House Tour

We haven't been great with steady posts this last month or two, so to make up for it a little we'll pretend that you're guests in our house and give you the grand tour.

Come along and step into balmy Kisoro for a few minutes.

Click here for our home photo album.

Laundry Day

For many months now, a lovely woman named Hope has done our laundry whenever we leave a bag out on the porch with a few thousand shillings tucked inside.  A few days later, the bag will return with all the clothes neatly folded and cleaner than they've ever been.

Well, we had just given Hope a big bag of our dirty clothes when I realized that literally every other garment I owned was coated in a brown-ish sheen of dirt accumulated over many months. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to teach myself the art of hand laundry.

In total, 14 shirts and pants got soaked in a bucket of hot, soapy water, vigorously rubbed around (my hands still bear the scabs that are testament to the skin-chaffing intensity of this process) and then rinsed in another bucket, and hung out to dry.

Of course, I choose to embark on this experiment at the beginning of a stretch of three rainy days. Nothing like a few extra rinse cycles, I always say. It took up most of the morning and there was more than a little bird poop to scrub away when the drying was over, but I'm darned proud of the clean shirts and pants that now hang on my wall.

Coffee Tour

A co-worker of ours recently offered to take us on a tour of a coffee plantation. Katrina and I, joined by med student Niki and psychiatry resident Uri, followed Deus up the side of hospital hill (the hill near the hospital that we'd been meaning to climb for, oh, 5 months or so). 

About a quarter of the way up we come upon a small compound where a woman meets us and offers, in Rufumbia, to start our tour down by the coffee trees. It turns out she's Deus' godmother and co-proprietor of this enchanting little plantation.

Those little redd-ish berries above Deus' arm in the picture are coffee!! Some of our more cultured readers may be perfectly aware that coffee in its raw form is about as different as could be from the dark stuff we buy by the pound. It was brand-new to us, however. After winding through a few stands of small coffee trees (they keep them short to make harvesting easier) we wound up a small hill to the backyard of the house. There we tried our hand at hulling the berries.

 This gadget strips the coffee of its outer, fruity shell, separating it from the bean, which at this point is pale green and encased in a milky-white casing.

Here are where the de-beaned coffee berries end up. The tub of water is for testing for bad berries: the ones you don't want float!

Next comes pounding. This is not a crude start to the grinding process (the beans are much too resilient to be split by mere wood!) but rather a fast way to get the white casing off all the beans. A few minutes of pounding and you've separated out the little green beans.

Here's where things got ratcheted up to the next level. We would have all been content to let our coffee tour come to a polite close after the pounding. After all, we'd seen the tree, seen the berries, and seen how you coax the little bean out into the open. But our tour guide had other plans. In a small sheltered area, she deftly lit a quick fire between three cooking stones and set a pot filled with the green coffee beans we had just smashed over the flames. It was roasting time! Katrina took a turn stirring and after about 30 minutes the beans had been transformed into a dark, shimmery, steamy mass.

Wow, right? That's some freshly-roasted coffee.

Deus prepares way too many mugs of coffee with three different methods: the quick steep, the stir-the-grounds-right-in, and the loooong steep. Each method imparts a slightly different flavor and intensity. We passed the mugs around and smacked our lips and looked thoughtful. But before any of that happened we had to grind it!

By hand, of course! The gizmo attached to the bench is the hand-crank grinder which, even you think it's going to be no big deal is hugely tough. Uri and I (and Jay who jogged up the hill to join us) were wiped after our measly little quarter kilo.

After sipping our coffee in the yard (maybe the freshest we'll ever have?) the group decided to keep heading up the hill. After all, Katrina and I had yet to make it to the top and we were already part of the way there.

You can see Lake Mutanda down below us.

And higher still we climbed...

...until we reached the top and could look over the other side at the whole of Kisoro stretched out in front of us. 

The way down was very steep and slidey but it was a very peaceful early dusk time and we made our way down slowly. 

We'll keep a lookout for more adventures and share them as soon as ONE of us gets un-lazy enough to find the pictures on their phone and post the darn things already.

Weekend in Kampala

Enjoy these photos from our recent weekend trip to the capital of Kampala. They're posted here in reverse order, but we think you'll figure it out.

-K&A

For all modern conveniences and groceries...Nakumat! Our bags on the trip home were substantially heavier.

Walking up to the Bahai temple. One of only 7 in the world!

The posh Kabira Country Club

Our favorite Indian place. First and Last night dinners here.

The brand new and very glitzy Acacia Mall. 

The city from the top of the Nat'l Mosque

Climbing the minaret

Our guide Ashraf explaining that the Mosque was financed by M. Gaddafi!

Two appropriately dressed Americans

Our favorite brunch place (also visited twice!)

Gearing up for a motorcycle tour

Yes Mom(s), we always wore helmets

The terrifyingly dinosaur-like Marabou Storks. Legend has it that they first descended on the capital city during Idi Amin's reign. So many bodies were being dumped into Lake Victoria, that these scavengers moved in!

Hooray! We made it to Kampala and modernity!

Our first splurge of the trip (and not our last)

Still early morning on our way to the city.

Happy Birthday Tri-tri!

Katrina turned 29 today!

The morning started with some hot-off-the-griddle Robie's Pancakes which, if you don't already know, are the finest pancakes that flour, eggs, and milk have ever had the honor of producing. I knew we had just enough ingredients to whip up a batch and I used a trick Katrina taught me to improvise on the buttermilk (add freshly-squeezed lemon juice to whole milk). The results were divine. We sat together in the early morning sun, sipped our french-press coffee and enjoyed hot, crispy pancakes slathered in real Kisoroan honey.

To further celebrate, she and Andrea and I all went to Lake Mutanda to bask on a certain porch that we've come to love. The Lake Mutanda Resort boasts an amazing view of the lake, its islands, and the misty rolling hillsides. We arrived in time for lunch and then read, listened to music, chatted and ducked in, and out of the two or three sun showers that blew through. Nothing could diminish the spirits of pure relaxation and celebration that we brought with us.

On the way there, we had an interesting run in with the Ugandan Public Works sector. Not once, not twice, but thrice did we come across enormous ditches being dug straight across the road. Straight across, I should mention, the only road to our destination. Each time we came to one of these ditches, our driver and friend Robert (Uganda's friendliest, most knowledge, bird-loving guide) exited the car and conversed with the two to three workmen to reach a compromise between our desire to reach the lake and their obvious desire to remove large pieces of the road.

Some money changed hands, some rocks and large amounts of dirt were shoved back into the ditches and in all three cases we bumpily made it over. At one impasse we even ran into the "engineer" of the project who was zipping back to town on the back of a motorcycle. He laughed off Robert's line of questioning, claiming he had never expected cars to actually use the road during his project. Leave it to an engineer to think of all the contingencies. 

But our time at the lake was divine. Blessed open time with no commitments. We were joined for dinner by Nori and another resident Sofia who had ridden over on a motorcycle. We were all happy to have this little slice of quiet paradise amidst an already beautiful landscape. It was a gorgeous place to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of a gorgeous lady!

Homemade Gardening

The girls decided to plant a garden. They borrowed a hoe from our neighbor (who probably looked upon the request with some amusement) and picked out a sunny patch of grass to hack to pieces. We now have a 2' x 5' rectangle of exposed earth in our yard with lettuce, spinach, and basil seeds ready to pop up and deliver salads unto us!

This is very much Andrea's and Katrina's baby. In fact, I've been asked not to help after I took a turn at the hoe and snapped the handle in half with a few hearty swings. Not my intention, I promise. Now I'll get to watch them plant and weed and tend to their field. Farmers Jacky and Jill.

To compensate for the violence I perpetrated against the hoe, I had the errand of finding a new one. I showed the wreckage to a hardware store owner in town and he pointed toward a carpentry shop around the corner that would craft a new handle. Woodworking is a pretty booming business in Kisoro. There's probably close to a dozen workshops in town that are advertised as such by the stacks of freshly made wooden furniture out front and the young men hard at work cutting and nailing and staining and scraping.

The owner of the carpentry shop that I found took one look at the broken hoe and handed it to a boy at a nearby worktable. The young woodworker promptly popped the head off the tool, grabbed a suitable piece of wood and a machete and got to work.

While I waited, I had time to admire the woodwork being done around me by other craftsmen. A family waited on a bench for a large door to be finished. A young man in coveralls was tracing a gentle curve on the corners of the door with a flexible saw blade and pencil. With his guidelines drawn, he used a machete to hack off big pieces first and then, swinging closer and closer to his line but never over it, cleaved away thin slices of excess door. In just a few minutes, he'd sculpted a very smooth and precise curve with a tool that we associate with slashing through a forest.

Meanwhile, the boy at the worktable had used his machete to whittle a thick dowel from a very square-shaped plank. He then ran a small hand plane over the surface, shaving off the bumps and leaving a rod as neat and even as if it had been passed through a machine. Finally, the iron tool head was fixed on and held in place with scraps of wood wedged tightly between the head and handle. The work was done and I owed 2,000 shillings, but all I had was a 5,000 shilling bill so we called it a tip and I walked home the proud owner of a handsomely restored farming implement.

Watching the process got me thinking about how little I know about the way things are made in my country. The origin of most of the things we use is hidden behind distant factory walls. We’re able to buy furniture, computers, even food without needing to know much about where these things came from or what they’re made of.

In a town like Kisoro there are plenty of examples of goods shipped in from far away, made from unfamiliar materials: mountains of used clothing from America, electronics from China and Korea, cars from Japan, packaged food from the Middle East. But there are also many prolific makers here, not just sellers. From furniture to food, you can find hundreds of examples of ingeniously used local resources here. I wonder about how this changes your relationship with the things you have. Knowing where they came from, how they were made… 

A Fine Balance