Taxi Day

Last week I had a very exciting/scary/annoying day. To start off let me give some background info. The taxi’s in Uganda look like VW Buses and can hold 14 people (sometimes they hold more, one time I was in a taxi with 25 people…yes I did feel like a sardine). To get a taxi I just stand on the side of the road and hope that a taxi comes by going to the place that I need to go, which could take a long time. Or I could go to the taxi park, get a taxi and wait for it to fill up. Waiting for a taxi to fill up when it is empty could also take a long time, case in point, last week.
So my day started off waiting in the taxi park, with my friend Brellis, for about 45 minutes for the taxi to fill up. Finally it did and we were on the road to Jinja (about an hour away from Mukono). About 30 minutes into our drive, the taxi started to make a funny noise and it barely made it up the hill we were going up. On the downhill we were cruising and I thought it would keep going but once we hit another uphill the car stopped completely. Someone told me that the car ran out of gas and that is when people started yelling in Uganda and a fight broke out when a passenger wanted to exit the car. Once there was a break in the yelling and fighting, Brellis and I jumped out of the taxi quickly. I tried to ask what was going on but everyone spoke Luganda and my Luganda is very limited. Now there were about 17 people walking down the road (for all I knew they were walking the rest of the way to Jinja, probably a 30 min drive from here) but thank goodness they hailed another taxi and I just followed.
On our way back from Jinja is when it got interesting. We hopped in another taxi and to our dismay it was empty again. When we tried to get out after about 10 min, the driver shut the door and held it closed. At this point we were just annoyed so we kept telling him he needs to let us out. After being trapped in this taxi for about 45 min we finally started to get really upset because he wasn’t letting us out and he wasn’t driving back to Jinja. So the two of us started to yell at the driver, use a tiny bit of force and make enough of a ruckus that finally he started driving to Mukono. Honestly, though I was starting to get worried that the driver was going to keep us there for a few hours. He probably would have if we didn’t take action haha. It was an adventure last week.
Also there were a few bombs that exploded in Kampala, Uganda by Somali terrorists but it wasn’t in my city and I am doing ok.

Doing Laundry

I only have 2 weeks left in Uganda and guess what that means? No more hand washing laundry. I love the person who invented the washing machine. It might be one of the greatest inventions. To do laundry here I have to set aside at least 4 hours of my day (and that doesn’t included checking on the clothes throughout the day and putting them away) and I have to start in the morning so that my clothes have all day to dry. First, I have to fill up three huge buckets of water and carry them to the back of the house (maybe 20 ft). Then I have to scrub at my clothes, with two different detergents, for the next few hours to get any dirt and smells out. I have to change the water every half hour because it gets dirty quickly. I have calluses on my hands from all of the scrubbing. Then comes the easy part; rinsing and hanging the clothes. If it rains that day then it stinks because I have to bring my clothes inside to dry. I’m glad I didn’t bring more clothes. Ok, I can’t complain too much because there are a few good things about laundry. First, it gets your clothes extremely clean. Second, there are no machine costs just the cost of detergent so it is approximately 10 cents to do 20 loads of laundry (it’s sweet considering the fact that in America I pay $2 for one load). I just did my last load of laundry in Africa. It’s bittersweet really.