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As with pretty much everything else, I had to revise my usual pancake recipe to make it work in Uganda. Here follows.

• Five tablespoons of flour. Actual tablespoons, as full as you can make them.
• A dash of salt
• One half-litre bag of milk. Yes, milk is sold in refill bags here. And they are stored in room temperature, which is a bit odd.
• Three eggs.
• A small (imagined) handful of butter.

The measures are inexact, but you have to live with that. Uganda measures volume in litres and cups. Half sane, half imperial. So, naturally, no matter from where you are you will have problems converting your recipes. Or, indeed, your bearings. Seriously, either stick to cups and gallons and feet and shoes and all the other imperial measurements, or make the transition to SI units with litres, decilitres, and so on.

Right. First, open your bag of flour. Resign to the fact that no matter how securely you store your powders, in tin cans and whatnot, they will still contain a considerable number of bugs, because the store from which you buy your groceries have not taken any precautions whatsoever against infestation and so the food you bought is already contaminated. Anyway, try to dig around the beetles or whatever they are, and put it in a bowl. Add the salt and milk while stirring. I actually like the milk bags, as they are cheap and I use them all at once anyway. Crack the eggs against the sink, open them carefully, and tip the contents into the bowl. You could crack them against the side of the bowl, but I do not fancy salmonella and neither would you.

From here it is pretty much the same as home. Melt your handful of butter in a frying pan, add it to the mix, stir continuously. Oh, right. The butter in Uganda is similar to coconut fat in texture, and it hardens really fast if you do not pay attention. Either stir the batter continuously, or put the bowl in a boiling water bath to prevent hardening of the butter. Do not forget to stir occasionally, though, otherwise you might end up with a giant bowl-shaped three-dimensional pancake.

The pancakes tastes almost like the ones in Sweden. I do miss our jam, though.

I have been wanting to bake something for a few weeks now. I decided on good honest Swedish kanellängder, since the recipe is simple enough and I had the recipe on the side of a Swedish flour tin can from back home. However, as it turns out, my oven is broken. So I had to make to with something which does not require an oven.

Cue negerbollar. A traditional Swedish dessert foodstuff. The name is really just a bonus on the side of irony: it would translate to mudugafu balls in Ugandan lingo. As people had previously shown interest in this dessert, I decided to make some. The recipe is simple enough: butter, cocoa, coffee, sugar, oats, shredded coconut. Should be easy enough to make, no?

Well, yes and no. Shredded coconut and sugar were both easy enough to conjure, but the other ingredients each had their own quirks, which I will discuss below for the benefit of the next person odd enough to want to make negerbollar in Africa.

Ugandans, as a rule, use margarine, as, unlike butter, it does not melt in room temperature. They have butter, but it is not something each and every household would buy. Also, it… well, behaves a bit different to Swedish butter. And, it tastes very undeniably bovine, which would feel a bit odd in a dessert.

One would think that the cocoa and the coffee would be of a really fine quality, but… Well, no. Note that I could have used Nescafé &c., but I chose not to. I wanted to use exclusively local brands, if possible, otherwise it would be cheating. The coffee powder I bought did not smell anything like coffee, which was a fairly good warning sign in itself. The cocoa… Well, the taste was there, but fairly weak. For the next batch, I will try to compensate for this somehow.

Last, but not least: the oats. I did have some prior suspicions, and this endeavour confirmed it: Ugandans, as a rule, do not use oats. I scoured the grains aisle, twice, thrice, but to no avail. At last I found a bag, not in the grains isle, but in the breakfast aisle, listed as “porridge”. No mention of oats, but fortunately the bag was transparent.

Making them was not easy, either. I had my fears that the consistency of the butter would be all wrong, but any hope of it being firm enough for balls evaporated the instant I accidentally added hot coffee to the mix. The butter melted, and everything just sort of slurred together to a brown heterogeneous sludge. Panic. I popped it into the fridge, hoping the cold would make it all better again; but have you ever tried to refrigerate molten butter? If you have, I am sure you only tried it once. Ransacking the cupboard for anything which could help, I remembered buying a box of cookies a while ago. Never do that in Uganda, by the way; they are all invariably dry and tasteless. Right then, however, they were perfect. Using the lid of my tin can as a makeshift pestle, I mortared the cookies into a rough powder, which I then added to the sludge. And sure enough:

The dry cookie powder absorbed negersmeten, and the result was a pliable dough which rolled easily. Needless to say, they do not taste quite as their Swedish counterparts do, but for the first try they are close enough. I would love to try making a kladdkaka, but that might be a problem without an oven. I might try building one, I suppose. I do have all the parts I need. Hmm…

Work often begins early in the morning. Let us say 08:00, as this is the time I start work here. Also beginning early in the morning are other businesses, such as the food business. However, for some reason, most cafes, bakeries, convenience stores, and other places which often sell warm bite-sized foodstuffs such as paninis, samosas, and meat pies, also open at 08:00 sharp. Or sometimes they open earlier, but do not have any of the warm stuff ready until 08:00. And then it is a bit too late for all the people who eat breakfast on their way to work.

Do these businesses not notice the horde of wandering wallets passing by every single workday morning? Do they not realise they could gain a lot of regular customers simply by making sure to have warm food to-go ready for sale by, let us say 07:40? The argument that some businesses in fact already do this does not hold any water; people live everywhere and work everywhere, and that means your venue is bound to be in the middle of a lot of people’s paths to work every morning. These people may already be going out of their way just to get some breakfast, and one could be certain this is not at all by choice. Why not steal these customers?

Yes, I am hungry. How did you notice?

Well, technically eight weeks and two days, since I really should have been writing this entry last night. But since this post mainly concerns yesterday, the title stands. Also, I have already written this post once, and I lost it due to my lousy Internet connection, so this rewrite is rather hurried.

You may have noticed I have not been posting much lately. The reason is spelt vibrio choleræ, and I will spare your sanity by not describing that particular ordeal in too great a detail. Given the candour of some of my previous ‘blog posts, I am sure you can extrapolate. On this matter I will only say this: Pray to Chance that you will never have to consider all fours in the bathtub the only acceptable seating configuration when tending to Nature’s call. Nature’s call having been temporarily redefined as odourous fishy fluid violently expunged from more orifices than you would care to count, or, at that particular moment in time, even be aware.

Now, enough of that. Eight weeks and a day. Why is this span of elapsed time so important? Well, it marks the amount of time I have gone without a proper meal in my belly. A proper meal, mind you, by European standards. As I may have hinted at in previous entries—cough—Uganda in general seems to consider food little more than sustenance. I am pleased to say I have finally found a restaurant which might even rival some restaurants with equivalent cuisine back home.

The restaurant is known as Haandi, and it is an Indian restaurant. Uganda has a large Indian Diaspora, so it stands to reason that the Indian restaurants ought to be at least half-way decent. But I could not have imagined finding any dish in Uganda which would be the best dish in its category I have ever eaten. The Chicken tikka masala was pure brilliance! So good, in fact, that I am thoroughly ashamed for ordering such a dish from what turned out to be the best Indian restaurant to which I have ever been. As we all know, Chicken tikka masala is British in origin, not Indian. But, frankly, it was not my choice: the waiter suggested it, and as it had been a long workday I simply could not be bothered to protest. I promise I will order something more Indian next time.

For there will be a next time. Plenty of next times, in fact; in theory I could afford on my stipend to go there everyday for the rest of my stay. Despite Haandi being much better than the good-enough-to-be-considered-food-but-still-quite-lousy restaurants, my tab did not reflect this fact. But while I may not be the most economic person in the world, I am not that daft.

Next time, I will be trying a Japanese restaurant known as Yujō. I hope the name does not reflect the food.

A question which I receive frequently is the one about missing my home country. Do I miss Sweden?

Well of course I bloody miss Sweden! What is there not to miss? However, since people insist on asking, here follows a great wall of whining:

I miss my bed. I miss my pillows. Plural! The pillow I have—which, although on the verge of splitting to pieces due to severe lumping, is still quite singular—looks like a sack of potatoes and is only somewhat more comfortable. I miss my family, my extended family, my friends, my adversaries, even complete strangers. I miss not standing out wherever I go, like dandruff on a lapel. I love my job, but I really, really dislike the limited means of doing my job. Downloading something might take an hour, a day, several days. Things which would take minutes now take days to accomplish, and it feels really humiliating because it feels as though I should be able to work so much faster and really show off and shine, but due to things beyond my control I work at the pace of a garden slug. And of course it is not my fault, but that is just it. Were it my fault, I would be able to do something about it. But that is, unfortunately, not the case.

Well, moving on. I miss a reliable state power grid. One which does not switch off at its leisure. And the food. The food. Generally, Uganda is like a big house full of children home alone for the first time. Everything seems half-hearted and short-sighted, from cooking to cleaning to building construction to road planning for Pete’s sake! But the cooking really gets to me. Uganda is not like several other African countries which are short on food. Uganda is fertile, and most of it is used for agriculture. Still, Ugandans seem to regard food as a necessary evil for being able to endure until the next meal. They eat more or less the same food every day: meat and food. No, really; saying “meat and food” to a waiter is very likely to get you a plate of, well, let us remain neutral and call it sustenance, without any follow-up questions. There are no spices, so the food is very bland. Almost as bland, in fact, as the waiters themselves. Service-mindedness is an alien concept here, it seems. Note that I am not a bloody Yank which would have his expedites frolicking like beagles around his legs before he would concede satisfaction. I am a firm believer of “do it your own bloody self, punter.” But Uganda is taking it a bit too far. Everyone in a service profession does their job in a maddeningly laconic, almost apathetic fashion. They speak quietly, and not one word too many. Quite the opposite—you almost have to be an archaeologist to stand any chance of uncovering any useful information in a reasonable amount of time! There is one exception to this rule, and she works at the Shell gas station in Bukoto. She seems to be the only one in Kampala who greets her customers with a smile and an attitude fit for service. Anyway, enough of that.

I miss being able to cross a street without getting flashbacks to the arcade game Frogger. And the similarity does not end at the river, either! The Kampala road commission—if there is one, and I would not be surprised if there were not—apparently took one look at the WikiHow page for road construction, copied the plans, but shifted accidentally the gutter depth figure by an order of magnitude. The roads here have moats. Moats, I tell you! Which is awesome for a while, until you actually have to use the road as a pedestrian. Which, co-incidentally, happens to be the exact same moment you wish they had spent some time on another alien concept known as pavement. So, just walk on the side of the road, you say. Well, that is exactly what one must do. But, as we have already established, everything in Uganda seems to be done half-heartedly and short-sightedly. There is no clear border between road and moat, and that border tends to shift rather suddenly. Most often when you are stepping on it, as it happens. I probably would have sprained both my ankles by now were it not for my exceptionally fine boots.

I miss our healthcare. Here, they just throw a barrage of tests—and price tags—at you which all come up either negative or inconclusive. And if the person who drew, or rather tried to draw, my blood last time is a licensed nurse then I am a vicar.

I miss laundry machines. At home, doing laundry means throwing dirty clothes in a machine, load it with detergent, start the programme, watch some telly until you hear it finishing up, unload the clean laundry and immediately throw it in the dryer, watch telly some more, et voilà. Instant laundry!

This is my washing machine. And this is my dryer. The washing part takes several hours, but that is probably because I am used to machine-wash results. The drying takes two to three days, because it is always cloudy when I do my laundry. On a related note, I miss dishwashers. And electric stoves.

I miss silence. Silence does not exist in Kampala. There is always a car with a broken muffler; or a madman and/or religious zealot rambling loudly in a street corner with a book in her hand and an eerie look in her eyes; or music which, through overdriven amplifiers and perforated stage loudspeakers, is sheared and garbled to utter noisebleed which is probably the reason why Tek-Ti sometimes wake up at night crying but does not know why. Yesterday I had my first moment of silence (using industrial noise-killing headgear) for six weeks, and I actually teared up a little. Not noticeably so, but still. I wish I could sleep with them, but chances are I would sleep for thirty-six hours straight due to sheer noise exhaustion.

I miss not feeling compelled—through bitter experience—to bang my boots against each other in order to evacuate forcibly any newts or other wildlife which have found the place I usually put my feet in the morning infinitely more suited as a nest or resting spot. Similarily—and, again, through bitter experience—I miss not having to sift through any powder-based foodstuff hunting for infernal red bugs which seem to thrive on anything which supposedly have been hermetically sealed at the factory. (I call them paradoxical bugs for this reason, by the way.) I miss not getting scared out of my wits when a dark something decides to defy gravity for a while and dart across the wall; this invariably happens when I am holding something either scalding-hot or filled to the brim with liquid. Or both.

I miss being able to take a shower where I can choose the water temperature and the water pressure, and not having to settle on little more than a trickle which is colder than death itself. And speaking of water: I miss not being able to drink the tap water. Actually, screw that, I miss not being able to drink bottled water which have been opened and at room temperature for more than a day or so. There is not enough room in the refrigerator for storing larger amounts of water. Which brings us back to the kitchen I suppose. I miss having a well-stocked refrigerator and a well-stocked cupboard. I miss not sharing the kitchen and the bedroom with at least a few hundred other significant life forms. I miss the silence in the kitchen at night, as opposed to the nibbling you hear here, a constant reminder of my insanitary living conditions.

Of course I miss all that. It is only natural. That is what I am used to, after all. However.

However. That does not mean I do not like it here. I could not care less about a few cockroaches or whatever else is nibbling on my leftovers. I guess it is a good thing that the stuff goes to someone, right? The newts are a nuisance, but just that, a nuisance. There are nuisances in Sweden, too. Granted, they are fewer and farther between, but anyway. Life is different here, and I am dealing with it. Of course I miss Sweden, but I am coming home in September. It is not as though I left Sweden for good. I will return. And with that piece of knowledge steadying me as I go about my business, I am able to cope.

Also, while the kitchen drawers are full of cockroaches, they are also almost impossible to open due to moisture swelling and years of neglect. So it all works out quite nicely in the end!

In this blog post, I will describe my illness in some detail. This includes faecal matters. If you would be better off not knowing, skip this post. In the future, all posts which could contain something someone could be better off not knowing will be tagged with the tag nsfw.

As some people have pointed out, it has been a while since I posted anything. This is because I have been ill. Stomach bug, most probably, although I must say I this particular bug has been a new experience to me. Last week I started feeling exhausted for no good reason. It felt as though I had not slept even though I knew that was not the case. Early this week I had some trouble falling asleep, and I guess that pretty much triggered my illness. High fever, malaise, lethargy, headache, cough, sensitivity to light and sound, and of course the diarrhoea. The abhorrent diarrhoea. I tell you, even Lovecraft could not have dreamt up anything remotely horrifying as the spawns from the wrath of my bowels.

I have no idea what I have expunged these past few days. But it was definitely not human waste. Human waste is not supposes to be less viscous than water. Human waste is not supposed to range from sunshine yellow to soylent green to  jet black, and I am not supposed to excrete it at biologically improbable amounts or rates.

And the smell. Usually, faeces smell either simply of faeces, or faeces with a hint of something else, or—if something is really off—of something else with a hint of faeces. In this case, however, they smelt of something else entirely, with no hint of being faeces at all save for the fact that I had just excreted it.

So of what did it smell? Oh, various things. Red clay. Ammonia. Parmesan cheese. That last one is particularly disturbing, by the way, since I have not eaten anything close to Parmesan cheese for about six weeks. Have I unwittingly—and quite contrary to my wishes—stumbled upon the secrets of making Parmesan cheese? God, I hope not. For all our sakes.

I feel better now, by the way. The fever vanished fairly quickly (shat it out, probably—hey, my illness were already breaking the laws of science) and while my bowel activities are still far from normal, everything indicates that normal services, as it were, will return shortly.

There we are. Now that I have gotten this out of my system, pardon the pun, I will try to post something less, well, icky next time.

This weekend I had planned to launder some clothes. Well, all my clothes, to be precise; I have not had the opportunity to have any laundry done recently. I was going to start on Saturday, but Henry then informed me that a guy usually comes by every Sunday to do his laundry for a small fee, so naturally I decided to make use of this service. But, of course, this being Uganda, the guy did not turn up until late in the day. Which, of course, meant that my laundry did not have time to dry for today. So, I am having a day off, due simply to lack of clothing. I have spent this entire day in my swimming trunks and not much else. I am a bit annoyed.

In other news, I appear to be shedding. Violently.

One of my duties here is to set up a computer training centre. In essence, a computer room. Except computers are really really expensive in Uganda, so we use multi-seat configuration. A proprietary multi-seat configuration. One which uses closed-spec hardware. One which only supports Windows and a Ubuntu version—and, more importantly, a kernel version—old enough to make me cry.

Even if I were Windows tolerant, I would not like this hardware. Basically, it crams two PS/2 signals, one audio signal, and one VGA signal into a CAT5 cable; a stunt which would be dodgy in Europe, but here, with cable, connectors, and crimping tool all being slightly out of spec so as to fail about 20% of the time and produce questionable cables the rest of the time, things are not working well. The keyboards lose their connection frequently; the pointing devices either go berserk or stop working altogether; the screen quality is hazy at best and bloody awful at worst.

The idio- *cough* the ill-considered decision to buy this solution (and I use the word “solution” quite liberally here) was made before I even started here, and as such I had no say in it. To be fair, the person responsible for this—a good man with sound ideals but apparently little to no experience in sales-department optimism and bald-face lies—did buy it out of good faith, since he believed that the GNU/Linux support offered was GNU/Linux support, not “GNU/Linux support.” I am not looking to lay blame, or even to rant—okay, I do want to rant a bit. But that is not why I am posting this.

I am posting this to ask for your help. See, being an open source zealot, I naturally assumed that GNU/Linux would be able to do multi-seating without fancy special hardware to complicate things. And sure enough: X supports multiple screens, multiple keyboards, and multiple mice, and it supports treating them like separate sessions so you could have several people on the same computer simultaneously. This means I could just throw this piece of utter rubbish hardware all the way back to the depths of Hell from which it came and just use this solution. However.

However indeed. For this, I need graphics cards. A lot of them. They do not have to be anything fancy; in fact, old PCI (that’s PCI, not PCIExpress) cards would be optimal. AGP cards would not be turned down, either, but PCs usually only have one AGP slot. My goal is to have each computer equipped with three extra VGA ports, and there are four computers, so I need a total of twelve ports. Which could mean anything from six up to twelve cards, depending on brands and models.

If you are a nerd: Fine, you know exactly what I need, so please rummage through your stashes and see what you could spare. If you are not a nerd, well, fear not. If you know you have an old computer lying about, have your neighbourhood geek have a look at it after reading this blog post. In fact, if you know anyone “into IT”, give them a nudge in this direction.

This room full of Windows terminals are causing me all sorts of troubles. I have acid reflux. I did not have acid reflux before we started working on that blasted centre. I can live with the heat, the rain, the dust, the sun, the power cuts, the water cuts, the traffic, the washing-clothes-in-buckets, even the noise I can tolerate. I can not live with closed-source crap software and hardware. It eats away at me from the inside. I am here to help, and deploying Windows is not helping. Quite the opposite. So please, please help me if you are able and willing.

My mother will be sending some stuff down on the 19th, but there will be several opportunities to send stuff. Just give my mother the cards and she will make sure they get here. I thank you; so, too, will Uganda.

I am still alive. I am simply running low on Internet quota, so I have been trying to conserve what little I have left. Normal service will resume shortly.

In short, though: Common cold, cows, banana fields, common cold again, delicious banana wine, sunburn six ways to Hell on my left arm, and general weariness as a result from most of the above. I will elaborate tomorrow. Or another morrow.

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I have a cold. Damn you, Menace.

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