A Tour of our Neighbourhood

Today we are going to go on a little trip through our neighbourhood so you can see what we see everyday.

Many of the roads in residential areas are not paved. We have driven in some areas with very large and expensive houses, but roads that are not paved and in some cases, can barely be called roads. We travel on this road quite frequently on the way to our friends' home. Just a note for those who were on the Faith Baptist 2012 trip- the church where we did the seminar day is about 500 metres from our friends' house.
In this picture, you can see that the truck is full of pineapples. They are very plentiful here and are sold out of the back of trucks, or often wooden carts along the road. For a nice, big, fresh, sweet, juicy pineapple (larger than any we see at home and much tastier too) we pay 1000 to 2500 shillings (between 40 cents and $1) depending on where and when we purchase it. That is going to be one of the hardships of returning home- having to drive to the store (instead of just stopping on the road) to buy a pineapple that is not fresh and costs way more! My children think I am going to get thrown out of the store when I try bartering for my pineapple at Safeway!

The young man in the picture below has one of the wooden carts that I spoke about, but he is not selling pineapple, he is selling sugar cane. It is a yummy treat that is in abundance here. Of course, they also make sugar with it, which tastes much different than our sugar.

Women (and sometimes men) walking down the street with things balanced on their head is something else that we see everyday. I have always been amazed at how much they can carry and the ease with which they do it. From the time they are very small they begin to carry things in this way. When you see them hauling water, the little girls will have smaller water containers and as they grow, they carry bigger containers. They learn how to adjust their body movements to keep the load from falling off their  head. That is the problem when we try to carry something on our heads, our bodies are rigid. They keep their bodies nice and loose and adjust as they need to to keep the load on their heads. I still can't do it, but I am learning the body mechanics of how the Ugandans do it.

It has been a long time (over two months) since we have had a good rain so it is very dusty everywhere. As we drive down this road you can see how the dust is just sitting on the leaves of the plants, covering them and causing them to appear orange.

We are very fortunate that we have paved streets all the way to our apartment (unless we come in "the back way"). Our friends tell us that we must have someone important living on our street (I think they mean besides us). We have paved streets and when our potholes appear, they get fixed quickly. Here is the way to our place...

Now you know the way! This is a picture of the building we live in with Greg sitting in our vehicle waiting to get in the gate.

That's a quick little tour of our neighbourhood. Next we will take pictures from our balcony and show you what we see when we look out the front and the back of our apartment. I wish you could hear the sounds- it would make it so much better. Or, when you are trying to sleep...so much worse!