Today we need to crack on with the work Primrose gave us; after all, we’ve been going on about how much we want to do work all week. However, we want to avoid going into the ‘office’ for as long as possible, it’s a pretty hot day and so we can only imagine how uncomfortable its getting in that little box. Plus we’re starting to enjoy sitting in our garden with our laptops and a bit of music (thankfully Sacha shares my variable taste in music!). The fact that the first of our two jobs merely involves giving feedback on the research tools and literature review for the research project on cash-transfers, psychosocial support, and female empowerment in Northern Uganda, and therefore doesn’t require Internet is the deciding factor that we definitely should work from home. For the morning at least.

A few hours later, when we’ve done all that is to be done offline, we reluctantly walk up to the university. Viola is in her office when we arrive, and so we take the opportunity to follow up on our trip to Nichevale refugee camp. Well thank god we ask the right questions! It seems that Viola has no idea where we should stay in the refugee camp, nor how we should get there. Oh fuck. We assumed that this was being organised for us by people who knew the place well. It turns out Viola hasn’t even been there herself. “Yes you organise it with your friends” she insists to our shocked faces. Erm, what friends? As I’ve mentioned before, Mbarara isn’t exactly awash with gap yeah tourists / interns like ourselves. In fact, apart from the two girls we live with and Matthew, we’ve barely spoken to anyone other than each other this week. I’d like to add here that this is not through lack of trying! But because most of the other ‘Muzungu’ here are doctors they’re super busy all of the time and therefore socialising is at the bottom of our to do list. There is a little hope for us though; apparently Viola’s colleague Robert is pretty Nichevale savvy and so she takes us over to his office to get some tips.

“No no you cannot stay in the refugee camp, there is nowhere”. Viola turns and looks at us as if to say, “who knew?!” Bloody hell. It also turns out getting there is also a complicated endeavour, and an expensive one at that. We would have to take either a private driver or a taxi, and chances are we’d have to pay for them to hang around for us whilst we explore. This could easily add up to 100,000USh per day. Luckily we have two weeks before we’re due to go anywhere, and so we resolve to ask our house mate Blanca, who goes to Nichevale a lot with work, what would be the best course of action.

With nothing more to do on the matter at this point in time, we walk over to ‘the office’. Luckily not all of our five office-mates are currently at their desks, and so there is a bit of room for Sacha and I to sit together and get on with our research. Or not. See Internet here is such a luxury that as soon as we get hold of it we’re completely distracted by messages from home and various social networking platforms. So maybe we’re not the best interns after all, especially when we’re left in the office alone and we can’t help ourselves snapchatting our situation to all of our friends and family. We also like to take the opportunity to download our favourite movies and series; it’s not safe for us to go out at night here so we’re cooped up in the house every evening, so we’re desperate for some entertainment other than our travel guides. If we come home proficient in amateur dramatics you’ll know the boredom got to us.

I’d say in total we got about an hour’s worth of work done before the power cuts out, thereby knocking the Internet off for the rest of the day. This makes being in the office completely pointless, as we have already completed all of our offline work in the sun this morning. So we start packing up our things and discussing what to do for the rest of the day. “You’re leaving already?” one of our office-mates calls after us. Awkward.

As we’re going to Kampala on Monday we decide that we really ought to go and find out where the bus stop is. So we take our very limited map material and head out into the centre of Kampala once again. Now I know I’ve said previously that people here are unbothered by us, which is still true, but they seem to have gotten way more interested over the past few days. We can barely walk down the roads without people trying to shake our hands and engage us in conversation! Naturally it’s mostly men and children that call out to us, and when we do engage in conversation we’re often told of how we came to them in a dream last night and now we are here! Ergo we are the women of their dreams and we should take them back to the West so that we can be together forever. Its hours of this that has forced Sacha and I to make the life decision not to become celebrities; its too much work! Having everyone fighting over your attention in the street everywhere you go in exhausting. Quite frankly I don’t know how Beyoncé does it.