Arriving in Uganda

Arriving in Uganda

The Kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale. You climb a railway instead of a beanstalk and at the end there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is different, the vegetation is different, the climate is different and, most of all, the people are different from anything elsewhere to be seen in the whole range of Africa. Uganda... the pearl of Africa.

Sir Winston Churchill

17^th August 2006
I finally made it to Uganda! Yay!

Getting Here
Getting here was a bit of a pain.

For starters, I managed to accidentally spend my last night in Ghana in a whorehouse. Well, kinda. I was in a house that whore's (such a crass word) frequented. One young lady tried to do business with me. A polite "No", was sufficient to send her elsewhere. This may sound like an unusual experience, but I hear similar stories from other volunteers time and time again. Accidentally spending a night in a brothel seems to be par for the course

The people at the airport made me store my laptop in the cargo hold due to the terrorist scare that England recently had. I was reluctant to see it go. Apart from a easily-fixed dislodged CD drive, no damage was done. The flight was a flight. *shrugs*

Airport Pickups
A lady called Leslie Weighill was at the airport to pick me up. Being the only white person in the crowd made her easy to spot. The "Malcolm Trevena" sign didn't hurt either.

Leslie runs a NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) called The Real Uganda. Leslie spends a lot of time coordinating volunteers with various other NGOs around Mukono - the area I am volunteering in.

I will be working for an organisation called MACRO (Mukono Aids Recovery and Recovery Organisation). I will doing a lot of education stuff, but a different sort of education that I did in the Philippines and Ghana. A large portion of my time will be spent visiting semi-isolated villages and talking to them about topics like HIV/AIDS, education and sustainability projects.

I had a brief meeting with Travis - the head of MACRO. He seems like a genuine guy committed to the betterment of Uganda. MARCO is involved in many different projects. Anything from HIV/AIDS talks in isolated villages, to helping ex-child prostitutes market their crafts, to distributing soap to prisoners, to organising camps for young HIV/AIDS sufferers, to adult literacy.

Most of these projects sound very cool. I'm just going to observe initially to see how things work before fully launching myself into a project.

I was talking to a fellow volunteer who recently did some outreach on one of the islands on Lake Victoria. The spent one night in a small mud-brick church with thirteen other people. They were attacked by an army of biting safari ants in the early hours of the morning. I will be having these sort of cool adventures in the not too distant future.

Already it feels like it is going to be a much better experience than Ghana.

Just tonight for example, I went to a bar with Travis and a fellow volunteer called Geoff. The main attraction at the bar was various entertainers miming along to songs. Not dissimilar to Priscilla Queen of the Desert, only not as gay. At one point, a female singer invited Geoff onto the stage to dance with her. I'm sure I would of been next if we had stayed for another fifteen minutes.

Had plenty of these sort of experiences in the Philippines. Hardly any in Ghana.

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(c) 2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.