Notes from: Tuesday March 27, 2012

My Guest House

The phone in my room rang at 8am.  The lady at reception called to tell me that breakfast would be finishing soon and asked if I was hoping to have some.  I have been taking breakfast at 9 or 10 so it confused me but that’s nothing new.  I said that I definitely wanted breakfast, as I have developed a pretty serious dependency on the pineapple.  I scurried for my trousers, splashed my face, and headed for the buffet, which is included at all guesthouses/hotels.  I arrived to find no food and no staff.  Had I missed it? Eventually I caught sight of the girl who called me.  I teased her about causing me to suffer by waking me for breakfast and then not having anything ready.  This would be an obvious joke to her as there is no such thing as sleeping in around here.  In fact, I think sleeping in is equated with drunkenness and irresponsibility.  I’m quite sure I provide a great deal of fodder  for back room discussions about ‘white people’ when it comes to my sleeping patterns of late.  If roosters are crowing it’s time to get up.  It is almost like waking me up has become part of the service that is offered despite not asking for this service.  Anyway, I got my breakfast with no problem.  My experience in Uganda is that despite what is posted or what the 'rules' are everything is negotiable and can usually be done with a little persuasion.

There is a definite staff work culture here at the guesthouse and I feel like I’ve got front row seats to a real time African soap opera.  Things are run top down in Uganda from what I can tell.  It is no different here.  The manager holds a supremely powerful rank and dresses so professionally he could be in President Museveni’s detail for all I know.  He conducts himself with poise and treats the guests with a calm servitude but there’s a vibe that comes through that makes you wonder what he is really thinking about us.

Beneath him, in the role of supervisor of staff, is the head matron who is built like a fire hydrant and has the unbelievable capacity to smile sweetly to me and transition seamlessly to scolding the workers.  She walks the grounds at a slow and menacing pace as if she is tormented by her failures of her staff.  And because of their failings she has no choice but to be the pathologically disappointed parent.  Last night in fact as I arrived she was walking past a very large rock that is used to prevent vehicles from passing that point.  She barked an order into thin air for someone to ‘remove this rock’.  Sure enough the next time I turned around the rock was in a different location. 

Each time she scolds one of them I have the impulse to scold her but this way of managing employees seems to be not only what is common but the hierarchy seems to make sense of things for everyone involved.  People defer submissively to whomever is above them in rank and everyone accepts it.  As far as I can tell it goes something like this:

Owner, Manager, Head Matron, Guest staff, Kitchen staff, Cleaning staff.  The night watchman doesn’t really seem to even make it onto the radar.  The further it goes down the line the less verbal they seem to be.  The cleaning staff for instance seem to operate in a kind of ‘don’t speak unless spoken to’ directive.  They happen to be my favourites.  The real drama seems to happen amongst the ‘Guest Staff’.  I can’t tell what they are saying all the time but I catch enough to know that there is squabbling over duties and failures in each other’s performance.  One will say to another, ‘why would someone do this?’ or ‘where is so and so?’ or ‘why didn’t you collect the bill from that guest yesterday?’.  Sometimes one who seems to take on a more senior role will speak in hushed tones to another offering them ‘constructive criticism’.  That said, the Ugandan way is to be happy.  Laughter is the punctuation that follows just about every circumstance after the drama has died down. 

There is one guest staff that strikes me as being beyond her station in life.  She communicates and relates well.  She has warmth that seems to elevate her beyond the rote mechanistic functioning of many of the staff.  In other words if I ask her for something she finds easy solutions rather than recite a rule that will require her to ask her superiors.  If she had the chance to continue her education I would imagine she could do just about anything. 

There are two bus boy waiter types who seem to be in constant struggle to manage their duties as assigned.  It is as if waiting on the guests requires all of their skill and concentration.  It is in the long periods of downtime that they apply themselves to the intensive paperwork involved in charging guests for the drinks they consume and making receipts.  I particularly love it when one will go to the phone by the bar to call back to the kitchen to request an order knowing that the other has already done it and then watch as they sort out whose job it was to make the call.  Stuff like this produces a kind of gladness in me.  The beauty is that Ugandans can laugh at themselves and in fact spend a good portion of the day doing just that.

I have developed a bit of a bad habit in going directly to the person who I know can help me with whatever my need might be.  Otherwise, it seems to take on the feel of that game called, ‘telephone’ where you pass a message around a circle and by the time it gets to the end it is virtually unrecognizable from the original message.  My method is likely seen as ‘going over someone’s head’ in effort to get my message through clearly.  In fact, the Head Matron has rebuked me herself, but not the way she berates her staff, for going back into the kitchen to speak directly with the cook.  This gives me a much better idea of what to order.  Instead of ordering multiple times with the staff coming back to say, ‘it is finished’ (meaning: there is no more chicken/goat/beef/fish/etc.) I can see with my own eyes what they have ready.   I have more or less made peace with my approach as it is necessary for my own mental health which I can’t afford to over tax.