Little triumphs
on Thea's Blog (Uganda), 25/Feb/2010 06:53, 34 days ago
It’s been a fortnight of small victories, mostly of an IT nature. Firstly, my new computer memory chip arrived in the post after only a month in transit from the UK, and now my ancient laptop hums along with 5x the RAM it had before. Next, the friendly guys in the IT department, after only a littlegentle coaxing, presented me with my own desktop. Okay, so it’s a bulky Frankenstein’s monster patched together from random, discoloured parts with half the RAM of my laptop before the upgrade, but at least I have a university machine to call my own. Reeling from this victory, I then spotted apile of rusty shelving bits covered in spiders’ nests in the corner of the campus courtyard. Using my rapidly evolving skills of persuasion*, I managed to secure them on the spot for my office without the usual need to fill out 2 forms in triplicate and wait a month for sign off by a procurement committee (I exaggerate, but there is definitely a strong taste for red tape here).*So the trick I have learned– first roadtested on an unfortunate immigration official at Central Immigration on the day of my flight home to England in December – is that a polite, light-hearted approach but one where there is a clear threat of oncoming hysteria, can be a very effective tool of persuasion. People are extremely non-confrontational here. Open displays of anger get you absolutely nowhere, but emotional meltdowns can move mountains. Perhaps a Ugandan’s worst nightmare is to suddenly find themselves with a hysterical, tear-stained mazungu woman on their hands. In the case of the immigration official, the desperation of the situation (I’d been threatened with a bill of 1,800USD to leave the country) led me to take things to such a theatrical extreme that the poor man ended up pleading, ‘Madam, please stop staring at me and leave my office immediately.’ I’m pretty sure that my irritating persistence paid off in that case, and I have therefore been applying the same approach in a modified form ever since. Obviously this is something you can overdo, and is best used sparingly like chilli sauce.With my new Frankenstein’s computer and bookcase, I now feel quite comfortably settled in my corridor and have even begun to do a spot of work.