I have just come back from the post office where I was trying to send a letter home. I came to the counter and asked for three envelopes. The man who worked there replied that they had no envelopes. I replied that even if they only had really big ones they would be fine but he replied that no, there were no envelopes in the building. He noted the disappointment on my face and reassured me 'but we do have stamps!'
It
has been a while since I updated my website - the main reasons being that I was
at hom eon leave and very
little has happened here lately. The problems with power continue. I hope to
begin doing exams soon but some of the students have not had a class in weeks
because of the power problems. The picture on the left is what the final
certificates for the course will look like.
The students will have two exams to do. The first will be a multi-choice theory exam. The user will sit at a computer and select answers from lists of correct and incorrect ones. The second exam is a practical one where the student will have to perform tasks on the computer, and then click a button which checks that they have done it correctly before giving them a new task. The idea behind these two exams is that the whole process is automated so that when I leave for good in mid-March, the course should be able to continue on without me.
We
are in the middle of the wet season here. Last week we had a huge hail shower
the likes of which I have never seen. In the picture on the right you can see
the size of one of the hailstones in my hand. (Click on the picture to see it
full size).
I had witnessed a strange incident on a road in Kampala when I returned from my three weeks of leave in Ireland last month. There was a fuel tanker ahead of my taxi and there were a couple of young men hanging off the back of it. I assumed at first that they were either working for the company that owned the truck or that they were just hitching a lift. Then I noticed that one of them was attempting to tie a black plastic bag around the tap that served as an outlet from the tanker.
The tanker stopped suddenly in the middle of the road in front of us and a man jumped out of the passenger seat. He had a big plank of wood in his hand. When the two stowaways saw him they made a grab for the black plastic bag and ran off – spilling diesel everywhere. It was only then that I realised they had been attempting to steal some diesel from the truck as it moved along the road!
The man who had jumped out of the passenger seat of the tanker didn’t bother giving chase. Instead he calmly re-tightened the tap on the outlet, climbed back into the cabin and it continued on its way. It seems this is a common occurrence for tanker trucks in Kampala.
At first I was greatly amused and impressed at the bravado of these modern day highwaymen. But then I began to think about how terrible it was that these two guys would be willing to risk their lives to steal at most a litre of highly flammable liquid from a speeding vehicle on a busy road. It is a good illustration of what poverty can lead a person to do.
I
have been having terrible problems with my cat Dudley recently. He seems to be
approaching that period in a cat's life where he goes a bit wild. I put him up in the
roof space on one occassion to deal with the bats that are up there but he liked
it so much that he keeps on trying to get back up. In the pictures on the left
you can see the size of the leap that he has to take from my book shelves to make it up
there. Then at the beginning of last week he climbed into my laundry basket and
urinated the most foul smelling stuff all over
my clothes. I plan to take him for the chop tomorrow in Kampala. Perhaps that
will sort him out?