Hit me up in 9,751 days

Hi. My name is Tumwijuke. I live under a rock.

I’ve just be informed, nay guaranteed, that I’ll be an attractive single, wealthy, healthy pensioner. It’s been sewed-up, sealed and certified. Good times ahoy! Well. In 9,751 days.

From the mouth of babes …

Uganda Vision 2040: It’s a sure deal for our future!

Modern hospitals, many jobs, clean cities, RICHES, good roads …

We shall all be winners!

Yeah!

No, really. It is that simple.

And this …

More five star hotels in all parts of Uganda by 2040 …

Less congestion in cities of Uganda by 2040 …

A rich country with a strong convertible currency …

Ahem.

Plentofminroz

Freshi wohta

Plentof fahtile laaand

With these investments, backed by possitive (sic) atitudes (sic), political will and commitment, this Uganda Vision 2040 shall be achieved.

We shall all be winners!

Yeah!

Of course you can get a different view from Daily Monitor‘s Daniel Kalinaki, from his column this week: Forget Vision 2040; Give Me Vision 2016 or Give Me Siasa. 

Down at the pensioners’ island paradise, we’ll laugh at his cynicism and short-sightedness and he won’t be allowed onto our yacht.

A Celebratory Condemnation of Superficiality and Swagg

It is so uninventive of me to enter this echo chamber to gripe about superficiality. After all, my lack of depth is the reason this blog exists.

Still, ngaha, New Vision. No.

To quote the primary audience of you awful teen magazine, Swagg, “I have jaw.”

Never read Swagg in the Saturday Vision? Let me school you.

Swagg is little more than a random photo gallery of social events from elite schools in two or three towns around Uganda.  Attempts are made to spice up the mediocre centre spread with picture captions that are totally bereft of wit and imagination and every accompanying joke falls flat.

But really, I have no problem with second-rate photos of entitled teens enjoying social events at schools at which, I admit, I studied. Seeing yourself in the media, I’ve been told, is a great way to connect with them in the future. It’s frail cheap marketing opportunity to a generation that can read, but won’t.

Not even the bad humor annoys me. It’s everything else that gets my goat.

With no hint of irony, today’s Swagg listed the “Weakest jobs in UG.” I read the article twice, in case I had missed the twist in the story. I hopelessly searched for something, anything to let me know it was another bad joke.

Fortunately or unfortunately, most of you are in school. It’s just one of those things society just forces on us … So as yet another public service, I present to you the jobs you should avoid. Here are the most suicidal jobs in Uganda.

Why Swagg? Why?

Don’t Read This. Read This.

This is my frigging eye.

Yes, that’s how beautiful I am.

Now on to more pressing matters.

Like?

Like looking me in the eye. Yes you, Valder IKnowThat’sNotYourRealName Larka. Look me in my beautiful bug-eyed glory and tell me the truth.

The truth about whether you really were an adventurous Swedish teen introduced to Museveni’s war in Uganda in the 1980s. That as a misguided youth you truly served as the personal bodyguard of a head honcho in the Kenyan police. That you left the comfort of your father’s home and a place at a prestigious university to fight alongside the disparate gang of guerillas in eastern, (or was it) central, (or was it) northeastern Uganda.

Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t lying when you describe crossing into Uganda from Kenya on a canoe down a long, winding river. And the massacre of the family of an undercover UN-worker-cum-guerilla-sympathizer. And your baby conceived somewhere in close proximity to a jacaranda tree. And the brutal slaughter of the Ugandan goddess who stole your heart.

And the wise bushman from southern Africa who spoke to you in proverbs and taught you more about yourself than anyone else. And the white South African mercenaries who fought on Museveni’s side, and the Ethiopian gunman, and …

Look me in the eye because there’s no way other way I can believe you.

You, Mr. Larka, provide me with neither the names, places, dates nor times that you allegedly fought with Museveni’s National Resistance Army in Uganda. A lone white man, fighting a black war; conspicuous, you would think. So why does no one know your name?

Swimming Our Way to Diversity

This is the team Uganda sent to Cana Zone 3 & 4 Swimming Championships in Maputo.

Photo credit: New Vision

We haven’t had this much diversity on a national sports team since the early 1960s. There’s something oddly intriguing about it …

Of Oil, Stones and Wisdom in Uganda and My White Men Zombies

zom.bie noun \ˈzäm-bē\

: my learning, my living, my growing

: Homo Coprophagus Somnambulus

: a mixed drink made of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice

***

Here lies Arthur Delmar Combe: prolific mineralogist, volcanologist and petrologist.

You are excused if you have never heard of A. D.  After all, who was he but the man for whom the mineral ‘combeite’ was named? So what if the discovery combeite in 1957 has led to important medical developments in biocompatible bone restorations as well as numerous orthopedic and dental innovations?

The sinking, stinking Entebbe European Cemetery is the final resting place for this former Assistant Director at the Uganda Geological Survey who had  a heart for the ageless stories of stones. The beautiful black block of Ankole granite used to fashion his headstone was a loving tribute to his pioneering work in mapping the crater lakes of southwestern Uganda and his discovery of potash-rich deposits in Toro.

Now, like much of Uganda’s inglorious past, Arthur Delmar Combe lies forgotten … and we wake to a grey dawn.

I have discovered pitifully little about A. D. Combes. An excerpt in the journal Nature from July 16, 1949 sheds some light:

Weeping for My White Men Zombies

Despair? No. Emptiness. No! Fancy? Maybe doom … maybe fortitude.

Mourned at the graves in the European Cemetery in Entebbe. Saw the face of inevitability, not in my mortality, but again and again in the shameful decrepitude of my nation.

They are not my zombies, but they are. Not my past, but my wretchedness.

… When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

- William Shakespeare; from Sonnet LXIV

Entebbe European Cemetery: The perfect idyllic resting place …

... so idllyic that a shallow, open public piss palace has been erected on it.

***

zom.bie  noun \ˈzäm-bē\

usually zombi

1. : my past, my reality, my end
2. : a mixed drink made of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice

***

Isn’t It About Time?

Seriously? Take it down already, Mr. Wava.

Dear Uganda: Dream or Death?

So Gaddafi is dead.

Time to move on to Greater Things.

Or not. Or Paradise Lost.

Adam inquires concerning celestial motions, is doubtfully answered, and exhorted to search rather things more worthy of knowledge.

Greater things like the “Magnetohydrodynaic Instabilities in Accretion Discs in Close Binary Systems: Study of the Anomalous Low State of the X-ray Binary Hercules X-1.”

Which is my way of saying that tonight was a great night to live in Uganda.

Due to the combined wonder of a five-hour blackout, a stubborn foul smell under my fridge, the gift of a Manu Dibango album and the marvelous Google Sky Map app I was forced to seek the solace of the stars. A beautiful exile it was.

For three hours I was treated to the spectacle of the Orionid meteor shower. A breathtaking celestial echo that resonates with my soul.

Resonates, Or so I wish.

Alas, I am no Milton. The dismal education I received at the hands of the Ugandan school system means poetry was taught as a non-essential and astronomy was for dreamers and fairies. A system that faithfully churns out unimaginative, shallow, unthinking, bland Ugandans.

Thankfully,

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Real Beauty, Real Heroes

((You know you’ve hit blog nirvana when you are called a ‘hater’.))

I’m on my way out of Bundibugyo.  The only reason I am returning to Krazy Kampala is that I ran out of money yesterday and my stupid pride won’t allow me to live on charity for more than one day.

I leave Bundibugyo at a loss for words on the Ebola epidemic.

What can I say about a people so poor and yet so brave; so frail and yet so strong?  What can I say about the medics, who despite their limited experience and the absence of equipment fought to contain a disease that baffled even the greatest among them?  What can I say about the more than 100 local volunteers, who receiving nothing but a small lunch allowance, traverse the mountains of this remote district to educate the population about Ebola, report new cases and struggle through the rough terrain to bring the sick to hospital?

What can I say about the Real Heroes … 

… and the Real Beauty of the magnificent desolate Bundibugyo?  

Sempaya Hot Springs

Semliki River Valley (on the other side of the river is the DRC)

Mbale Records its First Ebola Death

The first suspected Ebola death outside Kampala City and the Rwenzori Mountains region has been recorded at Mbale Hospital.  Olive Esther Mukite, the Sironko District Information Officer, died this evening at about 5 p.m.

Olive Mukite was admitted at Mbale Hospital this morning after displaying symptoms of Ebola and was quickly placed in an isolation ward. Henry Luigale, the Mbale Hospital Medical Superintendent, says Mukite and 65 councilors from Sironko returned from a study tour of Kisoro district on Friday last week.  He cannot say for sure that Mukite died of the disease and is awaiting a post mortem report from a team of medical experts from Kampala who will travel to Mbale tomorrow.  No case of the hemorrhagic fever has been reported in either Kisoro districts.

The staff at Mbale Hospital were completely unprepared for Ebola in their neck of the woods and several medical officers, including a nurse who was by Mukite’s side throughout her ordeal, have been put in isolation for observation.