Tag: university

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The Princess

Our receptionist was born and raised a true princess. She moved through life at only one speed: regally slow. This proved true even when bullets hissed by our office window.

It was my brother-in-law’s first week on our project in Africa. We were on a conference call with the New York team. Outside our second story office on the university campus, students were protesting. The army was sent in to disperse them. We peered out the window from time to time, but nothing seemed to be happening.  Then in an instant, the protest turned into a riot.

The two sides clashed in the parking lot below our office window. The students screamed and charged. The army began to fire their automatic weapons into the air to disperse the crowd. We dove for cover under the conference table as bullets whined by us from the parking lot below.

Except for our princess receptionist. As minor royalty from a tribe in western Uganda she was utterly unflappable. Amidst the volleys of rifle fire, screaming students, and cowering colleagues, she calmly sashayed across the office in her regally slow way to fix a cup of tea. As you do.

My brother-in-law stared at me wide-eyed under the table as the percussion of the guns continued. I assured him there was nothing to worry about and joked that this only happened every other week. In truth I was petrified. We had forgotten all about the people from New York on the conference line. Then their voices came on:

“What the hell is that noise, Chuck?” they asked.

“Weapons fire” I replied, trying to sound ho-hum. “I suppose we’re going to have reschedule the call”.

At which point, the New York team began to scroll through their Blackberry’s (remember those?) and mumbled stuff like “I suppose I could do next Tuesday, does that work for you?”

“Ah, guys” I said, no longer hiding behind a façade of calm, “we’re actually in the middle of a riot here. We’ll reschedule later”. I hung up. Our receptionist added more sugar to her tea. Then sipped it for taste.

Finally during a break in the chaos we saw a safe opening for us all to leave the office. But before doing so, the princess glided over to the hallway mirror to adjust her hair. And then washed up her tea cup.

[If you know others who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Apologies for a lack of blog post last week! Sometimes Mondays are too much even for us at Words for the Weary!]

Image Credit: Best African Proverbs

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Uni Year 1: The British Student

Guest Post, written by the site curator, Eloise. 

After Year 1, I am ready to present my findings on the creature that is the first year university student in the UK. Putting this into several categories, I’d like to share the amazing things I have learnt about the people who live in the country of my birth after infiltrating their ranks.

First: Issues of Health

University means moving to a new place, with new people and new DISEASES. The first week of Uni is ‘freshers week’, and is followed by ‘freshers flu’. To some, this is a code for a particularly horrific hangover that hangs over you like a ghost for over 48 hours. Like a mix of jetlag, a migraine and a fever, the stricken students do not attend the first few days of class (which teachers note with amusement). For the rest of us, freshers flu means the flu – but the worst version of it. A slow building disease that you watch take out your house mates one-by-one, awaiting your fate. My neighbour had it a week before me, and I used him to gauge how badly I would be hit. I was optimistic, seeing as he seemed mostly okay.

I was not okay. In a flat of 8 people, 3 of us were coughing so hard we coughed up blood. It was horrific. But did any of us go to hospital? No. We lay around, pitied ourselves and enjoyed the first few weeks of our 6 months of free Amazon Prime TV (free to Uni students, that is). I quickly learnt that the health system in the UK is somewhat broken, and students are also a little too lazy to go and get help – we’d rather google the symptoms, discern we probably aren’t dying, and then lie around and complain for the next 7 weeks. After that, you go home to your family who will once again feed you a balanced diet, and the symptoms finally relent.

 

Second: Drinking Culture

Coming from Switzerland, where 16 year olds are allowed beer, wine and cider, I was already used to alcohol. Or so I thought. British Uni culture is so involved with alcohol that kitchens in student flats boast a ‘chunder chart’ – a wobbly record of who has made themselves sick the most. I was amazed at the superhuman liver of the boy who managed to get over 40 points on this chart in 9 weeks. Similarly, I marvelled at the stupidity of my best friend who thought that downing three bottles of wine within 20 minutes would go well – 20 minutes after that, he saw how wrong he was. But I was amazed at how much people enjoyed drinking with the intention to black out. Having never done this – and intending never to do so as well – it is somewhat amusing to watch, yet also tragic. I do enjoy blasting Taylor Swift’s catchiest songs outside their rooms the morning after though, just so they have the right anthem to begin their miserable, hungover days with.

 

Finally: Cooking

Nothing quite beats the absolute hilarity of trundling down from my third floor room to first floor to find a plastic colander having been melted into a saucepan. The white plastic had created a once-molten-now-solid lump at the bottom of the now ruined pan, whilst weird tendrils of thin, partially melted plastic linked it to the original skeleton of the colander. I was in a catered accommodation block, where we only had to cook for ourselves on weekends. It appeared that even that limited requirement of selfcare had surpassed the abilities of one student. My flatmates weren’t much better. One – studying chemistry – was surprised when he poured water into a hot pan and it evaporated instantly (Repeat: He is studying CHEMISTRY). Another just constantly ordered take away food. I, however, perfected scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs with cheese, omelettes, fried eggs, and various types of pasta. I did make pancakes once, which my flatmates all ate, and then told me that they were the worst things they had ever eaten and never to cook them again. None of us are perfect.

 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my first year and couldn’t have wished for a better one. I look forwards to having to cook eggs in more interesting ways next year and avoiding freshers flu as it sweeps through campus and most of all, reading hundreds of books for my course of English Lit. (which I did not mention at all, which sort of shows where priorities are at in first year).