I have spent the last hour giving my maid instructions in the most basic of her duties – cleaning.
Yes, I agonise a lot about my househelp, but that’s because in Uganda we insist on getting people out of their muddy hovels in remote villages and bringing them to the city to help keep our tastefully appointed houses clean and orderly.
We get primary two drop-outs with no considerable history of interaction with electricity and charge them with operating flat irons, microwave ovens, electric cookers and, in extremely misguided cases, vacuum cleaners.
This is our reality.
Which is why my current maid – the first one I have found close to acceptable in decades of actively loathing domestic help – has had me frustrated for the last one hour of my life.
The excitement going round at the installation of a new cabinet is palpable (another one of those words we always like to use regardless of what they mean).
The last cabinet we had was fantastic when we first put it in, but the newspapers started messing it up within a very short time.
I have always detested newspapers for this purpose but everyone seems to think that’s what they are for, so whenever we have a new cabinet put in place newspapers go into action before anything else.
There are a number of reasons I begin to hate newspapers whenever I get a new cabinet:
1. The edge of the newspaper curls up in that funny way and gets in the way of the door closing.
The literary Jedi, that is.
This morning I watched the most magnificent traffic jam building up in Kampala, from the Mulago roundabout all the way to the Uganda Wildlife Authority offices in Kitante.
It was so neat I suspected that Events Warehouse or Silk Events were putting it together. By the time I got to the junction at John Babiiha Avenue I was fighting the temptation to park somewhere and watch the progress.
If I were Chinese I’d probably have set up a betting table and posted odds on how far the jam would go. Then, I’d have gotten cronies to place bets on Bukoto, around Kabira Country Club.
29/4/2011
PRESS RELEASERIOTS WITHIN KAMPALA CITY
On 27th April 2011, Dr. Dr. Besigye was granted bail from Nakasongola court and one of his bail conditions clearly stated that he should not involve himself in unlawful assembly and processions as it would attract crowds within Kampala city disrupting the peace, security, and possible loss of life and property.
Yesterday 28th April 2011 at 6:30am, Dr. Besigye defiantly started walking from his home, Ssenide road, Kasangati accompanied by about seven foreign journalists and three local journalists.
Three senior police officers advised Dr. Besigye to follow the court directive by Her Worship the Chief Magistrate Justine Atukwasa, to avoid unlawful assembly and processions for at least seven months. He responded by challenging the police to buy him fuel for his car.
I pray that the Good Lord and all the powers that be out there where the universe is financed reach an agreement regarding the punishment that is the Mayor of Kampala.
This gentleman, father of at least one pal of mine, is the human equivalent of that rat that you spot one night scuttling for cover behind the cooker.
From the moment you see the damn rodent your life becomes physically and emotionally uncomfortable.
You begin to suspect that all the cutlery needs constant washing because the dirty rat might have been rummaging through the drawers at some point in the night. Food starts going bad because you can’t bear to touch it, what with all those images of the filthy thing with its paws on the potatoes and its teeth gnawing at the bananas. At night, every sound you hear seems to be the rat smashing things to bits in the dark.
You need to know me to understand why this can be an issue in my life.
I am rarely to be found on my Facebook page, even though I have more than 1,400 friends overall. I pop into Facebook for not more than ten minutes at a time, about three or four times a week. Not because I don’t like it – that would be hypocritical and would reek of a certain type of arrogance one can only exhibit when one is being chauffer-driven in one’s Rolls Royce en route from the daily breakfast at the Serena to a magnificently furnished personal office in Kololo to oversee a few million dollars’ worth of business arrangements that one owns personally. But of course, if one had that million dollars’ worth of business then perhaps one would hire the Serena chef to make the same breakfast in one’s palatial kitchen…
…I digress easily into such nonsensical thoughts because someone yesterday emailed me photos of the new Rolls Royce Ghost.
WITS might as well become the new name of this blog, and may alternate with WTHITS (What The Hell Is This Shit?) which is more expressive of the situation abounding, but harder to pronounce the first few times.
Right now, my wrath has been drawn by a Cabinet chart of the Republic of Uganda 2009.
I say “a Cabinet chart” because I cannot be sure that this is the only one, in this world where one can get a functional, multi-coloured mobile phone called Nokiaheru.
The ire in me was not aroused by the uncertainity of the authenticity of the damn chart, though.
I was enraged because the chart, resplendent in pink (mbu), has adverts!
Seriously, WITS?
Commercial advertisements on a government chart that tells the world who the membes of cabinet are? Are we stupid?
It reminds me of the menus at the Kabaka’s wedding that had adverts.
But this is much, much worse!
