A Cacophony of Sound

Sunday morning. The day of rest. The one day of the week when you can take things a bit easier. Don’t set the alarm. Take time to wake up. Enjoy a slower start. If only it worked like that here.

This is a big city, bustling with people all living in close proximity to one another and every day seems to start as soon as the sun rises over the horizon, bringing with it the first rays of light.

The call to prayer wakes me each morning between 5.30 and 6.00 a.m. This is not as early as in some places I have lived but I seem to be staying very close to a mosque so it is by far the loudest I have experienced. Fortunately this Imam is mercifully brief in his cry although once he has finished it is followed by the distant chorus of other Imams also calling their congregations to pray.

Within minutes Christian worship songs fill the air. A choir at a nearby church practised for several hours on Saturday afternoon but as I desperately try to cling to the last moments of sleepiness I cannot tell whether this is the choir singing or just a neighbour playing their favourite music.

The man-made sounds are replaced with birdsong. A beautiful and varied chorus which has the effect of relaxing me again and I start to fall back to sleep. And then the ibis joins in with its loud, shrill, monotonous call and I am wide awake once more.

The ibis - one of the noisiest birds I've ever heard.

My desire for sleep has been defeated by this auditory assault. Never has the saying ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ felt more applicable. Time to get up, make a cup of tea and start my day just like the rest of the inhabitants of this lively city.

Ebola

I returned to Uganda last Monday having spent five weeks in the UK. During those five weeks the world has finally woken up to the seriousness of the Ebola crisis affecting West Africa and the reality that contagious diseases are not held back by international borders.

Whilst the British media has a tendency to give more attention to the handful of cases in Europe and the USA than it gives to the thousands of cases in Africa this coverage does at least raise people’s level of awareness of the disease. Almost without exception everyone who heard that I am working in Uganda asked if it was safe and you could see that what many were really thinking was ‘am I going to get sick and die from talking to you?’. One person visibly recoiled at the very mention of Africa…

The reality is I am probably as safe from Ebola in Kampala as I was in Carlisle. Although I am slightly closer to the epicentre of the outbreak I am still over 3,000 miles away from the Liberian capital Monrovia.

Entebbe airport has been conducting health checks on all arriving passengers for several months now - something I experienced on Monday evening. As I arrived in the immigration hall a lady wearing a surgical mask and gloves was spraying disinfectant on everyone’s hands. Then we all had to complete a health declaration form. As well as our personal details there were questions about which countries you had visited in the last 21 days (the known incubation period for Ebola), whether you currently had any of the symptoms of the disease (headache, fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, uncontrolled bleeding, etc.) and whether you have had any contact with a person known to have contracted or died of Ebola within the last 21 days. All passengers then had to line up to be seen by a health worker (also wearing surgical mask and gloves) who checked the form and took your temperature before stamping your immigration form and allowing you to proceed to the visa counters.

There was a newly erected room in the corner of the immigration hall marked as the ‘Health Centre’, where presumably passengers were directed if they answered ‘Yes’ to any of the questions on the form or showed signs of a fever.

I am not sure how robust these checks are and although it is not possible to hide a raised body temperature you cannot stop people giving false answers on a form. Despite that I did feel somewhat reassured that the Ugandan authorities are trying hard to stop this outbreak of the disease from entering their country.