Moved into our flat!

It's all feeling pretty good here at the moment.

We moved into our flat on Friday, and it was such a relief to leave the University Inn. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with the Inn, but it was a pain not being able to unpack or cook for ourselves.

Our flat is in a compound across the road from the university, and all the visiting lecturers (ie muzungus or white people) seem to live there. At first we were a bit reluctant to live in a compound, but it's nice to know that people are around, and we have the reassurance that the compound is guarded (by a man with a gun!) 24 hours a day.

The flat itself is fairly big. It's got 2 double bedrooms, a huge living/dining room, a bathroom and toilet, a kitchen (with a fridge!) and a storeroom. All in all, I think we've been quite lucky. We have the facility to have hot water (via a water heater), we have a fridge and there's a lovely balcony where we are comtemplating growing some herbs. We spent the weekend frantically getting staff for the flat, and were helped enormously by Danny and Annie (VSOs working nearby) driving us around in their 4 x 4. We had to get a gas stove, as the electric hob that was in the flat was a bit dodgy (to put it mildly). I will put some pictures of the flat and Mbarara on this blog as soon as I get a chance.

Weekends are really nice here, as we get a chance to catch up with the other VSOs in the area. There are three of us in Mbarbara university (me, Jason, and a neonatologist called Dr Unni), and three others at a teacher training college a short distance away (Danny, Annie and Sofie), so it's a good little community. We had lunch at Unni's flat on Saturday - he is an absolutely amazing chef! He even managed to cook matoke in a way that made it taste lovely. Jason and I have said we'll invite them all round for a house-warming meal sometime soon, which will be lovely, but there's no way we can compete with Unni on the culinary front.

I'm still trying to find my feet a bit at work - as the students are in the middle of the semester I'm not really required to teach yet. I am preparing a few seminars on 'Pharmacy in the UK', which hopefully should be interesting for the students.

I'm still getting used to the fact that life goes at a much slower pace in Uganda than it does in the UK. When I was a pharmacist in the UK, I seemed to have something to do all the time, and I hated it when the pharmacy wasn't busy. Now I am having to get used to not having a lot to do, and I must admit it's harder that I thought it would be!