Had some fun painting this weekend. I've got a couple of drawing projects on the go, but a friend of mine reminded me of the existence of goache paints. I knocked out some quick colour studies from my walk last week. I love it when the sky is dark and cloudy but there's still light coming from somewhere and makes such a contrast between the heavy sky and bright earth.
It's still raining here, and has been for over a week (although ironically it won't be enough to fix the drought we're in!) so all my doodles right now seem to include rain. It does make everything smell good after though.
My extremely talented friend Mark Watson performed his brand spanking new, comedy routine as part of the British Young Juggler of the Year competition at the British Juggling Convention 2012 in Southend. Most juggling acts you see are purely the juggler showing off their dexterity with the clubs and balls. Some will have a gimmick, a theme or outfit, usually to a musical backing, but never before have I seen an act that combines juggling and a comedy act!.
So go to Mark's Tumblr and say hi. He's a a great guy, is completely dedicated to his juggling, and is apparently a bit of a comedy genius too!
Had a hankering to go down Loughborough canal, so I donned my trusty raincoat and walking boots and set off into the drizzle! Being out of the country for a fortnight, great as it was, meant I've missed a chunk of our own spring so I didn't want to leave it another week before I got out there and saw what I'd missed. Good thing I did! Taking a leaf out of Rima Staines' book, literally, I took home my pictures to try and identify all the new plants I found. I did pretty well!
So half of England has officially been declared in drought, and as if the sky somehow heard we've had rain every day for the past week. It won't be enough to fix everything all in one go, but it's a good start.
I actually really enjoy rain (moreso when I'm heading home or when I've planned for it than not) and watching it out the window is always a joy. For some reason this last week it's made me want to draw, and I've certainly had the inspiration!
Today we flew home. The entertainment system was working on the plane this time round, so after more gawping at the extravagant nature of the technology we settled down and blocked out the flight with stories. I managed to make my way through Doctor Who – Let's Kill Hitler, Sherlock – The Hounds of Baskerville, The Lion King (trust me to go for the kids channel!), and The Artist, which I’d been meaning to watch for a while, but this marathon included regular stops to stare out of the plane window some more. With this flight in daylight I could make sense of what I'd seen in the dark on the way over, and most of it was desert. The plane approximately follows the path of the Nile north, so we few over first the Libyan Desert, and then the mighty Sahara. Seeing the empty vastness and the shifting dunes below I felt like a character from a Tintin book. I've never seen anything like it.
Sunrise at Entebbe airport, our last morning in Africa
Most of this morning was the mad race to finish the posters for Susan. Apart from a quick Scrabble break to give the Sharpies a chance to recover and get the marker fumes out of my lungs I got them all done by 3pm. Susan was out of her office so I dropped them off with a colleague instead. I also got a chance to sneak a peek at Mum and Emma's puppetry lesson.
One of the 10 posters. There's an 18 letter word in one of them. Seriously! 18 letters!
The Kabubbu puppetry class, passing with flying colours
First, can I just tell you about the nights here? When I learned we would be coming to a rural area I assumed the nights here would be quiet. Instead they are filled with the sounds of birds, frogs and bugs all ticking and whistling and chirping and chirruping together. Beyond that is the occasional howling chorus of the village dogs and tonight the sound of a loudspeaker down at the trading centre. As for what I can see, the security lights in the resort are still on but every few seconds the sky to the east is lit up with a phenomenal brightness that can only be distant lightning, too far away down the valley for us to hear the epic thunder that will be accompanying it. Above the stars are bright, if a hazy, but I can only spot one constellation I am familiar with – Orion – and he is bent over on his side like an old man.
We stopped en route to the Nile to check out some waterfalls. An astonishing volume of water.
Puppets at the assembly today, which went down really well. Dad was telling the story rather than doing it to a CD track or song, so there was more leeway to react to the audience and make time for comedy. When the farmer in our story scattered the seed we were able to lob real seed at them, and when he waters the crop we sprinkled real water out of the watering can!
No school today so it's off to the orphanage for decorating. Two rooms are done now so we were sanding and plastering and putting the base coat on the new room. We'll add the colour on the lower half tomorrow.
From start...
...to finish
As usual there were kids milling around, most of them with good English despite being only 7 years old. I find I enunciate more here, avoiding slang and borrowing some of their sounds to emphasise things (“Ehhhh!?”). Sue and I were chatting and I got to try out some of the words I'd learned from Ruth's kids.
Do-keh - Banana tree
Nyoomba – House
Gaar – Bicycle
Coco – Chicken
My teachers. From left to right: Nurugambe, Grace, Chiaga, Sandra and Christine
Happy Easter! Eh Bible eh gamba owakabaka bwa katona boli bo-fe (dodgy phonetics mine!), which means 'The Bible says “The Kingdom of Heaven is within us.”' Today I went to an Easter Sunday service in Kabubbu, held in the high school hall, and found this to be very true. Our hosts graciously did the speaking parts of the service in English for our benefit and then translated them over to the congregation. Most of the songs were in Ugandan, but even though I couldn't understand the words I felt very much a part of the community then as I could easily read their posture and expression – they looked just the same as we do when we worship God back home and it really reminded me that these people are not just my hosts or interesting foreigners to be observed, but my brothers and sisters in Christ. Although we've never met, we are family.
Enoch did the sermon and he was great. Very funny guy. Also this year marked the 6th Anniversary of him and Lilian coming to Kabubbu. It was a real honour to be able to join the rest of the church in reaching out a hand and praying for them. Whatever language we were using, we were all speaking under the authority of the same God. Felt very privileged. God is great!
Lie-in this morning, which was good as we had judged correctly and all had backs aching horrifically. We did a puppet show at 10am for the kids from the lower school who were brought over specially and really enjoyed it. Of course they didn't understand most of the words, but they loved all the visual stuff, the dancing and actions and pictures, and Dad was on hand with their teacher to explain what was going on. They'd seen puppets before but not quite like this and we could hear them all laughing from behind the stage.
Assembly at Kabubbu primary school
The William Parker lot were off visiting the Nile today so lunch was pretty quiet, and afterwards we had to discuss what we wanted to get for Ruth as part of the Development Challenge. Geraldine was there to ask all the difficult questions and we had asked Enoch, the director of the project, about prices. In some ways it was good because haggling over what we could and couldn't do with the time and resources we'd been given brought it home to me that this wasn't just an engaging game, we were affecting a real family so we had to do our very best.
So today we were brick-throwing, forming a human chain from the bottom of the hill where the truck dumps the large clay bricks, to the top of the slope. They are for the locals digging a new latrine pit for the boys dormitories at the high school. It's basically a hole the size of the pickup truck that goes down about 40ft. They are layering the bricks round the inside of it, walking happily along scaffolding made of bamboo and old planks. We worked from 8:30pm until about 11:30 then went to watch the high school's sports day. It was good work once we got ourselves organised, although there were a few accidents; blisters, and bricks thrown badly and dropped on toes. It was the biggest brick team of the week and the weather cloudy and cool today, but I have major respect for the William Parker lot who have been at it for four consecutive days. I'm not physically tired, but I think I'll feel it in my muscles tomorrow.
Latrine building in progress.
Our brick throwing chain. Some of the local kids got stuck in too, and hauled clay like the best of us.
Attended the primary school assembly this morning and watched the William Parker Sixth Formers that are also visiting this week do a play for the kids. Stories seem to be popular, so it's encouraging for the puppet show we’re putting on later in the week. Still not sure how the songs will go down as they are in English and, although most of the kids can speak it well enough to hold a conversation it’s not their first language.
Inside my shared banda, with mosquito nets above the beds
Our banda is really neat. It's a little hut with a surprisingly large bathroom and mosquito net above the bed. It's strangely nice to sleep under a net, like having your own little tent, although the chance of mozzies is slim here because of the cut grass and lack of standing water. The water we use comes from the borehole pumps or the rain collection tanks. There are bugs though, lots of them. The main ones are giant flying ants who seek out light and then drop their wings. There are piles of wings all over the place but when they're in flight they're really quite beautiful.
So here I am 33,000ft above the Mediterranean Sea, heading south to Entebbe airport in Uganda. I've got a wing seat, which is always my favourite – I've not flown scores of times but I do usually seem to end up near the wing. It never ceases to amaze me that those two flat planes of wing can lift a massive metal bucket off the ground.
After 3 hours the TV channels have finally started working, and while this wasn't a huge problem as this is a night flight and we'd kind of got used to the idea, I had just exhausted the dozen or so crosswords in Mum's magazine, so that's good! Chances are it'll break again in a bit [It did.] Either way this will be my last bit of telly for a week and a half, which I'm actually quite pleased about. Although there is phone signal in Kabubbu I won't be using it. In fact there's a couple of things that are already pleasing me about this trip:
The answer you're looking for is "Gyendi!" ("Hi, how are you?" "Fine thanks"), at least if you're where I've just been. I've just returned to the lovely drizzly British Isles after spending ten days in the significantly hotter, but equally wet (it's the rainy season) jungles of Uganda, where I've been volunteering with the Quicken Trust in a village called Kabubbu. They like their visitors to get stuck into life in the village, which is just how I like it - our family don't really do spectator holidays!- so I've been throwing bricks and painting walls, playing international Tug'O'War, eating (and for the most part heartily enjoying) every bit of food put in front of me, and walked everywhere surrounded by a gaggle of small clingy children whose English is surprisingly good!
Making new friends!
A typical house in Kabubbu
Uganda is an amazing place. From meeting with Geoff and Geraldine Booker from the Quicken Trust I did have some idea of what I might see before I went out there and was surprised to find that I wasn't particularly shocked by anything, as I expected to be. With hindsight I think that the media portrayal of African countries by the West is often very sensationalist, and even with doing some background reading before I went out my understanding was not good. Some of the people I met on my travels were in heartbreaking situations and hardships, but I also met a vibrant and character-ful community who were resourceful, hard-working, and more welcoming to us mzungu (foreigners) than most of us in the west remember how to be. That side of things doesn't get shown on the news very often. On the plus side, not knowing what to expect meant that I got to see everything with fresh eyes. It's funny how you go to a new place and the things that strike you the most are the ones that make you reflect on life back home.
The outskirts of Kampala, Uganda's capital
I've come back with a head full of stories and ideas, and as usual I've recorded the entire trip in words, photographs and drawings. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting it all up here, hopefully a new diary entry every few days as most of them are quite long.
Time is ticking down until I leave for Uganda after work tomorrow, but despite that I've still managed to have a very busy weekend. As well as helping out at the Tigerlilies Cancer Research fundraising group's first ever Easter Craft Fair, I've been going places, having fun, and tying up a few loose ends.
Movies
First things first, I went to the cinema on Friday! To watch this:
I only saw the trailer once and instantly knew it was just the kind of wacky time-wasting nonsense I'd been missing! Managed to get my friend Disco, -also a connoisseur of the bizarre- to come with me, and wore my pirate hat in the cinema for the entire film. It was great! Aardman have a history of producing stop-motion films with a very 'British' sense of humour; Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, and TV's Creature Comforts, however I was worried they'd lost the plot slightly with Flushed Away which kept the humour but tried to use CGI to replicate the look of the plasticine figures they are so famous for. Even with today's high standard of CGI there's just nothing like a 'real' object or person to carry a performance and I felt it lost something in the attempt. With Pirates! however, they were back on form, using plasticine models for the characters and close-up sets, while using CGI to enhance the performance with green-screen backgrounds and a very convincing ocean, rather than try to carry it the weight of the acting. The first two thirds were very good, with some excellent laughs, and then it the final third it really stepped it up and accelerated into Outright Brilliant. Disco and I were cracking up over and over, and may I humbly suggest to you that you simply haven't lived until you've seen an irate Queen Victoria arrive on scene by way of being folded into a Dumb-Waiter. The expression on her little face was priceless!
Drawing
Also, I finally got round to drawing down what I remember from my night walk up Bradgate hill. In the moonlight it was a very surreal sight and it really stuck in my brain.
Outdoors
This morning, after helping out with the kids group at church (always a fun challenge!) my friend Tatyana and I headed off to Bradgate Park for an aimless wander and some cookies sat in my favourite tree. It's such a peaceful place to be, and a great spot for finding shots that just seem to jump out at you.
Looking up - a tree trunk from the inside
I still can't believe how many deer there are there, and how chilled out they are about you wandering around - provided you don't get to close. When they stop and look at you, you know not to go any closer or they'll just run off... although this wasn't obvious to everybody. We saw one leash-less Scottie dog get out of hand and send the entire herd running, followed by two separate groups of wanderers who just didn't understand when to leave well alone. It was both amusing and a bit pathetic, but became funny again when a hi-vis-wearing warden stomped over to give them what for. Justice, we both agreed, had been served.
Tree climbing. Naturally!
Tatyana's one of those people I'm always pleased to bump into,but don't often get to spend a lot of time with, which is a shame as she's such a fun girl! What's that thing? -let's go find out! The path goes this way? -we should go the other way! You hungry? -I brought cookies! Definitely doing this again :)
Dinner
And finally, tonight it was my turn to host a Come Dine With Me for my housemates. My melty Camembert cheese with toasty bread and cranberry sauce, veggie-friendly Sausage Casserole, and Brownie goo with ice cream failed to beat Natalie's Peach Cobbler but I totally expected that because it was divine. In the end I got a respectable score with extra points for presentation (I love my flowers! Half of them came from the shop, half from an obliging bush) and for my entertainment being massive boingy balloons!! We get along really well and always have a laugh, so it's nice to deliberately decided to have that time put aside just to hang out together, and to serve each other with tasty food.
Spent my Saturday volunteering at the Tigerlilies Cancer Research fundraising group's first ever Easter Craft Fair! After all their hard work the day seemed to go really well, and I'm so pleased and proud of all the time and effort they put into it, and how nicely it all came off. I was assigned to the kids activity table, which I obviously loved. I'd already helped decorate some biscuits to sell, some more imaginatively than others...
"You're a chicken, Harry!"
The Craft Fair was held at the Fabrika IAC (independent arts centre) in Leicester, a venue for arts and culture events. I actually attended the launch three years ago as part of a group doing circus skills to draw in the foot traffic, so it was really nice to see a few familiar faces and catch up on how the place was doing. Having found it again I'll be very interested to see some of the events coming up there in the future.
