More things I've learnt in Uganda

- If you run out of fuel, take empty water bottles to a petrol garage they will happily fill a couple for you, as they will carrier bags
- A sign which says 'no stopping' or 'no parking' actually means 'this is a very convenient place to park so please turn it into a car park'
- Oranges are actually green, and so are lemons.
- A car or taxi is never full, regardless of seats available
- Its near impossible to keep using hand sanitising gel
- There is nothing unusual about a hen wandering into a prayer meeting or indeed a primary school lesson, so don't look alarmed.
- Sweet potatoes are grown in fields which are dug up into a million little molehill type lumps
- Shea butter comes from trees
- Post its are worth their weight in gold
- Wet wipes make quite good bandages when a 7 year old child in your class slits their finger sharpening their pencil with a razor blade.
- Health and Safety inspectors are simply unheard of
- Sleep is valuable. Guard it well.
- It is difficult to get people to understand that electricity and batteries are cheaper if you turn things off when you're not using them
- The song "God is so good, he's so good to me" means a million times more when you hear it sung by people who are really suffering. We visited a place in Soroti called Obalanga where a small trading town has become a sprawling mass of mud huts where people have settled in a hurry. Most of them were chased from their villages by the LRA rebels, or Karamajong tribesmen, or catastrophic floods last year, and because of all those things in that one small area there are over 2000 widows.
- Simple buses can overcome the most adverse camber i have ever known on a road, so much that a 5 hour coach journey became the ultimate alton towers experience.
- Riding side saddle on the back of a bordaborda (motorbike taxi) with pineapples, 5l bottles of water and a handbag is not as difficult as it seems when you get used to it.
- A 20l jerrycan full of water can be carried by an 8 year old, often on their head, for goodness knows how far, but I can't hardly lift it.
- Millet is the most disgusting food known to man. They say it is made out of Sogum mixed with casava flour but Mari and I are having a hard time distinguishing it from brown sticky chewing gum with sand in.
- Ugandans are easy to form really good deep friendships with.
- Most, if not all processed food comes from Kenya, which explains why so much of East Africa was affected after the troubles there last Christmas time
- Ugandans can look clean, tidy and presentable when they handwash their clothes and bath in a plastic bowl full of water. We simply cannot.