28th June First week

Have had a great first week here in Uganda. Had the Monday off to recover. Doing all those flights one after the other is hard work. Managed to sleep on the flight from KL to Dubai and felt really good by the time I got to Dubai. Was going to take a night-time night and day flu tablet to help me sleep but by the time we left the ground I was a sleep. Had a headache in Dubai and found some panadol to buy. I think that was more because I was so tired. On the Monday I climbed up in the roof of the Grainger’s house as none of the lights in the living room area worked (apparently since they had been here). Traced the fault out to isolate two lights and left it at that. I have never seen such bad wiring in all my life. There are wires twisted together for joins and exposed and metal cable clips lying across phases. How the power ever works in this country I will never know. I have 2 hot water cylinders to look at yet.

Packed the car up and went to Lawero on Tuesday. Experienced my first night in the village. No worries just like staying down the farm sheds at home. We finished concreting the fence posts in on the Wednesday. On the Wednesday when we got up the living area outside was crawling in large red ants. We were fighting them with ash fire and a can of fly spray. (I lit the fly spray so it was more of a flame thrower and it seem to work well.) Deane was too scared to do it. We have a video of it so we might be able to get it home at some stage.
Heading back on Monday to start the wiring of the fences. We have to go to Kampala, load a truck with 66 rolls of barb wire and follow it out there it make sure it all gets there. Will be there till Thursday when we need to be back to pick up a team of 11 from the States.

Ryan (Shannon’s brothers friend who we picked up from the airport Thursday night) and I went down to Makono to get a bar made up for reeling the wire out this week. Deane and Sherrilyn went and to Paul's (One of the locals living with Shannon) school for parent interviews so they dropped us off down there and we got a Boda back.

We went and got tyres and rims for Shannon’s vehicle yesterday all day job. But there was a gas station there and I brought us all a drink 4 x 500ml bottles for 4000 shillings. Zach had spotted a place where you get 800 shillings for an empty so the drink cost 200 shilling ~18c NZ. So I decided to buy a crate. This gets better. They charged me 15900 shillings for 20 bottles. And 4000 shillings for the plastic crate. I keep the crate if Zach is right with the empty bottle price the coke has cost me nothing.

I am not going to buy a phone at this stage. Deane and I are going to be working together all the time so they have said I can use their phone whenever I want. So if you want to text me use that number.

The internet is working on my computer at this stage but the connection speed here is painfully slow. Yesterday morning was the best we had had at 2.3kb/s but most of the time it is 1-3b/s.