Seekcharlie – Die Welt mit offenen Augen

Bellusci

.
.
.
.

We arrived in Uganda in March 2009, I (Bellusci) with a contract with an international development organization as development worker and my husband as a ‘dependant’. However, it didn’t take long for him to dig up a job which at home, in Europe, he would have had to kill for. In our first house in Kampala our Ugandan caretaker used to say: “If you are white and you want to work in Uganda then you cannot fail to find a decent job.” (More on this subject and many other topics to be found in various articles in this blog; just keep following via RSS Feed.)

I have always been drawn to Africa, I don’t know why. Africa was a dream since my teenage years. However, Uganda was not really a specific objective, it simply happened: I applied with this international development organization, and five months later I was invited to a selection procedure. After this, I was offered six jobs in six different countries. Thus we had the agony of choosing between Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Africa, Palestine and Tajikistan and with little time in which to decide. One night spent on the Internet searching for information on six different developing countries…and a final decision in favour of Uganda (because after Palestine, which we both agreed was out of question, the Ugandan job fitted best to my profile, plus the appealing climate and the security situation).

Now we both live and work in Uganda, I with my twenty two years professional experience: two university degrees, twelve years experience as a managing director (in a company, which I set-up and successfully developed), five years in England in a senior position, and my husband with a quite similar background, now we are here…

… however everything (or nearly everything) which we believed to know about Africa before we came to live here, which we thought was true, all the clichés and prejudices, things we learned at school and from the news: about living conditions, people, attitudes, volunteer services, development aid, business, etc. was either a very tiny fraction of the apparent picture or incomplete or totally wrong compared with the daily life and observations we now have before our eyes every day!

This blog is private, developed from emails to close friends; it reflects our personal learning process, not everything is necessarily correct as we may be ignorant of certain information. The blog is meant for those people who like to keep in touch; as well as for those who are genuinely interested in Africa, particularly in Uganda and like to glimpse another view of the world. We also hope to give ideas and input for exciting discussions, to reflect upon the European perception of this continent, to reflect upon ourselves and our understanding of this world. This blog is intended to be non-political, however reading though the many articles which have already been published in German and now awaiting to be translated into English it seems to be very difficult to stay away from certain topics.

Development Aid is a quite disputed topic (see also the links to various books, discussions and articles in the page Critic Development Aid ) and somehow we live in the middle of this. It is enormously exciting and for nothing in the world would we want to miss this experience and live and work anywhere else but here. However, please acknowledge that this is an entirely personal blog and we do not wish to be quoted anywhere, particularly without our knowledge and prior permission, but feel free to link to this blog if you fancy it.

Opinions which are published here are our individual views and observations. The contents of this blog do not represent any organisations we work for nor should they be interpreted as an official statement of any firm; and surely we do not intend to publish anything which may harm Uganda; on the contrary, we wish to attract interest in this beautiful country with its warm and friendly people.

Therefore if someone has any objections about articles or topics which have been published please do not hesitate to contact the authors for appropriate discussion/change of the particular article.

We hope that this blog will not cause any trouble and that our readers will respect our request for discretion. Thank you!

We wish you a lot of fun reading our pieces and viewing our thoughts and we look forward to receiving your comments and feedback.

IMPRINT
This is a personal and in addition a non-commercial web page. If you wish to contact the authors you can do it under the following email address.

LIABILITY
Any links on this blog are personally checked before publishing. We have however no influence on any changes and/or altering content, as well as over secondary links. Therefore, we cannot accept responsibility and/or liability for any links or comments through third parties on these. Furthermore, we will not acknowledge any responsibility for comments from third parties on this blog, but we reserve the right to delete comments of doubtful content.