Ice?

Ice, ice baby

I have to start this out with a positive note, the power in Entebbe is impressively dependable. Far more reliable than I thought that it would be however, it is a regular occurrence for the power to be off ALL DAY on Sundays. It isn't such a big deal as long as you get up before it goes off and get a shower and don't have any food that will spoil in the fridge. Last week that wasn't the case, after coming home from rafting we got in around eleven so the power had already been off for a while, we had purchased a great deal of meat on Friday, we had yogurt, milk, cheese, and some left over that I would have hated to go to waste. So around 2:30pm we headed out in search of “ICE”. We approached the first gas station with confidence, I jumped out to run in and grab a bag. I go in search around the store in each of the refrigerators and coolers with no luck. I went up to the lady at the counter and asked “do you have ice” “Ice”? She responded. Yeah, I said you know ice to keep thinks cool. She gave me a confused and said “no”. I ran back outside and relaid what I had learned to Travis. We went to the next gas station, we asked a women working inside if they had ice anywhere? She gave us the same confused look and then said “oh, you mean ice cream” and pointed us to the cooler of ice cream. We said “no like frozen water. So our second attempt was as fruitless as the first. We then preceded to the little grocery, and finally some one knew what ice was. They said “yeah, ice, we don't have that here. Go to Fish ways” We had never heard of it before so after getting an idea of where it is at from the woman we headed on over. It ended up being a HUGE fish packaging factory where they package Nile perch and send them to Europe. We approached the gate and the guard aproached the window he looked at us like “what are you guys doing here?” We asked bluntly, can we buy ice here? He gave us a strange look again and so we went into the whole story of the power and the meat and how no one sells ice and he let us in. We were really feeling funny as we walked into a nice air conditioned office and were brought to “The Boss”. He was an Indian guy sitting at a overly large desk. He gave us the same strange look that by this time we had become accustomed too and asked what can I do for you. We gave him the spill and some puppy dog eyes with hope that we could convince him to sell us some ice so we could save the meat. He laughed and said yes you can have some ice, I will give it to you but I will tell you this, you should just get a generator. Whooooooo. After all that time we finally had a simple bag of ice. We finally got back to the house about two hours later (note: none of the places we went were more than 10 minutes away, things just take a while here). The day was successful the meat and we had a big laugh thinking about the oh, so simple mission that we thought we had started out on but had turned into an our event.

P.S. I think that I spoke to soon when writing about how the power is pretty good besides Sundays, yesterday(Wednesday) the power randomly went off in the afternoon and just came back on around 8am this morning. Thankfully we saved our precious ice in the freezer and so it helped to keep things cool.

P.P.S. I really spoke too soon it was off again. I must of jinxed us LOL.