Hiring Domestic Help at Sambaker

Jerry Barr (1C)

            I never thought I would ever have domestic servants working for me in my house, cooking, cleaning, and doing other maintenance work. Starting out as the mathematics teacher at  Sir Samuel Baker Senior Secondary School—Sambaker—located in Acholi Province, twenty miles from Gulu in the north of Uganda,  I was assigned, and paid rent to the Uganda government, for a house on the school compound that folks called the deer park. It was a ranch style cement block house, three bed rooms,  living room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom, really nice, except no electricity.  Further, the kitchen had a cast iron wood burning stove, a wood burning hot water heater and no fridge.  There was indoor plumbing, running water, including the most important appliance in any place called shelter, a European type flush toilet.  However, this all presented a large scale challenge to this twenty-two year old single man; but luckily, the other teachers provided me with plenty of advice on dealing with this situation.  They said buy a kerosene fridge and hire someone for house and cooking work, someone called a "house boy" by the Brits in Northern Uganda.  Never did I ever imagine having a servant cooking and cleaning for me, but that's what I did.  Further, the name "house boy" was terribly annoying to me.  But as one of the two mathematics teachers for the first year, and the only mathematics teacher for the second year, handling more than two hundred live-in students, teaching math from arithmetic through calculus, doing basketball coaching and boy scouts after teaching,  there was no way I could carry that schedule and handle the requirements for living in a house without electricity if I didn't have help.   Coming out of Chicago in 1961, common living conditions there included complete 120/240 volt AC electricity with all the convenience appliances.  So now, I had  to live without even a toaster: What to do? 

     Not to worry: Francisco Opiga, my newly hired  "house boy," took care of that.  He had previously worked for Brits, and they fried bread in the bacon fat and out came delicious toast.  He hand-washed my clothes, ironed them with a charcoal iron, pumped and lit the pressure lamps, kept the kerosene fridge working, cooked on the wood burning stove, washed the dishes, and made sure I had some hot water for a bath.  He  got to the local butcher before sunrise because, after sunrise, flies swarmed over the newly butchered steer, and since the meat was sold at two shilling a pound regardless of the cut he got, there early to get the best cuts.  If he got there late and got the tough cuts, Francisco put the meat in a papaya fruit in the kerosene fridge, and the next day, he  produced mighty tender eating.  (I'm convinced that Adolf got word of Francisco's papaya thing and much later produced his own famous meat tenderizer!)  Thanks, Francisco, because, without you, I would have been a lost soul.