Sunday 3 November 2013

Relaxation

 

After a busy week we headed off to Mutanda Lake Resort for a couple of nights. It is only an hours journey from us and would take much less time to get there if the roads were not so bad and so bumpy. Like Lake Bunyoni, it is a huge lake dotted with small islands.

Instead of bamboo domes, this time it is tents on stilts.

 

 

 

View from our room with the nearest 3 volcanoes in the background.

 

The small peak on the left is our favourite walk to the view of Lake Mutanda. Kisoro is over the other side of the hill.

 

 

 

 

It may not look like it but the photo below is one of a pair of otters in the water just below our room.

It has been good to have a break. Jackie left on Thursday and just before her leaving 'do' began, I had a message to say that the new person appointed to help with finances had got herself another job. Praise the Lord, she said......nope, it didn't seem too praiseworthy to me! The following day the guy who does our purchasing went AWOL. Apparently he does this occasionally....great!

Still, when all is said and done, things are going fine. It is important to keep local norms of behaviour at the forefront and not have western expectations of work ethic or reliability. Some people do have a strong work ethic etc and they are real gems.

The new washing machine arrived from Kampala but the buttons do not do what they say in the manual. For instance, it fills with water for the rinse cycle, comes up with an error saying there is no water in the machine, empties the water and beeps until you turn it off and manually put it on spin. A Samsung engineer in Uganda? No, the nearest is in South Africa and the Supermarket in Kampala are not interested. At least it works after a fashion!

Mike has been using the new medical equipment he bought in Kampala. He began by testing the iron levels of some of our children. Even the lad he picked as his control example turned out to be mildly anaemic. This reflects the poor diet here. This is sad and rather concerning. It is the problem of lack of protein - and our children get tuna and mince every week, whereas most community children get neither. We are also feeding them broccoli and spinach from our garden but maybe vegetables that grow so quickly here lack the essential minerals? Mike sees children as outpatients who are incredibly malnourished. He is thinking and discussing if there is some intervention we can offer that is practical and effective without making people dependent on us. If anyone reading this has ideas, they would be most welcome.