Great news – OUR VEHICLE HAS ARRIVED THIS MORNING. Thanks to the very generous donations from the people of our church – Riverbend Bible Church, Hastings, NZ and a donation from SOS Ministries. The funds were transferred to Uganda and enabled the purchase of the vehicle, so once again many many thanks to all the kind and generous people that donated and became part of our “Mission” here in Mukono, Uganda.
We were very excited and decided it was a great opportunity to have a day out, Deane had a few quotes to get for the Luwero project and so we headed to Kampala – along the same road as 500,000 other people. There were so many broken dodwn trucks ont eh side of the road and the holdups were endless. We got to Kampala just on lunchtime so found a carpark and headed to Nando’s for lunch. We looked around a little at the shops and streets and went to buy a printer, so that we could get all the school work printed off for sending home. We had just about purchased a printer, when one of the salesman comes over and says, do you realise the printer only has a 5ml ink cartridge in it when you purchase it and the price of the cartridges are 120,000=/ each!! NZ$100 for a 5ml ink cartridge – more than the actual printer - so we put the printer back on the shelf and walked to our car.
We passed a ute load of council workers that were clamping a car, two back from ours – oh no we got to ours just in time, a local guy had told them we were on our way – we were illegally parked, not that there were signs or anything but imagine that - our first day with a vehicle and we could’ve had it clamped, I hhate to think how long it would’ve taken to get them back and unclamp it.
Next we headed to UTL to sort out our internet problem and my cellphone – internet can’t be fixed at this stage, todays story was that the copperwire for the connection to our house was stolen are people are exporting out of the country to make $$, yeah right!! Strange tho how Hurleys have internet 25m from our house and we cant get it connected to ours – Zach suggested to the lady he could get up on the roof and connect a wire from their house to ours!!! Not likely was the response. She promised we could go to UTL whenever we wanted and have FREE connections for as long as it takes – thats great but it is still 45minutes at least depending on the traffic from our house!!!
When then told her how my new UTL (Uganda Telecom Ltd) cellphone had just died after 4 weeks, she couldn’t believe it and directed us to another branch – 4 blocks down the road to collect a new one – anyway we walked there and the guy had to be phoned – he will be 30 minutes, hes coming on a boda boda!!!! Hot and stuffy sitting in this small sticky unairconditioned room and waiting. He arrived and said Oh I cant give you a new phone we have procedures, give me your phone and 2 hours and come back to collect it. We imagined having to get our way back in two hours so Deane said how about you meet us at Garden City (a mall by a hotel we know how to get to without getting lost) so he agreed.
Next we needed to go to see a fencing contractor – I headed north instead of south and we ended up in this street with 100,000’s people and at least 1,000 van taxis and the fuel tank had already been on empty for a longtime, I had got us lost. We moved along the street at snails pace and literally were bumper to bumper, side to side vehicles for 2-3kms. We had arrived at the old taxi park, everyone you tell laughs because you have to see it to believe it. Finally we got through, got fuel headed to Entebbee instead of Entebbee Road – LOST AGAIN but I must say everyone was very gracious, we had a good laugh and turned around and found the fencing contractors office – only 1 block from where we had originally setout 2.5 hours ago.
Loads of laughs at all sorts of things, got groceries and had dinner, headed home and finally arrived home after a days shopping basically - 10 hours later in the dark and rather tired.
