Many have asked me for photos of the apartment I’m living in, so I’m including them here. The apartment is actually a pretty nice place, though it’s not without its quirks.
So the jet lag finally caught up with me this past weekend and I ended up sleeping for nearly an entire day on the weekend (there are other contributing factors that I’ll get to as well). My sleep schedule has been pretty muddled the last few days. I’ve been consistently waking up around 2-3 AM and unable to sleep afterwards… so the days have been extra demanding as I try my best to stay awake until a reasonable hour so I can finally get myself back in a routine. Hopefully tonight will be the last night.
This has been the first “real” week of work for us. I hesitate to call the work that I’ve done so far developer work. It’s been more inline with what a sysadmin would be doing in an office. I spent the first couple of days teaching myself Laravel, as I believe I’ve said before. That’s just about the extent of what coding I’ve done. The days following have been spent trying to solve the heap of obstacles that we seem to keep running into — each as unpredictable and equally conflicting as the last.
For starters, each of the devs here are running on different operating systems (different versions of windows, ubuntu, etc), so I’m doing what I can to get them all up on the same local environments. The app that they’re working on (and that is currently being used by nearly 100 credit unions) has a number of bugs in it that could be caused of any number of reasons, but one significant way of reducing this is by ensuring that the problems are not a result of different environments). You can imagine the headache we’re having trying to get them all up using virtual machines when each of them has a unique process for installing a virtual box and/or creating virtual machines. We’ve actually had to request new hardware (in some cases, entirely new computers) for them because their currently machines could not afford to dedicate more than 1GB of RAM to their virtual machines.
The general lack of experience using command line, and the compounded effect caused by the absence of any legitimate sort of version control has made this process especially difficult. And the internet situation isn’t helping at all. We’ve spent the better part of our days simply waiting for downloads to finish — at creeping speeds. The internet is so bad here that we’ve actually resorted to using our phones as hotspots in order to maintain productivity. But even that is not as reliable as you might hope.
I’ve been in such a daze lately that I’ve just now been able to start getting my day-to-day things back in order. I finally went through all the receipts that I’ve been instructed to keep, and only now realized the toll this adventure has already taken on my bank account. Thankfully, everything (minus the food) will be taken care of courtesy of Ed, Boris, and Analusis (thanks, fellas!). Still, I have doubts that many students would be prepared to spend thousands of dollars on a whim. The flight tickets were about $2,500, and the medications were well over $2000. Not to mention the equipment, among other things… I genuinely had no idea exactly what I was getting myself into; nonetheless, I’m very thankful to be here.
We’ve been given a barrage of medical documents stating the dangers of traveling to Africa, primarily regarding the abundance of diseases that pose health risks to anyone who decides to come here. Corey woke up on the second day to find he had been bitten repeatedly during his sleep. His leg is rashed and seems to be getting worse by the day. I’ve also been bitten a dozen or so times. Though I wasn’t too worried about it initially (I only half-joked about catching something), I seem to be reacting badly to the bites; all of them are swelling and bruising pretty badly. And they itch worse than anything (think Tyone Biggums). Apparently, malaria takes anywhere from a week to a couple of months in order to incubate, where it eventually progresses to a state and symptoms begin to occur. The medication we have to take daily (malarone) supposedly delays the onset of malaria by a month to several months. With any luck, if/when we begin to feel any symptoms, we’ll be back in Canada and have doctors there that can treat us. Luckily, we haven’t had any other symptoms at all so far.
Corey and I decided to go out on Saturday night. We hit a few different night clubs, and had plenty of drinks on the way. The last club we went to (can’t remember any of the others, haha) was Bubbles O’Leary’s, which is apparently one of the more popular clubs in Kampala. The night started off pretty tame. We sat and chatted for a couple hours, watching the people trickle in. You can imagine how awkward it is for two light skinned guys in a city (let alone night club), whose population is predominantly black, to make open conversation with strangers. People around the city are usually surprised to see us around, often giving us looks that make me feel like I’m some sort of exhibit on display. (Just the other night when I was walking home late in the night, a group of five or so guys were standing just around the corner from our apartment. When one of them noticed me walking by, he screamed, acting like he had seen a ghost, and went running off in the distance. Yeah…)
As the night went on, we eventually found ourselves barraged by people wanting to chat. People here are surprisingly quite friendly, especially after they’ve had a few drinks (which is quite the contrast from living in Vancouver, where people have a difficult time even acknowledging your existence). I have no idea how long we were dancing. The clubs here stay open until the sun comes up, which is pretty cool. I guess that’s why the night seemed to start so late.
Corey and I ended up going our separate ways sometime late into the morning, agreeing that we would eventually meet at home. I’m not entirely sure what time I got home… and I probably wouldn’t have gotten home in the first place if Corey hadn’t messaged me asking where I was. I definitely took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up walking down this pitch black, winding road in the middle of the night (some time around 4 or 5 AM). Yeah, you can imagine how terrifying that is on your second or third night on the other side of the world. Somehow, I made it home safe and sound.
There are still some things that will definitely take time to get used to. One of those is having a maid. We weren’t even aware of the fact until we came home after work and found our beds perfectly made, our dishes washed and dried, and everything else placed perfectly where the maid thought they belonged. You can imagine the look of terror on our faces when we thought someone had been in our place, uninvited. We left thousands of dollars of equipment sitting around, ready for anyone who was willing to take it. Evidently, our maid is very honest. Corey left a stack of money on the table before we left, but every dollar was accounted for (almost $1000 Cdn, which is something like six million shillings) when we returned. We’ve also tried to tip her (and others) on other occasions. Tipping isn’t a thing here.
I have a whole bunch of other stuff that I want to share, but I’ve been trying to upload this post for the last couple days but the internet is crap and keeps cutting out. I’m not going to press my luck, but I will try to post more frequently! Talk to you soon!
Jamal
PS
On the bright side: Things are starting to look up at work! We accomplished a lot in the past few days, and I’ve (finally) begun work on the app that we were brought here to make. Cross your fingers for us that nothing else goes wrong!
Ciao!
