Weekend adventure

Another week begins on Monday and it's crazy that I've been here for five weeks. I went on an impromtu outing with some friends in the group on Thursday and we got back on Saturday. We went to Murchison Falls National Park in the north (as far north as we can go in the country-the top third of Uganda is off limits due to the conflict/civil war going on there). It was quite an adventure, especially because we really didn't have any of the trip planned out beforehand. I didn't hear about the trip until Thursday morning so I went to class as usual (our last Luganda class-sad) and went home to get my stuff. The taxi ride home was quite interesting-the taxi wouldn't start up in the park and I tried to get out but a heavily pregnant woman was blocking my way and a bunch of guys were pushing us to start the car, which it eventually did. But, it kept breaking down every ten minutes or so until we rolled into a gas station and I guess a little gas did the trip. I was so tempted to get out and find another taxi but we were in an area where it would have been hard to find a taxi going to Kagoma with an empty seat. So I just stayed in it and I got home safely though a little later than I would have liked. Then I packed very quickly and left to take another taxi into town. I was in such a hurry that I did something stupid-got into an empty taxi with only the driver and collector. Some more guys joined us and they were all talking like they were friends so I was a little creeped out but eventually a woman got in so I didn't feel to unsafe. Our ADs told us that as long as there is another woman present, it's ok. Anyway, this taxi took forever to fill up so we kept stopping and honking at people, trying to get them to join us. We also had to stop for gas and the driver went down this back road and we were stuck behind a car that broke down in the middle of the road for fifteen to twenty minutes. So I was a little late meeting my friends but we were good to go. So we went to the old taxi park to catch a taxi out of the city but were told to go to the new taxi park-just a slight snag in the plan. The two are pretty close so we just walked to the new taxi park and were completely bombarded with "muzungu, where are you going" and tons of vendors trying to sell us everything from men's briefs to friend chicken to shoe polish. Some creepy guy came and tried to sell us lace and asked us for $1,000 but after an hour and a half we took off and didn't have to deal with him anymore. By the time we left, it was dark out becuase we had waited a while to leave so by the time we got to Masindi, it was still dark and we had no idea where to go to find the hotel we were trying to stay at for the night. So the taxi people were nice and drove us past the last stop and around the corner to the Executive Lodge. It was so close but we would never have found it on our own. So we got a room for Sh. 7,000 a night, which amounts to a little over a dollar each, and it was definitely priced to value. The small room we got had two beds with mosquito (with large holes-they were too big to keep the mosquitoes out) while we found that the bathroom was a pit-latrine in the back (I'm used to that by now) and the shower was a cockroach-infested hole in a room and one bucket to split between the four of us. It was the worst hotel room I have ever stayed in, but it was good for only costing $1 a night. Since we were getting up in six hours none of us showered and we went to bed after deet-ing ourselves to keep the mosquitoes from biting.



We woke up at 6:00 the next morning becuase a woman at the hotel told us that we would have our private hire taxi at 6:30 the next morning so that we could spend all day in the park. However, we did a lot of waiting (as usual) and tried to find some guy off the street but no one seemed to know where they were going. A guy from the hotel got a friend out of bed to drive us and he finally showed up around 7:30 and agreed to drive us to the park, where we planned to go to a hotel and hitch rides around. However, there were no available cheap hotel rooms left for that night so we figured it would be better to just hire him for the day and go back to Masindi for the night. So we agreed to pay him Sh. 210,000 (a little over $25 each) and he drove us to the park. We paid our fees to enter and went chimpanzee trekking/tracking first. There is a forest in Murchison Falls National Park called Budongo Forest Central Reserve where we went to find some chimps. We were the only people there when we got there and we payed another $25 and had a guide for a three-hour trek into the semi-deciduous tropical forest. We started out and right away something exciting happened-the guide found this gorgeous bird on the trail. It was an African Dwarf Kingfisher and was caught in a branch so it couldn't move. The guide spent about 20 minutes trying to untangle the bird and eventually did so to find that its legs were broken. However, the bird flew away and we got back on our way. We walked through this lovely forest. We saw three types of monkeys-black and white colubus (sp?), red-tailed, and some patas (I think). However, we were tracking chimps. We saw chimp tracks. We saw the fruit that the chimps often eat (though it wasn’t very ripe) as well as the black and white monkeys that the chimps drag off to eat as well. We saw their scat (“This is how they make their poo”-our guide) and we smelled the chimps in a few sections of the forest. However, for three hours we did not see or hear them. There were three other guided groups in the forest at the same time and none of them were having luck either. It was 12:00 and thus time to head back so that our guide could have lunch and prepare for the tours in the afternoon. However, she wanted to try one last spot and suddenly, we heard them. She told us to be quiet as we headed off the trail into the forest, bushwacking our way through the tall grasses, trees, and other plants. She also told us that we would probably only see them for about ten seconds before they ran away to hide but that at least we would get to see them. So we followed her and there one was, sitting in a tree. We approached it and it didn’t run away-instead, it stared at us. Then our guide pointed out another one in another tree. Then we saw more in the trees and some on the ground. They were everywhere, some quite close and others high up in the trees. They just sat there and watched us as we watched them. A few times they even started talking to each other about us and howled. That was really cool, though at first I was a little alarmed that they might attack us. This has to be one of the coolest things I have ever experienced. We stood there and watched them for about forty minutes and saw some mating as well as some grooming going on. I feel so lucky to have seen them. We almost headed back without seeing any and total we saw about twelve while the other groups didn’t see any. I would have been pretty disappointed paying $25 and not seeing any chimps so it was great to see all of them. So we headed back to the main lodge, all satisfied at having seen such a cool thing.

After the chimps, we headed off for a lunch at a really nice lodge, the first lodge to open in the park. However, there was no one else there because people use cheaper places to stay. It was really nice inside and the grounds looked nice, but it was a bit out of our budget range. Then we headed down the road to the top of the falls. I was expecting a normal waterfall, something cool to see but nothing really impressive. However, Murchison Falls was incredible. It was so powerful and so fast. The falls occur when the Victoria Nile flows through a narrow ravine to plunge downward into a delta that eventually flows into Lake Albert on the border with the Congo. The spray that was coming up was incredible. We just went to a few lookouts and hung out for a while. One of the lookouts had quite a lot of spray so we got a bit wet. We were also at the very top where the river flows by quickly before falling. It was so neat. It made the trip even more worth it. We headed back when it started raining though it never rained really hard. We saw some wildlife on the trip back to Masindi including more black and white monkeys, red-tailed monkeys, and this rare gray one that crossed the road with some babies that doesn’t come out of hiding very often. We also saw hartebeests which were really strange looking with the face of a horse, the horns of an antelope, and the body of a deer or something like that. It reminded me of the thestrals from Harry Potter but I don’t know what real animal I would compare it to. They were really eerie looking. We also saw lots of baboons on the road. They would congregate on or around the road and then would run away as we approached in the car then start to emerge as we were driving away. We also saw some warthogs, including some babies, and some more waterbuck. Overall, it made the hundred dollars well-spent. However, I really would have liked to see giraffes. We could have crossed somewhere to see giraffes but the ferry wasn’t working and our driver would have charged us a lot more money. I’ll just have to go back again to see giraffes and to see Murchison Falls during the rainy season. We got back to Masindi, ate at a muzungu joint (I had rolex-chapati with an omelette), and went back to Executive Lodge for another cheap, showerless night. This time we didn’t even sleep with the nets because it was so hot and they really weren’t protecting us as we were leaning against them and the holes were big so we deeted up and hoped that we wouldn’t get malaria in a week.

The next morning we got up around 8:00 to make the bus that we were told left at 9:00. We figured that a bus would be more comfortable than a cramped taxi and it was Sh. 1,000 cheaper so we went for it. We got on around 8:20 thinking that there was no way that the driver would wait for it to fill up. Boy, were we wrong. We sat around for two hours waiting to get enough people before we could leave. It was around 10:30 when we slowly left Masindi. We stopped several times to drop people off and pick people up along the way, as well as stops in small towns to buy skewers of sketchy meat and sketchy water bottles from vendors. There was one large section where there were speedbumps every ten meters or so which was really annoying and prevented me from sleeping or even reading. We definitely took a different route back than we took to get to Masindi. It was the worst bus ride of my life. Never again will I take a bus in Uganda. We weren’t even comfortable because we had our backpacks that wouldn’t fit in the top bins and wouldn’t go under the seats very well. However, the scenery was pretty nice. I was reading “The End of Poverty” by Jeffrey Sachs and it was interesting to read about extreme poverty and then look out the window and see exactly what Sachs was describing with people in their homes made of mud with grass roofs and people getting water with dilapidated jerry cans from dirty ponds. It was pretty depressing.

We got back to Kampala that afternoon and were swamped with the usual taxi drivers asking us where we wanted them to drive us and not leaving us alone after we told them no. It wasn’t the best welcome back. Then I took the taxi home and was welcomed by my family. I have never been more dirty-we hadn’t bathed for two nights and the bus ride was incredibly dusty and dirty, especially since I was sitting behind a man who kept his window open the entire way the entire time (it was quite hard to breathe when we were going full speed-thank goodness for the speedbumps) so I was full of the dust of rocks and dirt from various parts of the trip. I probably smelled pretty dreadful. So I showered and ate and went to bed early because I was pretty tired from the trip.

The next day I went into the city as usual to use internet and finish up an assignment. I started watching “Funny Girl” with my family (my sister’s choice of the few dvds I brought) but went to bed early again because I was still tired. Then Monday we started our field visits of the in-depth modules. We have some pretty interesting facilitators for this module including Sister Harriet (sister because she’s a nurse, not because she’s a nun), who says Excuse Me all the time and wears a strange hairpiece. The public health group headed to a level four clinic in Kasangati, a suburb of Kampala. We saw a lot of women with their children there for weighings and inoculations. We even had a focus group with five women who talked about reproductive health and their families. It was really interesting though the language barrier was annoying during some parts of it because they weren’t always translated for us. Then we toured the various areas of the clinic. I was back to feeling awkward walking around, looking at patients, though this time I was with nine other muzungus. Then on Tuesday we toured some water sources: a borehole, a protected spring, some other dirty places to get water. Then we went to the dump. That was quite an experience. It smelled quite bad. We got out of the taxi and waited around for half-an-hour (it seems like we do this all the time) and had a tour guide and some other creepy guy to accompany us on our tour. We walked into the dump among the various waste items (I wore sandals-not the best choice) which was pretty gross. I did my best to avoid any really questionable looking stuff but it was hard not to walk on crap of some sort. There were so many marabou storks there going through stuff as well as people scavenging for anything they could sell. We then walked to where they treat the run-off water from the dump. It was not the most fun experience and it really wasn’t all that different from a dump at home. Afterwards we had some lunch at Mulago and headed off to a recycling plant. I’ve been drinking at least a liter of bottled water a day and I have felt really bad after throwing away each bottle because there really isn’t a program for recycling around here. However, we learned that people do pick the recyclable plastics out of the trash and bring them to this plant where they are recycled to make more bottles and such. It was pretty cool to see something good coming from all that bottled water I’ve been drinking. Then on Wednesday we went to an outreach clinic where the Kasangati level four clinic sends people to vaccinate and care for the simple cases of malaria, headaches, diarrhea, etc. in a woman’s home. It was good to see something more on the community level where people can reach free health services more easily. A teacher was there with her primary school class and we had fun with the kids for a little while. Then we headed off to some homes to see what poverty looked like which was super awkward. The first house we went to had two older people living with several grandchildren. They had six children but they all left and didn’t support them and two even left their children with the grandparents. The kids were sitting around on polythyrene sacks which was their bedding and one was eating leaves from the ground where the chickens and the cow had likely been walking. They were all wearing really tattered clothing, though the baby wasn’t wearing anything at all. They weren’t in school because the family doesn’t have enough money to pay for school and they weren’t eating at midday because they only had enough food for one meal a day. They had one calf to provide milk (not sure how that’s working out) and a few chickens scratching around. Then we visited the home of a woman whose husband was working making bricks. The woman has two children, one at school, and was watching her husband’s young step-sister. Four people were living in a very small room and they had to share their pit-latrine with the husband’s father’s family. They had a few pigs and chickens. When we left each family the facilitators would give them money. With the first family it was interesting to see that they gave the money to the woman right in front of the man. This is probably so that the woman spends it on household upkeep because she’s the one that’s cooking and providing for the children. Anyway, it was really awkward to just go to these houses and stare at the people and their circumstances. It was also quite depressing to see people so visibly poor, but that’s the reality through so much of the region.

So things continue going well. Time here is passing so quickly. I only have a week and a half left with my homestay. The homestay continues to go well though they are convinced that I’m bad at ironing so my host dad irons my clothes for me. They continue to enjoy my few dvds and I came home to my host mom watching “Hable con ella” in Spanish with English subtitles the other day. The funny thing is that she can’t read very well so I don’t think she understood what was going on. I think the same thing probably happened when they watched “Motorcycle Diaries.” However, my family did really like “Life is Beautiful” but shot down “Spirited Away” before seeing any of it because they thought it was a cartoon for children. I wonder if they’ll want to watch “The Sound of Music” tomorrow. I am just now realizing what a random mix of movies I brought though I have yet to watch any of them. Next week we have another expedition coming up. The practicum will begin soon-I think I’m going to look into international aid and transparency issues. I keep thinking about Ecuador, especially after the news of its conflict with Colombia. I still can’t wait to go back and there are definitely days when I feel like I should have just done another semester in Latin America. I think I hit the low point of the culture shock curve last week with many bad taxi rides, a lost raincoat (I still miss it-it would have been great to have it this rainy season), a flying cockroach in my bed, multiplying ants and lots of slow and unproductive internet. However, the trip really helped me get back on track and I’m feeling better this week. Hopefully things will go well during our trip out east next week. The rural homestay should be interesting but I’m feeling quite prepared because I already have to deal with a pit-latrine with cockroaches coming out of the hole every day. I hope people are doing well. If there’s anything specific you want to know about or if you have a general comment, feel free to leave a comment. Chao chao!! Siiba/sula bulungi.