Shopping

The day before Christmas we ventured into town on our own, just armed with our phrase books to do some shopping. Murgwanza and Ngara (the local town) are at about the same elevation but are each on top of a ridge with a valley inbetween.  The 20 minute walk down the hill isn’t too bad, though reasonably steep but the walk up the other side is a killer.  Fortunately it is entirely normal to give ‘lifti’ to strangers and since there are currently only 10 wasungu (white people) in the area, including us,  people will usually stop to give you a lift. We were fortunate enough to be picked up by a guy from a local orphanage (we had been told that it was safe to accept lifts from 4WDs with writing on the side, as it meant they were from one of the local organisations) just after we had started up the hill. He dropped us at the bank and we walked the rest of the way into town. We had a hilarious time shopping, especially watching Claire’s pantomime to try to buy stamps after she gave up on the phrase book.  We even managed to buy cheese, which is only sometimes available. You have to buy it in rounds so I ended up with a kilo of something like gouda, the first cheese we have had since we arrived. Claire also bought a frozen chicken, (she didn’t take Dr Rufano up on his offer to teach her how to kill one,) as she wanted to have chicken soup.

We started back home, laden with our burdens, and had just got to the bottom of the hill and were not looking forward to the uphill part when the same guy came along and gave us a lift back to Murgwanza.