Merry Christmas and Uganda

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Trip Start Aug 08, 2006 Previous
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  Kampala, Uganda
Friday, December 22, 2006

Hi all!  Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year to you all!  I'm sure you are all enjoying a frosty winter but here it is only getting hotter!  This Christmas will be a lot more low-key than usual sans my eight siblings and two households.  I've been a bit bummed about missing Christmas for the first time especially because there isn't really the holiday hoopla here that I'm used to and many of my friends are leaving the area for the break.  Luckily, however, I was invited by potentially long lost family members to their house to celebrate the holidays this weekend.  A few weeks ago I met an older couple from Galway, Ireland who work in Tanzania.  Somehow we started talking about Ireland and I mentioned that we have some cousins who live there.  They asked me my last name and it turns out it's their last name too!  We got to talking and they invited me to their house for Christmas!  They happen to have two sons and a niece (who is volunteering in Kenya) around my age that will be in town for the holidays

01 Mama and Magda

.  I'll just stay with them for the weekend and then on Christmas day, come back to campus to attend service and have dinner with my Tanzanian family.  It should be fun!  The following Friday my dad and stepmother will be here and the Wednesday after that my boyfriend, Kyle.  I am really excited to show them around Tanzania.  We'll be heading up to Arusha for safari, touring Dar, and spending New Years on Zanzibar.
 
The last couple of weeks have been pretty interesting as I have finished up assignments, traveled to Uganda, and said goodbye to friends who were here for only one semester.  It's exciting to have been here for so long and I look forward to even more experiences in the next semester.
 
 
Kampala, Uganda
 
Uganda is amazing.  The landscape is beautiful with greenery everywhere.  The transportation is fun - boda boda motorbikes, the people are so friendly, and the weather was great, almost cold!  Armed with the theory that Uganda was closer to the equator and therefore hotter (Prof. East, I should have asked for your advice!), my friend Sarah and I boarded the plane for Kampala last Monday with our tank tops and shorts

02 Rachel

.  We had been talking about going to Kampala since the beginning of the semester but hadn't really found the time.  I was especially interested in going because I almost decided to go to University there instead of in Dar (luckily I didn't because the University was out this semester because the professors are on strike).  Sarah wanted to get out of Tanzania and had heard about the white water rafting at the source of the Nile.
 
We arrived in Kampala late Monday night and took a cab to a friend's house, the brother of a friend from Dar es Salaam.  We spent the next day exploring downtown Kampala and visiting Lake Victoria.  At Lake Victoria, we watched as people boarded the boats to local islands and talked to ten 18- 25 year old Ugandan fisherman who were really interested in what we were doing there.  We also saw these giant dinosaur-looking storks that live on port.  They were about 4 feet tall and really creepy looking, although no one seemed to notice them except Sarah and I who were extremely frightened when they flew overhead (pictures attached).  While in Kampala, I expected to use my Swahili some but apparently it is not good to do so.  During Idi Amin's dictatorship in Uganda, he tried to force people to use Swahili instead of the native Luganda.  The people did not accept the change and still associate the language with that repressive regime.  Sarah had to stop me every time I tried to thank someone because I am so used to saying thank you in Swahili, "Asante."
 
The next morning we woke up at 6:00 a.m. and headed to the Game superstore to meet up with our ride to Jinja to go white water rafting at the source of the Nile.  It was a little rainy that day, which made it pretty cold, but we were still really excited

03 Fajita night

.  There were 10 other people rafting with us.  We were split up into two groups -- the ones who wanted the most extreme ride and those who wanted it to be calmer (not that white water rafting is ever calm).  Unfortunately for Sarah, I volunteered us for the extreme ride.  In our raft, we had three UN peacekeeping soldiers from Pakistan who are stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a German traveler, and our Ugandan rafting guide.  We were a little frightened when our guide told us that there are Crocodiles in the Nile but supposedly they stay away from the rapids.  The trip was a lot fun and everyone made it out alive, although there were a few cuts and bruises.
 
After rafting, we headed up to the hostel, which was definitely a haven for extreme kayakers and rafters as everyone did both and loved to talk about it.  We found out that staff from the company that we went with had recently made the first trip by raft from Uganda to Rwanda (4 weeks) and in 2004, made the first source to end trip up the Nile from Uganda to Egypt (4 ½ months).
 
The next morning Sarah woke up to find out she had been bitten by something.  She had a red swollen bump the size of a baseball on her leg.  One of the other guys in our bunk, an extreme kayaker, happened to be a surgeon and told us an awful story about a guy who had been bitten by a spider on the neck a few weeks before

04 Leaving from Dar

.  The area around his bite has swelled up and then rotted off, leaving a large wound on his neck.  I guess at this point we should have gone straight to the hospital but instead Sarah wanted to watch to see if it got any bigger and we carried on to Sipi falls for some waterfall viewing and hiking.
 
The Sipi falls area was beautiful and we stayed way up in the hills with a gorgeous view of the waterfalls.  It had taken us five hours by bus to get there and the area was pretty remote.  The hostel called for a local doctor from a nearby hospital to come to check out Sarah's leg.  He gave her a shot of cortisone (right in the hostel lobby in her bottom) and some other anti-histamine.  He didn't say what it was that bite her but was sure she had just had an allergic reaction.
 
The next day we went for a hike to the falls.  Throughout the day, we were invited by several locals to view the local circumcision ceremonies.  Apparently, we came to Sipi during circumcision week.  All of the 16 year old boys in the area were to gain their manhood.  They were paraded down the street all day by family and friends, then all night the family celebrated, and in the morning the boys would line up to be circumcised.  They would then spend two weeks alone in a hut recovering

05 Boda Boda

.  We decided that it might not be appropriate for us to attend.
 
The following morning we headed back to Kampala and had Sarah's leg checked out by another doctor because it had been growing.  He told her that she had been bitten by a tetsy fly and that the swelling would start to go down once the medicine kicked in.  We were very relieved that her skin would stay on.
 
That night we stayed with another friend of a friend in Kampala and checked out a night life a bit. It was pretty fun. In the morning, we headed back to Dar to finish up the semester.
 
 
 
 

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06 1000 Cups of Coffee	07 Dowtown Kampala	08 Dowtown Kampala	09 Large Dinosaur Birds
10 Giant Birds

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