Fascinating....

how people land up here that is....

I've never really gone into the Feedjit stats on my blog before but lately I have and I have to say....some people are WIERD man!!!!

The latest google search that directed here was "google look for my girlfriend uganda ladies in africa". ????!!!??? Eh???? I wonder what the searcher was hoping to find? A long lost friend? A Ugandan girlfriend?
Another search was "why do pigs have big ears" - guess where that directed the searcher to. :-)

I also get a LOT of hits from Google from searches on "Malan family" - maybe I should put up a link to the Huguenot website? Here it is..... http://www.museum.co.za/genealogy.html

My post about NGO's gets a lot of hits from searches relating to NGO's / Africa / Uganda etc which is hardly surprising I guess.

Most of my hits are either direct, in other words, someone has come directly to this blog which means they have bookmarked it / typed in the address or from expat-blog.com .

Then, I'm continually amazed at the countries that I get hits from too. A lot of them are from Australia, New Zealand and USA although most are from SA. However, there is the odd one or two that come from places I've never heard of like Sao Domingos or Arhus???

Very hits are from Africa - is that because I'm not interesting to Africans or because most Africans don't readily have access to the internet? Oh and by the way - YES, I do know SA is in Africa....

What did we do before the internet?

I cannot imagine life without the internet....generally, if I want to know something, I want to know NOW!! I don't want to have to wait until Monday morning when the library is open and spend three hours trying to find the right reference book. Don't get me wrong - libraries are great. There's nothing nicer than curling up in bed with a good book, a bar of chocolate and a cup of tea. It's just not the same curling up in bed with your laptop - I know, I've tried....LOL!!!

On another note....another story about "the sponge" as I'm starting to call him - today he counted to five in SPANISH!!!! Maybe I should cut down on the amount of Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go dvd's he watches huh?

Now imagine there was no internet and I was telling you this story - you'd have to trot off to the library to find out who Dora and Diego are :-)

NGO's, foreign aid and other do gooders....

This is one of my favourite topics....NOT!!! I usually have to go off and take a couple of Calmettes after I have ranted about them!!!

NGO's in my opinion (which is very much an outsiders opinion since I do not work for one and only know people who work at / with them) should be required to adhere to at least SOME economic principals like ummmm errrr maybe, waste not want not??

I'd LOVE to know if the American / German / Swedish / Danish taxpayer knows that their tax dollars are going towards paying for a 7 bedroomed house for a single woman with no children or the brand new Toyota Landcruiser that comes with a driver to drive this "do gooder" around.

I have NOOOO idea what a landcruiser costs at the moment but I'll bet the cost of it would feed a family for an entire year!!! A 7 bedroomed house costs in the region of $3000 - $5000.....wonder how many children could get vaccinated for that every month!!! How many cancer patients could get treated for a fraction of what that big house costs every month??

A friend of mine (whose husband, funnily enough works for an NGO enabling farmers to earn an income through sustainable agriculture) was telling me about a documentary by a filmmaker called Renzo Martens

For two years, Dutch artist Renzo Martens traveled around Congo, from the capital of Kinshasa to deep into the interior. Employing a casual film style, camera in hand, he roves through the poverty-fighting industry in the post-civil war country and regularly appears onscreen himself. He films UN peacekeepers in their SUV's supporting an international company to exploit a gold; corpses of gold-digging rebels, surrounded by Western photographers, white relief workers happily photographing the recipients of their emergency aid, with their logo on every canvas tent they hand out; a large landowner at a photo exhibition looking at pictures of his day labourers, who don't even earn enough to feed their children. It all amounts to one conclusion: poverty is there to stay, and 'fighting it' is an industry of which the poor benefit very little. Martens then launches a self styled emancipation programme: he teaches the Congolese poor that 'images of poverty' are their countries most lucrative natural resources. Under Martens' guidance, local photographers start photographing malnourished children instead of wedding parties.

Source: www.idfa.nl

I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of it. It's called Enjoy Poverty so if anyone knows where I can get it....please let me know!!

Then you get the REAL do-gooders like Letha (who, I'm proud to say, is my friend). Letha came to Uganda a few years ago with her husband who is a doctor and actually wanted to make a difference so she set up Wrap Up Africa. Basically - she enables parents of pediatric cancer patients to earn some income to save their child's life by teaching them to sew skirts which she then buys back. She set this up with mostly her own funds and continues to run it on her own with very little help and the odd grant here and there. I'm not going to go on and on about it but my point is, how come they live in a tiny house, pay their son's school fees, pay for their own flights home, put their own money into Wrap Up Africa while other "do-gooders" live in a mansion, get three flights home every year, get school fee's paid for as many children as they want and do arb things like assess the assessments of other NGO's and donate stupid things like tv's to people that don't have electricity!!!

It just doesn't make economic sense....

Ok - I'm getting off my soap box now and headed to the medicine box to pop a couple of calmettes.

Children are like little sponges....

Remember the other day I posted about Nicholas saying "you must give me the recipe for this?" well yesterday Jason astounded me!!!

He and Nicholas were playing but Jason was getting irritated because Nicholas was being obtuse (which he can be sometimes) so Jason growled at him and said "je te mange!!!!!" Loosely translated means I will eat you LOL!!!

So here's the background.....It's Francophone week next week at school and Year 1 are doing a French rendition of Little Red Riding Hood at assembly and Nicholas is Le Loup (the wolf). So he has some lines to learn and has been learning them in the car / in the bath / after mealtimes that sort of thing...mostly while Jason is around as well :-) . So being the little sponge that he is....he's obviously learning the lines too!!!!!

Jeeeeez - yesterday was an onion day of note!!

I'm STILL offline at home by the way....but at least I've got a 3G modem (which is a story in itself) so I will get around to all your e-mails and updating Facebook etc.

Cars in Uganda are usually cast offs from either Japan or Dubai so you have no idea what their history is. They CERTAINLY don't have a full service history or even manuals in them!! I lie - mine DOES have a manual but it's in Japanese and Nicholas likes to read it every now and then. So anyway when we got to Uganda we bought a little two door diesel Pajero which goes like the clappers and I do actually like it BUT.....it's a portable smoke machine. It started belching black / white smoke (depending on if it's idling or driving) a few months ago but it's going to cost about 4 million shillings to fix (about R21 500) which we REALLY don't have at the moment. (Or ever for that matter). So now everytime I go someone's house or am in a parking lot, just before I start it I say a little prayer that it won't belch tooo much smoke and apologise in advance for any smoke it might belch. So yesterday I'm on my way to Kindergarten to drop Jason and I bump into a friend who jokingly says

"Hi!! We were behind you in the traffic this morning. Well, I think it was - there was a big cloud of black smoke and we got a peak of red every now and then ha ha ha ha"

Hmpfh!!! Needless to say I was rather embarassed about it and had a good cry all the way to work!

Then....because we've been down for sooooo long (internet wise I mean :-) )I eventually asked if I could please annex his (Mike's) 3G modem for home and was told that it hasn't been working for the last few weeks but they've narrowed it down to the problem being with the sim card. FABULOUS....I'll quickly trot off to Rwenzori Courts (UTL's Head office) and get them to simply do a sim swap! HAHAHAHAHAHA!! I should have know....a) quickly is not a word that should be used in the same sentence as anything to do with Uganda and b)neither is simply. So, smoke machine and I brave the lunchtime traffic in downtown Kampala and get to UTL where I LUCKILY found a parking space in the visitors parking!! Life is looking up I think!! I tootle inside to the customer care desk where I know Victor and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and seethe, and imagine what I'm going to say to him when he gets back to his desk. EVENTUALLY one of the other chappies behind the counter(I think me tapping my car keys on the desk was irritating him actually) comes and asks if he can help! Can you see me rolling my eyes??????!!! Anyway - I explain the situation to him and he tells me that Victor will be able to help me but he's out at a customer at the moment and he's the only one that can help me. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!! So I had a little thrombie in the customer care office and stormed out. I even REVVED my engine when I started it so the smoke would blow into their office!!! My trusty little smoke machine :-)....

To get out of the visitors parking lot, you drive through the tenants parking but I was so angry I needed to vent so I phoned Mike who suggested I go up to the first floor to see Harriet who is his account person. (Mike's company spends about $9000 a month with UTL so he gets an account person....) So I park (yes, in the tenants parking) and storm into the building with one of the security guards running behind me to tell me that I can't park there. I think the fire coming out of my nose scared him off because he left me alone after I told him I don't care. LOL!!! I eventually find the first floor (the stairs were hidden ok??!!!) and demand to see Harriet who then ushers me into the sales manager's office and offers me coffee / cappucino / tea / water / soda / ANYTHING?

To cut a long story short....I had a serious rant at the sales manager about the lack of communication from UTL who totally agreed with me and then got me a new 3G sim card AND modem (just in case). So now, I'm back online. Yippeeeeeeeeeee!!!

"Oh hang on a second, isn't Victor the only one that can help with 3G?" I hear you asking. Welcome to my world!!

So, I'm happy now, and I've been introduced to the entire customer care team and I tootle off back to my smoke machine only to find I've been clamped!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

*sigh*

I've been offline again...this time for almost 10 days!! So much for UTL's turnaround time of 48hours on faults!

I haven't been ignoring e-mails etc....just so you know ;-)

Some arb stuff....

1. Nicholas is totally Star Wars mad. If he could, he would watch all 6 Star Wars movies one after another every day AND then watch The Clone Wars!!! So totay he's playing with his Zoob and he built a pod racer and then a Light Sabre but the sound effects that he makes with them are AMAZING!!! What is it about little boys that they just KNOW how to make that noise that sounds JUST like a light sabre slicing through the air or a pod racer swishing over the dunes?? The multicoloured thing in the picture is Obi-Wan Kenobi's spaceship by the way.....

2. Jason is now nappyless even at night!! It's such a bittersweet time for me because I had to clear out all the cute dungarees and sleepsuits that he used to wear. So - no more nappy changing for me. I'm glad but I'm sad.