Gloves in the time of ebola

Child soldiers in the north, ebola in the west, corruption in the capital…It’s not all white water and safari thrills in the pearl of Africa.

Ebola is big news in Uganda right now. Headlines about new cases, health workers not getting paid danger money, newly infected regions and the rising number of deaths scream out of the newspapers laid out on the cracked footpaths. It’s not only the newspapers making a noise about ebola, signs about symptoms and prevention are posted in coffee shops and restaurants all over Kampala. As far as I know, there’s no ebola (or bubonic plague or cholera or hepatitis or yellow fever) in the capital right now. Still, official injunctions to avoid handshaking make me a little uneasy. Fortunately, President Musuveni has stepped in to clarify the potential social confusion this kind of responsible behaviour might produce: "If I don't shake your hand, it doesn't mean I don't like you." Roger that. There are also some insidious murmurings in the Ugandan press that the ebola outbreak was covered up by officials until the CHOGM circus, complete with Queen, had left town.

And then there’s the plague, the one that wiped out half of Europe seven hundred years ago. Women are most seriously affected by the plague because they sleep on the floor. The fleas which carry the plague can’t jump onto the beds where the blokes sleep. So there is also a public heath campaign to get women back sleeping in beds. Try as I might, I can’t quite come to terms with the kind of living conditions in which ebola and the plague thrive. There’s something quite strange and unreal about spending a relatively short amount of time in a country like Uganda and just passing by such poverty and violence. Driving through slums to get to a waterfall, glimpsing at newspapers sold by war amputees, carrying a bottle of fresh water and watching people collect water from dirty puddles and tanks, wondering what the hell to make of it all. A campaign to get women sleeping in beds and out of reach of the plague fleas sounds to me like an awful, hilarious episode from a Beckett novel.

Happily, I'm not yet sweating blood and there are absolutely no reports of either ebola or the plague in Addis Ababa, my destination on the morrow.