UK

I'm sitting in my family's home in Sheffield, England. It's actually rained surprisingly little since I got here. But I haven't got outside much anyway, as I've been sick. It started with a fever about 10 days ago and now it's just a cough, but I'm a little worried it's a reaction to the anti-malaria meds I'm taking.

I'm taking a generic form of Larium, called mefloquine. It's a once a week pill that can leave you bed-ridden for up to a year if you have a bad reaction. Most people get very vivid dreams the night they take the pill but I've taken 4 now and haven't had any, and given the choice between a potentially lethal blood parasite and some dodgy and not too well understood medication I've picked the meds.

On Sunday I fly to Johannesburg, South Africa. The crime capital of the world. My first priority will be to get the hell out of there. Apparently I can't walk to the bus stop because I'll almost certainly be mugged, so I have to find transport that I get on while still inside the airport. I can't rent a car because it will probably get jacked as I leave the city. I know this sounds rather extreme but from what I've heard it's not an exaggeration. My plan is to find a tour bus with lots of people and take it to the first town out of Jo'burg, then rent a car from there. Then it will be either Kruger National Park or Swaziland.

I have a huge suitcase that weighs 73kg filled with books for the orphanage where I'll be teaching. It's going to be tricky to get around until I've got that car!

Jo'burg aside, I can't wait to get to Africa. I've been waiting for this for a long time. I'll post again soon when I'm somewhere safe!

Feedback

The Lovely Miss Lee pointed out that my blog is the colour of diarrea, which neither of us know how to spell. But from what I've heard about Westerners visiting rural Africa, that probably makes this colour scheme very appropriate, for at least the first few weeks.

Hooray for online dictionaries.

It's spelled diarrhoea.

Pretoria

I'm typing from an internet cafe in a mall in Pretoria, a city just North of Johannesburg.

South Africa gets top marks for hospitality. Walking into arrivals I was quickly approached by various people offering various things (at 4 times the price), and a mother waiting for her son who was on the same plane saw that I didn't have someone meeting me and offered me a ride into Pretoria. I drove with her son and daughter to a hostel there but it was full, so I'm staying the night at their house. The son is a bass player in a band and we're going to go check out the live music scene tonight.

Globalization can make some aspects of travel disappointing. This internet cafe is right next to a Guess outlet. A shopping mall is the same no matter where it is.

But there are things here that are strikingly different. The house where I'm staying is more like a villa. It has one floor but it's very large, 5 bathrooms, and it is surrounded with high walls and barbed wire. On the front gate there is a security notice with "Armed Response" in big bold letters. There is a black servant who is taking care of me while I stay here.

I specify that she's black obviously because of South Africa's history with apartheid. The family I'm staying with switch constantly in and out of English and Afrikaans, but black people here associate Afrikaans with apartheid and therefore only speak English. There are areas of the city where it's important I don't stray into, particularly at night, and as such Marinda is giving me rides everywhere I need to go.

In other news, I got an email from the charity in Uganda and they asked me if I'd be willing to be the volunteer co-ordinator for them while I'm there. Apparently there's been some cultural clashes between Westerners and the locals and for some reason they think I'll be a good go-between. I'm looking forward to it!

Now I'm off to buy toothpaste and to try and rent a car. I'm expecting to be in Mozambique for a day now too, as apparently that's where the best scuba diving is in the area. Hopefully I'll be able to drive out in the morning. Travel is hard without a car because it's not safe to walk around here, or even wait for a bus depending on the area. It's great staying with locals who know the area.

I'll post again soon!

Racism in South Africa

What a great welcome to the country. After being offered a lift to Pretoria from a local family, the son and daughter (De Wet and Karinda), took me on a 9 hour drunken tour of the local area with a bunch of their friends. The local stout isn't too bad! Hot countries aren't usually too good at beer.

The people I have met are wonderful, although the racism is very prominent. Over the course of the local tour I heard many comments that you would probably never hear in Canada: how black people smell bad, are stupider, can't be trusted, don't do as they're told, etc. And although I haven't spent time with any black locals it's easy to sense animosity from many of them as I walk around town. This animosity towards South African whites could well be the reason why they don't listen and are not trustworthy.

Some of the comments could simply relate to cultural differences, and I imagine could have some truth to them. I doubt, for example, that Africans from tribal cultures are as adamant about hygiene as people of European descent.

Employers here have a quota of black employees that they have to fill, and as a result white males have a lot of trouble getting a job and are routinely turned down even if they're best suited for the work. A lot of the guys I spoke to my age were very frustrated and most if not all were out of a job.

The segregation of the communities, while no longer institutionalized, is still very very apparent. White homes are large and fairly extravagant, and have electric fences around them and armed security. Black homes are falling apart. You always know for absolute certain if you are in a white area or a black area.

But it's not possible for me to draw any conclusions from such a short stay in the country. Hopefully I'll get to see more on my return. Tomorrow I go to Kruger national park, where I'll be doing a 24 hour safari. I'll update again soon!

The worlds most dangerous roads just got more dangerous

I have a car now.

I'm driving around on the left side of the road, with the steering wheel on the right, in a little manual-transmission Toyota Tazz. I haven't driven on this side before, this country is notorious for being a dangerous place to drive, and the most I've ever driven standard is taking my lovely VW camper around the block a few times.

South Africa, LOOK OUT.

Due to the 9 hour drinking spree last night I didn't get an early start this morning, and didn't get on the road for Kruger until 2pm. But it was a beautiful drive, through South African mountain roads at sunset.

You know you're in a different country when you keep seeing signs on the highway saying "ALERT! Hi-jacking hot spot. Do not stop!". And when cows walk out in front of your car while you're going 120 through the bush.

One of the bizarre things the SA government is doing is spending equivalent to $35 million on changing the names of the roads, as some kind of way to show that apartheid is over and a new era has begun. But the poverty in the black areas is so bad that you wonder if it's really the best use of the money. And it doesn't help when your lonely planet guide is a couple of years old and you're trying to find the hostel, at night, when all the street names have been changed and there are no updated maps.

It took me 2 hours to find it. By the time I arrived I was so exhausted and frustrated, not only with the getting lost thing but also the fact that I really am crap at driving this car and when you're doing 4 U-turns every 5 minutes that equates to lots, and lots, of stalling.

Arg.

But now I'm here, and I've booked the safari for tomorrow instead. I leave at 6am.

Kruger

My body's clock kicks ass. I don't have anything to keep track of time or wake me up while I'm on this trip but I got up at the exact right time, 6am, and was driven out to one of the entrance gates for Kruger National Park.

The park is a huge area of North-East South Africa (ahaha) where you can watch all the wildlife in it's natural environment. However animals aren't usually too keen on being seen, so it can be a bit of a challenge tracking them down. Kruger doesn't have many open plains where you can see a long way, it's a lot of bush and trees, so often you can't see more than 10 metres beyond the truck.

It's the start of winter here though, and despite the fact that it's 15 degrees, the grass is much thinner and lots of the trees have lost their leaves, which improves chances of spotting animals.

The Big Five, as they are called, are leopards, rhino, lions, buffalo, and elephants. They're called the big five because they're the most dangerous to track and hunt on foot.

We saw all but the leopard! We also saw crocodiles, hippos, giraffes, monkeys and baboons, antelope (called cudu after the sound they make when they run), lots of very cool stuff. It can sometimes take more than an hour before you see anything at all, depending on where the animals happen to be at that time.

And leopards are apparently very difficult to see. Even our guide said he only sees about 2 a year, and he runs safaris every day.

After about 7 hours in the jeep we arrived here at a rest camp in the park, and the guides cooked some great food and we sat around listening to baboons touching the electric fence. Despite being a vegetarian, I tried bultong, which is dried antelope meat. I'm not so bugged about eating meat out here, especially when the animals aren't farmed. Out here I feel like I'm part of nature rather than being worried about abusing it. Bultong is nothing special though, haha. Too salty.

There were 2 other travellers in the jeep with me - Laura, from the UK, and Elmer, from Holland. They're going to catch a ride with me down to Swaziland in the morning, where we'll be staying at a place called 'Mthunzi's Paradise Village'.

Now it's time for bed!

Mthunzi's Paradise Vilage

After a bit of a slow start leaving for Swaziland, we got to the border at about 3pm. It sounds a bit odd but it's nice not being scared of black people anymore. The racial tension here is not as bad and everyone seems friendly.

This country is stunningly beautiful, it's all mountains. Right after we crossed the border loads of kids were waiting and waving at the car. I tried to take a polaroid picture to give to them but they ran away as soon as they saw the camera, shouting no no no! I thought maybe it was a rural African version of the soul stealing belief but it turned out they wanted to be paid to have their picture taken. They didn't realize it was a polaroid camera. So I didn't bother and we just drove away.

Swaziland is extremely poor. The AIDS epidemic here is completely out of control and life expectancy is 27. People here live on well under one dollar a day. But as a tourist I am yet to see any overt evidence of the crisis other than beaten up and small houses.

The place where Laura, Elmer and I are staying must be one of the coolest places I have ever been to in my life. It's 3 little huts made from mud and straw on top of a mountain. There is no electricity, although running water is available sproadically from a nearby spring. It's pit toilets, and the shower is just a shower head beside a thatched wall, it's very open, so you have to tell everyone not to come near when you go to wash yourself. But the view is spectacular, and it's a pretty unique experience stripping butt naked on top of a mountain and admiring the scenery while you're showering.

Most people here cannot afford electricity, so when night falls you can see the milky way galaxy stretching over your head. I have rolled out my sleeping bag in the middle of a field and will be spending the night under the stars.

Well that didn't work out quite as planned

My lovely night under the stars wasn't quite as profound as I'd hoped. I went with Mthunzi, the guy who runs this place, to pick up some beer from the local store. The local store turned out to be a 2 room shack with no signs of any kind. We knocked on the back door and a woman with 3 kids let us in, and I paid her for 12 large bottles of beer for the whole group.

Seeing the way people live here, without running water and using oil lamps for light (no flashlights) feels quaint and cozy. There's novelty value as a tourist. But I'm not sure I'd feel the same way if it wasn't a choice I was making.

So last night we sat around the camp fire and ate mealie pap and boiled vegetables (nothing very good unfortunately, Africa hasn't been too impressive food wise so far), and I got progressively drunker through the evening. When it came time for bed, I went to the car and got some extra sweaters to keep me warm out in the field (it's cold up in them there mountains), and took all the stuff out of my pockets so it wouldn't bug me while I slept. Including the car keys, which I left in the car after I closed the trunk.

DOH!

I tried for half an hour or so to find ways to break into the car, and eventually gave up and decided to tackle it in the morning. The stars were beautiful, it should have been one of the coolest places I've ever slept, but I missed it because I was so mad at myself for locking the keys in the car.

In the morning, I told everyone what I'd done, and upon daylight examination we discovered that one of the back windows was open a crack. The rental car is pretty cheap, and it doesn't have electric windows, so we found some metal wire and slid it through the crack and hooked the handle for the window. We managed to wind the window down, unlock the door and retrieve the keys. Phew!

That put me back in a good mood. Mthunzi took Laura and I on a hike through the mountains, which took maybe 4 or 5 hours. This country is so beautiful, I'm considering coming back to Mthunzi's in September and spending a few weeks here.

We hiked through the marajuana plantation and through several little subsistence farms. after a few hours we reached a waterfall that goes all the way down the mountain. In Swaz' there's a water parasite that can make Westerners quite sick but Mthunzi and I stripped down to our shorts and went under the waterfall anyway.

We hiked back to the village and I gave one of Mthunzi's brother's a guitar lesson. I wanted to show him slide guitar but I don't have a slide, and there were no bottles or anything nearby, so I took out my umbrella (I keep it in the guitar case as it's too big for the suitcase) and taught Mngisi slide guitar using an open umbrella on a mountain top.

Mthunzi's family joined us for dinner around the campfire. They live traditional Swazi lives in cramped little huts near to where we were staying, and they don't speak much English. One of the young girls started humming something and Laura recognized it and asked what it was. It was the latest Gwen Stafani song!

There are lots of weird things like that. You can be on top of a mountain in the middle of absolutely nowhere, in one of the poorest countries on earth, hanging out with traditional rural African people, and suddenly Mthunzi's cellphone will ring. It's pretty bizarre.

Impoverished Africa skipped the whole land line thing. You either have a cell phone, or no phone, as it's cheaper to setup cellular networks around here than it is to install land lines. And a lot of people here have battery powered radios.

One more night at this wonderful little place then it's back to Pretoria to see De Wet and Karinda before I fly to Uganda. G'night!

I suck at cars

Last day in Swaziland, and again no shortage of adventure.

I'd planned to leave at 9am, check out a traditional Swazi wedding that Mthunzi invited me to in Mbabane, the capital, and then be on the road for about noon to get back to Pretoria. It didn't work out that way.

The rental car has a security keychain, which requires that you press a button that sends an infra red signal to the immobiliser verifying that the car isn't being hotwired. You press the button while you turn the ignition.

You remember how I was in that waterfall yesterday? Guess what I had in my pocket while I had water pouring all over me?

The car wouldn't start. I was meant to be giving everyone a ride to Mbabane for the wedding and by the time a replacement car came (electric windows and air-con, woo!) it was 2:30pm. Bugger! I suck at rental cars.

I drove Laura and Mthunzi to Mbabane and Elmer got a ride with one of the people from the rental agency. The deal that I'd made with Laura and Elmer when I agreed to drive them to Swaz' was that they would chip in for the gas. They were fairly short on cash, so I decided that if they offered the money without being prompted then I would refuse it because I don't really need it, but if they didn't offer I would ask.

Unfortunately, they didn't offer, and right before we parted in Mbabane I asked for a contribution. I asked for 50 rand, which is equivalent to about $10, in exchange for me driving them for 5 hours to Swaz' and Mbabane. Laura gave me the money right away, but Elmer argued with me and said it was too much. I pointed out that I was paying for gas (which ended up being 250 rand) plus 1500 rand for the car, that I'd only had the car one day more than he had, plus I'd done all the driving. He gave me the money, but what a bad final impression. I hate cheap people. And of course if I hadn't asked I never would have got anything. What an asshole.

It was good to be on the road by myself again, in a better car with a decent stereo, driving through the hi-jacking hotspots under the African sunset.

By the time I got to Pretoria, De Wet and Karinda had already left for a nearby town and I have decided to stay the night with their parents and get a good night's sleep before my flight at 9:30 in the morning. South Africa and Swaz' have got me really pumped about Uganda! Once again the hospitality here is wonderful. This family is so nice.

Uganda - arrival

I was woken at 5:30am by Marinda, to a breakfast of toast, tea, cereal, yoghurt, fruit. What nice people! I got in the car and drove to Johannesburg International Airport, following the signs very carefully so as to avoid going into the wrong area and getting shot, but it took me over an hour to find the rental car company, and when I asked for the price they tried to overcharge me and I had to argue for half an hour just to get the rate that they'd originally agreed to.

I got to the terminal an hour before my flight but everything else went smoothly and I touched down in Uganda at 2:25pm local time.

The volunteer co-ordinator, Abraham, met me with 3 other locals at the arrivals gate. We got into the most beaten up car I've ever seen to drive to the village. None of the windows worked, the windshield was cracked, 2 of the doors could only be opened from the outside, the seats were barely covered, and there were dents and rust everywhere. About 15 minutes into the drive, the car broke down. 3 guys and 20 minutes later the car was just about running again and we continued the journey.

Abraham informed me that this was a rental car.

Driving in Uganda is unbelievable. The only rule seems to be that most of the time you're supposed to drive on the left. Other than that, anything goes. Every car has 50 dents in it, everyone drives as fast as possible, there are no road markings or traffic lights and there are bikes, pedestrians, children, mopeds, EVERYWHERE. It's total chaos.

I'm told that a lot of people die on the road into Rwanda, because it's an unmarked border but in Rwanda they drive on the right side of the road, not the left. So at some unknown point everyone switches sides, but no-one really knows when to switch. The person who told me that had his father killed that way.

I arrived in Ndejje village after an hour's drive or so. It's all bumpy dirt roads here and mud houses with roofs that leak when it rains. There are children everywhere, I'm told the ratio of children to adults is 12:1.

The place where I'm staying is much nicer than anywhere else in the village, but there is no running water until 9:30pm and sporadic electricity that can cut out for days at a time, and is rarely on for more than a few hours a day. This is also where many of the orphans live. There are high walls around the compound and a security guard with a rifle at gate at all times. I'm sharing a room with another volunteer. The roof is made from tin so when it rains it's very loud.

When I got there I was introduced to the people running the NGO. It's a Christian organization and in rural Africa freedom of religion isn't perhaps as respected as in the West, and I think the staff here are fairly determined to convert me. I had some fairly long conversations, before my bags had even got to my room, about letting Jesus in and how by the end of my stay I will believe. Evangelist television plays in the main living room whenever there is electricity. Culture difference number one!

But despite this everyone seems very nice and welcoming. Most people speak English as a second language so communication is fairly easy. I arrived right at the beginning of a school holiday so my first week will basically be orientation and figuring out how things work.

Things aren't too organized here. The entire staff and all the volunteers thought I was a girl from Holland called Riet who made her living as a nude photographer. No joke.

There are 2 pit toilets. They are cement rooms with holes in the ground that are quite small and as a result a lot of people, um, miss. But there are lots of opportunities for wildlife watching, I am seeing on average about 4 large cockroaches each time. By large I mean about 2 inches long. Their feet click on the cement as they scuttle in and out of the hole in the floor. There is a normal toilet as well however and I use that one as often as possible, although with 30 children plus staff plus volunteers it can be a challenge getting to it.

The first volunteer I met was an older woman called Arianna. She's a medic and has been doing volunteer work for 40 years and has worked for Mother Theresa, although as far as I know she's not Christian. I got a bad first impression with her because she was quite rude to Abraham, and after being in South Africa I initially interpreted this as racism, but my first impression was wrong. Arianna is very wise and has been a huge help to me, she has the experience I lack and I'm confident the rudeness was not due to racism, but was a product of the pretty intense politics going on here. I'll go into more details with that later.

The other volunteers were gone, they were out doing their own things on their day off. They all showed up for dinner however, which wasn't great by Canadian standards but much better than I expected. It won't be too hard being vegetarian here. There are roughly 9 volunteers, all of whom are women besides Axel and I. Axel is my roommate. He lived in Uganda when he was younger, although he was born in South Africa and now lives in Sweden. He's very funny and intelligent and seems like a great roommate.

Over dinner Arianna told me that she'd treated a 6 year old boy for syphillus that day. He had not had the disease since birth, it was contracted through abuse.

After dinner Axel and I went to get a beer at the store in the village. We sat and had a drink with 2 locals, Ivan and David. The education level here is not really comparable to the West. This is how the conversation went:

"I would like to go to America, but I am scared to go because of the predator."
"The predator?"
"Yes, who lives in the forests and can turn invisible"
"I don't think you need to worry about the predator, Arnold Schwarznegger killed him in the third movie"
"Oh... that's good. Can you tell me... is Dracula real?"
"Well Dracula is a made up character, although he was based on a real person from the 1500s who drank people's blood, but there's never been anyone who could turn into a bat and the story of Dracula is made up"
"Oh... someone told me... that in America they have Dracula in a zoo"
"Still alive in a zoo?"
"Yes, and you can see him he is in a cage"
"No, that's not true"
"Oh, ok. What about aliens, are they real?"
"I think that's a little more debatable..."

Ivan is 22 years old and David is 20. It was David's father who was killed on the road to Rwanda, and most of his other family have died of AIDS. A volunteer here told me that in 10 years it is estimated that there will be no adults left in Uganda as they all will have died.

Axel and I finished our beers and went to bed.

Day 2 - Orientation

After breakfast Abraham introduced me to the different programs I can be involved in here. I'm planning to work in all of them, although my biggest job, given my expertise in the area, will be setting up an internet cafe in the village. The equipment has already been ordered and should be arriving in the next few weeks. There are never any guarantees here though. The cafe will provide income for the charity and will help locals educate themselves. Once the cafe is running, I will be teaching villagers how to use the internet.

I will also be running classes at a refugee camp in the village, for refugees from Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, and Somalia. I will help run music classes for the kids on Saturdays, and teach locals computer literacy during the week. I'll be working at the local clinic too prescribing drugs and doing medical testing under Arianna's supervision, and I'm also hoping to work in pallative care, where I'll be helping to look after people who are near death.

Abraham took me to see 3 families in the village. In every case there was one adult looking after at least 10 children, and all 3 adults were HIV positive. I went into the home of one family, which was one shack about the size of my bed in Canada. The woman was making necklaces, a skill she had been taught by ACF (African Child Foundation, the charity I'm working for), and 2 of her children are sponsored by past volunteers and are able to go to school. I saw pig pens that had been built by volunteers that widows were using to try and generate an income.

Walking around the village, all the children shout "Bye Mzungu!" as soon as they see you. Mzungu is Lugandan for white person. 6 months old and up they know how to say "Bye Mzungu".

After the tour of the village, I went into Kampala, the capital city. It's an incredibly noisy and busy place with chaotic traffic obeys no rules whatsoever, including the 'no driving mopeds at high speed on the sidewalk while pedestrians are walking there' rule. There are a lot of beggars but they are not too aggressive. People sell auto parts and building materials along the sides of the roads.

There are a lot of funny signs and adverts here. There is no diet anything, in fact there is a brand of bread that advertises "Extra fat and sugar!" on the package. Many local stores have names based around religion, for example "Believer's drycleaners". There is a family planning billboard that says "Don't have more children than can fit in a taxi", then there is a picture of a taxi that comfortably holds about 14 people.

I'm told there is a burgeoning cosmetic surgery industry among Uganda's elite, and many women get implants. Not in their breasts though, but in their buttocks. Bubble butts are considered very attractive.

This evening I went to the refugee camp. A new baby was born in the camp yesterday, and she was named Arianna after the volunteer, because the mother was 3 weeks overdue and it was a 2 day induced labour, and she would have died if Arianna had not paid the hospital bills. Arianna gave the couple her wedding ring to sell to help support the child.

When I arrived there was a party going on. I met everyone including the new baby, and was immediately given a bottle of Fanta and a plate of food. When I was finished, a daughter from the family took my dishes and washed them. I later found out from Arianna that they hadn't eaten for 5 days before the party as they'd had no food. All of the women there had been raped and many beaten, and many people there had watched their family burned alive in front of them with rubber tires around their necks. The grandmother of the new baby was raped and beaten before escaping to Uganda, but since arriving here she has been hit by a car and now walks with a cane.

Many of the people at the camp were qualified professionals in their own countries. There is a doctor and a lawyer among them. But to be qualified in Uganda requires a license fee that they don't have enough money for and as a result they are starving.

I've been told other stories that have made my first full day here quite overwhelming. The prisons, which I will be visiting and hopefully working in, routinely torture and beat the prisoners, and this has even been done in front of the white volunteers. There is no furniture of any kind in either the hospital or the prison. There are still ancient tribal practices in the area, including human sacrifices and religions based around worshipping trees. One of the children I was playing guitar for earlier was found in a garbage dump by one of the volunteers. Another volunteer told me she found a baby with a rusty razor blade in his mouth today. I saw a small child eating rusted metal as well during my tour of the village.

I am regularly being asked for money both directly and indirectly. But I have made a rule for myself to not give any assistance other than my time for the first month of my stay. Everything here is very overwhelming, there are a million things I could give money to and hundreds of people who need help but I feel like I have been dropped in the middle of the ocean and all I'm trying to do is float, and then when I've acheived that I'll take a guess at where land is and see how far I can swim.

Katebo Village

Day 3: A bunch of volunteers and a few staff piled into a Matatu (taxi) in the morning and headed off for Katebo Children's village. ACF just bought 150 acres of land and are constructing a primary and secondary school, plus 40 residences, where orphans will live and be taught. There is only one building so far, and it's unfinished, so the project has a long way to go. The heat was blazing and there were few places for shade, so I think this is one of the few aspects of the volunteer work that I'm not so interested in. I prefer the idea of working with people in need rather than doing construction in the middle of nowhere in the blazing heat. But I'm sure I'll do at least a little work there.

After seeing what there is of the village so far, we went to a crocodile farm, where I was told that the biggest crocodile had once escaped and eaten 83 people. I'm not entirely sure whether the person who told me that really believed it or not. It was a huge crocodile though! And it looked mean.

We then drove to a tiny fishing village on the banks of Lake Victoria. Thousands of tiny fish were laid out to dry in the sun on fishing nets. When we got out of the matatu, 12 kids dashed up to us screaming for sweets and gifts. Many of them were incredibly skinny and had the pot bellies that come from not enough food. I ran away from them and they chased me around for a bit, then they decided to copy everything I say and do so we did that for a while. They reminded me of the little green aliens in Toy Story, especially when they kept chanting "mzungu".

After the village, we went to what passes as a touristy area in Uganda, right on the equator. There was a line drawn across the road that marked the exact point of the equator, and this was proven to us:

There were 3 funnels and 3 buckets of water, maybe 10 feet apart. One on the equator, and one either side of the line. In the Northern hemisphere, when you pour water into the funnel and put a leaf in it, the leaf spins round in one direction (I don't remember which way), then 20 feet South, in the Southern hemisphere, the leaf span around in the opposite direction. In the funnel that was right on line, the leaf didn't spin at all! Pretty cool.

I bought a t-shirt that says "mzungu" on it. Just in case I get really dirty and people don't realize I'm a rich white guy.

After a rather tiring day of touristy things, we returned to Ndejje and I played some music with the orphans. They have good rhythm! We had a whole call and answer thing going on with blues chords and lots of stomping and clapping.

In the evening Axel and I decided to go to the lower volunteer compound and hang out with some of the others. As we were walking out, Ivan, the guy who thought the predator was real, was sitting by the gates and was surrounded by several security guards and a few staff. We stopped to try and find out what was going on but we were told to leave and that it was none of our business. Axel was especially concerned.

We went into the town and were told that Ivan had come looking for Axel. We decided to return and see what was going on, and by the time we got back we could hear him being beaten. After 5 minutes or so the door to the compound opened, and Ivan came out, and we saw a security guard hit him with a stick one last time.

We walked into the compound to face the security guards and the staff of the NGO. They weren't too happy we'd been listening. We were told Ivan was being disciplined because he had been hanging around the compound late at night and was considered a security threat. I was told that they were worried he was planning to steal from the volunteers, and that if he stole he would be executed, so the beating was for his own good. I asked why my money was being used to pay for security guards who beat the people I'm here to help. I was told that in Ugandan culture this form of punishment was common and that Ivan's mother consented to it.

The other volunteers were very unhappy about the situation as well. I haven't drawn any conclusions yet, Abraham said he would arrange for me to meet Ivan's mother and she will apparently tell me that she agreed to him being beaten. Being so new here I haven't figured out what counts as a culture difference and what counts as a human rights abuse.

It is obvious, however, that there is a lot of tension here between the volunteers and the charity. Maybe that will be something I can help diffuse a little while I'm here.

Day 4 - no water or electricity

Today is journal writing day, I have spent 7 hours in the internet cafe taking my point form journal and putting it on this site. So not too much happened!

The water has run out at the volunteer camp. The supply was cut off 2 days ago and the water in the reserve tank has all been used. Despite being 5km away from Africa's largest supply of freshwater, it is not expected to come back for several days. There has been no electricity the entire day either. The ACF car is still getting it's regular wash though.

Apparently the mother of the new baby at the refugee camp has no breast milk because she hadn't eaten for 5 days before the party, so the baby has been crying constantly.

Tomorrow Axel, Goldis, Arianna, Jules, Jen, and I are going on a 4 day trip to Rwanda. It takes 7 hours by bus to get to Kigali, the capital. Given the country's recent history it should be pretty interesting! I'm told there are never more than 55 white tourists in the whole country at any one time. I'm sure we'll get lots of attention.

Axel told me a few funny stories before we went to bed. Apparently people here don't care much for the pope, they think it's wrong to worship someone who is human, and when Pope John Paul died there wasn't much of a fuss. But Axel had a conversation with a guy a few weeks ago and nearly brought a man to tears by breaking the bad news to him that Bob Marley was dead. Apparently the man was inconsolable.

As I was going to sleep Peace and Josh, 2 of the locals here, were singing traditional African music just outside my door. It was incredibly beautiful, I hope to hear a lot more of that while I'm here.

Rwanda: Mzungus in the Mist

A long bus ride through the rolling green mountains of Rwanda.

Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and every square inch is covered with crops. It's mostly winding mountain roads and tiny mud huts, it's a very beautiful country. The people here speak French as a second language so all of us got a little practice, and the French influence makes for better food.

Speaking of which, in continuing my theme of bastardizing my vegetarian sensibilities, I tried deep fried crickets on the ride to Kigali. Salty. Never again.

Rwanda is noticably richer than Uganda. After the genocide a lot of 'guilt' money came in, and you see a lot of nicer cars on the road. There are even traffic lights in Kigali! None of them are switched on though.

The hassle factor is higher than Uganda. A lot of people trying to sell you things, and slightly more aggressively, although it was never too bad. The traditional crafts were incredibly cheap though, I picked up a few things for home.

Every so often in Kigali you see a pick up truck filled with people dressed in pink uniforms, or you might see them working on a construction site somewhere. These are convicted mass murderers from the genocide.

Tomorrow we go to see the memorials. It's a little odd being a genocide tourist. Snapping pictures of the convicts in pink, like we're on safari. Wildlife photography with a twist.

But that's a big part of what this whole 4 month trip is. If I wanted to help people as much as possible then I could have given my $2700 for the flight to the Red Cross and kept working back at home to send more money. And while the point of me being here does have a lot to do with wanting to help people, there is a bit of "fucked up country" tourist motivation.

Also strange: buying Quality Street chocolates at a supermarket at a price equal to about 3 days average wage in this country. Gorilla trekking for $375 US per day, only $25 shy of the annual wage. Then walking past people starving on the streets and not giving them anything.

But in reality these are the decisions that I've been making every day my entire life, I just haven't had the consequences staring me in the face until now. And although I can't explicitly justify my actions, at the same time I don't feel like I'm doing the wrong thing. I haven't figured out the answer yet. It's something that I'll be rolling around in my head a lot while I'm here.

The Genocide Memorials

After changing to a cheaper and more central hotel, we went to see the main Rwandan genocide memorial in Kigali.

Unfortunately my camera kept saying error and then ran out of batteries, so the pictures will have to be taken on a return trip.

The memorial is situated on one of the many mass graves in Kigali. It takes a few hours to go through and tells the story of how it all happened, with photos, video, and artifacts from the events. It's beautifully presented and very powerful. It's not the kind of thing you do every day.

One of the rooms has pictures of children, and it gives their names, age, hobbies, and then says something like "stabbed in eyes" or "head smashed against brick wall".

There is a room full of smashed skulls and other bones, and a room filled with pictures of the dead.

At the end it also briefly goes through other genocides of the last century. It's not really possible to express how powerful the memorial is, it's something that needs to be seen in person. It amazes me what human beings can be persuaded to do.

After the memorial we had a drink at Hotel Mille Collines, which is the hotel that "Hotel Rwanda" is about. I stole a beer mat. People keep asking me if I want coke with my guiness.

When we left Mille Colline, it was about 9pm, and downtown Kigali was completely deserted and unlit. No cars, almost no people, no street lamps, and electricity was out in most of the roads. We walked back to our hotel, slightly nervous, and entered the hotel and went to our rooms. We never saw a single member of staff or any other guests, all the lights were out and the building was deserted. We went to bed.

The church

There were staff in the hotel by the time we woke up, but the city hadn't quite returned to normal. Once a month Kigali has a community cleaning morning, and it is illegal to open any businesses or drive any taxis until noon. Having woken up at 7 am to get breakfast and head out to the church at Lake Kiyu for another memorial, we discovered the city still dead, and were stuck until 12pm when the taxis started running again.

I think it was everyone's first illegal breakfast. We walked into a hotel and persuaded the staff to make us some food, and we were put into a small room tucked away, well hidden from the breakfast police.

The memorial we went to was a gruelling, 3 hour packed-matatu ride from downtown Kigali. But we finally got there at around 4pm.

The church is on top of a hill with a fantastic view of the lake. It was a beautiful building, made from old stone and stained glass. Ten years ago, more than 1400 people were massacred here, when their pastor betrayed them to the Interhamwe.

Walking around the grounds of the church, we found several pieces of human bone, including half a jaw bone with all it's teeth, plus shreds of clothing and a large metal rod which may or may not have been a weapon. There were bullet holes in the stained glass windows, and in a little gazebo at the front of the church there were 3 or 4 shelves filled with skulls. There was only one local inside the church, and she sat looking at the alter the whole time we were there.

We had dinner on the banks of Lake Kiyu then got back in the matatu for the long journey back to Kigali. When we got back the electricity had cut out but we found a restaurant with a generator and had dinner. By the time we walked home, around 9:30pm, the streets were again deserted and unlit. I have no idea why, we were there on a Friday and Saturday night!

The next day was uneventful - a 9 hour bus ride through pouring rain to Kampala, then dinner and bed. Jim, ACF's president, has returned from a trip to Canada and I met him for the first time. Like the other Ugandan men I've met he is very soft spoken and seems very nice. And lo and behold, the internet equipment has arrived! Perhaps this place isn't so unreliable after all.

National Theatre in Kampala

Last night Axel, Jules, Jen, Goldis and I went to the only open mic night we know of in Kampala. The place was absolutely packed, several hundred people were there, mostly crammed into the tiny little room where the band was playing.

There were some excellent musicians in the house band, particularly the trumpet player and the sax. Every performer, without exception, played full band reggae covers. So when I walked up an hour after we arrived, bringing a little stool with me and my acoustic guitar, I had no idea what the reaction would be. I figured they'd either love it or hate it. Thankfully, it turned out great! There were lots of people dancing and everyone cheered at the end. Good stuff. The open stage runs every Monday so I'm planning to be back next week.

I've been thinking a lot about ways to help people here, and right now I feel like one of the best ways to alleviate poverty would be to get people here creating something that is marketable to people in developed countries. I'm not sure what that will be. But one of the things I started on today is an online portrait of the village. There will be lots of photography, streaming audio with people telling their stories, and various people from the village contributing. The refugees have already been writing stories of how they've got to where they are now, and if nothing else it's theraputic for them, and it helps them practice their English. They're also extremely excited about Westerners reading what they wrote. I'm hoping it will encourage people to donate to the projects here, and maybe bring in some more volunteers.

On the way to the internet cafe today I walked past a woman sleeping on the street with 2 new born babies. I think there's only so many times you can walk by something like that and not do anything. If she's still there on my way back I'll give her some money.

Something that I haven't mentioned yet, but keep meaning to: the public transit system here is absolutely fantastic. It's not too comfortable, it's usually very packed, but I've never waited for a matatu for more than one minute, literally, and the half hour ride into Kampala costs me about 30 cents. It beats every other city I've been to hands down. You can go door to door, pretty much anywhere in the city, for less than a dollar and you won't wait a minute.

Another thing, for all my fellow web geeks: every internet cafe I've been to in Africa, South Africa included, has had Mozilla Firefox. Wow!

The internet follows me everywhere I go. Time to go and buy film so I can start working on this "Portrait of Ndejje" site.

Politics

A rainy day in Kampala. I'm trying to download flash so I can build the site. It says it's going to take another 9 hours.

As I've mentioned before, there's a lot of tension here between ACF and it's volunteers. Last night Jim, the president of ACF, gave a sort of informal speech at dinner about the tension and ways to resolve it, which he and I had talked at some length about earlier that day.

I'm too new to draw any solid conclusions, but here are some of my thoughts so far:

I think many volunteers feel alienated and frustrated with the charity when they see things like staff not being paid on time, or money going towards different priorities than what they feel is right, when they've paid a lot of money to the charity to come and volunteer. I think this stems from the feeling that their program fee is a donation to the charity, however I don't think this is quite right.

People pay around US$600 a month, which works out to about $20 a day. ACF provides us with 3 meals a day and accomodation, which means we're probably paying roughly the Ugandan market rate for the services we're being provided. Nowhere in the application that I filled out does it call the program fee a donation, so to expect to have a say in how that ACF spends that money is not entirely fair.

And although we are providing services to ACF, no-one here signed on for barter work, they signed on for volunteer work, so to expect anything like food or accomodation in return contradicts the nature of the agreement. If you washed dishes at a restaurant in exchange for a meal, no-one would call it volunteering.

And volunteers have plenty of say on how they choose to help and what they put their money towards beyond the program fee. The program fee is also substantially lower than most agencies I've seen.

Then at the end of the day, all the volunteers get on a plane and fly back to our safe, rich countries with running water, permanent electricity, good health care and well paid jobs. The staff at ACF don't get to do that, they have been here much longer than any of the volunteers and will be here well after we're gone. They grew up with the people the foundation was created to help, and as such I think it's important to try to trust their judgement in what works and what doesn't, what's important and what is not, especially working within a culture so different from your own.

At the same time, in investing that money and trust into the organization, there is a natural and reasonable expectation that the profit made and hours of work given will be used to further the ambitions and work of the charity. There is also a very reasonable expectation that the charity you're helping is honest and genuine in their intentions.

And there are some things that concern me there. The biggest worry I have is the fear of the charity that many of the locals seem to have. People will talk to me and make me promise not to tell anyone that I spoke to them, or if they come out with us in the evening they'll have to meet away from ACF and there will be an alibi that everyone agrees on in case they are caught. Maybe there's a good reason behind this, but I don't know what it would be, and it makes me nervous about the organization.

Yesterday I told ACF's president, Jim, that I was going to be completely honest with him about any issues I had, and that would probably make him angry with me every so often, but in the long run it would be for the best. So I will talk to him about any concerns I still have in a couple of weeks when I have a more solid understanding of how everything works around here.

No conclusions yet.

Volunteer guessing games and Matatu Roulette

After nearly 6 hours at the internet cafe yesterday, my download froze at 81%. I never got the software. Bugger!

2 new volunteers arrived last night and this morning. Graham from Canada and Sophie from the UK.

Axel and I came up with an elaborate betting system on the characteristics of new volunteers. Each current volunteer makes 7 predictions about the new volunteer, and the predictions fall into different categories, worth either 1, 3, or 5 points if they end up correct. There is also the 'snitch' (I got Axel hooked on Harry Potter) which is an automatic win. After the 7 predictions, everyone also makes a guess at the new person's webmail password. That one is a snitch too.

My prediction of Sophie was as follows:

Lives in Holland
A mennonite
Has a prosthetic limb
Her favourite novel is the Lovely Bones
Favourite position is doggy-style
Recovering cocaine addict (but denies it)
Has been engaged twice but never married
Her hotmail password is "nofear"

As you can probably tell, most of my bets were in 5 point or snitch categories. In the interests of not sending her screaming from the compound on her first day, we have not sat down with her to find out all the answers yet. The Holland prediction is definitely wrong. We'll see what happens with the prosthetic limb.

I was explaining to Graham and Sophie which matatu to take back to the compound. Our village is called Ndejje, but there are 2 Ndejjes near Kampala: our Ndejje, and the war stricken killing fields of Ndejje where mzungu-meat is considered a delicacy. The 2 taxis park right beside eachother, both with signs for Ndejje on them, but you have to take the one with the blue and red sign. If you get in the one with the black sign for Ndejje you get cooked and eaten.

By the way, a little lesson on how to pronounce these words: the n in Ndejje and the m in mzungu are not silent. So Ndejje is pronounced en-dedge-ay, and mzungu is muh-zoon-goo.

Getting to the taxi park is also an adventure. I take bodo-bodos there every time now. A bodo-bodo is a 2 person motorbike. You pay 60c and sit on the back and you speed through the city to the taxi park. It's my daily near death experience. It's the bungee-jumping of public transit.

Last night I was teaching refugee children how to read. I taught one kid who was about 6, who could read and write very well, and another girl who was 10 who could only read words like "the" and "to", and struggled with everything else. I got the first kid to write out a story for me while I worked with the other girl.

In the middle of the lesson the electricity went out, and it was already dark, so the lesson was over. I made a big pile of kids on the grass so that I would feel organized. They did not want to be organized though and they ruined my pile, then jumped on me and I ended up at the bottom of the pile. That pile was not so good.

Mzungu suicide:

Buying a bag of candy, refusing the yellow supermarket bag that could have disguised it, and then walking past all the orphans on the street with the candy swinging from your hand.

I didn't give them any. In both Kampala and Ndejje kids ask for 'sweeties' constantly, and many volunteers bring candy for that purpose, but I never give anything out. It doesn't help them in any way, and risks teaching them that begging is a viable way to make a living.

There's lots of examples of foreign aid inadvertently doing more harm than good. Donations of goods to solve short term problems such as famine often undercut the local merchants and put them out of business, leaving the community more dependent on aid long term. The Ndejje jelly bean industry has been in dire straits for years now.

I left Canada expecting to be return with a new perspective on what being poor was. I expected the problems of Toronto to pale in comparison with the troubles faced here, and I thought I'd look at the homeless and poor people in Toronto and think how lucky they were, how much worse it could be.

The problems in Toronto do pale in comparison. But what's interesting to me is that my sympathy for the poor and sick in Canada has increased immensely since I started working here. Maybe it's from seeing how little control many people have over their lives. Or maybe it's because this is the first time I've been exposed to poverty for an extended time and I'm only now beginning to appreciate what it's like.

Enough philosophy.

I have decided that next weekend, despite a life-long fear, I will do a 44 metre bungee jump into crocodile infested waters. I say into, not over, because the top half of my body will dip into the water during the jump. Fly fishing for crocodiles.

Secretly, I have long considered myself an above average wuss. I hate fairground rides, don't like horror movies and would pick scrabble over a ouija board any day. Bungee jumping has long been on my never-to-do list. But I figure if I write in this journal that I'm going to do it, my fear of a crap story and well publicized wuss-ness will outweigh my fear of bungee-croc-death.

Oh by the way I was kidding earlier about the Ndejje jelly bean industry.

Last night I was back at the refugee camp. Louise and I kept the children entertained while their parents were taught English by Axel and Graham. We had absolutely no supplies, and the kids hardly speak any English, so we played a memory game where we went around in a circle making stupid gestures and noises in a specific order. Each person mimicked all the previous noises and gestures and then added their own to the sequence. It turns out stupidity is not language dependent.

Then Jen saved the day by showing up with crayons and some pictures to colour. The kids had to colour different sections different colours based on what words were in the boxes. It was a great way for them to learn some English words.

Which leads me to a request from anyone reading this journal: if you know of any good activities or games to play with kids who don't understand English too well, please let me know! If it involves worksheets that can be emailed, I can print and photocopy them here. If it just needs to be described, posting it in the comments here would be perfect. The activity needs to be very simple because it's hard explaining any rules to them.

I was also teaching Gracie, one of the orphans found in the garbage dump, how to use a camera. We had my polaroid sticker camera and he was absolutely ecstatic watching the pictures develop in front of him, and then getting to stick them on things. He doesn't understand how to aim the camera though, Axel and I kept showing him how to look through the lens and he kept touching the viewfinder to his nose and then going cross-eyed. Even when he learned to close one eye and held the view finder to his open eye, he was looking straight up, not into the camera. But as soon as he hears the click he starts laughing and jumping and dancing around while he waits for the picture to develop. It doesn't matter what he took a photo of, just the clicking and sticking is enough for him.

By the end of the day I'd destroyed my shoes, was covered in mud, and smelled like urine. Most of the refugee kids only have one set of clothes, and many are so young they aren't so good at using the pit toilets yet.

It was probably the most satisfying cold shower I've ever had.

Ode to the Body Shop

by Rich Lowenberg

O wonderous soapy bar
Thy scents speaketh to my heart
As thy bubbles cleanse mine skin.

Yours alone is the creamy of all creamyness.
My 72p Tesco 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo holds not a candle to thy smell
Even when the electricity doth be out.

I thank thee for thy lovely soapy touch.


A lazy Sunday. I went to church this morning, the first time I've been in years. Church is a bit different over here. There's a lot of evangelical stereotypes - the shouting "PRAAAAAAAISE JEEZUSSSS!!!!" and everyone singing and clapping and drumming and dancing. If church had been like this when I was growing up God would have been much trendier.

I grew out of my anti-religion phase a few years ago, and while I don't subscribe to any specific religion myself I have a lot of respect for religion and spirituality in general. It is of course used for horrific purposes some of the time, both past and present, but I think mostly it keeps people happy and helping eachother, and keeps everyone thinking about stuff beyond their everyday lives. And I don't find many religious people to be preachy. In Toronto at least, most of the preachy people I meet are atheist.

I must admit though church services are a pretty weird thing. Spirituality is presented in such a black and white fashion. You're either good, or you're evil. If you come to church each week and pray and keep the faith then your enemies will be destroyed and you will go to heaven. It's a McDonalds drive-thru for spirituality: fast, convenient, predictable, but probably not as fulfilling as a home cooked meal.

I just talked about how I have lots of respect for religion then I called church a McDonalds drive-thru. Maybe that will seem less confusing if I mention that before I became vegetarian I really, really loved Big Macs.

Although it's still a ways off, I've been thinking about what I want to do after this volunteer work. I'd really like to get to Madagascar, buy a drum and study some percussion. The best drums in the world are made there. I have decided that if I can get one made especially for me, I will kill the animal myself. That might seem weird coming from an ethical vegetarian, but I figure if I'm going to pay for an animal skin I should understand exactly what I'm doing.

I also plan to spend some time with my uncle in Amsterdam, and maybe work my way through Southern Europe and into Northern Africa. As a British citizen I can pick up work in the EU so it wouldn't have to be too expensive overall.

I kind of like the idea of studying a bunch of things in their appropriate countries. Drumming in Madagascar, cooking in France, brewing beer in Belgium etc. Then I'll be able to easily bullshit people into thinking I'm really good at all those things.

Tonight we're all going to a hotel called Blue Mango, that apparently has really good food. Tomorrow is my first day of teaching at the school. I'll post again soon!

Adventures with cockroaches

Last night most of the volunteers went to a place called Blue Mango, a western style hostel with a swimming pool, really cool furniture and good food. It was pricier than anywhere in Ndejje but it was nice having a decent meal. Ever since South Africa good food has been pretty much non-existent.

I've felt a little alienated from the other volunteers the last few days. Many of them talk pretty much all the time about the shortcomings of the charity, and all the supposed corruption within it. One of the new volunteers told me a day or two into their stay that they'd heard so many bad things right away their first instinct was to get on the next plane out of here. People aren't getting the chance to think for themselves, and although I'm too new to draw any final conclusions on who is doing what, I have seen several things now that suggest some of the volunteers have a strong vendetta against the organization, that is neither rational nor fair. I have seen things that make me question ACF too, but certainly nothing that warrants the strong opinions that many of the volunteers hold.

It's weird that volunteers would be so against a charity organization. I think some could be just naturally argumentative people, and in a situation like this where everything is so new and there's a lot of challenging situations in your work, sometimes it's easier to just reject everything and that way if you fail it's not your fault. That's not to say some of their complaints aren't valid, but I've seen people twist facts pretty heavily against ACF on more than one occassion now.

I told the 2 new volunteers to take everything they hear from people, me included, with a big pinch of salt, and to try and form their opinions on what they see for themselves and not stories they hear. I don't hold as much clout as the others here though because I'm so new.

This morning was the first group meeting I've been to. Jim and his wife, 6 or 7 members of staff, and all the volunteers met around the dining table. Jim asked the volunteers to raise their hand if there was anything they would like to discuss. There was a pause and no-one moved, so I raised my hand.

I said I was concerned about 2 things: firstly, I was unsure of how donations are used and I asked to see a breakdown of all the costs associated with the different programs. Money disappearing from allegedly inflated cost estimates has been the biggest criticism I've heard. I also said that I would like clarification on ACF's relationship with both the community and it's staff with respect to the volunteers, i.e. what expectations were imposed on the staff and the community in terms of how they behave around the volunteers.

A detailed break down of all expenses related to each of the programs is apparently already documented and will be posted on the notice board for all volunteers to read. I was told that there are no rules or expectations imposed on the community, as communicating and enforcing anything like that would be too difficult. Staff are not allowed to ask for money directly from any volunteer, but there are no rules beyond that.

Others asked questions too. The meeting ended up taking 2 hours. Jim was asked what ACF had donated to the medical clinic in the past, and he gave a short list of things like gloves, bedsheets and medicine. Later in the day, I was told that someone had checked with the doctors at the clinic after the meeting and apparently no donations had ever been received from ACF. People were angry with Jim for lying.

I spoke to Abraham later when no one was around and asked him if there had been any documented donations to the clinic. He said there was, and I asked him for a copy of the receipts which he said he would bring for me. Without mentioning names, I told Abraham some people weren't convinced Jim was telling the truth about the donations, and he told me that some of the donations didn't make it to the patients because of corruption within the clinic. He said that when they'd made the donation of bedsheets, he'd folded them and delivered them himself, but then they'd disappeared.

I told Abraham that I would probably ask him for a lot of documentation and proof of expenditures over the next few months, and he said that wouldn't be a problem, and that ACF had detailed files on all the incoming and outgoing money that he would show me if I wanted to see it.

I'm sitting firmly in the middle ground between ACF and the volunteers. I'm trying hard to base my opinions on things I see for myself and not stories heard from other people, and where I hear stories I'm doing my best to validate them. It is a good sign to me that ACF has been so open, often about things that really aren't my business, like looking at their books. I told Abraham today that there are still things that I'm concerned about regarding ACF, and he has said he will do what he can to resolve any issues I have. With things like the clinic donations it will be hard to decide anything without seeing documentation and ideally talking to the doctors there myself.

I think regardless of who is right and who is wrong, I'm in the right spot to help the situation. I've long thought that the most effective way to promote change is from inside an organization, not outside it. If you keep butting heads with people they stop listening. If you work with them and treat everyone involved with respect then I think you stand a much better chance of being heard.

Onto lighter topics: last night when we got back from Blue Mango the main house was locked up and I really needed the bathroom, so I had to use the pit toilets. It was the first time I'd had to do the squatting thing. It was not at all pleasant. At that time of night there were cockroaches running all around, including out of the hole I was hovering over.

To refresh your memory, African cockroaches are quite different from Canadian ones. They're at least 2 inches long, and they like to fly. Especially out of holes in the ground...

When I got into my room, there was a cockroach climbing up Axel's mosquito net. I knocked it out of the room and lay down to go to sleep, but I heard another cockroach under the bed. It was so loud it sounded like it was rearranging the furniture. After a while it emerged and I trapped it in a pringles can and threw it outside. They're too big to kill, I'm scared of the crunch.

That was the end of the cockroach feng-shui for the night. I hope it won't be a recurring activity.

After the meeting today I signed up for 4 weeks of teaching starting next Monday, with an emphasis on pre-primary school. I took a tour of the school and met the headmistress. The school is of course very run down but the kids seem like a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to it.

There's 3 Americans getting off the plane on Wednesday and Abraham asked me to meet them at the airport with him and show them around the village. I think I'm an official volunteer liason officer here now.

Famous in Uganda, and does Doris want money?

Yesterday I had real trouble getting out of bed, I was exhausted the whole day. It was Axel's last Monday night in Uganda and he was pretty keen on going to National Theatre again, the open mic that runs in Kampala each week. Axel lived in Uganda when he was a kid and he was meeting a friend there who he hadn't seen for 12 years.

I initially said I was just going to go to bed early, but Axel kept bugging me and eventually I packed up the guitar and went. To save time, we took boda bodas (2 person motorbikes) to Entebbe road, where we planned to catch a matatu to the city.

A boda boda ride, with a guitar on your shoulder, through slippery, dark, pothole laden dirt roads wakes you up pretty fast. At one point we went through a group of 20 or so boda boda drivers who were all beeping their horns by the light of their headlamps. It was pretty weird, it looked like hell's angels on mopeds.

National Theatre was different from last week. Instead of everyone piling into a cramped room upstairs, there was a large floodlit stage in a nearby park, raised 12 feet off the ground, and a crowd of about 1500 people watching (Axel and I agreed on that estimate). I found the host and told him I wanted to play originals with just me and a guitar, and he slotted me in at number 20.

There was less reggae this time around. Someone told us that because everyone around here plays reggae, anyone who plays anything else gets priority. The crowd was attentive but generally pretty quiet, most people didn't even get applause when they finished.

Axel and I met various people while I was waiting to play. I've met lots of Ugandan's who are really genuine and nice, but there's always some people who come up to you and can get pretty irritating. I get regularly asked for my email address and phone number by people I've known for less than 10 seconds. They'll say they want to meet me, or join my band, or they tell me about how strapped for cash they are and keep going on about the things they can't afford. Random people ask me to buy them drinks. It gets tiring being treated like the walking world bank just because you're white.

I did meet some really cool people though. The sax player from last week hung out with us for a while, and there was a guy called Mandela who kind of acted like our bodyguard for a lot of the night, he helped get rid of some of the annoying people.

Axel was also hit on by the most sexually aggressive girl I've ever seen, called Doris. She was so forward, for several hours we were trying to figure out if she was a hooker. I left the two of them to talk and occassionally looked back to see what was going on. He looked completely bewildered. I don't think he knew how to handle her.

I got Axel to write down some Doris quotes for me, but I'd rather not repeat them. They were pretty damn blunt. He's going to call her tonight.

By about 12:30 I still hadn't been called to the stage, so I went to talk to the host. He told me that because there were so many people waiting to play, anyone who played last week, like me, had been taken off the list. I'd been waiting to play for more than 3 hours. I argued with him for a while but it wasn't doing any good so I went back to tell Axel.

When all our new Ugandan buddies heard that I'd been knocked off the list, they were furious. 6 of them went to talk to the host. Then he came up to me and told me he'd put me on in a few minutes.

The park was still completely packed by the time I walked up onto the stage. There was an MC who told the crowd I was going to play for one minute. I started playing Talk Without Words, and it felt like the whole park started whistling and cheering. About a minute into the song the MC started shouting "stop stop!" into the microphone, but I ignored him and that made everyone cheer even louder. People all over the park were dancing and every time I swung the guitar around the crowd whistled. During the instrumental section the MC did that stupid thing that MC's do, where they shout random meaningless garbage into the mic. It didn't matter. I finished the song, thanked the crowd, and left the stage.

As Axel and I walked out of the park a man came up to me and said he was a promoter for Radio Simba, and asked if I would be interested in performing on the station and having my cd put in rotation. We exchanged contact info.

A taxi back to Ndejje village, and when we got to the gates of the compound, Axel decided he needed the bathroom. As he stood facing the bushes on the side of the road, we both heard a rustling sound. It was too dark to see, but it sounded like a snake. Axel zipped up as quickly as possible and hopped away from the bushes, and as we stood waiting for the guard to open the gates of the compound, we heard a soft rattling about 5 feet away. We were thankful to get inside without incident.

The medical clinic

Sorry for the gap in the journal entries lately. I've been sick for a few days and haven't had the energy to write.

It's always a little scary getting sick here because malaria is such a big killer in this region and it's symptoms are very similar to a flu. I felt nauseous, dizzy, I had a sore throat and congestion, I was sweating a lot, and I kept getting headaches. Those are all malaria symptoms, and it can kill an adult in 48 hours.

I'm being melodramatic though. Several other volunteers got sick in the last few days and malaria is not easily transmittable except through blood so I was quite confident it was just some kind of flu or food poisoning or something. And Arianna is a nurse and would be able to run the necessary blood tests and give me the correct medication very quickly if I became too sick.

What's the best thing to do when you're feeling awful? Go work in a medical clinic around lots of other sick people.

The clinic is about a 15 minute drive from the compound. It's a small building with maybe 6 or 7 rooms plus a waiting area. There was no electricity or running water the whole time I was there. Most patients don't have beds, it's mostly thin mats on the cement floor, even in the children's room.

Without any medical training I wasn't able to do anything too advanced, but I took the vital signs of the people waiting for the nurse. I learned to take blood pressure, and also took people's pulse, temperature and weight.

Most of the patients were children. Several kids around here have never seen a white person and many were terrified of me. Axel calls it taking their mzungu virginity. A few days ago a ten year old girl saw me and when I waved she started screaming and ran away from me crying. Axel told me he once went for a run to the outskirts of the village and a boy on the side of the road ran screaming into the forest. Axel could still hear him screaming "ooooo ooooo oooooooooo" long after he'd disappeared.

The simplest things are the biggest ordeal when it comes to children and medicine. Putting a thermometer under the kids arm results in wailing and thrashing about and most kids have to be restrained by the parent. With most children, taking their pulse was impossible as they wouldn't stay still.

When the child's temperature was over 38.5 degrees, I gave them 5ml of liquid paracetemol using a syringe in their mouth. Most times the child would have to be held down by a couple of people and their mouth would be held open while I squirted the liquid in, then someone would hold their nose to force them to swallow.

For children too small to stand on the scales, there was a set of scales and a harness hanging from a tree outside the clinic where the babies were weighed.

Working with me at the clinic were Goldis and Arianna. At one point Arianna told me she wanted to introduce me to the most beautiful woman in the world, and brought me into a room to meet one of the nurses. I don't remember her name, but I learned quickly that she was looking for a mzungu boyfriend. She was possibly the most beautiful girl I've seen here, but I declined her offer. She spent a little time trying to persuade me, saying she wouldn't mind if I had several girlfriends or wives, but gave up after a while. I'd be a little nervous about hooking up with locals anyway, given the HIV rate around here.

On Thursday I had a meeting with a woman called Christina, who is the Ugandan representative of Canadian Feed the Children. I met her in Mengo Hospital as her father had acute malaria and she was visiting him there.

The hospital was in an area of Kampala called Namirembe, a richer, well maintained region that was nicer than anything I've seen in Uganda. Christina's father was looking quite well when I arrived, he was sitting up and drinking milk. He used to teach Lugandan in Oxford, England, so his English was quite good, and he had lots of advice for me about how the world works and the way mzungus think. He taught me a few Lugandan words.

Over lunch Christina told me about the sort of work Feed the Children does, and she said she would show me around the projects underway in Uganda. She is also going to try and arrange a meeting with the national director of Foster Parents Plan. I'd like to pick up some work with a few different NGOs while I'm here, so I'm hoping a few opportunities will come from these meetings. I've been sponsoring a Pakistani child through FPP for a while now, so maybe that will improve my chances.

There has been an influx of new volunteers here, we've had 5 people from the United states in 3 days. I like having the regular turnover. There has been some silly politics amongst the volunteers and I've got the impression that a couple of people have been angry with me, there's been some passive aggression flying around. I don't feel any obligation to address problems that people won't discuss with me though. If it's any of their business then they can talk to me about it, if it's not their business then I don't care about their opinion, and it's easy to not let it get to you when there's new people coming in all the time.

Two of the new volunteers arrived late on Wednesday night, and Axel and I decided to give them a lasting first impression. I pulled my pants down low below my ass, put my shirt on backwards and inside out and tied a knot in the front. Axel dressed in a turban and sari, and we went to meet them. We shook hands and they didn't even blink.

Traffic stories: coming back from Kampala a few days ago our matatu hit a cyclist and knocked him off the bike. He didn't seem badly injured. On a boda boda the day before the driver drove too close to a matatu and I smacked my knee on the back of it. The same day Axel and Goldis saw a pair of sandals with pools of blood in them and streaks of red up the street. Apparently there are stiff penalties for boda boda drivers who get in accidents, a by-law introduced to try and calm the traffic. The boda boda driver had crashed and ran away to escape punishment, spilling blood all down the street and leaving his bloody sandals placed neatly beside eachother on the tarmac.

This journal entry seems to just be a collection of random stories, so I'll add two more before I go: walking around late in the village last night, the only light came from the stars, fireflies, and car headlamps. The cars kick up a lot of dust along the dirt roads and when someone walks in front of the headlights, their shadows in the dust clouds look like ghosts walking the streets of the village.

Axel was also telling me how he was given his name. It is part of his Swedish tribe's culture to hold the baby upside down while the name is chosen. It had been raining a lot the day Axel was born, and so his family chose the name "Pule", which means "comes with the rain". His second name is Axel. Upon being named, Axel promptly urinated in his own mouth. He goes by Axel, not Pule, because Pule means fuck in Norwegian.

Rafting and bungee-croc-death has been postponed until next weekend. Tomorrow is paintball. Now I'm going swimming at the pool in the Sheraton hotel. Man, life is tough...

Held hostage by Forest Whitaker

After writing yesterday's journal entry I went to the Sheraton Hotel nearby to swim in the pool with a few other volunteers. That place is insanely expensive, but the grounds are very beautiful and it was great weather for swimming.

While we were there a group of mzungus was taking notes and measuring the pool. After a while we got curious and asked them what they were doing, and it turns out they were a film crew working on the "The Last King of Scotland", a movie about Idi Amin, a brutal Ugandan dictator who was president in the 1970s.

I asked them if they needed any mzungu actors, and they said they did and would appreciate the help. We shoot on June 16th and July 6th if I remember correctly, although we have to call to confirm. We're going to be dressed up as British ex-pats from the 70s. I'm going to try and find an afro.

Forest Whitaker is Idi Amin, and he was hanging out in the hotel while we were there, although I didn't actually see him myself. But I'll be playing one of Idi Amin's hostages on July 6th so maybe I'll get to be tortured by him or something. Being tortured by Forest Whitaker would be soooooo cooooooooool.

I had my first paintball game today, it was loads of fun. It hurts a bit when you get shot but that just adds to the realism. I think I would make a good army marine. I only got hit twice in 6 games, and my combat roll looks amazing.

The computer that I've been building the Portrait of Ndejje site on was stolen from the lower volunteer compound on Friday, and I lost all the work I've done so far. Last night, someone tried to climb over the wall in the middle of the night and the guard tried to shoot him but missed, and the person got away. The gunshot woke several volunteers up. Then earlier this morning someone came looking for Axel saying they were from the Norwegian embassy, but they didn't have any ID on them, and Axel is Swedish anyway. There are strange things going on around here.

There is a police investigation underway, and Ivan, the boy I saw get beaten when I first arrived, is the prime suspect. I have spent some time talking to him and I highly doubt he was involved. I am worried that he will be falsely accused, and punishment is either mob justice or execution if it's decided that he stole the computer.

What makes things worse is that he's so scared of the charity and the police since he was beaten, that when they find him he will almost certainly try to run away. It is quite possible that if he does this he will be shot, and even if he isn't shot it will make him look guilty. He's not a smart kid and although we tried to explain all this to him I don't think it will affect his reaction.

I'm crossing my fingers for him.

Ugandan media

In some respects Uganda is vastly ahead of the times. Lord of the Rings 4 is out on DVD already here, even though they haven't even started filming. I bought it for 10,000 shillings (about $7). From what I watched in the store, it looked really good. It's a bunch of Chinese guys with bad English overdubbing and Chinese subtitles, and lots of horses. The production quality doesn't seem quite up to par with the first 3. Here's the blurb from the back of the DVD, letter for letter:

Lord of the Rings 4
The Keeper of Time

Time is shocked to discover that he has been chosen to the the most power full good wizard of his time. With His master Udo and brave portector, Bullrock, he has to travels to the dark castle. where dark evil power remains. to stop it. Alin the way. the most evil wizard and thousand monsters try to stop them too. how do they reach the castle alive?

The DVD has 4 other movies on it too, including "The Beastmaster" a guy who can control animals and forms an alliance with the cannibal bird-men against the evil sorceror Maaz, in an eenchanted warld of long ago. Genius.

The media is a little skewy here in general. I read the paper about every other day. Here are some stories I remember reading:

How can I shaft 3 girls with a dildo when I have a long penis? - that one was a front page headline, on a national newspaper, about a guy denying that he had used a dildo on his three step daughters.

Heads of gays named - this article listed roughly 10 homosexuals who the paper felt the public needed to be aware of. The list consisted of descriptions like "Mike from the IT lab at Kampala University".

What would you be a martyr for? - This was on the front of the main newspaper's children's magazine. It was interviews with various kids saying what causes they would die for.

I'll write more as I remember / read them.

I taught kindergarten class today, which was loads of fun. I always have fun around little kids. They all shout "Hi mzungu" at me when I walk by, which means "hello white person!", and I reply "Oli-ocha mudugavu", which means "hello black person!", and that usually makes the locals laugh.

Axel left this morning, which is a real shame. That guy was doing so much good work here and he was a blast to hang out with too. I think we'll be going for beers in the UK in a few months though.

I have decided to split my 3 months here into two parts, so one month from now I will be spending between 3 and 5 weeks travelling around the region, and then I'll return and do my final month's work. Despite already having collected a little sponsorship money, I don't think it will be feasible to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. After park and guide fees the total cost will be over US$1000, which is more than what I was able to raise. I'm going to go there anyway though and I may decide to just do it for my own experience. Either way any money given so far will go towards an extremely good cause, and if anyone wants it back I'll happily refund it.

I also plan to get to Nairobi, Zanzibar, Luma island, Ethiopia (hopefully), and go on a safari through the Serengeti. That's based on 30 seconds of research this morning, which is about the average amount of planning I do before any kind of trip.

Floods

On Tuesday night I went with a local singer called Julie to a club called Lumas Inn. Kampala has the best live music scene of any city I've been to, it beats Toronto, Vancouver, London, New York, hands down. Lumas wasn't as busy as National Theatre, but there were still about 100 people in the audience, in a stadium-seated garden looking down onto a floodlit stage. The equipment was more professional and the club isn't listed in any guidebooks so there wasn't a mzungu in sight.

If the audience likes what you play, they come up on stage and give you money. Every time I've played I've made a few dollars. Anything I get goes back to other performers over the course of the night. I think I might be the only mzungu in Uganda that's had locals give me donations.

After I performed, a guy in a cowboy hat and boots, shimmering silver shirt and lots of gaudy jewellery asked me if I would play guitar on his gospel album. His name was "Lone Gun". I explained to him that I was here to work on other things and that I don't play guitar for other people's music, which is actually true even in Canada.

The next morning I was woken at about 6am by heavy rain pounding on the tin roof of my bedroom. Water was leaking through and onto the floor. When I started walking to school I found many of the roads flooded and villagers' flinging buckets of water from the doorways of their houses.

A few local entrepreneurs were giving people rides through the flood on the back of their bicycles, but when I asked how much I was quoted about ten times the normal rate. Much to the amusement of the locals, I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants and waded through. There was a current in parts and my legs and clothes ended up caked in mud. I got to school wet and very dirty, and 40c richer. Perhaps it would have been worth the money.

As the end of my one month spending probation approaches, I'm getting some ideas about how I want to help people. One of the first things I plan to do is buy boxes of baby food and give them to mothers and children on the streets who have new born babies. I am also planning to buy some sewing machines that women in the community will be able to rent time on, to make clothes to sell at the market. Renting them out will help ensure that the people using them treat their time on the machine seriously, and it ensures the charity stays interested in providing access to them. The profit would go towards sponsoring orphans education, and when mothers are making money they can feed and educate their children. I plan to start with two machines, then if it looks successful and sustainable I'll add more.

I also want to look into setting up a little cafe here with old Sony playstations hooked up to TVs, and charge people by the hour to play. This would create jobs and the profit would go to the charity. I've never seen video games of any kind in Uganda, and a games cafe only needs electricity to run, unlike an internet cafe which has much higher overhead and startup costs, and already has a lot of competition. If you know of anyone with an old playstation or games that they're willing to donate, send me an email!

Bungee-croc-death

Yesterday 8 of us got in a bus and travelled to Jinja, a small town about 2 hours East of Kampala, at the source of the Nile river.

When we arrived, we were given the option of bungee jumping right away or doing it the next morning. I was one of three people who decided to jump right away.

As I've said before, I am a huge wimp when it comes to this stuff. I had always assumed that I would never attempt a bungee jump. The jump was from a round, rickety tower suspended 44 metres above the Nile. Prince William bungeed off the same tower a few years ago. Apparently he'd just shown up unnannounced one day after flying into the tiny airport just outside Jinja.

One of the other volunteers, Sailesh, jumped first. He'd never done it before and he hesititated as he jumped, and ended up falling feet first with the cord tied around his ankles. As it tightened he flipped around head first which made him swing back and forth as he bounced. He wasn't badly hurt.

One of the guides strapped the cord to my legs, which were wrapped tightly in a blue towel with bindings around it. I shuffled up to the ledge, and looked down. 44 metres is a pretty long way. I feel like I switched off my brain because I don't remember any thoughts going through my head, my brain just logged observations while my body functioned on autopilot. The guide having to tell me several times to let go of the rail. Then spreading my arms out wide at my sides, leaning forward and then the air rushing by my ears as I fell head first towards the river. The dip in the water, bouncing, and then being lowered too fast into the raft at the bottom, leaving me swimming in the Nile with a bloody nose.

After the jump was white water rafting. I was much less scared of this, and when the guide did a quick survey of who was nervous I didn't put up my hand.

It was a 6 hour rafting trip, covering 30km of the Nile river. Along the way we would cover rapids ranging from grade 2 to grade 5. Grade 5 is the most powerful rapids you raft without serious risk of death. Grade 6 is considered too dangerous to raft, regardless of experience.

Everyone in the raft, 9 people in total, paddles hard into the rapids and just before you hit the biggest waves the guide yells get down, and everyone turns and crouches low into the inflatable raft to lower the centre of gravity and try and prevent the boat from flipping upside down. The first big rapids we hit were grade 4, and when the guide yelled get down I didn't crouch in time and a wave knocked me out of the raft. I was pushed underwater and into rocks which bruised and cut my knees and back. I got back into the boat bleeding and a little shaken up but ready to try again.

The next set of rapids was grade 5, and the boat was flipped up in the air and everyone was thrown out. At some point I bit into my lip and when I got into the raft again I had another cut to attend to. We went through some grade 2 and 3 rapids which were pretty relaxed and an hour or so later we came to another grade 5 area, and we were all flipped out again. I managed to hold onto the boat and I wasn't hurt.

I got to the point where I was dreading any of the higher grade rapids, and I ended up taking the safety boat for 2 sets. One was a 3-5 metre drop down a grade 5 waterfall amidst shallow rocks, and the other one I skipped was right at the end, which was a grade 5 that had a 98% flip rate. During one of the grade 3 rapids our raft flipped and I flew into the air and landed on my stomach, hard enough that 2 clips on my life vest were knocked undone. The landing winded me and I was immediately pulled underwater for about 8-10 seconds. I think I swallowed most of the Nile.

As you can probably tell, I don't plan to go rafting again anytime soon.

Other news: Ivan has been cleared of all charges relating to the stolen computer, which is a relief. I'm not sure how that happened, but he is no longer considered a suspect.

I've also discussed the idea of the games cafe with the charity, and they're interested, so if anyone could help me track down 4 of the original playstations and some games that would be greatly appreciated! I plan to start small and expand once the business model is proven. People here don't have much if any experience with computer games so the simpler the games the better probably.

I'm also looking into doing a series of shows at the Lumas Club in Kampala. I've been getting a very good reaction with the locals here and a series of shows could be a fun way to raise some money for projects.

I also went to the audition for the movie and I'm getting fitted for my costume on Monday. I'm playing one of 6 British ex-pats, and will also be playing a hostage in a scene being filmed in the main airport in Uganda. Then on Tuesday I have a meeting with the Ugandan director of Feed the Children, who is going to show me around some of the work they're doing here and apparently has some opportunities for me to help out as well. I'll keep y'all posted!

Plans, progress, and working in a war-zone

I just returned from having my first hot shower in over a month. Man, I miss hot water! We took Peace, one of the ACF staff, and Gracie, the kid from the garbage dump, swimming at the Sheraton hotel. There were lots of things Gracie had never seen, like flights of stairs, swimming, and hot showers. He never dared to go in the shower, and swimming took about an hour to persuade him to do, but once he got in he had a lot of fun. He probably peed in the pool. Peace had only been swimming once before so I was teaching her. She wasn't swiming by the end but I reckon it was only because Gracie's pee made her less buoyant.

I've been teaching at the kindergarten every day. It's tiring but enormous fun. Today I found out that many children don't get fed, despite lunch being included in the school fees, because they are only given porridge if they bring a cup. Many children lose or break their cups and for whatever reason their families don't provide another one, so the kids go hungry. Of the 170 students, the headmistress told me about 100 children had lost their cups and so don't get fed unless they bring extra money for food they can eat with their hands.

I made an arrangement with the headmistress that I will buy a cup for each child on the condition that from now on the school is responsible for the cups. The teachers will make sure they are all returned after lunch, and if any are lost it is up to the school to replace them within one week. I'm buying 20 more than are needed to ensure there's always enough, and I've written up a contract between the president of the charity (who pays many of the children's school fees) and the headmistress, outlining the rules and guaranteeing that every child is fed every day regardless of the circumstances. Both parties have agreed to sign.

I've bought 2 sewing machines for the widows's empowerment program, and hired three women to make school uniforms for the kids in pre-primary who don't have them. I don't know for sure if uniforms will help their studies, but most of the kids are short on clothes anyway and the money goes to a good cause.

On Tuesday I got fitted for my hostage costume for the film, then I had a meeting with the director of Feed the Children Uganda. It looks like there's more adventure on the horizon! She gave me a bunch of options, and I chose to work on 2 projects: I'll be researching and writing a report on the effectiveness of FTCU's programmes, to be presented to Canadian Feed the Children who is their main donor. I'll have 3 or 4 staff to help me. I'll also be working in a refugee camp in Gulu, Northern Uganda, with children under 5 whose parents are missing because of the civil war. Gulu is still in civil war, so it will be a bit more intense than the work around here. Apparently there are more than 1000 children in the camp. Taking this work on means I'll probably be here at least a month longer than I planned.

Lots of responses from people tracking down playstations! Thank you so much everyone! If anyone has any games, memory cards or extra controllers as well that would be really helpful too. I figure memory cards can have space rented on them too, or it could come with a membership or something. I also plan to have a portion of all staff's wages get paid into a 3 year GIC, which will help them stop living day to day long-term.

The internet cafe is closing. Time to go.

The best play ever

On Saturday I went to see a play at a place called Pride Theatre, near Lumas Inn where I perform on Tuesdays. My friend Julie from National Theatre makes her living acting in the play, so I went to support her.

The theatre was packed, there were several hundred people there, and they were in hysterics through most of the play. It was probably the best play I have ever seen in my life, although I'm basing that entirely on the reaction of the audience, because the whole play was in Lugandan and I barely understood a word of it. During the interval one of the theatre staff took me backstage and Julie explained the story to me, and the second half made slightly more sense, although I was still completely lost. I left not knowing any of the character's names or even the name of the play. I was the only mzungu in the audience. I think it was pretty obvious I had no idea what was going on.

Despite not understanding the dialogue however, I enjoyed the low-budget sound effects and lighting, and the tension building music that cut in and out so abruptly it killed all the suspense.

So many things are done so half-assed here, it's funny how much lower people's standards are in Uganda. While often it's due to lack of money, I see so much that is just plain laziness, sometimes to an alarming degree. At the kindergarten, the benches that the kids sit on at lunch have rusty nails sticking out the backs of them. They've been like that for years. All it takes is a hammer to bend them down so they don't hurt the kids, but no one has bothered. I've been told by several people that they'll fetch me a hammer and it hasn't happened, even though they know what it's for. On Monday I'll just use a rock or something, and if that doesn't work I'll buy a hammer myself.

It's reflected in the music here too. Most of the music is recorded and performed with cheesy casio keyboard drums, and it's not like Africa is short on drummers. At the East African Music Festival, the day before I arrived, Axel told me that everyone performing just lip-synched to their cd. They didn't even pretend they were really singing, they started out their set by shouting "DJ! Track 4!" into the microphone. Every single artist! At a major music festival!

And of course there is the African time phenomenon. Nothing is ever on time, it's usually at least an hour late. Doesn't matter what it is. And every time I've developed film here the negatives have been scratched, and I've used three different processing centres now. I've had a couple of heated arguments with staff when I've refused to pay the full price.

I think this aspect of Ugandan culture is something that will have to change if they are to ever approach a Western standard of living. Maybe there's a piece to the puzzle that I'm missing, the laziness is a cultural by-product of poverty somehow. But I can't think of any excuse for those nails to have been sticking out of the kids benches for so long.

Jelly beans

With some of the kids at the school I feel like a fly trapped indoors, buzzing against the window. I keep hitting an invisible wall, but if I aim for different spots and fly from different angles eventually I find an opening. Sometimes, anyway.

I brought jelly beans to class yesterday and held between one and three in my hand, in front of each child. If the kid could count the number of jelly beans I was holding, they got to eat them. If they got it wrong, I ate them myself.

I ate a lot of jelly beans. About half the children couldn't count to one, and some of them have been at the school for over a year, doing math every day. They can repeat numbers one to ten easily, but they have no idea what they're saying. Only two of the kids can count past five, and the ages range from 4 to 7.

School here has to be taught in English by law, but none of the kids speak English at home, so as a result there are 12 year old children who can't do basic math because they have never understood their lessons. The teachers teach through songs and repetition but many of the children don't understand what they're saying. It's frustrating to watch.

There's also a strong emphasis on negative reinforcement which I'm not sure works. One time when a kid, Bukenya, was being disruptive the teacher threw me the cane so I could punish him. Instead I told him to stand up and moved his chair so he was sitting outside the classroom looking in, still under the watch of the teacher but unable to interact with the other children. I gave him some work to do, and when he finished, I held it up in front of the class to show everyone what a great job he'd done. I won't say he hasn't been disruptive since, but his behaviour has definitely improved. And he sits next to me at break now and actually does his work rather than just hit his peers and steal their pencils.

I'm making it sound like I'm the saviour of the Ugandan education system but obviously I haven't been there long and don't really know what I'm doing, it's mostly guesswork. And what works for one kid will by no means necessarily work for the next, I just think that turned out to be the opening in the window for Bukenya, at least for the time being.

Today was a really great day at the school, because it was the first day the children had access to the new cups I bought. Before today I would see two or three children eating porridge at break, but today almost all 50 of them had porridge, and those that didn't eat could have if they'd wanted to. It was a feast! I don't know if the school was making a show of it to please me or if this will continue long term, but it was great seeing all the kids fed, instead of the usual four or five. Money well spent.

After school I took a tour around a couple of other NGOs in Kampala. The first was called Kids in Need, and it's a centre for helping street children. Many come in with drug addictions or with a history of crime in varying degrees. I agreed to help run a music program there in the afternoons. I start on Monday.

I also went to a place called Missionaries of the Poor which helps mentally handicapped and HIV positive people of all ages. It was a pretty intense place. There was an elderly men's ward where most of the men were crippled, an elderly women's ward, and two children's wards. About 150 handicapped and dying people in a pretty small building. I'll admit some of the patients there made me quite queasy, but I'm planning to work there after I return from the refugee camp in Gulu.

I'm a bit nervous about Gulu. The average annual income there is US$30, which makes it ten times poorer than here, and it's been in civil for 20 years. But I can't imagine it being much more dangerous than your average boda boda ride. On Tuesday I was riding back from Kampala in the rain, without a helmet, the wrong way down the highway in the dark. It wasn't the first time that's happened either. The boda boda rides have made me really want a motorbike actually. Maybe I'll save up for one when I get home.

No Man's Land

I'm tired of disagreeing with people. In a week I'll be the longest serving volunteer in the compound, yet I feel like I'm the only one who isn't ready to crucify the people here for how things are run.

There is a serious communication problem between the staff and the charity, and both sides are very defensive, and as a result tiny little problems become huge ones. There was one time when a volunteer was shouting at the staff at breakfast for 3 days straight because one of the orphans took her yoghurt and she wanted it replaced.

In the past embassies have been involved, and I've heard reports of assassination attempts and volunteers sueing the charity. There's a lot of bullshit to sift through and there's gross exaggerations on both sides, so it's hard to believe a lot of what you hear, but you get the idea of what it's like around here.

I think the main problem is that the programs are not well organized, and people struggle to find things to do. Those who aren't used to taking much initiative start to feel like they aren't helping people much, and that makes the whole trip begin to feel pointless, which is extremely frustrating. That's why I think all the tiny little things become such a big deal.

In my opinion the charity has not handled the situation very well. As a result of the frustration some volunteers have been doing a lot of work outside the official programs. The charity has tried to prevent this and laid down rules banning volunteers from working elsewhere, but in the absence of many rewarding programs they have made themselves look like they are trying to stop the volunteers from helping people, which has exasperated the problem. There has been other silly things like volunteer phone lines being disconnected and a brief ban on volunteers taking anything, their own possessions included, out of the compound. There's an obvious mistrust of the volunteers, and this of course breeds mistrust of the charity.

When I arrived I was a pendulum swinging between the charity and the volunteers, and I soon came to rest in the no man's land between the two groups, and this has left me alienated from everyone. I have been able to keep myself busy and I've found the work I've been doing very rewarding, but in the quiet moments inbetween I've been growing homesick.

I have not seen or heard anything that justifies working against an organization that is putting hundreds of poor children through school, feeding them, and helping impoverished widows to start businesses. It is obvious to me that the happier the volunteers are, the more program fees get paid, and the more orphans get their school fees paid. So I plan to keep trying to work with the charity and relieve some of the tension. I just don't know how many people around here are listening to me anymore.

A new career?

I just came back from day three with Kids in Need, a charity in Kampala that houses, feeds and rehabilitates street children. I'm running a music program there in the afternoons.

I had my guitar on my back while I was boda-boda-ing to the shelter yesterday, and at one point we were rear-ended by a truck. It hit the guitar, which is rattling now and my shaker exploded in the front pocket of the case. We also got hit by tear gas while driving, my eyes were watering for a while and the boda boda driver was driving 'sans eyes', although that didn't make me feel any less safe than normal. I have no idea why there was tear gas being sprayed.

About a week ago I was listening to a boda boda guy complain about how bad African drivers were while we drove the wrong way down the highway with no helmets. This inspired me to approach a local boda boda driver and arrange a one hour driving lesson at noon on Saturday, followed by two hours of professional boda-boda-ing. I'll possibly be the first ever mzungu boda boda driver in Uganda! A couple of other volunteers have decided to join me, and we're going to have a competition to see who can make the most money in the two hours. We will probably die and kill most of our passengers too. But it will be an adventure!

I am sick of typing boda boda.

The kids at the shelter, who are mostly age 15 to 20, are surprisingly shy. I expected fighting and shouting and there's been none of that. Several of them are recovering drug addicts and have criminal records, and I was warned a few times to keep a close eye on my valuables.

I went a-bargaining today and managed to get a big plastic barrel, 2 water jugs, a metal bowl, a tin of rice and a bunch of wood cut into drumstick size. All for less than $10. We had lots of locals watching through the gates while we put together a kind of industrial samba squad, with a bass drum, toms, snare, and shakers, plus other instruments like rocks banging on gates, clapping, chanting, etc. I can't imagine a better way to run a music class for African street kids. They keep a solid beat and the language barrier is irrelevant, all I need to do is tap out a rhythm for them to follow. It was loads of fun, and it's going to sound really good in a week or two.

The games cafe has a potential location, at a cost of 25,000 shillings a month (about $18). It's just down the street from the compound, sharing with a woman who runs a photocopier there. Broken English evangelistic shop names seem to be a popular marketing theme here, so I'm thinking the name of the cafe will be "God is Realy Good Games Cafe". One l.

I've seen some funny signs lately, here are the ones I remember:

Goldfish
Restaurant and Clinic

Bilamwe Laundry Soap
No stains, no learning.

Bill's baking flour
Dust and sand free!

I made up the brand names for effect. Apparently other volunteers have seen flour that says "2% dust" on it.

On a slightly more disgusting note, I have a theory about why number 2's never flush in this country. I have spoken to a few volunteers about this phenomenon, and have heard stories about people having to perform pre-flush dissections and various other things I probably shouldn't repeat. Here is my theory: Uganda is on the equator, which means there is greater centrifugal force here as a result of the Earth spinning. People from the Northern hemisphere have evolved to produce stools of perfect buoyancy for that level of gravity, but once you get to Uganda, where gravity is 3% reduced, our bodily waste cannot adapt and therefore refuses to flush. I would be interested to hear if others have had similar experiences on the equator.

The politics here have died down a little and things have become easier. There's been a bunch of new volunteers coming in and last night ten mzungus came out to see me perform at Lumas Inn, which was really nice of them. Maybe I wasn't as alienated as I thought. So I'm less frustrated. And besides, I'm excited about becoming a boda boda driver.

Finally! Photos!

These were scanned in with a pretty crappy scanner, so please excuse the quality.

South Africa







All the above photos were taken in Kruger National Park. The park is huge and a lot of wildlife isn't keen on being spotted, so you sometimes go an hour or two without seeing anything.

Swaziland


Swazi homes on top of a mountain.


My home on top of a mountain!


Sunset in Swaziland.


It took 3 hours to climb up there.


This photo pretty much sums up Swaziland. It's all mountains.


The waterfall where I broke the rental car's anti-theft device.

Ndejje

My bedroom. Each morning I wake up and flick mouse and gecko droppings from the top of my mosquito net.


The path leading away from the volunteer compound. All the roads in the village look like this.


Random family in the village.


Boys playing in the floodwater. I didn't get my camera until 4 or 5 hours after it rained so the water levels were a lot higher earlier in the day.


The road where a few local boys made a fortune ferrying people across the water on their bikes.

Katebo

The equator, with the 3 water funnels. It's amazing how little distance you need to walk before the water spins in the opposite direction. This is the Ugandan version of a tourist trap.


A woman walking into her kitchen where she was cooking food. There was also a piglet being kept in a garbage can in there.


A school / church built by ACF. It's the only school in the region, so 3 seperate classes are taught at the same time in the one room. Another class is taught under the tree outside. The class under the tree starts on the right hand side and moves gradually to the left hand side over the course of the day, so as to stay in the shade.


The small fishing village on the banks of Lake Victoria. People live in those houses.


One of the homes in the fishing village.


This building will house volunteers in Katebo, who will help build 40 residences, a primary school and a secondary school for orphans over the next several years.


A woman cooking with her son.

Kampala

This is the old taxi park, where I take a matatu most days back to Ndejje. There are 2 Ndejjes in the area, and the matatu for each are often parked right beside eachother. The other Ndejje is located in Uganda's killing fields - so you have to be a bit careful about which Matatu you take.


I can't imagine a sign like this doing anything but encouraging public urination.


The streets of Kampala, strangely devoid of the usual insane traffic.

Rwanda

The main genocide memorial in Kigali. Thousands of bodies are buried underneath the buildings, and in some parts they haven't been fully covered and you can see piles of coffins. Some coffins have 4 or 5 bodiescrammed inside them.


The hotel that is the subject of 'Hotel Rwanda'. Pricey but pretty nice.

Jinja

Bungee jumping 44 metres into the Nile.


I'm on the left side of the boat, second from the front. These rapids are pretty tame, only grade 3 or so.


Grade 5: I'm somewhere under that boat. Rafting is scary.

200 shillings and 10 american cents

That was my total profit from boda boda fares. I think I'll stick to web work and music.

Drew, another volunteer, and I were driven to the sports field in Ndejje village where we learned to ride the bikes. They weren't in the best shape: mine had a dodgy throttle and the handbrake was broken. Every time my teacher wanted me to speed up he would shout "more fire!".

We drove them around the field for a while, taking kids on the back as we became more confident. After a while I decided to try out driving on bumpier parts of the field and I went so fast over a bump I caught a little air. I had two kids on the back and one of them jumped off in mid flight.

Once we were on the road, every car that passed us stayed the hell out of the way, I don't think the locals trusted our driving ability. We had the volunteer paparazzi take a bunch of pictures then I took a few people for rides and nearly killed them. Lots of fun!

I've been having some fun with the locals recently. Two nights ago a volunteer called Danny and I were talking to a local about how often he had spanked monkeys. He didn't understand why we were laughing, but the poor guy laughed along with us anyway. At one point he told us that he was the only man in Uganda who spanked other people's monkeys.

I also made an alphabet book today for the kids at the kindergarten to copy and colour. There is a drawing for each letter then a word for them to copy. Most of them are pretty standard fare: apple, hippo, ice-cream... but L is leper, and there's a drawing of a sad looking man with severed limbs, and V is vasectomy, and there's just a drawing of a man with a big smile. It's all very simple and cartoony and when the staff at the African Child Foundation went through it they didn't even notice.

I saw a slogan today that I want to write here before I forget it. It's part of the government's campaign to stamp out HIV:

Abstinence
Why not?

I found out why there was tear gas last week. The president of Uganda is changing the consitution to remove term limits, so he can hold on to power. He's been president for 20 years. The tear gas was used to quell a riot that had started in protest to the amendment.

By the time things get bad here I'll be gone, but come elections next summer there is likely to be a lot of intimidation tactics and many people will probably be killed. The government has a reputation of being very corrupt, and even the state-owned newspapers acknowledged that politicians who voted in favour of removing term limits were given 5 million shillings (about CN$3500). Chief members of the opposition still managed to find it in themselves to vote against the interests of their own parties. Since independence Uganda has never had a peaceful transition of power, and it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon.

I found out a big reason why I'd been alienated from the volunteers for a while. Apparently one of them believed that I was an informant for the charity regarding the refugees and had been telling people I couldn't be trusted. The charity is reluctant to support the refugees officially and there's been a lot of tension because of this. She left yesterday and before she went I had a conversation with her explaining that I wasn't an evil spy, and I'd never talked about the refugees with any staff since the day I arrived. The conversation still finished with her telling me I should give them a chance and not try to stop people helping them. The politics here are so weird.

The volunteers who have arrived recently are fantastic though, some of the nicest people I've met. The atmosphere in the compound has improved immensely.

I'll finish with a story about one of the orphans in the compound, called Sarah. Her mother died of HIV when she was six and her father deserted her soon afterwards. Her house was not part of a village, and Sarah survived on berries and fruits she found in the forest for a full year before she was found by locals and taken to the orphanage. It's amazing some of the stories you discover about the regular people you spend time with every day.

Kindergarten Ravin'

A few nights back there was a party at the school. It was held in the kindergarten classroom where I teach, and two other volunteers came with me. The party was very formal, an agenda had been laid out on the blackboard with speeches from the chief guest and headmistress, and there was an MC who introduced each speaker. There were only seven or eight of us in total at the party, sitting around tiny kindergarten tables, on tiny chairs, standing each time we addressed the room. Everyone gave a speech, volunteers included, but it soon got dark and there was no electricity or lamps, so after a while we were eating and talking in total blackness. It was one of the weirdest parties I've ever been to.

Since Barbara and I made the ABC books for the kids, we've been asked several times by locals what "vasectomy" means. Each time I've explained that it's an operation men have to prevent them from fathering children. Mostly this has resulted in a confused silence and then a change of subject, but when one teacher asked why I chose "vasectomy" rather than "vest", or "vine", I told her I thought it was important to start the children young when it comes to family planning. No-one has commented on L for "leper".

Corrupt ABC books aside, I've been doing quite a bit for the school lately. Barbara and I are replacing the roof on two of the buildings where we teach, because they've rusted through and every time it rains all three kindergarten classes have to move into the only room that doesn't leak. We're replacing the tin with clear plastic, so more light gets into the classroom (there's no electricity so they're very dark), it won't rust, and it makes less noise when it rains. We're also painting the walls and installing a cement floor in the one class without one.

An Irish girl called Rachel and I also bought enough textbooks and teachers guides so that there is at least one book per subject for every three children in every grade. Previously there was one book per subject per class, which slowed the teaching down immensely.

You know you're teaching in a poor school when you give a kid a napkin to wipe spit off their shirt, and all the other kids spit on themselves so they can have a napkin too.

While some people choose to jump out of planes or race dragsters, it seems my new hobby is visiting dangerous places. It looks like I may be going to DR Congo for one week to learn about alternative medicine in the jungle. DR Congo has been in intense war for several years, most of the refugees I've met are from there. The trip isn't guaranteed yet though, another volunteer was invited and I've asked if I can join her, but it will be at least a few days until I find out if that's possible.

Tonight I'm going for an Indian dinner with a bunch of volunteers, then performing at a very African style pub called "European Pub". The street kids I teach will be performing there too. On the weekend there's a conference on development being held at the university, with many high profile speakers including Uganda's president and representatives of the Lord's Resistance Army, the rebels waging the civil war in the North. Should be interesting!

Ten feet from the president

On Friday a bunch of us went to a conference on development at Makerere University. It had been put together by students from Concordia University in Montreal. I've met so many Canadians working over here, it's really boosted my faith and pride in my country. Given how small our population is it's really great to meet so many people making an effort to help others.

Six of us, on a boda boda each, sped down to the University for 9am. The first official speaker was Museveni, Uganda's president, so we were eager to get good seats.

Security at the university was high. There were soldiers everywhere and as we walked in we were asked if we were bringing in any guns. We left our cameras and our phones at an improvised security barrier, then walked past the soldier with the bazooka and entered the main conference hall.

As it turned out, there weren't more than two hundred or so people in attendance, and I ended up sitting in the second row, spitting distance from the podium. The president was meant to talk at 10:30am, but the sirens didn't announce his arrival at the grounds until noon. We were told that he refuses to talk unless there are two bouquets of flowers waiting for him, and they'd only bought one, so there had been a mad rush to buy a second before he arrived.

A few short, boring introductions and then Museveni stepped up to the microphone. He's a fairly large man, who until he got up to speak looked very serious and authoratative. Every so often a soldier would bring him a note, he'd read it, write a response and then send the note back.

The president spoke for an hour. He is very charismatic and had the audience captivated. As he talked he wrote on a flip chart and would get audience members up with him to answer questions, mostly about history and how Africa got to where it is today. Various other important people were in attendance and he kept making fun of them and talking about how they didn't know what they were doing.

Interestingly, he made it clear that he didn't think African debt forgiveness was very valuable. The audience cheered when he said this. He said Europe doesn't listen to Africa enough and that aid and debt relief are a waste of time if you don't fix the problems that cause the debt in the first place, which he belives are unfair trade laws. He said Europe is barking up the wrong tree with it's solutions, then he pointed his eyes to the sky and did a pretty decent impression of a dog. It was a little surreal.

At one point he asked for audience members to write the social hierarchy of Uganda on his flip chart. People wrote things like "aristocrats > working class > peasants" or similar things, but the third person wrote "Political leaders > working class > peasants". The room went very quiet and there was a small smattering of applause, in contrast to the loud applause the others had received. With all the soldiers around, and the conference being broadcast on television, public criticism of the government to the president's face made the audience nervous. But Museveni took it all in stride, and afterwards he reviewed the four suggestions, and said that he agreed with the political leaders point but would add high profile businessmen to the group.

As much as I enjoyed the talk, I definitely wouldn't vote for Museveni. There was an arrogance there that I suppose comes naturally with 20 years of power. But it definitely made for an interesting morning.

Life as a hostage is boring

Saturday morning I woke up at 4:30am and arrived at Makere University to be fitted for my costume an hour later. I was given a comfortable white shirt with a big pointy collar, some stylish grey slacks, and a mezuzah: one of those little round skull caps worn by Jewish men. Someone told me my hair makes me look Jewish. The movie is set in the 1970s, and throughout the day I heard people complaining about how awful they looked in their costume. Especially the girls in their early twenties, preserved on dvd for all time in their gawdy flowery dresses.

The main library of the university had been dressed up too, transformed into the arrivals gate of Entebbe airport. There was a duty free shop and flimsy wooden walls, put together so fast that half way through the day one of them collapsed. They had to change the camera angles to keep the wreckage out of the shot.

Forrest Whittaker is a huge man, and he definitely looked the part of Idi Amin. He seemed very friendly and relaxed, while the doctor, a Scottish actor and the main character in the film, came off more like a famous film star. I don't think anyone knew who he was.

The extras were fed at lunch by a catering company called Film Unit Catering Kenya. An appropriate acronym given most people's reaction to the quality of their meal.

If there was a category at the Oscars for best extra, I reckon it would go to "Guy in Last King of Scotland Who Moves Leg While Doctor Steps Over Him". Moving my leg, over and over again for all the different camera angles and takes, I discovered within myself an immense untapped acting ability that has been dormant the last 24 years. I also discovered that being an extra is an incredibly boring job: the shoot was 13 hours long, and it was mindless and very repetitive work. Still, no regrets, it'll be fun watching myself move my leg on the big screen.

The roof

On Sunday some volunteers and I went to the development conference again to see a talk on HIV. There wasn't any new ground covered for me unfortunately, it wasn't too interesting. The highlight was when the professor of statistics at the university gave a presentation and all his percentages added up to over 200.

The rest of Sunday was boring, and I refuse to say anything more about it.

On Monday I arranged with the African Child Foundation to have someone come and help me put a new roof on the kindergarten. A man called Godfrey showed up and we went around buying the necessary materials, and then climbed onto the roof of the rickety building and got to work.

I could do the construction thing. There's a permanence to the work that doesn't exist in software, where accidentally hitting delete can suddenly set you back to square one. And it's strangely fun being balanced precariously on a rotten wooden beam and pounding nails into it.

The roof of the larger building was complete by the end of the day, but because it was transparent plastic sheets there was a bit of a greenhouse effect in the room. We decided to paint the roof blue, leaving patches of white for clouds. We're also replacing the floor of the building, and we plan to mix green paint with the cement so it looks like grass, then paint flowers and trees around the walls.

The smaller building is also having it's roof replaced, and the paint design will be like this:



I can't tell you how PROUD I'll be when it's complete.

Murchison Falls

A volunteer called Allie and I left early in the morning for Murchison Falls, a national park in Northern Uganda with one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world.

Allie is a 2 week volunteer from New Jersey, and she and I hit it off as soon as she arrived. She'll need an entry here all to herself, so for the time being I'll stick to the rest of the story.

Allie was taking a tiny little satchel with her on the 3 day trip and I was taking an enormous backpack and a guitar. Rural Africa is supposed to be teaching me the things I can do without, but I suppose I haven't been a very good student.

We took boda bodas to the tour company where we would get the bus, and I was so weighed down with luggage that when the driver took a corner too fast the wheels slid out underneath the bike. Both driver and I tumbled, helmetless, and I remember thinking "Protect guitar! Protect guitar!". The guitar wasn't hurt. Oh, and I was fine too.

A 4 hour drive to the park with about 6 other tourists, then we pulled into a little clearing in the forest with a few straw huts. We unloaded the van and met one of the local guides, who sneakily grabbed Allie's ass within ten minutes of meeting us. As far as I'm aware that is not a traditional African greeting no matter what tribe you're from. He took us on a walk through the rainforest and every time someone asked him a question he replied to Allie. It was funny and irritating in equal measure.

As it turned out, there were 4 guitar-enabled tourists in the group, and the guitar went around the circle a few times before we went to bed. We slept in huts called bandas, round little buildings with thatched roofs and lots of bugs. When I put on a clean shirt after a shower I felt a stinging on my skin and ripped off my shirt to find a praying mantis foraging for food in my belly hair. They don't bite, but they pinch, and judging from the reaction of being inside my shirt they don't like Sure deoderant.

We woke up at 4:30am and drove an hour into the park in a little safari truck. The safari was better than South Africa's Kruger National Park. There was more wildlife and less vegetation blocking our view. We saw hippos, elephants, giraffe, buffalo, antelope, lions, crocodiles... you get the idea. I took lots of photos.

We had lunch near a whiny hippo, then drove to the banks of the Nile and boarded a boat that took us to the falls. The current near the falls was too strong for the boat to get close, so we got out and started a long climb to the top of the falls. Allie, Kevin-the-16-year-old-Glastonbury-festival-nut and I were moving a bit faster than the others and we got ahead of the group. When we finally got to the top we reached a big sign saying no access and there was a barrier blocking us from the the falls. The guide was a long way behind us though and there was no way we were doing all that climbing and not seeing it, so we hopped the barrier and walked into the spray.

Murchison Falls is incredible. The whole Nile squeezes into a gap maybe 30 feet across, and the roar of the water smashing against the rocks as it tumbles down the cliffside drowns out your voice. I jumped another barrier and leaned over the edge to watch. Then Allie and I walked right up beside the rapids, not more than 2 feet away from them, but when we suddenly got hit by a wave of water at our knees we retreated. A guard caught us and threatened us with a fine if we did it again, but I don't think he had to worry, it had given us both a bit of a fright. If you got swept into those falls you would be broken into a thousand pieces before you hit the bottom.

The following morning we were up at 7am to go chimpanzee trekking. The guide must have relieved himself overnight because he actually spoke to people other than Allie this time, and as it turned out he was pretty good at the whole tour guide thing. It was a long walk, 3 hours though the forest with no sign of the chimps, until eventually he gave us the option of going back to camp or trying for 30 minutes more. A couple of people turned back, and 5 minutes after they left us we found the chimpanzees.

I didn't think I would care that much about seeing chimps in the wild, but when I saw one sitting on his haunches high up in the fork of a tree, it was like watching prehistoric man. There was an eerie similarity to humans that was amazing to me. Unfortunately it took so long to find them that we only got 10 minutes to watch before we had to get our bus back to Kampala.

On returning to Ndejje and the African Child Foundation, I discovered that my belongings had been locked in storage and new volunteers had been moved into my room. The management had got mixed up and thought I had gone to Gulu already, so I slept on a mattress in the office for the night. It would have been unfair to expect them to keep my room, I only had one more night there before I left for Rwanda, but it's unpleasant having people go through your things. Several volunteers were furious about me being moved out, it seems I manage to play devil's advocate to people's complaints even when I'm the only victim. During my few days vacation I definitely didn't miss the politics.

Rwanda (the sequel)

Allie flew back to the US Friday morning, about 20 minutes before 13 volunteers and I left for Rwanda. Here are their names: Jenny, Rebecca, Griffin, Ollie, Owen, Danny, Cathy, Lindsay, Blake, De, Jessica, Diana, and Matt. If any volunteers are reading my journal and feel insulted by their place in that list, let me know and I'll bump you up.

Rwanda's capital, Kigali, is a 9 hour bus ride away, and that 9 hours becomes longer when your bus breaks down and you end up sitting by the side of the road for a couple of hours. Apparently they were having problems with the brakes, although this didn't strike me as serious enough to justify delaying our journey. It's not like drivers here ever use brakes anyway.

After a lot of bargaining we managed to get the last 5 rooms at a place called Hotel Isimbi at a good price, and I ended up sharing a double bed with De (full name De Neptune). He said ever since India he always slept on the floor and I could have the bed, but when I came in after drinks at the hotel restaurant he was hogging the whole thing. Dammit.

Two guys sharing a bed is an awkward thing. Guys (read: me) have such silly hangups about that stuff, even if they don't have the slightest problem with homosexuality. You both lie on your side facing out, straight as a pole on the far side of the bed, as if gay cupid has placed a booby trap in the middle of the mattress. When you're getting in you do a few manly grunts and scratch your balls a bit.

It's always funny watching new male volunteers meet local men, because it is part of Ugandan culture for men to hold hands, platonically, and many will do that when you first meet them. It's wonderfully awkward. But there's no better way to shock a local African than telling them that men can marry men in your home country.

In the morning Ollie and I decided to try our luck at booking the gorilla trekking. Trekking mountain gorillas is a major tourist attration in Rwanda and Uganda, this is where Diane Fossey did her work that led to the book and film "Gorillas in the Mist", and it's the only place in the world you can see them in the wild. The goverment regulates visitors to avoid putting stress on the animals, so you're supposed to book several months in advance, and the price is high: US$375 for a one hour visit. Transportation and food not included.

We arrived at the tourist office and asked if there were any spots available for the next day. The woman searched the records and it turned out there had been two cancellations, which we immediately reserved. Five minutes later a girl walked in who had been coming in every morning for a month trying to get a cancellation spot. I'm a long term volunteer in rural Africa, which makes me an Official Good Person, so I didn't feel the need to give up my spot for her. Ollie and I couldn't believe our luck.

Early afternoon we hired a matatu and went to see a couple of genocide memorials. The first was a church in a town called Ntarama. There was construction going on all around the church and it didn't look open when we arrived, but the workers let us through and we entered the building.

The first thing you see when you enter the Ntarama memorial is bookshelves filled with the skulls of babies, children and adults, many with holes smashed in them or metal spikes still stuck in them. 5000 people were massacred here in 1994, and they never cleaned up, so to get through the church you have to hop from bench to bench because the entire floor is obscured by the human remains. There are holes in the walls that the Interhamwe blasted open to throw grenades in, and the tin roof is riddled with tiny bullet holes - a blanket of stars shining down on the bones, rags, shoes. But it's the random little things that are the most powerful, that make it real: an exercise book with children's exercises in it, or a small wooden bowl and spilled beans.

We moved on to another memorial nearby in a town called Nyamata, another church where 10,000 people were killed. The church itself bore little evidence of the events, aside from blood stains on the alter cloth and some of the walls. But beneath the church, down a flight a steps, was a pristine white tiled room with a glass case filled with skulls and bones of victims. It was so immaculately presented it felt like an art exhibit rather than a memorial, but one of those perverse art pieces like the cow split in half, where you can't quite figure out what your reaction is supposed to be.

In the grounds of the church were the mass graves, and they were open to the public. Down another flight of steps and into a series of tiny, claustrophobic rooms where it was almost impossible to not be touching the coffins. Some of the rooms had large, deep shelves piled so high with human remains that when I walked through my feet crunched on the bones. There was no light in there and I didn't go all the way in, it got very dark and being that close to so many coffins and bones... there was only so long I could be in there.

We ate dinner at Hotel Mille Collines, the hotel that the film Hotel Rwanda is about. It's a nice place but their food is nothing special, and the portions are small. You'd think they'd be cashing in on their fame after the movie, they could be having genocide themed meals, serving swimming pool water in tall glasses or something. Maybe I'll suggest it to the manager.

Gorillas

Ollie and I left at 3:30am Sunday morning for Parc Des Volcans, Ruhengeri, in North West Rwanda. The tourist office told us that it would cost us US$150 for a bus there, which I thought was ridiculous, so we arranged our own transportation. We'd been warned that a 4x4 was required to reach the park, but our cab driver said he'd done the journey before in his regular car so we decided to trust him and save ourselves $100.

The journey was freezing cold, the car was quite beaten up and my door didn't close properly, and freezing cold air was hitting me the whole time. We got to the park without too much road trouble at about 6am.

Parc Des Volcans is a gorgeous national park with towering volcanoes overlooking dense jungle. We were given a brief talk about the different gorillas and what to look for. We were to meet a family of fourteen, with one silverback, and three babies. Trackers had gone out in the early hours to find the gorillas so we would know where to walk. We were told that sometimes the gorillas were in a bad mood and when we met them the guides would ask them how they were, and if they weren't ok then we wouldn't be able to stay. They couldn't make any promises.

We were asked to drive to the trekking start point, which was about twenty minutes away. We hadn't anticipated this, and after watching several of the tour buses drive off with empty seats we went back to our cab driver to ask him to take us there.

This journey must have been the 4x4 part. The car kept hitting huge boulders, and on several occassions we had to get out and walk so the car wouldn't be so low to the ground. The car lurched and bumped along over the rocks and craters, and by the time we arrived it had taken quite a beating. It felt like white water rafting on a dirt road.

We started our trek into the jungle, past the tobacco plants and enormous elephant footprints, mostly in silence so as not to disturb the wildlife. Getting to the gorillas can take up to three hours, but for us it took less than thirty. We were asked to leave all our bags in a small clearing and then we pushed our way into a very dense part of the jungle.

About 3 metres from us two adult females and a baby were eating bamboo. The guides made a noise in their throat, which was them asking the gorillas how they were. The gorillas replied that they were ok, so we were able to stay.

Hanging out with a family of 14 wild mountain gorillas was one of the most unique experiences of my life. They have no fear of humans, which is understandable seeing as they weigh about three times as much as I do. They would regularly walk right beside me, I could easily have touched them. One of the babies had an afro, he looked like Don King. They ate and rolled around, and the babies wrestled eachother, and we followed them as they moved down the mountainside until our hour was up. When people took photos the guides would make noises to ask the gorillas to face the camera, and all but the silverback would obey. The silverback doesn't obey commands from anyone.

We got back to Kigali and had a relaxed evening, save for a bit of trouble holding on to our hotel rooms. Jenny and I decided we were going to push back our return date by five days or so, so we could explore more of the country. When I woke up the next morning it was just her and I left.

Killing George

Tuesday morning I woke up after a rough night of stomach pains and headache. None of it was too bad, it was just uncomfortable, but over the following two days I probably went to the bathroom twenty times.

Pit toilets and explosive diarrheoa do not mix. Remember the bathroom scene in Trainspotting? That was NOTHING.

My roommate, De, is a loud, hyper, 27 year old rastafarian guitar player from Trinidad, who also happens to be a qualified surgeon in the UK. He explained to me that 20 trips in 48 hours was not food poisoning, anything food related would have been flushed out of my system by now, and most likely I had an intestinal parasite.

I named him George. I stopped referring to myself as "I", and instead used "we". I asked volunteers to touch my belly and see if they could feel him kick. George and I went everywhere together, but mostly we just went to the bathroom. Now that I was eating for two, I began to pay more attention to the foods I ingested, but there wasn't much George seemed to dislike, he was having a ball in there. My intestines were his oyster.

Do you think there are extreme vegetarians who believe killing intestinal parasites is inhumane? As you can probably understand, I am not that extreme. On De's orders I bought drugs from a pharmacy in Kampala and started my 10 day Kill George campaign.

The bathroom trips gradually decreased, and George passed away after six days of medication. I'm not sorry to see him go and I am glad that he is dead. He is a bad intestinal parasite, because I am a volunteer and therefore I am an Official Good Person, and George could have infected Chad Kroeger instead and used his talents for the good of humanity. I am not ashamed.

RIP George.

Rains

It's pouring rain in Kampala, the rainy season is just beginning, and the weather reflects how I've been feeling the last ten days or so. I'm losing my patience for this place. I've been here three months and more than anything else, I'm tired of people assuming I'm rolling in money, and I'm tired of the daily hassle and distrust associated with that. I want to be left alone, I want people to stop shouting at me or grabbing my arm just because I am white.

It's not an unfair assumption of course. Just to be able to come here in the first place you have to have access to more money than 99% of Uganda's population. Everything that I am feeling right now I expected to feel before I arrived. And I am at the end of my service - I'm only a couple of weeks from the three months I agreed to do. But my energy is low and I feel like I don't have the extra steam to do the work in Gulu, or even to explore East Africa and do the tourist thing. I want to go back to my family's house in England, where no-one will notice my skin colour. I'll take hot showers, eat safe food, and sleep for a week without having to fend off mosquitoes and cockroaches.

I am not especially close to any of the current volunteers either, and that makes a big difference to my mood. If a volunteer arrives who I really connect with, then the situation may change.

I'm not the only person who feels like this. The African Child Foundation appears to be on the verge of implosion, five volunteers have left prematurely in the last two weeks, and the president of the charity has told me he has stopped accepting applications for new ones. I call it implosion because I believe management is exclusively responsible for the situation, in my three months I have never once heard the president admit he was wrong or take responsibility for any problems, which is the exact opposite of what a good manager needs to do.

A wise British woman (called Mum) once told me that when I'm unhappy I should avoid reversing decisions I made when I was content. So that's the plan. Feed the Children emailed me asking if I could leave for Gulu next week and I've said yes. I leave at 11:30am on Monday. When I return, I will head down to Zanzibar for white sand beaches, ancient islamic architecture and good scuba diving, then I'll go on safari through the Serengeti and maybe climb Mount Kenya.

Look at me whining. Somebody slap me. And mail me valium. You can mail the slap and valium to this address:

Rich (the white guy)
Africa.

Thanks.

And then there were two

After running a few errands Jenny and I decided to make our way to a town on the banks of Lake Kivu, called Kibuye. It had got fairly late in the day and the bus company had no more space on the bus, so we hopped on a taxi to a town called Butare instead.

Butare is a major university town, but it feels like Rwandan hickville. The buildings are spaced out wide along dark dirt roads and I thought at any minute I might run into those guys from Fubar.

We arrived after dark and decided to stay in the second hotel we went to, where I had the most panicky shower of my life. The water was freezing cold and the way the shower was setup you couldn't step out of it. By the time I got out my nipples could have cut glass.

In the morning Jenny and I went to the national museum in Butare. The exhibits were all in French and Kinyarwandan, so we couldn't read about what we were seeing, but what was odd was that everything in the museum we'd already seen people using in their daily life in Rwanda. The country and culture hasn't changed for centuries.

After the museum we went to a nearby genocide memorial. On top of a mountain sat an old technical school, with maybe 60 classrooms. 50,000 people were massacred in the school after being surrounded and starved for two weeks. A year afterwards, amazingly, people in Butare began denying the genocide ever happened. In response to this, 1800 bodies were exhumed from the mass graves and placed on tables in the classrooms as proof.

The bodies were preserved with chalk, so they were white, and the pressure from the mass graves had flattened their bodies so they looked like roadkill. Many still had their hair, and when I touched one of the corpses the skin was still soft.

In the evening I forced Jenny to try frogs legs at a French restaruant. I had a bite as well, they were quite bland. Jenny finished about half of them, which I thought was pretty impressive. We stayed in a different hotel that evening and got a cab in the morning for Kibuye.

Kibuye (pronounced Chee-boo-eee) is a tiny town on the banks of Lake Kivu, an enormous lake that crosses the border into the DR Congo. We found a beautiful hotel with a spectacular view, clean rooms, and hot water, and decided to stay a couple of nights.

Rwanda is a hard place to get money - credit and debit cards are not accepted anywhere other than the capital city and we were running out of cash. I had to hussle other mzungus at the hotel to exchange some Ugandan shillings.

There were local boys in tiny dugout canoes fishing on the lake, and by talking English to a man who knew French, who spoke to a woman who knew French and Kinyarwandan, who talked to the Kinyarwandan fishermen, I was able to hire a traditional canoe with half an oar for a couple of dollars, until noon the next day.

I woke up at 5am and spent about 10 minutes scooping water out from the bottom of the boat, then brought it to within ten feet of our room. I woke Jenny up and we paddled our tippy canoe with the one broken oar into the middle of the lake as the sky got brighter. There were eagles all around swooping down to catch fish.

Kibuye was a much needed break. The scenery was beautiful and the weather was perfect. We returned to Kampala on Saturday, our bags loaded with local crafts, and ready to get back to work.

An email to Oregon

To: Rogue Brewery, Oregon, United States
From: Rich Lowenberg
Sent: Saturday, August 6th, 2005, 6:46pm Ugandan time
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi!

My name is Rich Lowenberg. For the last three months I have been volunteering in rural Uganda, East Africa, with refugees and AIDS orphans, and I have been helping locals start businesses to help create sustainable incomes for impoverished people.

I have found the work to be very rewarding, but from the day I arrived here there has been one major drawback: there is no good beer in Africa.

I usually live in Toronto, Canada, and because of our province's strict laws with alcohol I have to get my favourite beer - your chocolate stout - privately imported. My friend in Toronto has been trying to order me several cases so they'll be waiting when I return, but he has had trouble getting hold of the importer.

I can do without running water, and electricity, and things like hot showers and electric toothbrushes and the like. But I am really struggling without good beer.

Volunteers come and go around here, and there is always someone from the United States on the way. I was wondering if Rogue would be willing to deliver a bottle of chocolate stout to a future volunteer so they can bring it over for me in their suitcase. Carrying more than one would be too much to ask of someone I've never met, so one is all I need.

Do you think that's something Rogue would consider?

Thanks!!


Rich.
www.richlowenberg.com/africa

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dammit! I forgot to tell them it's my birthday today too (I'm 25!). Opportunity missed. We'll see what they say!

Happy happy war zone happy happy war zone

My mood is improving. Lots of volunteers showed up for my birthday party last night, and Peace and Harriet, two Ugandans at the compound, sang me a hushed African-style Happy Birthday after everyone else had gone to bed. George is dead and I read that he is associated with depression, so maybe that has something to do with it.

25 is old. But the last three months in Africa have made me feel older, or at least I don't feel like a kid anymore. 25 feels about right.

Yesterday someone asked me how Africa has changed me. I don't think I'll figure it out until I return to Canada, but here's what I've got so far: I feel like rather than being changed, parts of my personality have cemented. I feel more confident and comfortable with myself, less defensive and more rational. But at the same time I am less scared of taking risks. Africa has given me a taste for adventure that will be hard to shake off when I get home.

Introspection is boring. Here are a couple of random things I keep forgetting to write:

At the kindergarten when a kid hit another kid and made him cry, the teacher took them both outside and made the boy hit the other boy back until he cried too. All the mzungus tell the children not to hit, and the teachers actively encourage it. The poor kids are going to grow up very indecisive.

I also found out that the word matatu means both taxi and prostitute in Swahili. I was told this is because the literal translation is "moves around a lot".

I leave for Gulu in the morning, and I feel ready for it now. I still want to reduce my stay if I can, but I'm eager to go. Some friends of current volunteers are up there filming a documentary on the war, and apparently they've been catching some shoot outs on tape. If I see them filming any war scenes I'm going to walk by with a big poster saying www.RichLowenberg.com. It's not like they can ask the rebels to do a second take, is it?

Gulu

I've been in Gulu for 24 hours. It reminds me a bit of Butare, the Rwandan hick town I was in a few weeks ago. There's one major road with three roundabouts that runs through the town, and little side streets lined with run down market stalls and dilapidated buildings.

I'm staying in the nicest hotel in town, the Acholi Inn, although my room is still without a shower curtain or proper toilet seat. The mosquitoes are bad: I've been bitten four times already, which is more bites than I've suffered in my whole three months in Africa to date.

There are no tourists here. In fact the Lonely Planet guidebook has just a single paragraph on Gulu, which states rather bluntly that Gulu is not safe and "there is absolutely no reason to come here". My other guidebook says that they were unable to research the region because of the ongoing civil war. So needless to say, I don't have a map of this place.

The Acholi Inn houses UN officials, journalists, and NGO workers. In the evenings there is a buffet dinner that many guests attend, and Peter (the Feed the Children employee who brought me here) told me it's a good place to meet some interesting people.

Peter is an Australian accountant who has been working with Feed the Children for six years. He's done work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and a bunch of other places. He's one of the more interesting accountants I've met.

He took me to see the refugee camps this morning. More than 1000 children under 5 years old, housed and taught in two camps about ten minutes from the main road. The majority are here with at least one parent. They live in hundreds of tiny, round clay huts with thatch roofs, on land donated by the community. The buildings and staff wages were donated by Feed the Children, and the food was supposed to be donated by the World Food Programme but when the tsunami hit WFP "changed their priorities" and stopped providing food, despite having committed to it in writing. So children and staff have been going hungry, which has resulted in the staff going on strike.

Strikes in refugee camps are bad. So one of my main jobs while I'm here is going to be trying to resolve this situation, by motivating the local council to put pressure on WFP to honour their commitment. Peter doesn't think I stand much of a chance but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I'm told it only costs about US$3000 per month to feed more than 1000 children, so while I work on WFP I'm going to see if I can track down some alternate income streams. If anyone thinks they might be able to help with that it would definitely be appreciated!

While Peter talked to some of the staff I took a walk through the huts and around the camp. Eventually I had a crowd of about 150 children following me. I stood on one leg and touched my nose, and they all copied me. We played the copying game for a while until a teacher showed up and took them away.

I'm going to have a fair bit of travelling to do around here, and I'd rather not walk, especially after dark. So I'm going to see if I can get a boda boda driver to let me rent his bike for 10 days or so. I've confirmed that my stay will be between ten days and two weeks, working at the camps. I'm sure I'll have a story or two by the time I leave.

Boda-cycle diaries

I have wheels: a Honda CD50. It has a big red sticker on it that says 'Beware of Landmines'. It's manual clutch, 3 gears, and it's top speed is about 60 miles an hour, which is all I need for the bumpy dirt roads around here. Feed the Children is paying for the rental and the gas, and they've also given me a cellphone to use while I'm here. Internet cafe's aside, I've had so little access to technology that having my own phone is very exciting. I feel like James Bond.

I love having a bike. Aside from my brief stint as a boda boda driver I have no experience with motorbikes, and the bike I had before was automatic, so it took me a little while to get the hang of the clutch, much to the amusement of the locals. When it rains the dirt roads to the camps become muddy and slippery, and one of my shoes is caked in mud from when I had to save myself from a puddle. The other shoe has a five inch tear along the side and is unlikely to last much longer. I need to find a cobbler in the town.

The political situation in Gulu is bizarre. Here's a basic idea of what's going on with the war here: 19 years ago when Museveni (the current president) took power, the Acholi people in the North thought he wouldn't represent their interests because he's from the West Nile, and a resistance was formed that eventually became known as the Lord's Resistance Army.

The LRA fought with the government but when they weren't winning they gradually turned against their own people, exchanging military targets for civilian ones, and persecuting the people they'd originally formed to protect. Children, typically between 8 and 16 years old, are abducted and indoctrinated into the army, and this forms the vast majority of their forces.

There are many horror stories of what the children are forced to do. The girls are often made 'wives' of commanders and soldiers, and I read a story about a girl who became pregnant, and when the baby was born he was put in a bowl and a new recruit was forced to pound the baby to death in front of the mother.

There are also regular reports of LRA soldiers killing villagers, then putting body parts in a pot and making a stew which survivors are forced to eat. A common initiation task for a new recruit is to return to the village and kill their parents. This is meant to reduce the likelihood the abductee will try to escape, because he or she won't have a home to return to.

25,000 children were abducted last year.

What is so insane is that the motive for the violence is absent. The people the LRA was formed to defend are now the victims, so it has become war for the sake of war, without any direction or goal. Abductees who escape and return home come back with no idea what they were supposed to be fighting for.

Because of the risk of abduction, at about 8pm every night 40,000 children walk into Gulu town to sleep. They walk up to 12km each way to the shelters.

I went to one of the shelters last night, where 450 children were sleeping. Some of the children sang a song written for NGO mzungus like me about how they are victims of war, how they walk far and have suffered long, and please don't forget about us when you go home. It was a powerful, awkward moment.

Being here I am reminded of Rwanda, of the genocide tourism. I'm well aware that a big reason I am here is out of curiosity, as well as to help people, and this makes me uncomfortable. In a few weeks I head off on safari around the Masai Mara and lounge on white sand beaches in Zanzibar, and the situation for these kids won't have changed.

I can't justify that. The best I can do is imagine what it would be like if no-one came here, if nobody showed an interest in what was happening to these people. I think that would be worse. And in the short time I am here I will try to make a small difference, and take back some stories that might encourage others to help too.

My money for the posh hotel has run out, and my bags have been moved to the Feed the Children office. Tonight I'm going to sleep in the shelter with the night communter kids. The rooms at the shelter are named after different mzungu places: UK, New York, Denmark, Norway, and Canada. Of course, I'll be sleeping in Canada.

I suspect I'll still feel a long way from home.

This is a long one, sorry. It's interesting, I swear.

The theme music to the average Ugandan's daily life in 2005:

1) The local brew with casio keyboard drums and 80s synths;
2) Celine Dion, Boyz 2 Men, Westlife;
3) Johnny Cash.

How Johnny Cash managed to infiltrate the Ugandan market so effectively I have no idea. He is a genius. If this journal entry slides into a tangent about burning rings of fire you will know why.

I leave Gulu tomorrow, and I am sad to go. The hassles of Kampala didn't follow me here. The Acholi people (the main tribe in this region) don't shout at me, and despite the low number of white people here I haven't felt harrassed at all. I trust people more here. A waiter at a restaurant I've been frequenting bought me a drink last night, and I'm quite confident he wasn't trying to get anything from me, he was just being friendly. This is my first time working in a civil war zone, and I love it here because it's the first time in three months I've been able to let my guard down.

Feed the Children have been wonderful. They have covered my accomodation, paid for my motorbike and my fuel, given me a phone, and when my cards didn't work at any of the banks they offered to give me a small daily wage to cover my food and basic expenses. I managed to get good ol' Mum to wire me some money though so that didn't end up being necessary.

As much as I appreciate the free accomodation, it isn't exactly the Sheraton. I have been sleeping in a damp concrete room, with mouldy sheets and very little light, on a pillow that feels like it's filled with large marshmallows. The room is directly opposite the pit toilets, which gives it a farmhouse vibe, tempered only by the used condom underneath my bed.

But compared to where I slept last night, that place is the Sheraton. When I wrote the last journal entry I was planning to stay at the shelter for night commuters that evening, but I kept putting it off. I don't have a reason for the delay, I suppose it just takes energy to take the initiative to try new things, and at that time that energy was low. But last night I finally went.

Before we settled down to sleep, the children asked me questions through a member of staff, who was our Acholi-English translator. They asked me if Spiderman was real, and if King Kong was real. Then they asked me if the Vietnam war was real. I told them King Kong was my next door neighbour and he'd bought a huge house with his movie royalties.

Last night was cold, and the room where we slept had no glass in the windows and no door. We lay on paper-thin papyrus mats on the cement floor, with a folded sheet for a pillow and wool blankets to shield us from the wind. The heavy breathing and snoring of the 60 or 70 children in the room eventually became white noise, like the crickets outside, but we were packed so tightly I was touching both the kids next to me and they kept rolling onto me during the night.

I didn't get much sleep. At about 5:30 am the muslim call to prayer woke us all up, and several children went outside and started sweeping the yard. I pulled my tired, sore body off the floor and got on my bike, and drove back to my farmhouse bunk for a couple of decent hours sleep.

I have regularly made a fool of myself on my motorbike. I am a bad driver. I bounce off curbs, I slide around in mud, I nearly hit small goats. I beep a lot so people get out of my way. I am a cross between the Terminator 2 pinball machine and a honker from Sesame Street.

I have been eating maybe twice a day at the Acholi Inn, even though I'm no longer staying there, and I've met some interesting people. A couple of nights ago I had dinner with a woman called Anna, who is a Uganda correspondent for the BBC. She had just got back from interviewing a former LRA abductee, and she was excited because "no-one had got to him yet".

Anna explained that many of the children she interviews have already learned, through conversations with family and NGO workers, what feelings they are supposed to have about what they've done, what answers they are supposed to give. But this boy was unspoiled, so to speak, and Anna told me that he hadn't yet learned to hide certain feelings. It wasn't that he necessarily enjoyed killing civilians, she told me, but it was obvious that he had enjoyed the power he had been given.

For the Live 8 concert the BBC asked Anna to find a group of local Nigerians who were watching the concert, so they could switch back and forth between the audience in Europe and the audience in Africa. But Anna found almost no-one who had heard of Live 8 in Nigeria, even the most famous local musicians didn't know what it was. No-one was planning to watch it, and besides, there was a big game on that day. There wasn't a TV in the country that would pick a concert over a football match.

OK, take a breather, stretch your legs. This is a long journal entry. We're over half way now.

Yesterday I met with a man named Wilson, who was Uganda's minister of defense under Idi Amin. In a very small nutshell, Idi Amin was kind of an African Saddam Hussein in the 1970s. A family I met at the Acholi Inn had given me Wilson's number and I'd called him and persuaded him to meet me. Our first meeting was quite brief, but I went to see him the next day at an orphanage where he now works, and a thunderstorm trapped us indoors. I talked with him and his daughter for several hours.

Wilson's daughter, Innocence, is probably the most intelligent and articulate Ugandan I've met so far. She told me Africa's relationship with the West was like an African housemaid's relationship with her master. If the housemaid asks to go to school, the master will refuse, but he'll buy her a new dress, or give her extra chicken to eat that night. He tries to keep her happy without letting her become independent, because then he will have no housemaid.

Innocence was deliberate in using an example from her culture, because she was trying to illustrate that Africans are no better than anyone else, and that Ugandan's have inflicted the same thing on their own people. She was arguing that acting in self-interest was human nature.

I think a lot of aid and humanitarian work is carried out under a banner of selflessness, and I think that is unrealistic. While there is obviously a lot of personal reward in helping people who are suffering, there's also a sense of heroism that attracts people to this kind of work, especially when it's in areas of more extreme poverty. This can lead people to self-righteousness and egotism, for the same reasons a successful actor might have a strut and fancy sunglasses. It's a dark side to the work that I've seen in several people I've met out here.

I think it's ok to have some selfish motives for charity, because if self interest is truly a natural human behaviour, then maybe trying to surpress it makes the work unsustainable, at least at an individual level. I am able to stare poverty and suffering in the face and then book myself a trip to Zanzibar. And I think I am at peace with that. Like Innocence said, it's human nature.

Fulvio

On Friday a close friend of mine, Fulvio Boletta, died of cancer. Fulvio was a drummer in a band I used to play in, and he was one of the most inspiring people I ever met. He influenced my music more than anyone else I know.

When I found out Fulvio had cancer I wrote a song about him, that I later performed at a benefit concert for his treatment. Since I've come to Africa I have played it to myself every couple of days, wherever I've been. As an agnostic, I think playing that song is the closest I've ever come to prayer.

His wife kept an online journal through their entire journey. It's absolutely heartbreaking. You can read it at alexandfulvio.blogspot.com.

I'll miss you Fulv.

The White Man, the Arab, and the African

A white man, an Arab, and an African show up at the gates of heaven to meet God. When God sees them he tells them he will grant any one thing they ask for. The white man asks for wisdom, and God gives it to him then sends him home. The Arab says he wants money, so God fills the Arab's country with oil and sends him home. Then God asks the African what he would like, and the African replies 'Oh don't worry about me, I was just driving the other two here'.

Regine, a Congolese refugee told me that joke. She said it explains why there are so many problems in Africa. She said people here act like animals, they do not think properly. I told her that in Canada there are many people from Africa and they are just as clever as the white people, that it is the culture and the education system that causes the difference. She wasn't convinced.

Rural Uganda can be a hard place to maintain a sense of idealism about the human race. I have seen a woman beat her one year old child with a stick; I saw a new-born puppy, too young to open it's eyes, get tied in a plastic bag and thrown over the wall of our compound, only to get thrown back again by the kids; I saw a man drag a goat by it's neck along a dirt road and every time it stood up he kicked it over again.

I believe that how a person behaves when there is nothing for them to gain says a lot about them. The way we treat the helpless, the people or creatures we do not need to treat well, is a good measure of the kind of person we are. I have seen many people here fail that test. So when Regine told me that she thinks many Africans act like animals, I didn't disagree with her.

On Friday I leave for Nairobi, and I am looking forward to going. In the 14 weeks I have been here I have become the Fox Mulder of rural Uganda: I trust no-one. But I think now I am ready to star in a sitcom instead.

I never wrote everything I wanted to about Gulu. I didn't talk about how each morning I would get on my bike and drive into the bush, where I'd wait for the military to scout the area and confirm there were no rebels waiting to ambush me. I didn't write about throwing a frisbee and having 450 half naked toddlers run after it screaming. I didn't mention the time I ordered a pizza from a restaurant and it took them four and a half hours to make it, and when I asked why there was such a delay they told me "oh, we had many orders, many orders". And I didn't say how at the end I added up what Feed the Children had spent on me, and with the money I bought 86 hand drums for the kids at the camp to start a music program. Gulu was great. I hope I can go back some day.

I visited another NGO called Sanyu Babies Home on Wednesday. The children admitted have no ties to anyone, they have been completely abandoned. When they arrive they are given a name, an age, and a birthday. Joe, who runs the centre, arrived to do five days volunteer work and hasn't left for three years. I talked to him for an hour or so, and he told me about a new arrival they'd had two days before. A passerby had seen two dogs barking at something across the street, and gone to investigate. In a bush on the side of the road was a new born baby with the umbilical cord still attached, still covered in blood and water from the birth.

There are 41 children at the home, most of whom are under a year old. All the drama and the politics of the African Child Foundation seemed absent there, it looked like people could actually do what they came to do without distraction. If I'd known about that place I think I would have gone there instead.

I have spent my last four days in Ndejje tying up loose ends. I gave the African Child Foundation's driver, Joseph, a framed photo of Morgan Freeman because all the volunteers say he looks like him, but Joseph has never seen him. I found a bunch of large water bottles and a small basketball and organized a ten pin bowling tournament with the orphans in the compound. I oversaw the installation of a cement floor in one of the classrooms at the kindergarten, where there had just been dirt and rocks before. And the games cafe is up and running, fully staffed and making money, and in the second room of the cafe we are running a computer school and offering scanning and photocopying services. 50% of the profits will go to Sanyu Babies Home.

I have loved my time in Ndejje, although it has been emotionally draining. I am ready to just enjoy myself. Kenya, here I come.

Nairobi: where did all the boda bodas go?

I am speeding away from Ndejje, in a luxury bus that has only three seats per row and came with a breakfast of french toast and juice. Luxury, of course, is a relative term. When it started to rain it was dripping on my head.

And now I am in Kenya. See how fast time goes by in journals? Much more convenient than real life, where travelling from Kampala to Nairobi takes 14 hours. You guys have it so easy.

Kenya looks similar to Uganda, but with a few extra acacia trees. The touts at the rest stops tried to sell me a watch but I told them that time is an African phenomenon and in Canada we only exist in the NOW.

Another tout was trying to sell me music cassettes, and I asked for a Ugandan artist called Chameleon, who I did a few shows with in Kampala. He handed me the tape but the price wasn't right, and when he wouldn't let me give it back to him I got mad and threw it on the pavement. He swore at me worse than any African I've encountered, but two minutes later he seemed to have forgiven me in the hope I might still buy it.

Nairobi is cold by African standards, it's actually sweater worthy. When we drove into the city my face was glued to the window, staring up at the first skyscrapers I've seen in four months. There is money here, Nairobi feels more like London than it does Kampala, except it's a little rough around the edges, and it looks like God trimmed the skyline with a giant lawnmower. There are parks in the city here, and pedestrian zones that are actually respected, and I think that's what makes it feel so Western.

Further evidence of the money flowing through this city is that Stoney is available in 500ml bottles. Stoney is an East African ginger beer that is a staple of the Ugandan experience. And in Kenya, it comes in two sizes!

And the matatus are huge! They are about the size of a schoolbus and they are totally pimped out, in metallic purples, yellows, neon greens, and they're decorated with big shiny words like 'ZOOM!' and 'Sean Paul' and 'Bad Mofo'. It's maybe the coolest form of public transit I've ever seen. But the hulking, shiny matatus do not make up for the lack of boda bodas. Walking from place to place is so boring, it makes me feel like a common mzungu.

All three of my credit cards and both my bank accounts have holds on them, so I have no access to money. The credit cards were frozen while I was in Gulu, so I'm going to phone Visa and explain that putting holds on my cards without consulting me, while I am working in a war zone, is not just inconvenient but also dangerous. I'm sure they will sincerely understand my concern, and do nothing to address it. But that's ok, I only use Visa because of how wonderfully empathetic they are.

Assuming the money situation is resolved, I leave in the morning on a 4 day safari to the Masai Mara national reserve. This and the Serengeti in Tanzania are the best places in the world you can go on safari, and I'm doing it at the best time too. It's the annual wildebeast migration, where millions of animals migrate to the Mara. And by the time I get to the Serengeti, they should be on their way back. Then I take an overnight train to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, before heading up to Lamu island, a small muslim island that is supposed to be the Kathmandu of Africa. I'll write again when I get there!

Dodging Nairobbery

The evening after the last journal entry, I went out for drinks with a local girl called Paulina and her boyfriend, who I met at the hostel. Paulina is a professional athlete in Kenya who has an immediate family of 32. Her father has two wives, and her stepmother gave birth to six sets of twins and three sets of triplets. Paulina is a twin herself. Her family was all over the papers in the seventies. We ran into two of her siblings while we were downtown.

We took a cab to a bar called Simmers, that had a live band playing that night. When we got into the cab, Paulina's boyfriend, whose name I forget, paid the cab driver up front. When I asked why, he told me it's a bad idea to take your wallet out in downtown Nairobi. Earlier I'd suggested going to an upmarket club in the suburbs, and Paulina had told me rather bluntly, "don't go there, you'll probably be killed".

Although no robberies or muggings took place that night, the evening wasn't as relaxing as I'd hoped. In mid-meal Paulina and her boyfriend split up. He called his ex-fiance who showed up soon after, and while he and his ex were all over eachother Paulina was all over me. We went home early and I managed to escape to the dormitory, leaving the two of them arguing on the steps outside.

The next morning I got into a minibus with five other mzungus and set off for the Masai Mara national park.

The Mara is the kind of place you think of when someone says 'African safari'. Vast plains of savannah West of the Rift Valley, populated with thousands upon thousands of wildebeast, zebra, and antelope. We also saw cheetah, elephants, giraffe, hippo, and several prides of lions, many with cubs and recently killed prey. The wildebeast migrate up to the Mara at this time of year for lusher grass to feed on, and they have to cross the Mara river to get there. Many are swept away by the current and are killed, and when we reached the river there were large groups of vultures fighting over the corpses. Driving through the park with the wildebeast running alongside your safari truck was a fantastic experience.

The Maasai tribe are indiginous to the Mara, and are famous for largely maintaining their traditional way of life, despite the modernization of Kenya and the camera-toting tourists scaring their cattle. However their reputation among tourists precedes them: before I'd met them I'd already heard many stories about how aggressively they try and get money from people. They constantly try to sell Westerners crafts, jewellery, or traditional dances, and they charge you if you take a photo of them or their village, or even if you walk on their land. I'd heard so many bad stories I wasn't even interested in dealing with them, and sure enough when we reached the park gates there were a group waiting to sell us their wares.

"No" doesn't work with the Maasai. They just keep repeating the price, and they push their goods in through the car window and drop them in your lap. But on the second day I got a little of my own back. I succeeded, I'm not sure how, in charging 20 shillings for two traditional Canadian handshakes, and the Maasai warrior found this so funny she gave me a free bracelet too. Then I tried to sell her a pocket knife I no longer needed, and when I couldn't talk her up above 110 shillings I traded it for another seven bracelets. Later, when I tried to sell another warrior dental floss, I didn't have quite as much success.

In the evening of the second day a group of tourists and I paid some (slightly more polite) Maasai to do a traditional dance for us. It lasted half an hour, and afterwards I sat with the warriors around the campfire and we talked for a while. They told me the Maasai are at war with another tribe in Tanzania, and they still fight with spears and steal their cattle. The women are circumcised at twelve years old, and the boys are circumcised at about age sixteen, and are required to go into the bush and kill a male lion with a spear to prove their manhood. Seeing as the tribesmen had performed their music and dance for me, I brought out my guitar and played them some of my own songs. It was definitely one of the more unusual audiences I've played for.

On the fourth day of the safari we drove to a place called Lake Nakuru. Although Nakuru isn't as renowned as some of the other safari destinations I've gone to, it was my favourite place I've seen yet. It's a large soda lake surrounded by mountains, and on it's banks there were maybe a hundred thousand flamingoes wading in the water. It was an amazing thing to see, and the scenery was spectacular. In the bush around the lake we watched a baby white rhino picking a fight with his dad. There's less than 500 white rhino left in the world.

I haven't seen a leopard yet, but I've seen cheetah and I don't care about silly spot patterns. I'm truck-safaried out, so I'm going to try and do the safari in the Serengeti in a different way if I can. There are camel safaris, hot air balloon safaris (at $400 an hour), and canoe safaris. But I'm crossing my fingers for a motorbike. Hopefully the lions won't be too hungry.

The Kathmandu of Africa

Driving back from the safari, I was dropped off at Nairobi train station where I was to take the overnight train to Mombasa. On the advice of a traveller I met in Gulu, I paid the extra for first class, and as luck had it I ended up with a sleeper cabin all to myself.

Mombasa is on the Southern Kenyan coast. It's much warmer than Nairobi, and it has beautiful white sand beaches dotted equally with palm trees and Italian tourists. There's a lot of resorts, and as I walked along Tiwi beach I passed several signs saying "for the safety of our guests, please do not walk beyond the hotel boundaries". I had several uzi-toting security guards escort me off their employer's particular section of the Indian Ocean. I guess I don't look Italian enough.

Tiwi beach was postcard perfect, but I've never been the lie-on-a-beach-all-day type, and I didn't stay too long. Besides, I can't take my shirt off around scantily clad Italian women. After 4 months of wearing t-shirts in Africa, I have the worst farmer's tan you've ever seen. I am Michael Jackson inverted. My forearms and face make me look almost indiginous, and my chest and back are blindingly white.

On the way back from the beach a matatu driver lied to get a fare and I was dropped off an hour's walk from my hotel after I'd already paid him. I had chosen the cheapest hotel in Mombasa. When I finally reached the hotel a woman who was either mentally handicapped or on serious drugs grabbed my arm and started moaning at me. I yanked my arm away and went upstairs, past the "no prostitutes" sign and into a room with an unmade bed, an unflushed toilet, overlooking the noisiest street in East Africa. I spent most of the night tossing and turning and anticipating my morning escape to Lamu island.

I didn't have to be at the bus station until 6:30am, but the traffic ensured I was awake before sunrise. I dozed for a while, then got ready and packed, and waited around in my room for an hour and a half before leaving for the station. I thought the bus journey was going to be ten hours, but at the five and a half hour mark we had arrived at the ferry. It was a sign of things to come.

The ferry was a leaky wooden sailboat that took me to Lamu town in half an hour. I met a German mzungu called Tim on the way over, and we went to four guesthouses on the island before settling on a place called the Bahari Hotel.

Lamu is an ancient Swahili town, with buildings dating back as far as the 14th century, although most were built in the 1700s. The architecture is all stone, with intricate carvings decorating many of the doorways. Because the town was built before cars were around, there are no roads, just tiny winding alleyways filled with street vendors and donkeys, and according to the guidebook there is only one car on the whole island. People travel by either donkey or by dhow, a traditional wooden sailboat that holds about six people. It's an islamic society, and most of the locals walk around in traditional dress, many of the women in full purdah with just the letterbox opening for their eyes.

A half hour walk South of Lamu is Shela beach, a 12km stretch of deserted white sand on the Indian Ocean, with not a hotel in sight. In the morning the water is calm enough to wind surf and in the afternoons you can body surf on the waves. If you divided up the beach between the tourists, we'd get a kilometre each, and behind the beach there is no development, just sand dunes.

Lamu is not a big tourist destination, only two or three people arrive on the ferry each day, but it's one of the most interesting and beautiful places I've ever been to. The guidebook recommends leaving Lamu until the end of the trip, because many people cancel the rest of their activities and just stay in Lamu. I loved Lamu as soon as I stepped off the ferry. I think I'll be here for a while too.

Ali Hippy

There is a man in Lamu who has been entertaining tourists in his home for 33 years. He is listed in both the Lonely Planet East Africa and the Rough Guide to Kenya, and his name is Ali Hippy.

Lamu is a tiny town, you can walk end to end in less than ten minutes, so it wasn't long before I ran into Mr. Hippy. He is a small round man with a big smile and a high voice, a cross between Mike Tyson and Santa Claus in traditional muslim dress. He invited me to his home that evening, where for 300 shillings (about $6) his family would cook me dinner and play us some music. Tim, the mzungu from the ferry, joined us with two other English girls.

Ali Hippy is a better salesman than he is a chef, and the food was a long way from what it had sounded like at the waterfront. The "prawns", technically speaking, should have been referred to as "a prawn", and the crab samosas were barely larger than my thumbnail. I was eating vegetarian however and I was satisfied by the end of the meal. We sat on the floor of the stone courtyard and talked for a few hours, and the Hippy family performed some traditional Swahili music, with Ali playing lead on casio keyboard.

Tim is a medical student from the UK, and when Ali discovered this he asked Tim for advice on a problem he'd had a few weeks ago. As Ali distributed the samosas, he told us how he had taken painkillers for a pain in his arm, and had started to get stomach pain shortly afterwards. He decided to shit in a bowl, and as we ate our vegetable stew he told us how there was a lot of blood in his shit. Then he started vomiting regularly, and as we helped ourselves to more rice he explained that after several days of shitting blood and vomiting he eventually collapsed in his home and was taken to hospital. He recovered a few weeks ago and has since tried various medications but still gets heartburn and the occassional pains in his stomach. Tim got mad at me later because while Ali was telling Tim all this he had to keep a straight face, while I was wetting myself in the corner.

The following day Tim and I hired a dhow for a day. Dhows are traditional Arabic sailboats that are still in regular use along the coast. A captain and two crewmen did the legwork while Tim and I worked hard reapplying our sunblock. We stopped for a while near an island of mangrove trees to try to catch some lunch.

I've been vegetarian for five years now, but for the last six months or so my opinions have been more moderate than they've been in the past. For a long time now I haven't had a problem with killing animals for food; humans have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years, and plenty of other animals kill for food too. It's natural. But I am not a full blown carnivore all of a sudden, I still have a problem with animal welfare being undermined for the sake of economic efficiency, and I still don't want to support that. So I've moved from no killing, to no factory farming. So when we stopped to fish, I threw a line out too.

I must have still looked vegetarian to the fish, because they seemed to trust my line a lot more than Tim's. I only caught one small fish however, and I threw it back, and the larger bites got away. The dhow crew used nets and I ate a barbecued fish for lunch, my first since 1999. I don't like the way the animals are treated in Africa and don't plan to eat meat here, but when I get home I think I'll start buying from local farms and cooking my own.

Lamu isn't exactly Vegas, and the nightlife is non-existant, so the evenings have become mzungu parties on our hotel roof, with the guitar being passed around the small and rotating group that shows up each night. Today is a lazy day, but tomorrow will be hard work. I've signed myself up as a crew member on a two day dhow journey to the neighbouring islands, so I'll be learning to sail and cook some traditional food. I feel sorry for the other mzungus paying full price, I hope I don't sink their boat.

And the award for most unique insurance claim goes to...

An excerpt from a recent collect call to RBC Travel Insurance:

RL: Hi, I'm calling to find out if I'm eligible for dental coverage, I've damaged a tooth and I'll need dental work before I leave Africa.

RBC: No problem sir, can you explain what happened?

RL: I was stampeded by a herd of donkeys.

RBC: You were stampeded by donkeys?

RL: Yes. A rope was tied between two of the donkeys and I got caught on it and dragged through the street. I hit my chin on the cement blocks they were carrying on their backs. A few hours later, one of my molars disintegrated and now most of it is missing. Does my insurance package have provisions for donkey related incidents?

RBC: Not donkey related incidents specifically, sir, but one of the categories does cover miscellaneous causes of injury. We can cover up to $300 of your expenses.

The idea of getting dental work in Dar Es Salaam is not particularly appealing. The state of people's teeth in Africa makes the average Brit look like Pamela Anderson. But I don't have much choice, it'll get worse if I ignore it, and besides, RBC is footing at least part of the bill. And yes, that's not a made up story for the sake of an insurance claim. I was stampeded by donkeys in Lamu.

I have discovered the wonder of collect calls. I asked the Bell operator what it cost the companies when I call from Kenya, and I was told $9.49 a minute. Visa has been pissing me off, so I called them and was chatting away for over two hours. It's amazing how much fun waiting on hold is when you know your phone call is costing more than all the interest you will ever pay. Telus is my next target. That's an especially good one because they'll be handing over hundreds of dollars directly to their competitor.

Nothing moves quickly in Lamu, it took about four days to organize a dhow sailing lesson, and then when it was finally set the captain kept changing the deal and upping the price after we'd paid our deposit. The deal changed again five minutes before we left and when I complained one of the crew started shouting at me and became quite aggressive. My friend Johnny and I decided we wanted a refund, Captain Ali had lost our trust, and despite being assured many times we could have a refund if we wanted, suddenly they couldn't refund our money and we had to talk to Nassir, the sales agent to get it.

Johnny and I didn't want to hold up the other tourists in Captain Ali's dhow, so we decided to figure it out when they got back. By this time all the shouting had attracted a lot of attention from the other dhow captains and there were lots of new captains to choose from. We haggled a bit and settled on a dhow with Captain Simba, and two crewmen called Coconut and Spoon.

Everyone should go on a dhow trip before they die. When I am old, rich, and bored I'm going to buy a dhow and make my living as a pirate. I'll be nearly dead so it won't matter if I'm killed in battle, and cannons are FUN.

There weren't any cannons on our dhow though, and we didn't hijack any other ships. But we did sail around the islands and swim in the channel and sleep on the beach and fish in the ocean. When the dhow is sailing against the wind the crew wedges a plank out the side, and a crewman stands on it to balance the boat against the wind. That crewman was me for a lot of the trip. I sat on the end of the plank, skimming over the ocean, chewing my miraa, and feeling like a real sailor.

Miraa is a local plant that is legal in the UK and illegal in the States, and it is supposed to have a euphoric effect and keep you awake all night. You chew the leaves and the bark, which are quite bitter. I chewed through several plants but never felt any effects. I blame my lack of sleep that night on the sand in my sleeping bag and the crabs crawling on my face, not on the drugs.

I spoke to Nassir, the sales agent, as soon as we got back to Lamu. We approached Captain Ali and when he refused to refund my money we brought the chief of police to his house. There was ten minutes of shouting, then the policeman asked me if I would like to deal with the matter locally or officially. Based on East Africa's reputation for justice, I don't know which one would have been the least violent, so I said I didn't care how it was handled I just wanted the deposit back and I'd walk away happy. I got it sixty seconds later, and the captain was let off with a warning.

There are so few tourists here, and the town is so small, that after a few days I knew every mzungu staying here, and when new ones arrived I knew their names and nationalities before I even met them, just from local gossip. The rooftop of the Bahari Hotel became the hippest nightclub of the entire Lamu archipelago, and each night I'd bring the guitar up and play a few songs beside the oil lamp.

Here is Africa in a nutshell: the morning I left Lamu, the hotel had forgotten my wake up call, lost the keys to the safe containing my passport, forgotten to make me the breakfast I'd paid for, taken my towel for laundry instead of the hotel's towel, and had no money in the till to refund me the 200 shillings I was still owed. I was staying in one of the more upmarket hotels in town. The night before Johnny had asked for some t-shirts to be made, and they'd come back on the wrong colour shirts, with the wrong colour ink, and most of the words missing. And he still had to hunt the guy down for his change. The simplest things are never easy here.

I will come back to Lamu. Everyone should come here. It has fantastic beaches, a long and fascinating history, and a relaxed island vibe. Just watch out for the donkeys.

Barney sucks

I took a bus bound for Mombasa, but as we drove into another town called Malindi it looked nice, so I got off there instead. Malindi is another coastal tourist town, although it's much smaller and prettier than Mombasa. I stayed in a cheap hostel with a rather rude landlady who didn't look me in the eye once during my stay. I wandered around a bit then took a matatu to the Gede Ruins.

The Gede Ruins are the remnants of an ancient Swahili town that dates back to the 13th century. There are no records of the town in any historical documents and the town was mysteriously abandoned in the 17th century. It's hidden deep in the jungle was not discovered until the 1920s. I went there late in the afternoon and with the exception of my guide and a few monkeys, I was the only person wandering around the remnants of the town.

The ruins are very atmospheric. There is a large palace and several mosques. The tombs of the town's Sultan and his wives are still intact, and the bodies have not been dug up. When I asked the guide why, he told me there had been many attempts to excavate but every time someone tried strong winds would cause rocks to fall on the archaeologists. He said there had been several injuries and they had given up.

I took a matatu to Mombasa in the evening, with the intention of going on a tour I'd read about called 'Dolphin Dhow'. I'd spoken to the company that morning and they'd told me there was a 50% change of swimming with wild dolphins, and I'd decided to take the gamble, even though it seemed fairly overpriced. I got up at 5:30am the next morning and waited with my bags in a fairly dangerous area of Mombasa, and at 7:15 when they still hadn't arrived I phoned and was told they'd forgotten to pick me up. This solved the overpriced problem. I got them to knock a third off for the next day.

I wandered around without much to do. I went to see 'Be Cool' at the Kenya Cinema, an old school movie house that looked like it should have been playing Charlie Chaplin films instead. I would have preferred that, 'Be Cool' wasn't very good, I felt like I was watching a bunch of Hollywood producers play circle jerk.

The driver for Dolphin Dhow remembered to pick me up the next morning, and I was driven South with a few other tourists to a little town called Shimoni. It was obvious early on that this was the kind of adventure where I was more likely to meet Barney the purple dinosaur than bump into Evil Knievel. We were to be taken on a dolphin spotting trip in the dhow, and those who dared could go on a guided snorkel tour of the reef. Guided snorkelling! I've been diving for five years. This was stupid.

We saw lots of dolphins, but never got to swim with them, and although the food was reasonable and the crew were friendly I walked away having lost my gamble. I returned to Mombasa and got a bus in the morning to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

The price of a soda in Dar Es Salaam

My tooth is 'temporized'. It has been filled with minty chalky sticky stuff that is protecting it until I get it fixed properly.

South Africans are such generous people. I showed up at a clinic looking for a dentist, and I met a South African family who had been living in Dar for five years. They recommended a dentist they'd been using for a long time, and they gave me a ride to his office, then gave me their number and told me to call them if I ever wanted a free meal. Remember at the beginning of this trip when I was given a free place to stay with another random family I met in South Africa? These people are so nice.

The dentist recommended that I temporize the tooth then get it fixed when I return to Canada. This made him seem so intelligent and rational I decided to completely ignore his advice and have him do the work for me in a few weeks, when I pass back through Nairobi. It will be cheaper and it seems to be as professional as a Canadian clinic, and this way I will have gold in my tooth so if I get mugged in Nairobi I can sell it for bus fare to Kampala. It's bulletproof.

Dar Es Salaam is clean and rich by African standards. The traffic is relaxed and the hassle factor is lower, although still ever-present. There isn't too much to see, in fact there's a whole section in the guidebook debating whether to skip the city entirely, but it has a lot of the modern amenities I have been going without for the summer.

Perhaps as a symptom of weariness, I have been craving Western culture lately. I have eaten twice at the Subway in Dar Es Salaam, I have traded Rwandan history for a Nick Hornby novel, and I spent yesterday afternoon sliding down waterslides on an inflatable donut. I saw two Bollywood movies, one called 'Chocolate' and another called 'Salaam Namaste'. OK, so that's not exactly Western, but it was at an upmarket cinema and it felt a hell of a long way from typical East Africa.

I went to see 'Chocolate' with a girl called Kate, who I met at the hotel. We were told it had English subtitles, but the staff were wrong. About 30% of the dialogue was in English, however, which was enough to figure out that the movie was a blatant rip off of The Usual Suspects, just with more cleavage and Kaiser Sosee bursting into song every twenty minutes. Sometimes it was shot for shot, line for line, but when Kate and I sat through the credits at the end it made no mention of the original movie.

'Salaam Nameste' was a little more original, and really did have English subtitles, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The music and dance sequences in both movies were excellent, and less hokey than the Bollywood stereotype (although not without hoke), and the films were looooong. They both had a ten minute interval in the middle.

Despite all the entertainment, I've been a little stressed out these past few days. My patience for the mzungu hassles is at a record low, and I have started walking very fast and I'm regularly blunt to the point of rudeness. There is always someone following me, trying to get me to take a taxi, or a tour, or change money, or go to a restaurant, or safari, or buy a painting, or carving, or anything they can think of. Nothing I say makes any difference, and if I continue to be this annoyed by it all then I will go to extreme measures to avoid it. I have some ideas but I don't want to jinx them.

Coming into Tanzania, I had bought a transit visa with the intention of taking the train through Zambia to Victoria Falls. But when I sat down with the train schedule and figured out my dates, it was too ambitious. I decided to stick to the original plan and head to Zanzibar, but first I would need to extend my permit.

I waited in line for an hour before being led into the chaotic world of the Tanzanian immigration office. A hundred people clamouring at the booths where the officers sat. When I finally got my turn to talk I was told I could not extend my visa here, and I would have to leave the country and come back in.

This would add twenty hours of bus travel over at least two days. The idea of this put me in a sour mood, I was thoroughly unimpressed with the Tanzanian Government. Did I mention that when I was coming into Tanzania they refused to accept payment for the visa in Tanzanian shillings? The government does not accept it's own currency. Madness.

I stormed back to my hotel and flipped through the guidebook for ideas. I thought of trying the customs office at the city airport instead, and eventually decided to walk to the tourist office for help. On the way there I passed a building that also said Immigration Office. Weird. I decided to try office number two.

I didn't mention that I'd already talked to immigration, and explained with lots of smiles that I wanted to extend my visa. I was alone in the room with the officer this time, rather than being tossed around in an immigration mosh pit, and when I asked what it would cost to extend the visa I was told it would be $50 plus 'money for soda'. When you're talking to East African government officials, soda can get pretty expensive, but the charm machine was running at full tilt and I told the official I would buy him a very large soda when it was all sorted out. The price for my visa was dropped to $20, I got the stamp on my passport, and I took off for Zanzibar while the officer was in the bathroom.

Real life without the soundtrack

I woke up, played with Chicks the monkey for a while, then caught a ride to Nungwi on the Northern coast of Zanzibar Island. It’s a busy little beach town, dotted with cozy waterfront restaurants and brimming with backpackers. But I have seen white people before, and although they are endangered in many parts of East Africa they are fairly common in Canada, so I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere. I left for Matemwe first thing in the morning.

There was no direct bus so I took a dalla-dalla to the turn off. A dalla-dalla is a canopied pick-up truck that holds four people (approx. 22 chickens) per square foot. After I got off at the junction I realized I had left an unopened jar of Nutella sitting on the truck. You have no idea how long it took me to find Nutella in Africa, if I had lost my passport and bank cards I would have been less distraught.

Especially because of the Nutella incident, I didn’t particularly enjoy the dalla-dalla experience, so I hitched the rest of the way and got a free ride right to the hotel. There is only one budget place in Matemwe, everything else is aimed at the honeymooners and costs at least $70 a night, so when they told me they were full I pretended I’d made reservations and kicked up a fuss. A room magically became available and I got a nice clean double for $10 a night.

Matemwe is a tiny town on the Eastern coast. It’s water is as blue as the sky and it’s sand as white and soft as talcum powder. Just offshore is an island called Mnemba, where Tom Cruise and Bill Gates have bought holiday homes, and if you swim across the armed security will bill you US$300 for a visitor’s permit. An overnight stay is US$1400.

The next day I went diving around Mnemba island, taking care not to step on Mr. Cruise’s sand. I’d been warned of poor visibility by other divers but I showed up on a good day, and the conditions were excellent. There were thousands of fish, and we saw ten or twelve hawksbill turtles, some as large as four feet long. During the dives we could hear dolphins in the distance, and at the end of the day they showed up and followed our boat for a while.

After the diving I hitched back to Stone Town and stayed at Sheikhan’s place, before leaving for the ferry in the morning.

I have been using an alarm clock that I bought in Uganda, and because I bought it in Uganda it has a tendency to stop for a rest for a couple of hours each day. Time isn’t usually much of an issue around here, especially in Zanzibar, where watches are merely fashion accessories and are not used for any practical purpose. If you ask anyone the time in Stone Town they will invariably be at least four or five hours off, but they’ll deliver the information with complete confidence. They'll tell you it’s 1:10pm even though it’s been dark for several hours, and they’re half way through closing up their shop.

When it comes to catching ferries however, time is a little more crucial, so yesterday I woke up with the Muslim call to prayer and left for the dock. I was an hour and a half early, which in African time is three hours early, so I sat and waited with my bags by the water.

I have heard many calls to prayer in Africa, and it often amazes me how anyone could possibly concentrate on prayer while such nasal, off-key singing is bouncing off the buildings. Imagine trying to talk to God while PeeWee Herman serenades you at Concord volume. They really should implement some sort of audition process before they put anyone in front of a loudspeaker. They could televise it and call it Muezzin Idol.

The ferry ride was two hours, then I took a taxi to the bus station and in a sudden lapse of judgment I didn’t try to bargain for the ticket and paid two and a half times the real price. Several staff of the bus company came on at various points before we left, trying to charge me varying amounts for luggage fees, all of which were illegitimate, and all of which I refused to pay. The bus left an hour and a half late.

There is a bad habit of drivers in East Africa to start driving away before everyone gets on the vehicle, so the conductor and sometimes a lagging passenger or two will have to run and jump on while the vehicle is moving. As we were leaving a town called Same (pronounced Sah-may) the coach pulled out and a passenger ran barefoot to catch up but slipped as he jumped on, and the front wheel ran over his right foot. The coach came to a sudden halt, and the world was switched to mute as the man lifted his leg, and stared at the flesh hanging off his bone like the peeled skin of a roast chicken. He turned slowly like a ballerina in a music box, his elbows out at his sides, then fell unconscious into the arms of two village women.

The volume came back on, and people started shouting for a taxi. A cab came but when the driver saw the puddle of blood trickling into the dirt he tried to drive away, causing the villagers to start kicking and punching his car. A pick-up truck arrived and the man was lifted into the back and driven to a hospital, probably several hours away.

It is strange to me how uneventful major events feel when they happen. I have been so conditioned by Hollywood that it felt odd to see a man crippled without an 80 piece symphony orchestra to back it up.

Arusha is supposed to be the capital of mzungu hassles, but the bus was five hours late arriving and this meant the street touts had thinned considerably by the time we arrived. In combating the touts, I have become fluent in Richarian, my own made up language that no-one understands and that causes all the touts to speak Italian to me, although they give up quickly when I repeatedly shout “No Eeengleesh!”. In Stone Town I went looking for a full purdah and sunglasses, planning to disguise myself as a trendy yet conservative Muslim woman, but couldn’t find it at an affordable price and was a little concerned I would be stoned to death if discovered.

The brother of a Tanzanian woman I met on the bus gave me a ride to my hotel and refused to take any payment for it. I love meeting nice people who don’t want money. I spent today bargaining with safari companies and in the morning I will climb Mount Meru, a mountain more than four and a half kilometres high. I was originally planning to climb Kilimanjaro, but I’ve heard many bad reviews from other travelers and it’s nearly three times as expensive to climb. Meru is meant to be more scenic and much less crowded, the girl I’m climbing with told me she started her Kili climb with more than two hundred other trekkers leaving from the same spot at 11am. Meru takes three days and I’ll be at the summit to watch the sunrise, as long as I don’t collapse or suffer severe altitude sickness along the way. I have drugs for that. And I have been a pro web developer for seven years, so I am in perfect physical condition for something like this. Wish me luck!

Chicks in Zanzibar

The second time I went to Rwanda I met a mzungu called Ed who had been working in Zanzibar, and he'd told me to get in touch with a guy called Sheikhan if I needed somewhere to stay. Getting off the ferry I was rushed by touts wanting to take me to a hotel, and of course it didn't matter that I didn't want their help. One guy followed me the full half hour walk to Sheikhan, despite me telling him to leave me alone the entire journey. I even pretended I had to use the internet and ducked into a cafe, but he waited around the corner and when I emerged he kept following me. I made it very clear to Sheikhan I'd arrived independently and he shouldn't pay anyone a commission.

Sheikhan's place is a plain, unmarked door in the centre of Stone Town, and there is no reference to it in any of the guidebooks. It costs half the price of the next cheapest hotel, the rooms are large and clean, and it's in a three minute walk from the waterfront. But because no-one knows about it I had an entire floor to myself.

Zanzibar is a richer version of Lamu town. It's Arab Swahili architecture from the same period, and Stone Town is filled with little winding alleyways, although this time there are cars and motorbikes squeezing through and I haven't seen a donkey yet. There are many tourists, and a few upmarket craft shops that I would spend thousands of dollars in, if I somehow came across thousands of dollars. When I am a famous rockstar I'll buy a big house and come here for the furniture.

Just outside Sheikhan's place is a monkey called Chicks, leashed to a post. If you sit down next to him he'll climb all over you and rifle through your pockets. I was trying to teach him how zippers work but he wasn't really getting it, and he kept plucking out my arm and eyebrow hairs and eating them.

The restaurants here are excellent, and the atmosphere of the island is very exotic. I've met several couples on their honeymoon here, and I can't imagine a better place for something like that. It's been a lazy and relaxed couple of days. Wandering around, eating, buying paintings, and hanging out with other travellers. I leave today for Nyengi, a small town on the North coast of Zanzibar that is supposed to be the backpacker capital of East Africa. I don't really know what is supposed to be up there other than white people and beaches, but if it's boring I'll just spend a couple of days diving and come back to Stone Town.

Mount Meru and Me

I now know what it's like to be 95 years old. I am hobbling around and making other people carry things for me. Mount Meru put up a good fight, but in the end it was no match for this web geek. All those treks to and from the tea room in the office must have really added up. I reached the summit at 7am on day three of the climb.

Meru is the fourth highest mountain on the African continent, a volcano that erupted so forcefully half a million years ago that the middle of the mountain exploded and formed an enormous, semi-circular crater surrounding a smaller ash cone that is still active. The highest part of the crater is the summit, and it stands at 4562.13 metres high. The last 13cm were brutal, I nearly turned back.

I think climbing mountains has as much to do with mental preparation as it does physical preparation, of which I had none, tea treks excluded. I did a few jumping jacks the night before, but they made me tired and bored and I went for pizza after about ten of them. But in my mind, I was doing fifty press-ups a second. A SECOND.

All this mental activity meant I slept five hours and woke up exhausted for the first day. I ate three breakfasts and still wasn't full. Fried eggs fried eggs fried eggs. A true climber's breakfast.

My climbing partner was a girl called Sam, a Yorkshire lass who runs marathons for fun, had already climbed Kilimanjaro and was chillin', quite literally, at Everest base camp in November. Our guide, Edwin, had been taking squidgy white people up Meru since 1999, and had climbed to the summit of Kili via the nine day route in less than fifteen hours. Then there was me, still hell bent on my mental preparation philosophy.

The first day was a four hour hike through a forest at the foot of the mountain. Every so often we would have to wait for a giraffe to get out of the way so we could continue, and at one point we walked past a family of elephants. On several occassions there were white colobus monkeys swinging through the trees above us.

Altitude sickness is one of the main hurdles people face when climbing mountains. It's important to pace yourself and focus on a slow, steady climb that allows your body to adjust to the changing conditions. People who rush up get sick and lose stamina, and don't make it to the top. So we moved with small steps, and enjoyed the animals and the scenery. We reached the first camp in good spirits and ready for more.

My appetite was unstoppable. I ate constantly and bombarded the cook with special requests. The night of day one my brain was hijacked by Richard Simmons via satellite, and I got about four hours sleep again.

I couldn't remember Richard Simmons' name just now, but a Google search for "famous gay fitness" gave me the answer in the number one slot.

Day two was similar to day one, although steeper. We trekked through more forest, saw more monkeys, and reached the second hut in about four hours. We still had plenty of energy so we hiked to a point called Little Meru, that stands 3.8km above sea level. The view was impressive, we could see for hundreds of miles and the clouds formed a perfectly straight line parallel to the horizon, like God was measuring something. It was completely silent, there wasn't even any wind.

Edwin, our guide, asked me over dinner whether I had brought a wind proof jacket. I said I hadn't. He asked me if I had a hat. I said I didn't. I felt like this was the wrong time to be running through the checklist. It was decided I would make do with my two sweaters and Edwin had a spare hat to lend me. We went to bed early in preparation for a 2am start towards the summit.

I got more sleep than I had the previous two nights, although I still tossed and turned a lot. I remember waking up and wondering where I was, then realizing I was about to hike to the summit of a mountain in the middle of the freezing night. It was a moment when I seriously questioned my own sanity.

One of the things I had remembered from the checklist was a flashlight, although it was a Ugandan flashlight which meant it didn't always turn on when you asked it to. Everyone else had posh head-mounted lights and warm, windproof jackets, while I was about to climb with my strobe light for sloths and a fleece sweater.

The cook by now had got used to my appetite, and there was a big plate of pasta waiting for me when I got up at 1:30am. We started our hike a little after 2am.

The summit climb was much harder than the previous two days, it was far steeper and often involved climbing the rock face with our hands, edging our way up and around the craggy mountain side. There was about an hour of sandy scree slope, where each step would take us a half step backwards, and this was the only point in the whole climb that I really disliked. But just as the scree slope finished the sunrise began, and watching the band of orange light colour a bed of clouds several kilometres below us restored my energy, and I reached the summit at 7am.

The view from the summit is far and away the best scenery I have ever seen, and it made the whole gruelling journey worthwhile. It was very cold and windy at the summit, so after ten minutes we started the descent, which turned out to be the hardest part of the journey. After a five hour steep climb on little sleep, the hike back down took eight hours and by the end Sam was popping painkillers for her blisters. All the downhill walking packed my toes like gunpowder into the bottom of my shoes, and I was hobbling by the time we reached the vehicle at 5pm.

When I got to the hotel, I made the staff carry all my bags and I limped up to my room, ordering dinner on the way. I ate, showered, and slept for 16 hours without interruption. I woke up this morning feeling better, although walking remains a bit of a challenge. Still, for a squidgy white person, I think that's understandable.

Leopards, languages, and major mass murderers

I've become an expert haggler out here. For the Serengeti safari I went looking for a group that had already set off, and arranged to catch up with them via public transit. This meant that any money I gave the company was an unexpected bonus and it was easy to negotiate a good price, and I got a night's accomodation and a shuttle to Nairobi thrown into the deal.

Friday afternoon I took a beaten up, crowded car to Lake Manyara National Park and joined the two other tourists at the campsite there. I was a little concerned they were going to be a couple on their honeymoon or something equally awkward, but it was just a couple of British friends who'd been working as doctors in Southern Tanzania. They told me some stories about men having their wives cook them dinner despite being in labour, before letting them go to the hospital to give birth. We headed off for the park first thing in the morning.

The Serengeti is the most famous safari destination in the world. Vast, treeless savannah plains, stretching hundreds of miles and interrupted only by occassional boulders. You've seen it in the movies. But when you do it this way, you don't have to put up with Elton John.

We saw everything you're supposed to see, including a couple of leopards, which was the only animal I hadn't yet seen on the other safaris. Although leopards don't kill as many people as hippos, they are considered more dangerous, just less common, and while we were in the park a ten year old boy was killed and dragged from one of the expensive lodges. His parents had been snapping photos as the leopard approached the family.

On Sunday morning a driver came to pick me up at 5am and drove me and a bunch of rich folk to an expensive lodge. We had posh tea in a posh restaurant then drove into the middle of the Serengeti as the sun was rising.

After saving so much money on the safari, I decided to blow it all on an outrageously expensive but very fun way to see the park. In the middle of the savannah was a hot air balloon, with the basket turned on it's side. We got in and the staff began to inflate the canopy and fire the burner, until the basket was pulled upright and we floated into the air.

The wind took us along the river, gliding about twenty feet above ground in the soft dawn light. We flew over hippo pools, a cheetah running across the savannah, lions and hyenas around a kill, and now and again the pilot would raise the balloon so we didn't get caught on a tree. The flight lasted just under an hour, and it made me want to be a hot air balloon pilot when I grow up.

Upon landing we were given champagne and breakfast under the shade of an acacia tree. I checked it for leopards before I sat down. They gave me a certificate, proving I had spent an extortionate amount of money to stand in a hot air balloon while someone else flew it.

Another game drive through the Serengeti, then we made our way to the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater where we camped for the night. Some tribal people showed up and did some traditional dances, and I joined in and learned a few steps myself. We woke up early again, and were the first truck to leave the campsite at 5:45am.

I am certain the Ngorongoro Crater is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. A ring of high blue mountains, surrounding dusty yellow savannah and a drunken spider's web of dirt roads stuccoed with animal tracks. We arrived so early that for the first two hours we had the place to ourselves. The animals retreat from the roads as the cars come but the lack of tourists meant we saw everything up close. We saw a cheetah chase down and kill a baby antelope, which is a very rare sighting. The big cats do most of their hunting at night, and although seeing a kill is at the top of every tourist's list, I haven't known a single person to be able to check it off. The light at that time in the morning was beautiful and I can't wait to get home and develop the photos.

I had the safari driver let me off at a junction a few hours from Arusha, and I took a dalla-dalla to Lake Eyasi, where I had read about a hunter gatherer tribe that speaks in a language of clicks. There were a couple of overland safari groups there and I pulled a cook aside and persuaded him to make a little extra food in exchange for a few thousand shillings. I was asked to sit where the tour leader wouldn't see me and the cook brought me the food an hour or so later.

In the morning a guide woke me up at 5:30am, my fourth sunrise in a week, and we started walking to where the Hadzabe hunter gatherers live. I was told along the way that a visit to the tribe cost twenty thousand shillings. Apparently even hunter gatherers need a new pair of Levi's every now and then. But I'd come a long way and decided to stick with the plan.

An hour's walk and we came to their camp. The guide shouted something and suddenly a man came running out from the bush and started making fire with two sticks. He got the fire going and a few other bushmen sat around it talking in Swahili. When I asked the guide why they weren't speaking in the click language, the guide said something to them and suddenly they switched, although the click language turned out to sound more like Swahili with a stutter. Then I was told they would take me hunting, and two boys picked up their bow and arrows and we set off across the hills.

The boys would stop, crouch, and aim their bows at a bird in a tree, then fire and miss by at least three metres. After ten minutes of this I was sick of how contrived the whole thing was and I told the guide that I didn't need to see any more. I skipped the rest of the tour, saw Lake Eyasi, then hitched my way back to Arusha.

The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is in Arusha, where the most prominent figures of the Rwandan genocide are being put on trial. It's not too well known among the tourists, most people come for the wildlife, but if you show up there with your passport they'll let you sit in the courtroom while it's in session, and I went twice, the day before and the day after my Serengeti safari.

The courtroom was clean, formal, and the furniture was covered in a wood grain laminate the same as my Honest Ed's desk at home. There were three judges sat in front of the United Nations banner, the defense counsel and defendants to their right, the prosecution and translators to their left, and the witness in front. Most of the lawyers were Canadians.

I sat in on a trial nicknamed the Butare Case, and when I was there the defence counsel was cross-examining the accused, a woman called Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, who is the first woman in history to be tried for genocide. She sat ten feet from me answering the questions. It was fascinating watching history unfold in the courtroom, particularly as I'd been to Butare during my two trips to Rwanda, and read enough of the history that I recognised many of the names referred to as they talked.

Whenever anyone spoke in Kinyarwandan or French, which was often, translators would deliver the English translation to staff and visitors via headphones or the low volume speakers in the visitors area. There were two translators, and one of them sounded exactly - and I mean exactly - like the guy at the end of Michael Jackson's song Thriller. His voice was saturated with drama, it sounded nothing close to objective, but it made the whole thing immensely entertaining. His translations were also being used by the chief judge whose first language is English, so I don't fancy Pauline Nyiramasuhuko's chances.

Watching something as high profile as an international criminal tribunal reminded me how completely normal people are, regardless of status. There would be delays for absurd reasons: on one occassion the judges were told that the man who works the photocopier was out for lunch so documents couldn't be delivered, until another lawyer stood up and said he knew how to work a photocopier and was willing to go and make copies himself. One defendant kept falling asleep in his chair and several of the lawyers were chewing gum. There was bureaucracy to the hilt, everything moved very slowly and deliberately, which is how I would do things too if I was getting paid the way those judges and lawyers are.

I took the shuttle to Nairobi and this morning I went to the South African Airways office to confirm my journey home. They told me I couldn't extend my stay in Johannesburg without authorization from my travel agent, and if I don't get it I'll have to skip Cape Town and head straight to the UK. In the morning I take a bus back to Uganda, then I'll fly out from there as quickly as possible. My East African days are numbered.

Waleba, Uganda

I've been here long enough that Uganda feels like home in a lot of ways, and when we crossed the border I got that chicken soup feeling, not least because the minute we were on Ugandan soil the driver became an absolute maniac and nearly killed us on more than a dozen occassions.

Sunday afternoon I arrived at the African Child Foundation to say goodbye to the kids. When Jim found out I'd come back, he and Abraham came looking for me, and when I saw him he didn't look too happy. I pointed this out, and he told me to leave the village or he would have me arrested. I asked him what I had done wrong, but he refused to tell me, he just kept telling me to leave and never come back or he would call the police. I asked Abraham to shake my hand before I left, but Jim forbade him to do it and Abraham complied.

Although Jim wouldn't tell me why he was angry, I knew perfectly well the reason for the threats. I'd anticipated not receiving too warm a welcome when I returned from the tourist trail, and as a result I'd moved all my things to a friend's house, under cover of darkness, the night before I left for Kenya.

I had also shown up Sunday afternoon intentionally, because it meant that I caught all the kids coming back from church and I was able to say goodbye without having to be let into the compound. I'd arrived Friday night but spent Saturday doing volunteer work for Sanyu Babies Home, to kill time before Sunday.

The advantage, and disadvantage, of online journals is that lots of people read them, and when one of those people is the president of the charity you're working for, and the owner of the house you're living in, you have to watch what you publish if you don't want life to become a lot harder all of a sudden. Now that I am no longer living or working with the African Child Foundation, I can explain a few things I haven't been able to talk about until now. And I can tell you about the dastardly deed that deserves to land me in a Ugandan prison.

As I said in an early post, I believe the best way to influence change in people or an organization is from the inside, not the outside. You need the protestors, people who instill a sense of urgency in dealing with the problems, but no-one will take the advice of someone who doesn't treat them with respect. Putting yourself in a position where people will listen to you, not just roll down the blinds and turn up the music, gives you more opportunities to incite positive change.

When I arrived at the African Child Foundation I heard many stories of corruption and caught Jim and his wife in a few lies that made me distrust them. I brought up the issues where I could, but often there was risk to a third party and I wasn't able to address it.

A lot of the time I was the only volunteer in the compound who wasn't openly furious with Jim, and because of this he said he trusted me more than any of the other volunteers who passed through. When the Global Volunteer Network had been looking for an official mediator in a paid position, I was the only person who Jim and GVN could agree on, but I was so sick of the politics at that stage that I wasn't interested in the job. I explained to him on several occassions that I was not on his side, that I was on nobody's side, and I told him and several members of staff I thought it quite possible there was corruption at ACF. I even told him that I didn't trust him, but at the same time I made it obvious that I wasn't out to get him, and that's what made the difference.

But ultimately I didn't show up in Africa to mediate, I came here to help people in need, so while I was working with ACF I was also involved with several other organizations and my own independent projects. Something I had observed on a few occassions was how angry Jim became if people worked on projects outside the charity, so I didn't talk about the other work I was doing, although I made a rule to never lie about anything to anyone, and I stuck to that the whole way through. But I avoided topics, I kept information out of this journal knowing that Jim might read it, and at times when the conversation seemed to be going in an undesirable direction I would change the subject. I never told a lie, I just avoided the questions.

When Jim fired Mike, the ACF computer technician, I asked him to be in charge of the games cafe. Mike had become a friend over the months I had been there, he was well educated and seemed honest. After the stories and the lies I didn't trust the African Child Foundation to handle the money responsibly, and they had no qualified computer techs in the organization anymore now that Mike was gone. So Mike and I went about setting up the cafe, which ended up becoming a games arcade, computer school, and the first internet cafe in the village, with a great location right in the centre and a big posh sign. It also has cd burning and scanning facilities, a photocopier, and we're planning to find a dvd player and run movie nights in the evenings. It's been open for about seven weeks now, and it's already turning a profit. I reviewed the books today and all the transactions are well documented.

I emailed future volunteers and asked them to bring over playstations, and that's how we got the games equipment for the cafe. When I found a willing courier, I would send them an email telling them it was an independent project outside of ACF, and request they don't give the equipment to the staff, but I would avoid portraying ACF in a bad light as much as possible. I figured they deserved to make their own decision. When I was in Kenya, a volunteer showed up with some games and posters and gave them to the staff, and this is what led to Jim's discovery of the cafe. The idea of Jim's most trusted volunteer using a fired member of his staff and ACF's own volunteers, to setup a cafe that ACF doesn't control is what made Jim threaten me with arrest.

Jim's view of other organizations being a threat to the African Child Foundation is one of the things that causes the corruption speculation, understandably, because surely if the ultimate aim is to help people it doesn't matter whose doing it. Someone told me that he is in legal trouble for bribing a government official to revoke another organization's NGO status. I don't know if that is true, but I do know that the organization in question has a kick ass website, because I'm the one who built it: www.pedrru.org. Another project I couldn't talk about here. But if you're looking to sponsor a kid, those ones are super cute, and PEDRRU will let you send the money directly to the school so there's no opportunity for corruption.

As to whether or not volunteering for multiple organizations is against Ugandan law, I would guess it isn't, although I'm sure Jim could tie up a day or two of my time with the hassle. I made it clear that I was never out to get him, and that is still the case. I have better things to do with my time than wage war on a third world orphanage, no matter how corrupt or mismanaged they may be. I don't know for sure if ACF is corrupt, but I think it's more likely than not. Things work differently when a country's income is 52% aid, it means that if you want to make money you start a charity. And Jim seems too convinced of his own greatness to notice himself pilfering funds or breaking promises.

I went back to the kindergarten, and my kids came pouring out of the school and piled into me in the middle of the road, nearly knocking me over. The teachers extended their break so I could play games with them a little while longer, and I left them after an exhausting hour and a half. The kids are what I'll miss the most about Uganda, they are so completely unspoiled. I have lots of photos.

I am heading straight back to the UK, my plane leaves Friday afternoon. I have a two hour stop in Jo'burg and land in Heathrow at 6am, and from there I'll take a bus up to Sheffield. I seem to remember Mum saying she signed up for high speed internet, and I'm quite certain the house has hot water, tap water that's drinkable, and a noticable lack of flying cockroaches. I think I can deal with that.

A glimpse into fatherhood

I spent my final week in Uganda living and working at Sanyu Babies Home in Kampala, the centre for abandoned children I had visited before leaving for Kenya. It's a tiny British oasis in an urban African desert. Tea is always being made, the rooms are clean and the food is decent. In the evenings there is always a card game being played and everyone speaks like James Bond.

Babies are a scary thing. They scream and cry and don't speak English well so they can't tell you what they want. They are very passive aggressive, they refuse to even write down what they want on a piece of paper, even though they've been living in the world much less time than everyone else and don't deserve superiority.

They also shit in their pants then expect you to clean them up. I have been dutifully doing this, putting on new diapers and fresh clothes, only to watch them dribble milk all over themselves as soon as I start feeding them. Babies are inconvenient.

My favourite is Rachel, a five month old twin whose mother died during birth. I never heard anything about a father. There is also a two year old called Arthur, who is so wet with dribble and mucus you could put him in the middle of the Sahara and flowers would grow. He only just learned to walk and he regularly stampedes across the play area and collapses on top of volunteers, covering them in a thin film of mucus like the monster in Alien.

My first evening at Sanyu I went with some other volunteers to Uganda vs Burkina Faso, the FIFA World Cup qualifier being held at the national stadium. Given the obsession with English soccer here, I expected absolute chaos, but when the game started there wasn't more than a couple of thousand spectators, it was like being at a CFL game. The Ugandan's who had joined us didn't even know the names of any of the players. The volunteers I went with were listening to the England game on the radio at the same time, and kept cheering at odd moments. The other fans must have been wondering why throw-ins were so exciting to us.

We were easily the loudest spectators in the crowd. We were the only people in the stadium wearing the stupid paper hats sold outside, with "Uganda Cranes" written on them. No-one was singing songs so I invented one that went like this:

"C, R, A! N, E, S! If it looks like we're losing we'll just bribe the ref!"

Near the start of the second half of this international FIFA World Cup qualifier, there was a power cut, and the entire stadium was plunged into darkness. The game was put on hold for about twenty minutes and finally resumed when the floodlights came back on. The final score was 2-2, which meant both Uganda and Burkina Faso had failed to qualify. Ah well.

On Friday three of the Sanyu volunteers and Julie, the musician from National Theatre, came to the airport to see me off. I was glued to the window the whole way, taking in the rich green landscape and rust red roads one last time. I don't know if I'll ever come back here, Uganda is a tiny country in an unmarked alley, away from the main road, and I'm not sure I'll make the detour again. I hope I do.

My suitcases are loaded with crafts and souvenirs from all over East Africa. I have seventeen rolls of film to develop, many of which are black and white. I am tanned olive and my hair is so long I can tie it back, although I tend to leave it sticking out in all directions like a Hindu sun god. More than half my clothes have holes in them and my shoes, after four trips to roadside cobblers, are stitched together like Frankenstein's wretch and covered in dollops of red paint.

I am returning home with a long to do list. There are funds to raise, websites to update, photos to scan and post online, an album to record and release, a van to renovate, a job to find, and lots of people to see. I've missed Toronto. My prayers for decent beer have been answered, and there are four cases of Rogue chocolate stout waiting for me.

I also have a long list of things I want to learn. I've emailed Mum saying I'll cook dinner each night when I'm in the UK, I'm going to learn some Italian cooking. Since Lamu, when my vegetarianism walked the plank and sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, I've been planning to get into the habit of cooking regularly. That way I can be sure I'm sticking to the free range rule, and hopefully save some money too.

I'm going to learn auto mechanics, so when I'm touring in the summer I'll be able to deal with most of the problems I encounter. And I want to keep writing, although I won't be continuing this journal. I've had some ideas for a novel and I'm going to do a bit of prep work before hopefully setting aside six months to write it next year.

I also have more travel plans. In a couple of years I plan to do Asia the same way I've done East Africa, although I won't go as part of a volunteer program this time, I'll just show up and start knocking on doors. That will give me the freedom to leave and allow me more control over how my funds are spent. I'll need to get to Nepal at some stage, so I can meet the people making my album covers and climb to Everest base camp.

But for now, I'm ready to stay in one place for a while. I am sitting here in my family's house in Sheffield after a twenty-two hour journey, using their high speed internet and flat screen LCD monitor. Tonight I will go to the video store and rent the most formulaic Hollywood movie I can find, then in the morning I will sleep in without risk of roosters or calls to prayer waking me up. It's been a long journey, and I need the rest.

Tea. Lots and lots of tea. And rain.

For a long time this trip felt like my over-stuffed suitcase, now matter how full it appeared to be I was always able to squeeze one more thing in. But the change in temperature has been met with a change in pace, and I've spent a lazy couple of weeks in Sheffield, cooking and surfing the net.

When I haven't been sleeping or watching films, I've been rolling out pasta, roasting chickens, pounding pesto, and making all sorts of other things too. It seems to work most of the time. My Mum bought me spices and a set of scales as a leaving present, which means now I just need pots, pans, a food processor, utensils and cutlery.

Each time I come back to England I like it a little bit more. Having returned on about an annual basis since I moved to Canada eight years ago, each two-week snapshot is fairly easy to compare to the last and I've watched the country transform considerably in the last decade. It feels more and more like Canada each time, although it retains the British architecture and strange manners, where honesty is usually considered rude and people spend most of their time trying to guess what other people think. The majority of conversations I overhear centre around people who guessed wrong, and therefore have become the subject of a whirlwind of drama they will never find out about.

It's easy to see the effects of globalization in the country. I spent a few days in Manchester visiting Axel, my roommate from my early days in Uganda, and when I walked into town it felt like I was circling the block: Subway, McDonalds, Starbucks, Subway, McDonalds, Starbucks. But the standard of living here has improved immensely since I left, everything seems cleaner and more efficient, and if lack of culinary variety is the only expense in the quest for LCD screens on buses and power sockets on trains, then I'm all for it. And outside the city centres there's plenty of cheap local food anyway.

This evening I'm heading down South to my old home town, Marlow, and then in the morning I'll head into London and do a bit of tourism. The occassional school trip aside, I've never really been a tourist in England, it'll be a novel experience. And it seems like a decent way to kill time before my flight to Toronto.

Home

My last couple of days in the UK were a mad dash around the South East, visiting my brother, friends from my old home town, and a few people I met in Uganda too. I walked some of the tourist trail in London, visiting the British National Gallery and the British museum. I went to a town fair and discovered I haven't lost my fear of rides. I can drive a motorbike helmetless through a war zone but I can't get on a rollercoaster.

Emily met me at the airport, and we got in a cab back to Barton Ave, where my trusty old apartment sits. Emily had painted the inner door with chalkboard paint then drawn vines and a sun, and 'WELCOME HOME JUNGLE BOY' in huge letters. She's been living in my place since I left, but by the time I arrived she'd moved her things out and everything was exactly how I like it. There was even four cases of my favourite beer sitting by the fridge.

There was several trees worth of mail waiting for me, including collection agency warnings from a couple of companies. It seems Telus, my cell phone carrier who ignored four requests to cancel my account and rarely bothers to reply to my emails, started up the collection agency process even though they knew full well I was out of the country for six months. They won't be getting a penny from me. The other unpaid bill was my own forgetfulness. Bah, who needs credit.

I split with Emily when I left for Africa, but my departure seemed to postpone rather than avoid the creaky, jerking stop that follows a relationship, like the end of one of the fairground rides I hate so much. Canada is less fun without Emily around.

I haven't properly started looking for work yet. I have enough freelance work to keep me afloat for now and I'm happy to just stay home for a while. I've been working day in day out on updates to my music site, and all the photography will be online when the update goes live, hopefully sometime around the 15th.

Thanks to everyone who read this journal, I loved getting the feedback and I really enjoyed writing it. Now it's back to regular Canadian life, which is less interesting, so this is the last entry I'll write. If this leaves you stuck for ways to procrastinate at work, check out the music site in a few days. All the photography should be there by then.

Waleba, mzungus!