One of the things that it took me awhile to wrap my head around was the currency here in Uganda. It is so different from Canadian dollars. They call it Shillings and for about every one Canadian dollar you get 2,000 Shillings. Basically, when you go into a store to buy something you take away the last three zeros and divide it into two. Easy enough right??? Well, let me tell you when you’re getting use to everything at once those extra 0’s can throw you off a little…..hence some interesting looks from the locals the first few times I bought something. Let me take you back to our first week here.
Our first full day and the head volunteer coordinator took us to the grocery store to get some of the basic things you need. We filled our cart up with your everyday food supplies like toilet paper, sugar, fruits and vegetables….I’m sure you get the idea. Anyways, by the end of the shop, I had about $80 worth of food supplies. Well, me thinking that all these extra zeros on the bill makes it look like quite a lot of money and not yet have anybody explain the currency made paying for those groceries an interesting moment. When it is time to pay, I handed her a 1,000 Shilling bill……which in my mind seemed like a lot of money. I was then told I needed to give her more money, so I hand her another 1,000 Shilling bill……so now I’ve given her a total of $1.00. Still not enough, but it looks like lots to me. So finally, the volunteer coordinator steps in takes my stack of bills and hands pretty much the whole thing over to her. It seemed like a lot of bills to me compared to the currency I’m use to back home, but I can imagine it would have taken a long time if I had kept paying her 50 cents at a time.
Some things can be very expensive here as a lot of things we consider back home as basic needs are really luxury items here. The other day, I was in a local store that wanted 25,000 shillings (12.50) for a box of Kellogg’s cereal. Well, I can tell you that the cereal did not come home with me that day. It can be very frustrating to try and do a grocery shop here as it always hard to decide what to eat. A lot of the food we enjoy in our diet on a daily basis you can’t get here and some of the things you can get is very expensive compared to what you would pay at home. Yet other things are so cheap compared to what we pay. For example today Lawrence and I went out for breakfast, we both got had an omelette and drink, we paid $20,000 Shillings for the meal. So for a sit down meal it cost $10 a total of $5 each. This however is a luxury that many Ugandan’s simply can’t afford; some of the locals only make about $10,000 Shillings a week which would mean they are living off of $5 a week. That makes something as simple as pineapple which sells for $3,000 Shillings ($1.50) a treat some can’t afford. It makes my frustration about the lack of “good things” to eat because I’m annoyed with things like eating a meal of beans and rice……AGAIN seem really immature. (One could say a spoiled western girl tantrum). I love how this country is growing, and you can see how it is changing and building itself. However, the poverty line I see here truly does break my heart. I can no longer agree with the excuse that we have issues back home to deal with before we can look at global issues. The issues here can’t begin to be compared with the issues we have back home. Although we need to be quick to help those next door it’s no reason to ignore those down the street. Being here really makes me so grateful for all the resources that we do have at our finger tips. My only question now is how to find a way to share those resources we have been entrusted with???
Alison
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