rinsed… and I don’t mean the dishes

Living in the Disability Centre here in Bidi Bidi we are blessed with a cook.  But I’m not one for breakfast, and its mostly too hot to eat at lunchtime.  The cook finishes after lunch so we are left to fend for ourselves for dinner, which I knew and is good. Let me explain; the food is pretty boring very bland in fact, and not at all appetising, to my Western palate at any rate.  Vegetables are sour and overcooked, to tenderise them, and the ‘meat’ is tough and chewy.  Most of the folk here go over to the OPM Centre, a facility 100yards away.  OPM stands for Office of the Prime Minister, who coordinate all of the NGOs efforts here… through a fair amount of bureaucracy, but as ever they are mostly good people and coordination is of course vital.  Just reminds us who is in charge of Uganda, as Museveni heads into his 37^th year in power…

Anyway food.  The sun is down (rapidly, as we are on the equator) by 7, so by the time we assemble and head over to the OPM its dark.  So then you have a choice, use your head torch (absolute magnet for the mozzies and other flying insects) or eat in darkness (and hope for the best).   So I choose the third way, I brought my camping stove a; handy little MSR that can use petrol.  So far I have had lentil pomodoro and lentil curry… but anyway last night it wasn’t about the food.  A couple of the ladies wandered by, suitably impressed that I had cooked for myself (its not a Ugandan thing for me to do), and asked I wanted them to wash my plates.  “No; if I can cook, I can clean”, was my response.

Next morning I was chatting with that particular lady to confirm my theory of it not being a male thing.  “No”, she said, “not that, we don’t let elderly people clean”.  FFS. Rinsed indeed.