusk hanging like a swarming host

Heat firing back at my body
Relieved by sudden ghostly eddies of cool air –I emerge high above the Nile, enthralled.

The moped’s tyres grind and churn to a halt

As sand and murram skid aside in 

gritty protest.

I sense …….. an eternal waiting – for hope of resurrection,

For someone to love this land, its forlorn longing

“Kiss our soils to life, charm our skies open;

Come sing for the rain; release Eden once again”.

Is this really silence? The nearest I’ve heard!

But for the undertone chatter of mousebird and weaver

The cry of kite and coucal – and always the hens!

Yet children’s cries seep through bush and teak.

Shadows fight the piercing sinews of golden sunset

The track ahead melts in the intense shadow and light.

Flicker, flash, flicker, flicker, strobe light and dark

Interplaying through boughs and grasses like the staccato rhythms

Of the beats of Africa, drumming through a sun-silked fringe

Playing out a dying refrain of life still not nurtured

Nor yet embraced.
Will someone love this land – answer its cry?

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes”

(Its dead sobbing below for redemption, for hope to arise)

16 years of peace out of 46. 

Hatred and cursing

Lies and shame, confusion and violence –

All smouldering beneath me, its victims embraced by dirt;

Feeding the mango and teak

Speargrass and Spear Sorghum

Dust to leaf, ashes to fruit

Is this the only redemption – the only cycle?

Can crackling cries from bleached bones not find a hearer?

Can we yet cradle life amongst the thorn and flame trees of Kiri?

A child’s wave and cry of exultation at the glimpsed white stranger

Lifts my heart to soar again.  Hope hovers by.

Stephen Waldron