Little triumphs

It’s been a fortnight of small victories, mostly of an IT nature. Firstly, my new computer memory chip arrived in the post after only a month in transit from the UK, and now my ancient laptop hums along with 5x the RAM it had before. Next, the friendly guys in the IT department, after only a little gentle coaxing, presented me with my own desktop. Okay, so it’s a bulky Frankenstein’s monster patched together from random, discoloured parts with half the RAM of my laptop before the upgrade, but at least I have a university machine to call my own. Reeling from this victory, I then spotted a pile of rusty shelving bits covered in spiders’ nests in the corner of the campus courtyard. Using my rapidly evolving skills of persuasion*, I managed to secure them on the spot for my office without the usual need to fill out 2 forms in triplicate and wait a month for sign off by a procurement committee (I exaggerate, but there is definitely a strong taste for red tape here).

*So the trick I have learned – first roadtested on an unfortunate immigration official at Central Immigration on the day of my flight home to England in December – is that a polite, light-hearted approach but one where there is a clear threat of oncoming hysteria, can be a very effective tool of persuasion. People are extremely non-confrontational here. Open displays of anger get you absolutely nowhere, but emotional meltdowns can move mountains. Perhaps a Ugandan’s worst nightmare is to suddenly find themselves with a hysterical, tear-stained mazungu woman on their hands. In the case of the immigration official, the desperation of the situation (I’d been threatened with a bill of 1,800USD to leave the country) led me to take things to such a theatrical extreme that the poor man ended up pleading, ‘Madam, please stop staring at me and leave my office immediately.’ I’m pretty sure that my irritating persistence paid off in that case, and I have therefore been applying the same approach in a modified form ever since. Obviously this is something you can overdo, and is best used sparingly like chilli sauce.

With my new Frankenstein’s computer and bookcase, I now feel quite comfortably settled in my corridor and have even begun to do a spot of work.

Oh dear

Well at risk of sullying the portrait of a worldly-wise, cool-headed and in-control volunteer I have been striving to project over the last eight months, I feel I have to get a few things off my chest. Sometimes a blog is a handy therapeutic/confessional tool in the absence of a priest or psychotherapist. Although admittedly a slightly more public arena than either, it does have the distinct advantage of not talking back.

So here we go. To cut a long, mortifying story short, I seem to have single-handedly started the Ugandan (or at least Fort Portal) chapter of that well known international campaign to propagate the stereotype of British girls as the drunken piss-artists of the world. The sole redeeming factor about my fall from grace was that is was witnessed only by my Irish colleagues at MMU, some chivalrous lads from the Peace Corps and one surprisingly sympathetic boda driver who was apparently prepared to suspend his disbelief and accept that madam (smelling suspiciously of vomit and mumbling incoherently) was just ‘very tired’ after a long evening. I’d like to say that this was an isolated event, but there have been one or two other marginally less cringe-worthy occasions in recent months that would seem to indicate an unfortunate and rapid regression to my late teenage/early student years.

That’s probably enough public self-flagellation for now. I don’t think there’s any need to sign up to AA just yet. I’m secretly hoping that behind these embarrassing experiences actually lies something a bit more positive to do with me shedding my control-freakishness of recent years and loosening up a bit (I was actually having a lot of fun until the third glass of Bond 7 - an evil, evil drink - did something to my ability to walk, talk and hold down my dinner). I suppose I could also use the pretty lame excuse that I was only doing what the Romans (or in this case the long-term resident mazungus, particularly those of an Anglo-Saxon extraction) do, but then that doesn’t make me look any less of a tit really.