Week in Kampala, Uganda

After leaving Nyeihanga, we set off for Kampala (Uganda’s capital) for a week of relaxing before attempting to climb Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. As soon as we arrived we were able to enjoy some of the luxuries we had been without while in the village, hot showers (well just running water in general), toilets, and Westernized food (I had a burger… amazing!).  We kind of just bummed around the hostel the day we got there and the next day. Late on the day after we arrived our buddy from home, Blake Shubert, and his girlfriend, Bianca, arrived. Blake works for the organization we had been volunteering with in Nyeihanga, and was coming to Uganda to check out how all the organization’s operations were working, especially in Nyeihanga. The plan was to brief him on what we had done with our time down in the village, provide him with any ideas or plans for the future of the village, and then just hang out for the rest of the time we had with them.

We got lucky the day after Blake and Bianca arrived. There was an Africa Cup of Nation’s qualifying soccer match between the Uganda and Guinea Bissau national soccer teams downtown about 10 miles from where we were staying. All of Kampala was going crazy for the game. People were dressed in soccer jerseys all over town. We got lunch downtown and the crowds of people we saw in the streets was nuts. When we got to the stadium there were huge lines of people trying to get in and they were so tightly packed that we didn’t really want to get in the lines. We walked around for a little while trying to find a shorter/safer line when we found this gate that was letting cars in. Whenever the police (in full riot gear toting large automatic rifles) would open the gate to let a car in about 50 people would run through the gate and then the riot cops would go crazy, start screaming, and push the people who didn’t make it back with their huge clear shield thingys.  We watched this happen 2 or 3 times until one of the cops just points to Blake and tells him to follow him through the gate. Jackpot. We ended up bribing him to “pay for the tickets” which we never received but at least we were inside!! The crowd inside the stadium was electric. Uganda ended up winning 2-0 and whenever they scored the crowd would erupt and people all over the stadium would blow whistles and go to town with their vuvuzelas. As annoying as they were during the World Cup, being there in person took it to a whole other level. My ears were literally ringing by the end of the match. Another cool thing was after the game was over no one left the stadium. We were planning on waiting around to let things clear out before we left (to avoid any tramplings), but the stadium was completely full even a half hour after the game. By the time we made it to our car we were all pretty tired and ready for dinner and drinks back at the hostel. Unfortunately we were about to experience the worst traffic any of us have ever seen. At literally every intersection the entire way home 3 lanes of traffic (where only one should be) would try and turn in each direction of the intersection at one time. Things would completely grid lock and cars would inch forward as much as they could. After 25 minutes of this, half of the people would get out of their cars and try to direct everyone to get unjammed. About 5 cars would make it out and then the cycle would start over. It took us over 4 hours to get the 10 miles back to the hostel.

The next day we said our goodbyes to Blake and Bianca as they left to continue our efforts in Nyeihanga and then Erin and I took a few hour bus ride to Jinja to whitewater raft the Nile. This trip was one of the coolest/most fun things we’ve done on our entire trip. The river was full of Category 4 and 5 rapids that were tossing us all over the place. Erin and I shared our raft with 2 British guys and our guide. At the beginning our guide told us the day could go one of three ways. We could go easy and make sure the raft didn’t flip over by just going over the edge of the rapids, we could go medium by going near the center of the rapids but there’d be a chance we might flip, or we could go hard and the guide would try to hit the center of the rapid and pretty much try to flip us every time. Obviously the 2 other guys and I chose the hard way. Erin was a little apprehensive but went along with it. By the end of the day the boat had gone over 3 times and I had popped out one more time. By the end of the day we were all exhausted. We pulled the rafts out of the water and a huge BBQ was waiting for us on the banks of the river. It was so good.

The next day we had booked a mini safari through our hostel up to Murchison Falls National Park. The park was about 4 or so hours away by minibus. Our group was made up of Erin and I, another couple who was on holiday from some volunteer work in the DRC, and a really weird Italian guy named Bernardino. Now, we met Bernardino the day before while whitewater rafting, but he was in a different raft so we didn’t interact too much with him (besides being treated to some pretty epic Italian boy-shorts swim trunks… Bernardino wasn’t a small guy). He was a nice enough guy, he just didn’t like the sun and was really afraid of mosquitoes so he was always in jeans and a sweatshirt, lathering the rest of his exposed skin with sun block, and spraying bug spray everywhere. As soon as we got to the park, the group went chimpanzee trekking. We hiked for about an hour with a guide until we spotted a group of chimps in the trees. There were about 5 or 6 female chimps and most of them had baby chimps with them. It was pretty cool just watching them eat and the babies swing from the branches. We had about an hour with them and just before we left the chimps started calling for the male chimps who were a few kilometers away. We waited for a few extra minutes hoping the males would show up, but we didn’t get lucky and hiked back to the bus. We drove to the campsite and just hung out for the rest of the afternoon. One thing that we experienced here that we really hadn’t yet was true equatorial African heat. Where we had been staying in Nyeihanga was at a higher elevation so it never really got too hot and Kampala would maybe get into the low 90s, but in the park it was well over 100. Too hot to even lay down in the tents. The next morning we work up early and went for a game drive around the park. We saw a ton of baboons, giraffes, bushbucks, and elephants. We didn’t see any lions or cheetahs or anything, but we weren’t really expecting to, and there’s always Tanzania! After a quick lunch back at the campsite we jumped on a boat and cruised down the Nile to the falls. The boat ride was about 3 hours long and along the way we would pull the boat over to check out the animals drinking. We saw hundreds of hippos, a few crocodiles, and a bunch of elephants and buffalo. When we got to the falls our group jumped off and hiked to the top. This was when having Bernardino in the group got a little crazy. About a half hour after we started the hike, Bernardino had to stop. The other couple went ahead and we waited with him. He looked terrible. He was just dripping with sweat and he got sick a few times. I told him to take his sweatshirt off because it looked like he was about to get heat stroke. He claimed that he was just sick from spraying bug spray in his tent and then breathing it in 3 hours before, and that he didn’t want to take his shirt off because he didn’t want to get burned. We stayed with his as he basically crawled to the top. He made it and didn’t die so that’s good I guess. The view from the top of the falls was awesome, totally worth it.

On the drive back to Kampala the next day we stopped at a rhino rehabilitation park. All of the rhinos in Uganda were wiped out in the 80s due to poaching, but this park is trying to bring them back. We walked for about a half hour and got to within about 20 yards of 2 huge rhinos. It was pretty cool to be so close to these massive animals.

The next morning we hopped on a bus and headed to Tanzania. It was an overnight bus from Kampala, Uganda to Arusha, Tanzania. The bus was supposed to take 16 hours, but there was some overturned truck in the middle of the night which held us up. The trip ended up taking a full 24 hours. We also had to cross two international borders during the trip. Everyone had to get off the bus at these and go through border control. It was crazy how unregulated these border crossings were. People were just walking back and forth through an open gate. Not exactly like the US-Mexico border. When we got to Arusha, we got our stuff ready for our Kilimanjaro climb which started the next day.

Next up… Climbing Kilimanjaro: He Said, She Said!!!!!

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Ugandan Generosity

After our Middle East adventure, we headed to Uganda where we are volunteering for two months. Many of you may know Blake Shubert, a friend of both Brian and mine from high school. Blake has been the director of global operations for an international Christian service organization called Light of the Lord Global Missions (LOLGM) for more than a year and a half. This organization is especially cool, in my opinion, because they strive to make their aid projects self-sustaining through small business. Their Kampala branch, for example, launched a successful dairy enterprise that funds its projects. When we decided we wanted to have a volunteer component to our honeymoon, we first thought of Blake and the good work we know he does with LOLGM.

Our flight from Istanbul got to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, early morning the Sunday before Easter. We stayed in a pretty nice hostel on the outskirts of the city that met my standards because it had hot showers and monkeys roaming around the ground! (Mention of monkeys is probably a dead giveaway that it’s Erin writing this post. Not surprisingly, monkeys have quickly ousted camels to resume their position as my favorite animal). After spending Sunday catching up on sleep, Monday and Tuesday we were shown around Kampala by two guys from LOLGM, Stephen and John, who do a lot of the on the ground management of LOLGM projects in Uganda. They took us to get phones and an internet stick to use in the village, took us to a zoo and to the “source of the Nile” – the point where Lake Victoria starts draining into the Nile. The conversations were pretty interesting with a lot of lost in translation moments where Brian and I had no clue what was going on. But we had a great time in Kampala with Stephen and John. Somehow we managed to find out that they worked in Iraq for the same company I had worked for in Virginia right up until our wedding. This is especially crazy because the portion of the company operating in the U.S. is tiny, maybe a hundred people, and they (and a LOLGM guy from the village) are probably the only Ugandans my company ever employed. Small world!! Kampala is surprisingly small for a capital city but it is full of people and sprawling, with bad enough traffic to make us miss our old commutes up 495 (not).

Wednesday we headed down to Nyeihanga, the village in southwest Uganda, five hours from Kampala, where we are spending about 2 months helping out. The LOLGM branch in Nyeihanga is really new – it began in late 2010 and already has some great projects going such as a school for vulnerable children and orphans and an adult literacy program. We’re going to be working with these and also with getting some sustainable businesses going. A highlight of the drive up was that when we would pass through towns, where traffic would slow, dozens of people in blue vests would run up to your car and shove all sorts of foods, drinks, and other things for sale into your window. Then, as soon as another car would go by, they would take off and sprint towards that car. And then sprint to another car, and so on. I guess with so many vendors, competition was fierce and you had to be fast to make a sale. Brian tried some skewers of grilled meat but I thought it was safer, and more appetizing, to stick to roasted bananas.

Thursday was our official welcome ceremony by the community. It was one of the most amazing experiences of both of our lives. The event took place on the grounds of a building that doubles as a church, a school for kids and adults, and a center for other community activities. First, we were welcomed with songs by the kids from the community school, then songs by the adult education participants, and then songs by the church choir. These songs were beautiful and personalized to welcome specifically me and Brian. They were all choreographed with dances and accompanied by drums. We took some short videos and pictures that don’t do the performances justice but at least give a bit of a picture. We’ll post when we have fast internet again. Next, some of the kids and adult learners recited various poems they had written. Finally, the kids and the choir each performed plays they wrote for this occasion. We didn’t understand everything that went on in the plays, but they were seriously funny and Brian even said his cheeks hurt by the end from all the smiling and laughing. As if all of this wasn’t enough, the people of the community all brought gifts to personally welcome us. We ended up with an enormous pile of fruits, veggies, eggs, even two sugar cane stalks two feet taller than Brian! Now, two weeks later, we are still getting daily gifts of fruits and veggies. Even today we were brought a bushel of sugar cane stalks, a big bag of guavas, and a bag of local berries! After the presentations, we found out that we were expected to make a speech (this is something we end up having to do at every community event we attend – so at least five times weekly!). It really wasn’t hard to find words to say after so much generosity! Brian said some great, heartfelt words and we passed out some measly candy and coloring books we brought for the kids. The community spirit here and the kindness of the people are humbling. We hope during our time here we are able to give back something more substantial to the amazing people here.

Over the past two weeks we have attended events ranging from Easter Baptisms in the local stream to the school kids’ term graduation. My favorite thing is definitely the adult literacy classes where we get to work with some incredibly motivated women.  Mostly we are just trying to get involved in everything to learn more about how things work here. There are about a billion adorable kids that we get to play with, we’re working to get a microfinance program started … the only thing that could make me happier is if there were more monkeys roaming the village streets!!

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