Half Way In

I am a magnet for gap year wallies. I only have to put one foot in an internet café, before one of them sits beside me and starts shouting into Skype about how they’ve just scored on the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Maybe Raleigh International are running a marketing ploy, giving volunteers a 10% discount if they go around sounding off about their sexual exploits. It can’t be enough just to build a school and follow in the footsteps of Ronan Keating, there also has to be a guarantee of copping off with someone who you were probably at the same school with anyway.

I am less a magnet for the Missionary types, who can probably see I’m already a lost cause. The Christian faith is impossible to ignore in Uganda. There is a shop called ‘Jesus is Lord’ on every street and someone preaching the bible on every corner - usually right opposite one of the many security guards casually slumped on a chair with a massive rifle across his knees. I suppose the more time you spend in a place the more you get used to all these things. This morning I passed a woman who was carrying something not dissimilar to a haystack on her head. There is nothing strange about that at all, except for in five weeks I’ll be back in a nation full of people with weak necks, who carry their daily load in the boot of a car.