The um, south part of the north ...
I had the day off work today - beleive it or not, International Women's Day is a civic holiday here. There is piles o' irony in that, when you think about the actual status of women here, but the point is that i had a long weekend and hence the chance to get out and away from the city. Myself and 8 others (7 of whom were canadian, and 2 of whom were Queen's grads - i've oh so diversified my social group by moving across the world) drove up to Murchison Falls National Park on saturday morning. Murchison is in the northwest of the country - sort of barely the edge of where it is safe to go in Uganda, but safe nonetheless. (See my posts below, about LRA activity in the north, for more info) Murchison Falls is supposedly "the most dramatic thing to happen to the Nile along its entire length", what with the wide (50 meters possibly, but that could be wrong) river squeezing through a 6 meter wide gorge and plunging over a 70 meter fall. Waiting to be awed by the majesty of it all, we headed straight to the ferry docks to go on a 3 hour falls-viewing cruise upon our arrival in the park. The temperature at Murchison is about 10 degrees hotter than in Kampala, so we spent most of the cruise on the lower deck of the smallish boat, hiding from the sun and checking out all the hippos and crocodiles along the length of the river. (Did you know that hippos are africa's deadliest animal? Yup, more people are killed by hippos than by lions or rhinos or any of the other more viscious looking big animals. Hungry hungry hippo indeed.) When eventually we got to within about 500 meters of the falls, the boat stopped, looked at them from half a kilometer away, and then the boat turned around... Hey, it was relaxing at least...The rest of that day was spent hanging out at Red Chilli Rest Camp, the parks only budget accomodation. We stayed in bandas, which are mud walled & thatched roof huts, and are generally what most budget accomodation consists of. I lucked out and got one of the bandas that didn't have any bats hanging around the ceiling! :-)
The next morning we got up early and went for a game drive around the park. 30 years ago, uganda was teeming with wildlife - and then Idi Amin came along, and the vast majority of game was killed either for sport, and then later, for food. As a result, the amount of wildlife in Uganda is much lower than in neighbouring Kenya or Tanzania, although wildlife population has been slowly growing since the late 80's when 'democracy'was restored to the country. As a result, i don't have gushing things to say about this drive compared to my experience in Tanzania's Serengeti, but we did see lots of elephants (which are my favourite African animal) and warthogs, which are actually kind of cute in a really ugly kind of way. It was especially neat when I was called out from shower to check out the family of warthogs that decided to visit me and my banda-mate at our doorstep... They've got these big tusks and look kind of scary, but it they're actually herbivores and it was really interesting to watch them get down on their "elbows" to graze on the grass...
So, now i'm back in town, getting prepared for an interesting day at work tomorrow. Its looking to be interesting because tuesday will be my first full day as U****'s Acting Executive Director. Yup, the organisation that I was Interning for has made me ED, and my first day coincides with the first day of a brand-new staff member as well, so I get to orient her at the same time as i orient myself... It should be an interesting experience! On a more unfortunate note, tomorrow will also be just two days following an incident where my co-worker was accused of stealing 1 million shillings (about 730 Canadian dollars and over half her annual salary) from the outgoing ED... And guess who gets to deal with that?!? Yay for me!
This past week also marked my three-month anniversary of my arrival in Uganda, and it also means that I only have less than two months left to go. I've really grown to enjoy my time here, and I've made some good friends, and its hard to beleive that I'm almost done! There's so much that needs to be done (from a work perspective) and so much to see (from a traveller's point of view) that its hard to beleive that I ever thought that 5 months would be enough! The culture, the landscape, the environment, it is all so rich and layered that i'm starting to understand what it means when people say that 'africa gets under your skin' - it is just too hard to feel like you're ready to leave when its almost impossible to feel like you've done more than scratch the surface of the place. I felt like I had sooo much time when I got here - and now that I have 7 weeks left I feel like I need to cram in everything - so hopefully I'll have lots of interesting stuff to put on here in the coming weeks!!
In a related matter, please check out Maternity Worldwide, a UK-based NGO started by a friend of mine from Queen's. They provide pre/post natal care to women in Africa, and have a great way to help the world's poorest women this Mother's Day.
posted by Deanna @ 5:49 p.m.
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