Greetings from Uganda! My school is on break, and all the teachers were told to leave, so I decided I would leave to visit my neighbor country of Uganda. And yes, I still don't understand how we break these two weeks while the rest of Kenya breaks in April... And yes, I am still apprehensive that the students have to take exams the moment we resume on the 28th... And yes, despite my concerns, real or imagined, I was thankfully able to leave those behind when the time came to go... And yes, I thought I was leaving on Sunday but then my ride to Nairobi switched to Saturday so I packed and left without saying goodbye which is never a good feeling... surely they know I am coming back because they ask at least once a week when I am leaving(not because they are trying to get rid of me, just because they know that everyone is always leaving...)
Meanwhile, while missing my children, I am having an amazing time. I was able to get a ride into Nairobi Saturday, stayed that night with my MCC country reps who just happened to be having a potluck that evening so I was able to catch up with some other MCC friends as well. Then I went to church Sunday with two of the MCC service workers, and joined them and some retired MCC people(legends was how they were described to me) for lunch after. We had the most amazing Indian food! Meanwhile, the conversation was an amazing combination of history and Kenya and peace... and I mostly just listened because the MCC legends are legendary for a reason. They have lived in Kenya or East Africa since the seventies(and she grew up in Tanzania even before then) and are very wise.
Then Sunday evening I got the night bus to Kampala, befriending most of the other bus riders as my means of security... or Ugandans are more open than Kenyans... or something. Anyways, I was glad to have chatted with some of them when we hit the border at five in the morning, still dark, and had to walk through this wide expanse of no mans land between the Kenyan and Ugandan immigration offices.
I arrived in Kampala around ten, met up with my friend Amanda who is doing SALT in Uganda, and we got lunch. I had an amazing calzone! Monday Kampala was electing a mayor, so we opted to lay low that day because elections can often mean conflict. There was no conflict on Monday, but I think the police did fire tear gas on people celebrating their candidates victory a day or two later... It was great to catch up with Amanda though and to hear how her SALT experience compared to mine.
Then, Tuesday I followed her back to Kamuli where she is living and working and got to see first hand how her SALT year was going which was lovely. I got to meet and stay with her host family who were incredible: while my position has me with the biggest host family ever, who I love, sometimes I wish I had a more traditional host family. I enjoyed borrowing hers for a few days. Then I got to see her work, where she works split between some teaching and some social work.
I really enjoyed visiting the schools and seeing how they compared to my experience. My school is not typical. Our class sizes are a dream, and education is such a priority that I don't have to worry about convincing my kids to study. Not so at the primary where Amanda teaches. Class sizes averaged around 100, and with so many children, the teachers had a daunting task. The teachers were very welcoming of me as their visitor, and I had a good conversation with one of them when Amanda was off doing some home visits. He says education is a real struggle in Uganda because people have so many children and there is free primary education(which is good) but with so many children that can make 100 children in a class. It does seem here like there is an abundance of primary schools, probably in Kenya too. I got to help with one of his classes, reviewing a social studies exam with p. 7, and then the next day another school had asked Amanda if I could visit so I taught their P. 7's English. The second school was much smaller, not in a permanent building but a subdivided hall, but the class sizes were much more reasonable. It was great to have an insight into education in Uganda.
As I showed up midweek I really just tagged along for daily life, but another fun experience was getting to sit in on Amanda's churches school outreach practices. The church youth had a trip planned for this weekend where they would go and visit secondary schools doing outreach and encouraging youth to be smart about AIDS. They had songs, dances, skits and plays that they were practicing, and it was fun to meet them and also to watch them practice. At a certain point, their leader had to confiscate all their cellphones because they kept talking during practice... some things are the same the world over... cellphones are taking over the world.
Truly, it was a rich couple of days, and then Friday morning I headed out for some solo traveling adventures, starting in Jinja a few hours away from Kamuli. Jinja is famous as the source of the Nile, and I went to the site where Lake Victoria becomes the Nile river. It was a beautiful sunny day(despite the rains starting this week, which while a blessing has left me often enough quite damp) and I rented a boat to take me out to see the source better and then to go out onto Lake Victoria. I had a great and knowledgeable guide, and while I feel I might have paid more than I should(I am a poor bargainer) it was well worth the $10 I paid... I takes a drop of water 3 months to make it from the source of the Nile to the Mediterranean. There were many beautiful birds along the source, and I even saw a monitor lizard. Then, after my tour, I had fried Tillapia and chips.
That afternoon I just walked around Jinja as I had decided to stay the night before heading onto Kampala. It is a medium sized town, but as it was also the first port in Uganda along Lake Victoria and connecting as a trade route to Tanzania and Kenya, it has some beautiful colonial architecture and just a friendly feel. I like walking, finding it the best way to get a sense of a place. I also had a cup of really good coffee.
Then, this morning I headed upriver to look at the Bujangali Falls, falls made famous mostly by the rafting industry which runs the Nile. I decided to save my money, remembering how scared I was rafting the Spokane river one summer in college with its non-existant rapids. Still, it was a beautiful falls to look at. I have a deep love of waterfalls, probably stemming from my time in Ghana where we would go chasing waterfalls for weekend adventures. They also are very majestic, but this waterfall will soon disappear as a dam is going in nearby. It will be good for the electricity it will provide, but I also can't help feel a little sad for the waterfall. When I left Jinja, it was starting to rain, and by the time I reached the Bujangali falls it was raining quite properly. I think I amused the people working there, having trekked through the rain to just look at the falls...
Then I headed to Kampala, but will leave my time here(still ongoing) for another post. Random Uganda observations... people here are very welcoming(a stereotype my Kenyan friends had told me about Ugandans, but it is true)... a primary means of transportation is riding boda-bodas, motorcycle taxis, and in rural communities the proper way to ride for women in skirts is sideways which was a slightly terrifying, if completely safe on rural backroads, experience... also on transportation I was in a 14 person minibus taxi yesterday that easily was holding twenty people(as I ride more popular routes in Kenya... i.e. police checks... this was a new experience)...
Anyways, that is all for now... I will blog again about my adventures in Kampala and beyond. We have MCC team meeting Friday and then I head back to Hope next Saturday. It feels strange to be away for so long, and I hope things are going well on this break that I never felt anybody knew anything about...
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