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!

---

[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

The flavour of Uganda

I never seem to fully communicate the flavour of Uganda and get you to smell the smells and sense the sensations, so this Blog’s purpose is just that!

1. We learnt recently that until very recently women were not allowed to eat chicken – the preserve of men alone!
2. The Buganda (main tribe, and our area) greet by falling on their faces (women) before each other and before men (I love it!!) – but tribes from the south of Uganda actually hug and kiss each other on both cheeks!
3. A couple of people were arrested recently in Kampala for selling dog meat as goat meat; it seems that elsewhere in Africa, e.g. Nigeria, dog meat is prized and there are special dog meat butchers.
4. Ugandan men (and some women!) find it quite acceptable to pee at the side of the road.
5. You should never talk to a Ugandan woman about being pregnant and NEVER touch her tummy (not that I ever do) – this is seen as an attempt to curse the baby or put witchcraft on the child.
6. The bodaboda driver is quite happy to carry two or three passengers as long as they realise it costs more than one. 6 incl. driver is the maximum I have seen to date.
7. Men here are generally more fanatical supporters of English Premier League teams than the English.
8. Tilapia, the main local fish of Lake Vic, beats cod and haddock any day, but is an ugly brute. Best eaten chargrilled, with ones fingers.
9. One of the regular ‘village’ jobs of women out here (that really upsets me) is stone breaking; women sit with babies on their backs hammering rocks on a large stone to create aggregate of different sizes for concreting, which they sort into piles around them, for which they get paid a pittance; they never wear protective glasses and Lord knows how many of them go blind.
10. The driving … LORDY LORDY! The driving …. not enough room here to describe. There are no rules, be clear on that point at least.
11. Ugandans don’t generally discuss important things with each other (unless very, very close friends) because showing any interest is seen as an opening to offer financial help – which everyone is always looking for - such a sponsorship for children at school (there is no such thing as free education in Uganda whatever the government says); so conversation tends towards being shallow and dull – almost an art form; this is apparently why mzungus (ex-pats) get into such trouble being asked to provide financial assistance – we show too much interest in people!
12. Lake flies and grasshoppers are delicacies here – crunchy fries, mmmmmm!
13. Papyrus is no longer found in Egypt but abounds here around Lake Vic.’ a papyrus mat or screen 2m x 3m costs 70p - I use it as one of my key materials in construction out here as a shade screen etc.
14. A common site here is a bodaboda carrying a massive, live sow on the back, strapped up rather fetishistically, or an 85kg Nile Perch protruding from a vast sack. No-one blinks an eye!
15. For Ugandans a woman’s most provocative part of their body is their bottom. Breasts are, apparently, boring. I have yet to work out what a sexy bottom looks like to a Ugandan because it is a no-go topic of conversation….! However one could balance a full tea-tray on the top part of the bottoms of many women in this part of Africa, although I have yet to see this.
16. Bilharzia is a deadly disease caused by microscopic flukes in the liver, which the BBC website will tell you comes from swimming in the lakes, but in fact you get it from any contact with any infected water; I have it (because of my sailing) but am now in a sort of safe symbiotic stasis with several of the worms living in me and defending their territory against all invaders – all of which keeps me safe!!
17. Entebbe, the old capital of Uganda, has not a single public butcher’s shop with fridges or cold stores for keeping meat, let alone separate cutting boards for different things.
18. 50% of all deaths on the roads (which occur 100 times more per capita than the UK) involve bodabodas (mopeds) – about 16 deaths a month in Kampala city each month alone; now you know how terrified I am of driving my bodaboda and how exhausted I am after every trip!
19. Wherever a Westerner goes in Uganda the children will scream out incessantly, “Bye, Mzungu!” and not stop until you reply (Mzungu is their word for stranger – its not meant to be insulting). It can get a bit waring …..
20. Go to the National Livestock Research Centre, Entebbe, to get help with an infection with your birds. They will have no medicines or vaccines to treat them although they are the national centre for breeding Uganda’s chicken!
21. Pineapple cost from 25p; mangos from 13p; a huge hand of bananas 65p; massive avocadoes from 13p; pawpaw from (papaya) 45p; it’s heaven!!
22. Women must have multi-jointed hips; they bend 130° from the waist. This means that they can stand upright but pivot down above the waist and wash the floor with their palms spreading a large floorcloth - for hours at a time.
23. You haven’t really experienced thunder and lighting until you come to the northern shore of Lake Vic – Kampala is the lighting capital of the world! The cacophony continues for up to two hours within the same location with maybe 10 and minute. The thunder is louder and more intense than anything in the UK. Nearly every night one can look out to the lake and se in the distance somewhere an amazing firework display of the heavens. It’s awesome and beautiful - until one is under it!
24. You get on a taxibus and the conductor tells you the intended journey is 100USh more than you know it to be. All the Ugandans inside are also being cheated and agree with you that it is too much, but none of them says anything. You complain and insist on getting off and at the stop find the bus immediately behind you will charge the right price, at which point everyone on the first bus gets off and joins you. But no Ugandan will challenge the wrong price themselves – not even when in a gang!
25. 51% of all Ugandans are aged below 15. Kids are everywhere! They are intoxicatingly happy, beautiful and FULL OF LIFE!
26. T-Bone steak form the very best butcher in Kampala – superb quality – costs £2.50/kg or £1.13/lb.
27. When you enter a house the person entering should greet the owner, not the other way round. So when you go shopping at a local/village shop the shopkeeper will expect you to greet him not him to greet you. So customer service starts on the wrong foot!
28. Ugandan skin is like black satin or velvet; one wants to reach out and stroke it …… there is almost no body hair.
29. A regular sight is a dog lying dead in the middle of the road. This tends to happen mostly on Saturday nights for some unknown reason – Sunday trips to church are most unpleasant! No-one ever seems to remove the carcasses so the stench by Wednesday affects a long stretch of road. I do have a satirical comic sketch I have written on this subject, but not for here!!
30. Queuing is a western art, and don’t forget it!
31. Ugandan men have a habit of walk along clutching their groin area of their trousers in bad weather to keep their trousers out of the mud. It’s not a pretty sight.
32. Police override the traffic lights when directing traffic at junctions – although the lights carry on operating as normal. Police don’t seem to understand that this probably is more likely to cause accidents ….
33. A constant background noise is the sound of a colony of male weaver birds chattering as they weave their nests.
34. Fetching water in jerrycans from the lake or village pump is a task for children from as young as two years old.

Have you got the flavour?

Venice; 1.07.08.

Venice always evokes in me strange passions. The sheer undiluted extent of its beauty astounds me. One can visit Florence and see the sights but know that even there, round the corner, there will be disappointment, even slums. But here in Venice the beauty, intensity and passion of spaces that excite and delight goes on street after piazza after canal.

I try to analyse its success. So many scholars and academics – generals of the artistic world - have tried and studied this great city; I am merely a foot soldier trying to understand his terrain. The narrowness of the arterial bending, twisting streets, overlaid and interlaced with contrasting sinews of water of endlessly varying breadths is the main theme my mind distinguishes. But then there is the endless flickering of reflected rippling dappled light dancing seductively on the underside of the hundreds of bridges and up and along the sheer flanking walls. There are the never-ending steel-tipped gondolas drifting lazily through these veins, slapping a staccato through the constant percussion of shoes along the fissured alleyways. The properties of a tightly controlled language of finishes, windows and doorways; the fading glory of exotically painted walls; the glimpses around and through openings into hidden courtyards awash with flowers – mostly geraniums and vines; the punctuating solidity of medieval and classical churches, civic buildings and theatres with their dark, heavy interiors packed full of artisan craftsmanship; the sudden explosive entry into sun-scorched courtyards and piazzas whose generous proportions contrast so strongly with the cool, shadowy, crack-like chasms that lead to them.

I love that I never know if the next alley will lead to a dead-end set of steps to a canal landing, or into square, or round a tight, hidden bend and beyond. I love the lack of an Oxford Street or Bluewater mall. Shops spring into view in the most idiosyncratic places. This is true shopping; trying to find the shops is the biggest part of the adventure!

As one climbs the steps of the miniscule bridges, under which the gondoliers duck at the last moment with that mixture of staggeringly grandiose arrogance and skill, the resulting subtle shift of viewpoint down and along the canals is one of the most exquisite charms of the Venetian experience. What is around that last corner, I wonder? Many Venetians have opened up an arch from the canals into the very heart of their home, where often an ancient chocolate-coloured armchair sits shrouded with silks and embroidered tapestries, telling of the wealth – true or imagined – of the owner.

Windows packed with carnival masks, grinning and gawping at me. Sheer perfection in colour and finish, fresh with the smell of turpentine, which pervades the deepest of alleyways. I pause and breathe in deeply and I am back in the apprentice studios of Da Vinci or Michelangelo. Lines upon banks of sightless, silent faces, all holding a lost language of intrigue and occult behaviours, refusing to tell their stories. Huge feathers sprout from every nook and corner, like ferns in a spume-soaked waterfall grotto. Headdresses fit for princes and princesses, nobles and baronesses abound, each one placed with care and precision.

People move slowly and aimlessly, silenced by the sheer volume and never-ending feast of history and pageant. I feel I am part of a tender deep dance of slumber. Even the most brash tourists seem strangely muffled by the lapping water and embracing walls, by a silence that crushes the intrusive clamours of a modern, hurtling world. Here we slowly and intuitively sense with a growing internal hollowness just what has been lost along the way. How that progress is really a master of deceit. How easily we have fallen for our own lies! How much has been lost amongst the gains. I overhear one of two garish American women remarking that in Las Vegas she visited a life-sized copy of Venice’s Grand Canal, but …. and she gasps for air and for words, eyes rolling, as she acknowledges the sheer outrage of the comparison.

How did we lose this? What created it and made it possible in the first place? I can guess at the answers but clarity eludes me. Something about immense trading wealth, coupled with the centrality of art and creativity, the high calling of being a commissioning patron, and above it all a belief of the essence of God in all things, sacred and secular – in fact the indivisibility of life. There is no secular in Venice; God is everywhere. He breathes through the stones.

Uganda seen from afar

‘Does Uganda still exist?’ my mind tussles with this thought as I relax and unwind in a far-flung world, hidden deep in a mountain valley in the Italian Friuli Mountains. It seems impossible that such differing worlds can coexist in such a small and diminishing planet. I am in the centre of civilisation. At least, I mean civilisation from which my world was spawned. Civilisation from which nearly everything that I value and take for granted has sprung. Values that support and uphold me and make me glad to be alive. This is the backdrop to words, lines, duets, concertos, arias, operas, plays, poems and symphonies that resonate through my being.

Am I wanting the same for Uganda? No – something unique and different! But can I identify and accept the values and beauty that make Uganda what it is and what it could be? Or does it need to go through the world wars and plagues that shaped Europe into what it is today to be able to compete on this stage? Can we get something so wonderful for nothing? What is the essential-ness of Uganda that I need to extol and laud? What qualities and elements do I need to recognise within the chaos and corruption?

Fear and loathing in Uganda - methinks. I am finding it hard to work my way through the utter waste of lives and effort – of human potential represented by the rhythm and way of Ugandan life – even if this is less than half the truth.

Firstly there is the corruption. No! I am not going to give in to the ‘politically correct’ mist that invades my brain and seeks to cloud every true judgement. Of course there are reasons for corruption, and endless extenuating circumstances, but the fact is, no matter how you dress it up, that until corruption is significantly reduced there is no hope for Uganda. You just can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Then there is tribalism. Every Ugandan I meet dreads the knock on his door or the ring on his mobile of the distant relative or clansman asking for yet another favour. On the one hand it is wonderful to have an extended family that means you are never in want for a home or a bed. But the country is littered and crawling with half-built structures representing the people’s attempts to tie up their money away from the hands of others. It is an abomination and scourge; a promotion or benefit is lost immediately by the relatives who will camp nearby to eat up the crumbs that fall from the table. A greater educational qualification is a signal to people from distant shores to relocate nearer their family member. A deep sigh rumbles from the belly of every successful but caring wife that I meet in Uganda; “What can you do?” she sighs. “They are our flesh and blood”.

At a broader level jobs are always given to one’s family or tribe, never outside the fold. The contempt and hostility from one’s family if one failed to do so would be too much to bear. There is no concept of ‘the best for the job’. Indeed suspicion is so great between people that the worst are often selected, who will never ever threaten the benefactor’s position, but who, at the same time, will never ever advance his cause. This behaviour is not limited to ‘evil’ or ‘ignorant’ people, but even the very best of men and women cannot see any other way to act, unless they have experienced life in the West.

So what does Uganda offer the world? Gentle, hospitable, softly spoken people who work hard; graciousness; a country of great agricultural potential with a superb climate in most of the central and southern areas; significant untapped mineral wealth; beautiful women!; hydro-electric power; amazing bird-life; Tilapia; biggest crocodiles in world; masses of hippos, crocs, and elephant; much much more ……