Today is Tuesday, and we’re still in Fang Fang hotel. We thought we’d be able to get into our new house on Sunday, but it turns out that we’ll be here for another four days or so.

As Jon chronicled, we found a furniture maker to make us a bed over the weekend. It’s a nicer bed than either of us have ever had. It’s being hand made out of local hardwood. We can’t remember what the wood is called, but it’s really quite pretty with a headboard that is slatted wood. It also has matching bedside tables, a good mattress (worthwhile, we decided since we’ll have it for several years), and they’ll also install the frame to our mosquito net and the net itself. We’re excited for it. However, it’ll take three weeks to build, and it is taking four days to get the mattress. And so we wait a little longer at the hotel. In the grand scheme, another few days isn’t bad, and in a lot of ways, it will help us out because we’ll have some more time to get appliances to the house. But as we approach two and a half months living in hotels, we’re really ready to be a little more settled, and have more than one room between us.

On Sunday, though, we went back over to the house and we brought two of our behemoth bags and our new kitchen stuff. We got just a little lost on the way over—we’re still learning how to describe to taxi drivers where we live—but we found it fairly readily. We got there a little before Colin, our landlord did, and so we had a little time to walk around the house together. There were still a number of workers painting and fixing things at the house. The woman who lived there before us had been there for five years, and so it’s nice that everything will be fresh when we move in. Also, Colin decided to take up some of the laminate flooring in the bedrooms and to put down tile. The tiles were done yesterday, and they’re very nice. In the kitchen, they’re replacing some of the drawers so that things are in good working order by the time we move in.

Yesterday we also had the strange experience of hiring a guard who will also do our gardening. Luckily we had just a little warning—Colin had given us a heads up that he had found a couple people that were recommended, and so he wanted us to meet them. However, we still didn’t have a clue on what the standards were (salary, if they live at the house, days on and off, etc). Colin gave us a quick briefing before they arrived to be interviewed, which really was to be hired.

The housekeeper, Teddy, from one of our neighbors’ houses brought her sister, Margaret, and her cousin, Godfrey over. Teddy has been working with the family she’s living with for the last 13 years and has been in their current house for the last five and the house next door to ours for three odd years before that. To us, that seemed good recommendation for her family members. Godfrey was presented to us as a guard and gardener. He will live in the little room behind our house. He has a high school education, though Senior 4, which is just before graduating in the British system. He has not completed his A-levels and so is not officially a high school graduate, but he’s quite close.

Although we’re a little uncomfortable with it, we know that we need a guard, and since I’ve been born with a notoriously brown thumb and Jon’s not much better, I’m afraid, a gardener is in order pretty quickly. We agreed on a price that Colin said was fair, and he’ll start on August 1. We’ll pay half this month’s salary upfront so that he can get himself a mattress and whatever else he needs to be comfortable in the uncomfortably little room he’ll be staying in. At least we’re uncomfortable with it…

We were still a little unclear about what we would need in terms of housekeeping. Since it’s just the two of us, we don’t need someone to help us everyday. We’ll have a washing machine, and so even the laundry is not as difficult as it maybe had seemed. However, I get the impression, as I’ve discussed with some of you before, that in hiring someone, we are giving a job, which is important. And given that, I won’t lie: It would be nice to have some help in mopping and dusting, etc. So once we’re a little settled, we’ll go find Teddy again and see if we can hire Margaret for one or two days a week.

The whole thing is the norm here, but not something that Jon and I have had any experience with, and so find bizarre and uncomfortable.

More positively, Jon and I also got to meet our neighbor. Our house is actually a duplex (a large one, but a duplex nonetheless). Samuel lives next door with his wife and their three small kids. I can’t remember now, but I think the oldest was about eight, the next five, and the last three. Samuel and his family are Ugandan, and he was both English- and American-trained as an engineer, I believe. He now has a consulting business that does something like auditing which he enjoys very much. We’re looking forward to meeting the rest of his family and to inviting them to dinner once we’re more settled (and have a table, perhaps). Colin’s house is across the street and just beyond that is the English family that Teddy works for.

Today we’ll try one more time to get appliances. Sunday we found a place where we can get refurbished refrigerators, stoves, and maybe washers. They were closed then (though people were clearly working, which found funny), but we went back yesterday after some other errands, only to realize that we hadn’t brought the directions to the house where they’ll be delivered, nor did we think through the fact that we would need money. So it was a false start, to be sure. Today, I think we ought to be able to finally get our act together and get things up to the house.

We’re learning. It’s a slow start, but we’re learning.

Written by Sarah in Life ~ CommentsFalse+Starts2008-07-29+05%3A10%3A31Sarah

So here we are in Kampala.

We’re officially starting our third full day.  It’s been a trip being here.  On Wednesday morning, our first day here, Jon and I went for a long walk around the city.  After we’d trekked through what I think is considered the largest taxi park on the continent, I turned to Jon and asked, “So, isn’t it wild that we’re actually living here?”  I think we were both a little bewildered, but we’ll get adjusted.  The city center is definitely busy busy busy, but once outside the center just a little, it seems to calm down quite a bit.

Jon and I spent all day yesterday looking at houses.  We found some really nice ones and some not so nice ones, all for really reasonable rates.  We had been worried because when we started looking for houses online while we were in Atlanta, all we could find were houses that were renting for $1800 to $4000 a month–way, way out of our price range.  On Wednesday night we went with a new friend to visit his apartment complex and his landlord showed us a really awful small apartment for $1000 a month.  I was horrified and was really frightened that we’d have to pay a more for our house here than we did in Atlanta.  I went to bed really put out and feeling like maybe we’d made a big mistake.

However, yesterday, we went out and saw nearly a dozen places.  Not one of them was for more than $800 a month, and they were all beautiful.  We looked at one that had incredible fan banana trees when you enter, an enormous yard, and was just huge overall.  It was way more house than we need, but it was $800 a month, too!  It was oh-so-tempting, but when all is said and done, I think it would have felt really weird living there.  Also, it was in a neighborhood, which, while lovely, to me felt a bit like a compound.  Like many places there were massive walls and everything was really secluded.  All of the neighbors were expatriates, which in some ways is nice, but I was also worried that we’d end up only having expatriate friends, which I really don’t want.

We settled on a beautiful house in an area called Kitintale, and we’ll move in on Sunday!  It was both Jon’s and my first choice and favorite.  It’s a little ways out of the city, but close enough that we think that we’ll both be able to get to work relatively easily, wherever work ends up being.  The house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms–still probably more house than we need.  It’s nice, though, because we’ll turn one of the bedrooms into an office for Jon, and we’ll use the second bedroom as a guestroom (so come visit soon!).  I’ll also probably use the second bedroom as a yoga room when we don’t have guests, and perhaps as a place to read.

It has a really good-sized great room/dining area.  It’s all one big room, so we’ll be able to define it how we want to.  It has a nice-sized kitchen, pretty basic, but definitely functional.  Or at least it will be once we buy a fridge and a stove–a project for today.  Off the great room, and visible from the kitchen (I think, we saw so many houses yesterday that I’ve forgotten a little) is an amazing porch.  It’s tiled and covered and it overlooks the city.  It was lovely during the day, and I’m sure it will be very pretty at night, too.

One of our favorite things about it, is that it has a beautiful yard.  It’s really green and lush, and is pretty mature, already.  I’m hoping that we can plant a vegetable garden, or at least some herbs, and it has some beautiful flowers already, including some lovely habiscus which makes me really happy.

So today we’ll start looking for furniture.  Kitchen appliances and a bed will come first, and then we’ll do the rest as we’re able.  It’ll be a challenge to figure out the logistics of moving appliances and furniture from the store and/or market to the house, but we’ll figure it out in good time, I’m sure.

Jon has also been really good at meeting new people here.  He invited a Couch Surfer to dinner the other night, and we had a really nice time.  His name is Naizi, and he’s from Uganda.  He works for a tour company that specializes in river rafting on the Nile and taking people out bungee jumping.  There’s no way he’ll get me to go bungee jumping, but I’d love to raft at some point.  He was able to give us a lot of clues about which internet providers to use, as well as some other good advice, too, which was good.

Yesterday we met up with a guy, Oscar, who was a friend of a friend of a friend of ours in Atlanta.  Oscar was able to connect Jon to a professor, Michael, at Makerere University who heads the IT department.  It was exciting to hear them talk about the possibilities for collaboration.

Once we get the house a little more settled, I’ll begin looking into office space and figuring out how to actually go about starting this office.  I’m looking forward to meeting a gentleman named Alex, who I’ve working with from afar to register the office here.  We were going to meet this afternoon, but now that we’ve found the house, I’m anxious to get things set up there so that Jon and I can both work more easily, so I think that we’ll try to meet up on Monday, instead, when hopefully we’ll have some of the housing basics covered.

Our other project is figuring out how to get internet at the house, so we may be offline a little when we first move.  However, I know that Jon won’t let us be without internet for very long!

And here’s to Day 3!

Written by Sarah in Life ~ CommentsThe+Beginnings+of+a+Life+in+Uganda2008-07-25+05%3A02%3A00Sarah