Gadgets

I have lived in my new home for about ten days.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I now have a full-time gardener/guard and a housekeeper who live with me. I haven't lived with anyone in about four years so this is an interesting adjustment.

The first night, Kate, my housekeeper/cook came to me with the can opener at 10pm as I was working on a legal memo for the High Court.

Kate, my driver Robert's sister, is wonderful but she has only worked for Somalis before me and, before that, had been raised in the same rural village that Robert grew up in.

She is super-smart and sweet as can be but she has no familiarity whatsoever with gadgets and electronics.

Robert insisted that this was a good thing as people who don't know the value of things are less likely to steal them (odd logic, but OK) but it does present other issues.

"Madame Boss (I still HATE this title and keep trying to get everyone to call me 'Patricia' but am having no luck), what is this...thing?" she said as she held out the can opener.

"It's a can opener," I told her.

Seeing the look of complete confusion on her face, I got up and went with her to the kitchen to demonstrate.

I opened a can of dog food for Ginger and Ssebo, my dogs, and handed it back to her.

She smiled at me and called in Godfrey, the gardener/guard, to show him.

The next morning, every can in my pantry was open. Dog food, tomatoes, kidney beans, soup, peas, and tuna fish. All open.

"Madame Boss!" Godfrey called, "Look, I have opened all of the cans! This thing is amazing!"

The other odd thing about having two employees who live with me is that I am fed all of the time.

Kate makes me breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I have never been a hearty eater but waking up every morning to a three-course breakfast is overwhelming. My lunch is always neatly packed in a container and ready for me at 9am when I leave for the office. At 7pm, Kate starts cooking dinner.

"There are plenty of leftovers from last night," I told Kate on Wednesday evening, after she made a massive chicken dinner on Tuesday night. "Don't cook dinner again, I can eat the remaining chicken you made last night."

She looked at me like I had fallen off the moon.

"My job is to cook for you and make sure everything is clean. If I can not cook tonight, then what am I supposed to do?" she asked me.

I felt embarrassed and told her to go ahead and cook, we'd figure out what to do with the leftovers.

By Thursday, I had enough food in my refrigerator to feed half of Kampala.

Wasting food in a country where people are hungry stresses me out. So I gave all of the food to Kate and Godfrey and told them to give it to everyone they knew.

Then we confronted the microwave.

"Thank you so much for the food, Madame Boss," Godfrey said, "But how do we heat it?"

I was in the middle of editing a 120-page legal opinion for the government, on a Skype call with a lawyer from my organization recently relocated to Tanzania, and doing the end-of-month accounting so I was completely distracted.

"Just throw it in the microwave," I said, not thinking.

Kate came into my office an hour later, looking upset.

"Sorry to disturb you but...it isn't working," she told me.

I went into the kitchen and discovered that all of the food, about 17 containers, were shoved in the microwave and the internal light was switched on but that was about it.

"Oh, it's OK, you switched on the light, not the actual microwave...here, let me show you..." I said.

As I proceeded to heat up seventeen plastic containers of food, Kate made an interesting observation.

"Americans are strange," she said, "Why do you need all of these things? Doesn't fire work just as well? Are all Americans like this? You need all of these...gadgets?"

Meanwhile, Godfrey was in the pantry opening the newest cans I had brought back from the store that day.

Godfrey is currently the most favorite person in my world right now, besides Eric, the handsome internet service provider who smells so damn good.

Like Eric, and hundreds of Ugandans, he fought in the civil war here that went on from the late 1970s to mid-1980s and he is half Ugandan and half Rwandan. He went back to the war in 1994 during the genocide in Rwanda on the side of the RPF (Tutsis) and is probably more loyal to President Kagame of Rwanda than President Museveni of Uganda.

He also speaks flawless English.

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that killed almost a million people in 30 days, Kagame often used aid money to hire instructors who were mainly Irish and British to teach his troops English. Sometimes at the expense of not giving his soldiers medicine or weapons. It was an odd strategy but, to this day, you will find regular foot soldiers from Rwanda who speak English perfectly, even if they cannot read or write. Godfreyi s one of those people.

But Godfrey has been at war for a good portion of his life. So living with me, my dogs, and my other pets in this huge house in Kampala overlooking Lake Victoria seems to be paradise. He wants to please me so badly that opening every can in my pantry seemed logical. He also knows I love flowers and puts roses from the garden in each room daily. He waits for the hour in the evening where we spend time on my balcony with me teaching him how to read and write English just as well as he can speak speak it. He wants to be a teacher when he saves some money for school.

As for me, I wait for our final ritual of the evening, training the dogs, just as expectantly. It is normally midnight when I wander outside to meet him and the dogs and we spend 45 minutes training them how to sit, stay, lie down, and roll over. Then Godfrey stays up all night with them reinforcing the command, like a drill sergeant. When I came out of the house Friday morning to go to work, Ginger ran up to me and immediately obeyed every command that Godfrey and I had worked on the prior night.

"You are amazing!" I told him. "How did you do that? It takes dog trainers in America weeks to teach a dog those commands that easily!"

He shrugged, it was easy for him.

The microwave was a different story.

Kate, clearly annoyed with American technology and gadgets, said to Godfrey, "You figure out how to use this machine, I don't want to be involved."

Godfrey stood beside me as I demonstrated the skills of "Microwave 101" to him.

He looked me straight in the eye and said,

"Madame Boss, this is amazing. But why don't we just heat this food on the stove? It is so much easier. This microwave is not like the can opener...now THAT has a purpose..."

I paused and declared that he was right. It made sense.

Kate was watching though, and discovered a new purpose for the microwave: drying clothes.

I saw her do it with a wet towel at one point and thought, "Well, OK, if that works, who am I to correct her?"

But then Friday, sitting in my office eating the leftovers from my breakfast at 7pm as Kate was cooking me up another round of dinner, I smelled something burning. I ignored it at first, thinking something must have spilled on the stove, until it became overwhelming. It didn't smell like food, it smelled like...plastic or something.

"Kate, what is burning?" I called from the office.

I heard her gasp and ran out to see what was going on.

I found my underwear on fire in the microwave. All of the tiny flowers and cute appliques that seemed so durable reduced to a smoldering, melted, pile in the microwave.

Honestly, I burst out laughing. Yes, it was a bit of an expensive loss but I just never thought to put underwear in the microwave before.

"Kate, why did you do this?" I asked when I could breathe normally again.

"Wasn't me, " she said, "These were the last things I needed to iron before cooking dinner and Godfrey thought they could dry in this...machine. It worked for the dish towels but not for these. I am so sorry, though."

I walked out onto the lawn, where Godfrey was training the dogs, and said, "Hey, Godfrey, don't put my, um, clothes...my women's clothes...my women's, um, underclothes, in the microwave anymore, please, they burn."

He looked horrified so I let it drop. No one has touched the microwave since.

Then there was the missing box of red wine.

Admittedly, I am obsessed with grocery shopping. It is both a practical and spiritual event for me...and even a social one. I love going to the grocery store and Robert and I go on a daily basis. It's not that I NEED to shop that much, I don't, but it is just a habit carried here from the U.S. that I never got rid of.

This practice confounds Kate and Godfrey who, rightfully, see it as wasteful. They also don't quite understand the products I bring home because I actually don't shop for basic staples at the grocery store (either me or Kate goes to the bustling African market for those supplies), I buy alcohol and whatever happens to catch my fancy on a particular day. I have a rule: I never spend more than $20 on anything but, prices being what they are here, I can sometimes do a lot with $20.

"Hey, Kate," I called on Tuesday night, as my colleague Liz and I were setting up for a series of long phone conversations on the computer with the home office and both felt like a glass of wine, "where is the box of wine I brought home yesterday?"

(Yes, I am drinking wine in boxes these days but that is because it is decent South African wine and not the crap found in boxed wines in the U.S.)

Kate came out to the porch and looked at me nervously.

"Which box?" she asked.

"The wine. The box of wine. I have looked all over the kitchen and pantry for it and I can't find it anywhere. Do you know where you put it when you helped me unpack yesterday?" I asked.

We went to the kitchen together and Kate opened the freezer to reveal a perfectly frozen 3 liter box of Merlot.

"This?" she said.

"Yeah, that would be it," I said.

"What IS it?" Kate asked.

"Wine. The grape juice of the Gods. The nectar of heaven. Wine..." I tried.

I had part of a bottle left in the pantry so I opened it and passed it to Kate. "Do you want to try it?" I said.

She hesitantly took a tiny glassful, took one sip, and spit it out in the sink.

"Awful," she declared, "THAT gives you pleasure? It's poison!"

Godfrey, on the other hand, had no such issues. He grabbed a coffee mug, poured himself a decent-sized glassful, and downed it in three minutes. He looked at me and then at Kate and said, "You see, she is from the village...but me, I know wine. I have lived in the city!"

("Yeah? But then why are you putting my panties in the microwave?" I wanted to ask but held my tongue)

"Wine's frozen," I called out to Liz, "how 'bout a beer?"

She didn't even blink or register any surprise.

"Stella (her housekeeper) keeps putting my Camembert cheese in the same drawer with the sponges. No matter how many times I explain or tell her that it is food, and not a cleaning product, she still doesn't believe me," Liz said.

I love Camembert cheese too, but sort of understood the mistake.

"So what did you say to Stella?" I asked.

"I did the same thing you just did with the wine. And got the same reaction. She thought I was trying to poison her with the cheese. Said it was the most disgusting thing she had ever tasted in her life. Then she told me that if I kept eating it, my tits would shrink," she said.

"Least you're not having that problem," she mentioned, pointing to my chest.

The emulsion blender was the final straw for Kate. It is a hand held-blender that basically eliminates the need for a conventional blender or a food processor, neither one of which is too common in Uganda. But I had bought this one in South Africa and it remains one of my absolute favorite gadgets.

Kate and I were busy making potato soup on Friday when I pulled it out to demonstrate.

Kate looked at me curiously and then gave it a go.

"I like this one. But I have seen these before. You have one in your bedroom drawer," she said, "so did Amina, my former boss. I just didn't know they were used for soup too..."

I was completely confused. "Too?"

What was in my bedroom drawer that looked like the handheld blender?

When it dawned on me I blushed three different shades of purple.

"Kate, that is not for soup, the one in the bedroom. Never for soup." I said.

She looked at me like I was a complete moron.

"I thought not," she said, "But this looks a lot like it. Do you want me to get Godfrey? He likes all of your American toys..."

"No, please don't get Godfrey. Most certainly DO NOT get Godfrey about this blender or the one in the bedroom...NEVER," I insisted.

She winked at me and we went back to cooking.

Maybe a return to simplicity is needed.

In the meantime, nothing has started shrinking yet but I am watching carefully.