Floods

On Tuesday night I went with a local singer called Julie to a club called Lumas Inn. Kampala has the best live music scene of any city I've been to, it beats Toronto, Vancouver, London, New York, hands down. Lumas wasn't as busy as National Theatre, but there were still about 100 people in the audience, in a stadium-seated garden looking down onto a floodlit stage. The equipment was more professional and the club isn't listed in any guidebooks so there wasn't a mzungu in sight.

If the audience likes what you play, they come up on stage and give you money. Every time I've played I've made a few dollars. Anything I get goes back to other performers over the course of the night. I think I might be the only mzungu in Uganda that's had locals give me donations.

After I performed, a guy in a cowboy hat and boots, shimmering silver shirt and lots of gaudy jewellery asked me if I would play guitar on his gospel album. His name was "Lone Gun". I explained to him that I was here to work on other things and that I don't play guitar for other people's music, which is actually true even in Canada.

The next morning I was woken at about 6am by heavy rain pounding on the tin roof of my bedroom. Water was leaking through and onto the floor. When I started walking to school I found many of the roads flooded and villagers' flinging buckets of water from the doorways of their houses.

A few local entrepreneurs were giving people rides through the flood on the back of their bicycles, but when I asked how much I was quoted about ten times the normal rate. Much to the amusement of the locals, I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants and waded through. There was a current in parts and my legs and clothes ended up caked in mud. I got to school wet and very dirty, and 40c richer. Perhaps it would have been worth the money.

As the end of my one month spending probation approaches, I'm getting some ideas about how I want to help people. One of the first things I plan to do is buy boxes of baby food and give them to mothers and children on the streets who have new born babies. I am also planning to buy some sewing machines that women in the community will be able to rent time on, to make clothes to sell at the market. Renting them out will help ensure that the people using them treat their time on the machine seriously, and it ensures the charity stays interested in providing access to them. The profit would go towards sponsoring orphans education, and when mothers are making money they can feed and educate their children. I plan to start with two machines, then if it looks successful and sustainable I'll add more.

I also want to look into setting up a little cafe here with old Sony playstations hooked up to TVs, and charge people by the hour to play. This would create jobs and the profit would go to the charity. I've never seen video games of any kind in Uganda, and a games cafe only needs electricity to run, unlike an internet cafe which has much higher overhead and startup costs, and already has a lot of competition. If you know of anyone with an old playstation or games that they're willing to donate, send me an email!