Welcome to Lira

In the Uganda Bradt guide, the section on Lira starts by saying that "this is a town for which the term 'backwater' might have been specially coined". 

I don't know if the author had actually been to Lira when he wrote this. And I don't know what exactly you would picture under the term "backwater". But what I definitely would not imagine is this (you must add to the pictures music screaming at top volume from every stall along the road):

This is my new (or actually not that new anymore) town. After Kaabong and Kalongo, the third station in just over a year.

Like most places in northern Uganda, Lira had been affected by the 20-year LRA insurgency, in particular in the first half of 2000s when it hosted a big population of displaced people and several IDP camps, and the town had grown a lot in size as a consequence. But after 2007 most of the people slowly started returning to their villages, and now you won't notice that only 10 years ago this was one of the scenes of a major humanitarian emergency which had seen two million people displaced across northern Uganda.

Now Lira is a fairly pleasant, busy and growing town with a centre full of movement, people, bicycles, some cars and ocassional cows or chicken.

 

It is in a good middle way bettween the urban and the rural - it's quite comfortable to live in, but not too big and still not too far from the "field". Lira doesn't have Kaabong's amazing scenery, or Kalongo's rock - with the exception of some small hill nearby, the surroundings are boringly flat - but what it lacks in scenery, it compensates in quality of life. I already talked of toilet, pizza delivery (which admittedly I had never used back in Europe) or the small community of expats that is nice to meet and helps to keep my sanity. Though only some 5-6 hours from Kampala on a fairly good road, I'm finding out that I'm actually quite comfortable here and the main reason to go to Kampala is just to buy cheese.

I started going to classes of Leblango, the local language. No serious thing - we're five muzungus who in spite of the weekly promises to our teacher never actually study, so half of the classes is just repeating what we had succesfully forgotten from last time. Out of the three words I've managed to retain over the past months, my favourite is nyanynya, meaning tomato. And this is where you can buy nyanynya (and other things) in Lira:

The Lira market

The other highlight of my essential Leblango is the sentence "who took my pen?". Very useful for office use. 

While Kampala is flooded with motorcycles and cars, in Lira it's the bicycle that rules as the mode of transport. And so I also acquired a bike:

The best part of it is the basket.

The first months in Lira were not exactly easy - still working on the Kalongo projects while already taking over the Lira ones, down with malaria followed by some sort of an infection, hard time in the personal micro-universe... but slowly, things are getting better, and slowly I'm finding my Lira existence nice. And so at least until April next year, which is when my current contract expires, this is where you'll find me.