I was exhausted yesterday.

Field visits on Wednesday and Thursday. (I’ve finally visited all four districts!) Field visits are usually already really long days because I have to get up early to get to the field, walk around the whole day in the scorching sun or pouring rain to visit farms, and then attend one or two farm group meetings at the end of the day. Then take a really long trip back home. I still don’t have a car (my guess – it’s going to come in two months) so I’m taking public transport, which you can wait for 5 minutes to 1.5 hours for it to fill up with people and actually depart. One of my supervisors yelled at me about why I didn’t rent a car. But I feel like it’s so wasteful. I really only need transport on the tarmac roads to get to the point where I meet up with my field staff. Once there, I just jump on their motorcycles. You can’t drive a car in the field: the roads are too narrow and the rains can ruin your car any time. I think from now on, I’ll just take a bodaboda (motorcycles for hire with a driver) whenever the wait for the buses (taxis) is too long. Let her think I’m stubborn. I’m not going to waste that much organization money to rent a car for a whole day and then use it for three hours on paved roads.

But it’s worth it. I’m so happy to be out in the fields. Just seeing the farms and talking directly with the farmers. It’s amazing to see how well most of the crops are growing. It makes me almost giddy to see my field staff and the farmers so happy. Of course, and the assurance that the loan will probably be repaid in full this season.

On Thursday though, there was a huge down pour of rain (as is how rainy season works here) right before I was trying to leave. So we took shelter for almost 1.5 hours. It was so cold that even some hail stones came down. I had nothing more than a coat because most of the days are really hot. I really need to get a rain coat. Once the rain lightened a bit, we braved it and tried to get back to the main road. But the road was under construction and water was everywhere. I thought we were going to break our legs because the motorcycle felt like it would flip over all time. Thank goodness for my very experience field staff who has been riding a motorcycle in these conditions for a long time. It was seriously the worst motorcycle ride I’ve been in.

I was shivering by the time I got back to the road and I still had to take public transport back. Waited for so long for the first taxi to a town called Mbale (one hour away from Tororo). Decided I really need food, so I ate quickly. But that meant that it was late and the taxis weren’t filling up as fast as usual. I waited another hour for the taxi to depart Mbale. I got home at 9:30 pm. So grateful that electricity was on so I could have a hot shower (and grateful that I have a hot shower). The moment I got out of the shower, my phone rang and I had to go back to the office to print a lot of documents for the next day. The factory is now open 24/7 because of production deadlines. Poor management, some of them get so little sleep. It took me two hours to get the printer to work (the desktop was so slow it opened 10 pages of pdf in 1 hour. I had 189 pages to print. It took me two hours to figure out how to download the printer driver onto my computer because the internet was so slow). I finally left around 1 am. Got home, fell asleep immediately.

Got up at 6 am the next morning to prepare for the weekly team meeting. Took taxi back to Mbale. Waited an hour because my field staff were all late an hour. Although the silver lining was I talked to an interesting guy at the inn while waiting. Another post for another time. Had a really good meeting. I’m quite happy at how the meetings are going; I think we’re really starting to build a team now. At the end, I was told that the walk to work protests were surrounding Mbale. So I had to wait before I could go back to the office. Luckily I had my computer and lots of receipts to sort out, so I worked the whole afternoon. I left at 4 pm and the streets were eerily quiet with burnt tyre (?) remains. The taxi also took forever to leave. I actually don’t mind because I support these actions against Museveni (president of 25 years).

I took a 15 minute nap once I got home, but I had to get back to the office. My supervisor was demanding a report as soon as possible. Funnily, I was really in the work zone so I got a lot done. My colleague also came back from distribution of inputs to the farmers at 9:30 pm (we work hard here, mh?). We were ready to go by 10:30 pm but we had to wait for a car from Kampala to arrive at the factory because we had to wait for the management at the factory to drive us home (there are no bodabodas this late at night). So I got home at 11:30 pm. I’m still exhausted. But most probably I will work today (Saturday) just so I won’t fall too behind.

Interesting thing happened at the office apparently. It was HIV/AIDS day, so they tested everyone for HIV/AIDS. I heard that only one person (I think one of the labourers working on the production) was tested positive. I immediately asked if they would be fired. Thankfully they wouldn’t be. They’ll just have a private conversation with the doctor. Darn, I missed a free test.