Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia
Trip Start
Aug 08, 2006
1
14
Trip End
Jun 12, 2007
Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia
Saturday, October 20, 2007
After finishing my last exam, I headed to the airport for two weeks of traveling in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. The travel plan was pretty complicated and my first stop was Nairobi airport to meet up with friends who had flown down from London (Chris I knew from George Washington, and his friend James). My plan was to spend three days in Uganda, then fly to Kenya to stay with a friend of a friend, and then fly to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I would meet my friend Gita coming from Dar es Salaam and spend a week.
Uganda
My friend Chris from GW and his two friends James and Kristian flew into Tanzania the week before we went to Uganda. They flew in on Saturday. We went all around Dar; out at night, laid at the pool on Sunday, and then they headed out Sunday night to fly to Arusha for a 5-day safari. While I was taking exams, they were enjoying the Serengeti, Ngorogoro, and Lake Manyara in Northern Tanzania.
My exams weren't too bad and ,in fact, were a lot easier than the 15-20 page papers that we had had to write during the semester. The tests were made up of three essay questions that we had three hours to complete. Many of the questions were familiar from research and notes. It was a bit difficult because I decided to finish all my exams in two weeks instead of taking the three weeks other students had so that I could do some traveling.
Four hours after my exams were finished, I headed to the airport to fly to Nairobi to meet Chris and James and then to head to Uganda. I had been to Kampala, Uganda once before and had loved it. It seemed like this would be a different experience because James had a friend from high school who was working at an AIDS NGO outside Kampala called Reach Out.
We arrived in Kampala (after luckily finding each other at the airport in Kenya even though my phone had died!) James' friend Michaela picked us up at the airport with her boyfriend Fez. We stayed at their house for the weekend. This was excellent because we stayed in their neighbor's apartment in the house and had an awesome view of Kampala. Kampala is built on seven hills.
While in Uganda, we went white water rafting and rode boda bodas (taxi motorcycles) around the city. We were there over a weekend and on Saturday night we went to the most ridiculous show of my life, "Love Affairs Featuring the Ebonies." This was a lip-synced musical using pop songs from artists such as Beyonce and Michael Jackson about affairs that was half English/half Bugandan. It was playing at the LA Bonita Theater and I swear it changed my life. Good thing there are no intellectual property rights in Uganda because this show would have been able to happen. It was truly crazy and different; even the dialogue was lip-synced. This is the website if anyone ends up over that way: http://www.vcl-theatrelabonita.com/index.html
We also visited the organization that Michaela works at, Reach Out. Reach Out is a really amazing community-based program. It started out of a church but covers the whole community regardless of religion. It is a HIV/AIDS organization but provides a great model because it's also a center for food distribution, career services, and micro loans. Having all this in one place better serves the HIV/AIDS-affected community by working on the broader problem of poverty rather than just focusing on the disease. It is true that programs like these are hard to organize but the Reach Out program really included the community to make the program work with many working as staff and volunteers themselves.
Our time in Uganda went by quickly and before I knew the boys were off to London and I was off to Nairobi.
Kenya
In Nairobi, I had arranged to stay with a friend of a friend from GW. My friend Ben had a friend whose parents work at the US Embassy in Nairobi, and she agreed to put me up. After getting a little lost in a taxi from the airport, I found her house in a gated UN/ US embassy worker community in the Nairobi suburbs. When I got there, she had not returned from class at the American University in Nairobi and so I had dinner with her mom. Her mom is library coordinator for all embassy libraries in East Africa and her dad works for PACT, which is a USAID funded organization. They truly lead an interesting life and have lived in Cairo for many years, the Middle East, and other locations around the world on different assignments. Hilary had moved around with her parents her whole life and had just returned from the Peace Corps in Jordan. They live in a really nice townhouse in a gated community of ex-pats. They have a driver and other house help but this seemed typical among the ex-pat communities and is often necessary. Nairobi is especially dangerous and because of this extremely segregated. Originally Nairobi was my top choice for my year abroad but I was talked out of going there by friends and professors.
The city was big and really developed but seemed so inaccessible. Most of the places we went were gated and had lots of security. We went to a mall and it seemed like we were back in the states; everything was available. Nairobi was quite developed but really divided. Granted this could have been more extreme because I was with Hilary and her family and they live in a gated area but I have heard a lot about the violence in Nairobi. We did go to feed giraffes one day and to the Nairobi museum. Because Hilary was running a kid's camp this summer, we got a special tour of the museum and were amazed by the number of artifacts they had but were also amazed by the storage of these artifacts; many were piled in big bowls on endless shelves.
I also attended class with Hilary one day and it was a much different from my University in Tanzania. First of all, it was private, which would never happen in the semi-socialist Tanzania and seemed to have great resources. The students were really nice and were very active in class. The subject of the class was economics and they discussed topics such as private investment which would not have been discussed in any of my classes. Kenyans usually speak much better English then Tanzanians because they are taught from an earlier age and the Kenyan upper class is much larger than the Tanzania. Before I mentioned there was segregation but it's not necessarily a race issue but rather an economic divide. There are many rich Kenyans but it seems like the divide between rich and poor is much more extreme. In Tanzania, people talk about "shared poverty" which seems to be left over from socialism. Tanzanians share everything with their extended families and don't seem so focused on wealth. Kenya, on the other hand, is a capitalist society and so the focus of of development is economic. Perhaps I'm just biased toward Tanzania but there really seemed to be a difference. I saw the same thing in South Africa, the richest country in Africa. The poor were the poorest even though the country was said to be the most developed.
On the last night, Hilary and I went out for a few hours even though my flight was at 7:00 a.m. It seemed worth it when met the son of the former President Moi. We didn't get home too late, maybe 1:00 a.m., and I fell asleep right away. I had called a cab for 5:00 a.m. and set my alarm. Of course my alarm didn't go off and the guards wouldn't let the cab in the gate! I called around to see if I could get on another flight and worried I would miss Gita who was getting into Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that night. I went to the airport and hung out all day hoping to get on the 6:00 p.m. flight but at 5:45 p.m., I was told it was full and I could go the next day at 3:30 p.m. Disappointed, I headed back to Hillary's house and contacted Gita to let her know I wouldn't be in until the next day.
Ethiopia
Poor Gita arrived the night before I did and met up with a Tanzanian friend of mine who goes to school in Ethiopia. Unfortunately they didn't get along and he dropped her off at a slightly seedy hotel that might have been fine if there were two of us but was a little weird for one. Fortunately, Gita had gotten in contact with some friends of friends who work at Save the Children in Ethiopia. The next day, I finally got there. Gita and I moved our stuff over to our new friends' house and stayed there for the night. We spent the next day traveling around the city in Russian built cars from the 50s, learning a few words of Amharic, buying baskets, and enjoying Ethiopian food.
Addis Ababa seemed more Arabic then any of the other East African countries I had been to and the people were much lighter. Since the famine in the 1980's, many aid workers had moved to Addis Ababa. I was skeptical of the Save the Children organization that the girls we met worked for because I had always associated Save the Children with the Sally Struthers commercials of dying African children. They assured me that the organization knew it had been pegged in that way, and that in general organizations were realizing the harm of portraying Africa that way and now focus on the success of programs. We discussed that programs that sponsor one child can be harmful. The children get stigmatized, some children are chosen over others, there are political issues, and it can tear communities apart. It is much better to support communities or specific issues but because supporting a child is so popular with American donors, it's difficult to get rid of it.
After enjoying a lot of spicy Ethiopian food in Addis Ababa, Gita and I headed to Lulibela and Aksum to take in the historical sites of northern Ethiopia. Ethiopia has all the history of Egypt but none of the commercial business or tourists. Lalibela is amazing. It is a city with 11 rock-hewn churches. These churches built over 800 years ago are built right out of the hills and rock. They were built this way to avoid destruction in wars and succeeded. They are still in use today and Lalibela is a pilgrimage site.
Aksum is further north than Lalibela and is made up of large steales (like the Washington monument), ruins, and tombs. It is extremely fascinating and many of the sites have been recently excavated so it seems so raw. We met some tall Australians in our hostel and walk around all day discovering the local historical sites. It was good and bad to have met up with them. Good because I had been sick the whole time I was in Ethiopia (I think it was the altitude, much higher than Tanzania or Kenya) so Gita had someone to hang out with. Bad because as I was begging to see as many historical sites as possible my Scottish travel company and new Australian friends were ready to drink beer at 2:00 p.m. Luckily I convinced them to head on even with a bit of rain but it was hard. Ethiopia was so different from anywhere I had every been and seemed to be so mysterious and full of history.
While we were in Ethiopia, it was the year 1999 by their calendar and this September they celebrated their millennium!
Back to Tanzania
After all this traveling, I headed back to Tanzania to say goodbye to my friends and family. It was a really emotional weekend. My family asked me if they could have a photographer take a photo of me to add me to their family wall and we talked about future visits. My friends threw a kwaheri (goodbye) party for me and then my family brought me to the airport to head back to the US.
More to come -
I am still working on getting some Tanzanian goods over to the US to support an organization working with mothers who have disabled children and working with the Info Camp to set things up for next year. There is a chance I'll be in touch about those projects. If you are interested in helping with those, please let me know. Thanks again!
