Some details about the trip….
It’s raining outside, and we are set to start our long commute home, but since everything stops when it rains in Uganda (people here have no concept of the Portland-like way of going about business with total disregard of the constant rain), we thought we would get in some internet time here at the Hospice.
A bit more about the weekend: We left at 2:00am from our house after experiencing a insect plague of biblical proportions in our house. We had left the porch light on, which attracted the large, flying ants that come out of the termite mounds to mate. Well, they were creeping under the door, through the cracks in the window, and swarming our house in the wee hours! All Denise and I could do was turn off the lights, sit on the stairs, and wait for Fr Stephen to pick us up. So, we survived!
We went to mass with the children at the seminary and then headed out on our loooong trip. We loaded 150 students, plus priests and other teachers, on to two gigantic buses, complete with a tv mounted to the roof. Denise and I were subjected to incredibly loud rap, hip hop, and rock music videos from the states, and the kids knew all the words! The best one was probably the Creed video I remember from junior high. We told our seatmates that this song was almost ten years old, but they wouldn’t have it.
Of course, we stopped at the Equator and took some ’snaps’ (photos) and moved on to Kabale…..a 7 hour trip with many stops along the way. Then we made our way over and down beautiful green, terraced hills. This is why Uganda is known as the “Switzerland of Africa.” The place couldn’t get any more prestine. The locals have learned to farm on the hillsides and have terraced them in such a way that the landscape looks like a giant quilt had been thrown over gently rolling hills. We stopped at Lake Bunyoni and had dinner (rice and beef…the whole weekend). After getting terribly lost (we went 25 km out of our way) we finally arrived at the seminary where we were to stay the night, and received amazing hospitality from the priests there. I enjoyed a late night Nile Special and hit the sack at 12, only to wake up at 4am to be on our way again.
Then, off we went to Queen Elizabeth National Park, located north of Kabale. There is a stark contrast between the landscape of Kabale and the Rift Valley. After driving down an escarpment, you are in another world……a world that is flat and scrubby, with gigantic cactus-like trees and wild-looking ‘tooth pick’ trees with giant thorns. Many of the students had never traveled even out of their district, nor had they even seen many of the animals that we in the West have already seen in our own zoos. The belief that Africa is just roaming with wild game is a myth (or at least, it’s no longer true). Animals are restricted to certain areas and are not great in number, do to Idi Amin’s habit of shooting elephants and lions, etc., for fun. But numbers are replenishing. I often assumed that my Ugandan friends thought lions and elephants were old news, but just as many Americans have never laid eyes on a moose or a bear, they have never seen these animals, either. We weren’t able to see much, but we saw a fair amount of hippos and Cape buffalo on our boat lunch, as well as some antelope, waterbucks and elephants!
On our way out, we visited a salt lake, one of several and the largest in Uganda. Many of the locals, as well as people from other districts, harvest salt from this lake and sell it at market. A British man said he even saw salt from this lake in a grocery store in London. They have their own “plot” or pool made out of mud and stones and filled with the salt water through an irrigation channel. The salt harvesting process looks extremely arduous. Much of it involves sedimentation and enduring long, hot, dry days that that the water evaporates, leaving the salt behind. Rock salt is harvesting from the largest pool and people must immerse themselves in the water up to their chest and break apart the rock salt from the bottom with their feet, which they then place on floating rafts to bring to shore. I saw children and men without shoes carrying what looked like very heavy slaps of concrete on their backs and loading them into trucks. Turns out those heavy slabs were salt slabs…..salt before it is processed. Strange and interesting. Every time I pick up a salt shaker, I will remember that experience.
Then we moved on from QENP to Fort Portal, another beautiful part of Uganda, where the majority of Ugandan tea is grown and harvested. We drove by acres and acres of green hills covered in tea plants. There are a few processing factors in FP, but not many, hence Uganda must export much of its tea to Kenya for processing. If you ever buy a box of Kenyan tea, it’s most likely you are actually drinking Ugandan tea, even if the label doesn’t say so. We stayed at a beautiful “major seminary’ (the equivalent of ours in the US in terms of age) and I enjoyed a nice, hot shower and some delicious food. But my sleep depravation put me to bed early and I slept like a log.
The next morning, after a few historical sites (including the place of the Toro king, who came to power when he was 3.5!), we made our way home. What an enjoyable, albeit CRAZY trip. I can’t wait to head back to the seminary sometime this week and talk with the friends we made on this trip. They are a riot. And I can attest that teenagers in Uganda are not unlike teenagers in the US. I heard American slang (“dude!” “awesome” “totally cool!”) all weekend!
Until next time,
Heather
