Making your own luck and leaving Uganda
Uganda had treated my quite badly, it had stolen my stuff, promised me jobs which were not real, begged for money and filled my lungs with red dust and car fumes. Every day I risked my life on boda bodas to avoid the hideous traffic and places which everyone said were beautiful, turned out to be no so.
Why people like Jinja is beyond me. It’s a small dirty town with nothing but a large central market selling fruit, vegetables and household items. There are no nice cosy cafes, no charming parks, nothing but dirt and traffic. Masaka was supposed to be pretty, but it turned out to be yet another dirty Ugandan town.
A chance meeting on a bus from Moshi to Dar several weeks earlier was the catalyst for my move to Dar es Salaam. And here I was, arrived and in a basic Airbnb and found myself yet again on the search for work. I am getting fed up of always looking for work. It’s exhausting. This time maybe it will come off and the promises made to me, kept. We will see.
In the meantime I must get used to a new place, a new language, Swahili, and new forms of transport, the tuk tuk (or Bijaj as they call it here) and the dala dala bus (like Matatu in Kenya). I don’t mind learning Swahili, in fact I’m looking forward to it, especially if I’m going to stay here for a while. It has to be easier than Chinese surely.
I appealed on Facebook for somewhere more long term to stay and found myself a very nice place on the beach, looking out across the Indian Ocean. It’s a haven of tranquillity and I am very lucky to have found it. But I believe that everyone makes their own luck. I made my own luck when I talked to the professor beside me on the bus a month weeks ago. And I made my luck when I posted my accommodation needs online.