uganda highlights

a boy hearding cattle through a swamp














us in Jinja, in front of the Nile














a view from our Nile River Explorers porch















paradise / sesse island














Chimera in a rice field



















Little Richard / the two year old with a weave that lived next door



















I loved this little creepy house in the middle of nowhere




















the side of someone's house














The dreaded Matatus



















me fastening a student's mask














The Freestyle Kayaking competition
















The Bad Place, the class 5 rapid that had my life flashing before my eyes



















Mentally preparing to Bunjee














Chimera and some of the 15 relatives that live in this one room house, all cared for by their aged grandmother



a video of me Bunjee jumping... takes me a little while to gather my wits, I kept making the poor guy repeat the instructions. The scariest minutes of my life.

some Kenya pics

Alright, so here's some pics finally!!!

This is our view of Mount Kenya from the back porch of where we were staying
















This is our host family in Kenya:


















Our students at Jubilee, loving the toothbrushes we gave them!















Me and an adorable baby at the NuLife orphanage




















Letting a couple of the kids listen to my Ipod, they loovvvee dancing!















The schoolyard at St. Mary's



















Me getting an authentic Kenyan tattoo





















Stay tuned for Ugandan and Parisian ones :)

La vie en Paris

Bonjour!

We've been here in Paris for a couple days now and, as one can imagine, it's quite a shock after Africa! I had nearly forgotted what being extremely cold felt like - I remember even vaguely looking forward to the sensation of frost-bite while squished in the backseat of an overcrowded Ugandan taxi with sun burns covering my body... but my feet have suffered a painful reminder that being frozen is not good either. We started our visstay in Paris with a chilly visit to Versailles, the Dali Museum, and a tour around the sights of Montmartre, but last night we did the sensible thing and went shopping for coats, hats and gloves, and our experience has been much more comfortable ever since.

We visited the Eiffel tower today and it was; of course, breathtaking but we've resolved to revisit it at night when it's all lit up to get the full effect. We also went to Notre Dame cathedral and climbed the 400 steps up the increasingly narrow spiral staircase of the main bell tower to where Quasimodo and the gargoyles hang... not the most enjoyable hike for one with claustrophobia but decidedly less painful than scaling the Statue of Liberty, and well worth it once you get up there for the view of the city alone. The cathedral bit was very beautiful and impressive - especially all the stainedglass windows.

I think I may want to live in this city at some point, even though it is huge, it's still so charming with all its sloping cobble-stone streets and the metro system is so easy to use that everywhere feels like only a hop skip and a jump away... and, more to the point, there are bakeries everywhere and the pastries are out of this world.

Well I'm off to rest up for another full day (a week in Paris is not much time!). Tomorrow we tackle the Picasso Museum, L'arc du Triomphe; Centre Pompidou of modern arts, and most importantly the LaDuree pastry shop, which according to exhaustive research is supposed to be the best in the world...why do I get the feeling this new year's resolution will involve the gym?

Last Post from Africa!

We have just returned from a one day vacation on Ssese Island to soak up some final rays of equatorial sunshine before we head off to Paris tomorrow morning! I'm a bit worried about the climate shock as we have no coats, and very few warm clothes, but one of our first stops will be the biggest flea market in Paris, so hopefully we'll have a bit of luck there.
I am a bit sad to leave Africa... I think i'll miss the scenery, children, rafting, and pineapples most, possibly in the reverse order. I'm not all that sad though as I hear Paris is at it's most beautiful around this time of year, and there are several nasty contagious things floating around Uganda at the moment... Ebola being the biggie, with the bubonic plague, typhoid, and as always malaria. I got one really wicked bout of sickness the other night, where I really started to miss Canadian bathrooms... by 4am I had woken everyone in he house up, and there was talk of bringing me to the hospital. Luckily it didn't come to that and whatever it was it seems to be over now so off to Paris I go! Hopefully they don't decide to stop letting ppl from Uganda in because of the ebola outbreak... I think it might be hard to work up a good holiday spirit spending Christmas in quarantine.
We've got a jam-packed itinerary for Paris so I'm not sure if I will be posting again, but it is my goal to get some pics up here at some point!
Au Revoir!

Extreme Weekend in Jinja!

Hello again!
Well we just got back from Jinja yesterday, and luckily we have done so with our bodies fully intact! Rafting down the Nile was so much fun.. we caught some class 5 rapids, which were scary but awesome :) It was a 30 km distance that we covered, with enjoyable lazy stretches in between the rapids where we could bail out of our rafts and just lazily float along in the nice warm (slightly crocodile-inhabited) water of the Nile and enjoy the scenery and a slice of pineapple. The scariest part of the trip was the final rapid - we were meant to paddle past the class 5 rapid, aptly named The Bad Place, as the water levels were low that day, and aim instead for a neighboring class 4 rapid. Unfortunately, as we had to pick up two stranded tandem kayakers without paddles, and the importance of paddling as hard and as fast as humanly possible was not sufficiently emphasized, we all (unknowingly) entered the class 5 rapid, which caused our raft to do a huge flip, giving us all some air time before we got sucked under. Yours truly was caught under water in what's known as the "washing machine", which spins you around in circles so fast you don't know which way is up. I was seriously scared because it felt like i was down there forever and i almost ran out of air. Luckily when i did manage to surface, a safety kayaker grabbed me and took me to shore.

Having survived rafting, next on the agenda was bungee jumping into the nile! It seemed like a good idea until they made me hop to the edge of the ledge (because my feet were tied together) and gave me a countdown. You have to overcome all your natural survival instincts and convince yourself that jumping off this ridiculously high precipice is a good idea. They say 3... 2.... 1...bungee! and you better jump the first time or you psych yourself out and it's even worse. I managed to do it and gave the most blood curdling scream as i went down! which luckily was caught on camera and hopefully i can upload it on here soon! It was beyond scary, but a lot of fun once i realized i wasn't going to die :)

Another adrenaline-filled first this weekend was that magz and I took our first bota bota rides. A bota bota is one of the most common means of transportation here.. second only to the taxis. It is a motorcycle and there are no helmets. At first i was so scared I think i left bruises on my driver but by my third ride my biggest fear was falling asleep on it.

The annual kayaking competition that was taking place was really impressive, as kayakers from all around the world showed up. The first day's event was freestyle tricks and they did things like "double helices" and "air blunts" and "pistol flipping" and a whole lot of other tricks that i don't fully understand the details of but were quite impressive none the less! The second day was a long nile race, and the third day was a short nile race, followed by a bota bota land race back to the camp, where there was an obstacle race made from upturned rafts which both the kayaker and their bota bota driver had to go through, and then both chug a bottle of Nile Special beer.... and those were the actual requirements of this reputable competition! Ugandan won in the men's division, which made the locals really happy and there was a huge celebration.. mind you, everynight at the camp was a celebration, with everyone including competitors staying up until at least 4 in the morning - I'm not sure how they managed to go extreme kayaking in the morning but there you have it! and they organized their own extreme events at night like fire dancing and one guy, supposedly one of the best kayakers in the world, had injured his ankle from flipping backwards off a table in the bar and so they made him a cast out of an old waterbottle, plastic bags and some tape and he still competed.

The only downside of having been there during the competition is that the people who normally put together a tape of the rafting expedition were competing so we don't have a dvd of the day... so I want to go again next weekend as a re-run is only half price and it's so hard to explain what the rapids there are like - it's supposed to be the best rafting in the world.
My body is happy to be back to the teaching routine in Lugazi as it replenishes its adrenaline and alcohol dehydrogenase stores.

Oh, and if you hear about the current ebola outbreak in Uganda, fear not - I'm aiming to avoid those areas... thanks to Jinja i've had enough adventure for one trip.
=:0)

life in lugazi

Oli Otya! or, as the slightly more hip Ugandans would say, Jeballe!

Sorry it's been a little while since my last post - the power here is not the most reliable, and the internet was down somehow due to CHOGM... but now all that craziness is over and life in Lugazi is returning to normal: hot, buggy, and filled with adorable children chanting "how are you mzungu!?" over and over again

We've begun teaching at our placement and so far it is going very well. Valence wants us to focus on "fine art" (think mr dressup crafts), debate classes, and Physical Education - basically all the stuff that leaves a bit of room for the kids to be creative and have fun, so it's been a blast. It's amazing how good they are at painting and such when they've rarely (if ever) had access to these types of material before. Some of them come from the hardest backgrounds imaginable but all they seem to do in classes is smile and laugh, so it's a great experience for us too.
On the first day we had a "getting to know everyone" class with the P. 5 s and we asked them their name, how many brothers and sisters, and what they want to be when they grow up (which, by the way, is pretty much split between doctors and socce players) and many children in the half had upwards of 15 siblings, some had even lost count - polygamy is fairly common.
Our main form of transportation here is a taxi van built to hold 14, which are over-crowded on a regular basis to help the drivers combat rising gas prices. On the last count, there were 26 passengers in our 14-seater... I think by the end of this trip I will either be cured of my claustrophobia, or have jumped out one of the van windows. We ride on these taxis at least twice daily to get to our placements.

Lugazi is a lovely little village, but unfortunately its stores are somewhat lacking in the "Mzungu" food - not a chocolate bar or bag of oatmeal in sight and i'm down to my last serving!
Oh well, I'm starting to really like Beans and Posho, which is made from maize flour mixed with boiling water, a meal many people here eat 2 times a day as it is cheap and fills you up.

Well, the mosquitos are starting to come out so I should run for cover under my mosquito netting. Hopefully soon I will be posting some pictures of our trip so far!

Weraba!

Back from internet hiatus

Hello All!
Well, it’s been a while… where to begin? The safari was amazing, we couldn’t have asked for a better experience! We saw the big 5 (lion, leopard, water buffalo, elephant and giraffe), along with hyenas, hippos, flamingos, rhinos, and a bunch of awesome birds like Nubian Vultues, Kori Bustards, and one species which our guide didn’t know the name of but that we all agreed looked decidedly like Dan Rathers…. As well as baboons, gazelles and zebras and cheetas and warthogs (which are amazingly adorable and look exactly like Pumba... in fact, the Lion King was bang on about pretty much everything!) It was awesome to be close enough to a family of elephants that we could have actually touched them, had there not been a giant, cranky grandpa elephant protecting the babies. We also had a similar experience with a huge rhino, who was stationed at the side of the road to protect his two-week old baby while nursing. Trouble was, that was the only road leading to where we were headed, and so we had to do a bit of offroading, and let me tell you that being charged by an angy rhino is quite an adrenaline rush! Also, we saw lions mating a few times - a much less exciting event.... we were lucky enough to come upon a pack of female lions on the prowl, as well as one female with her cubs playing in the branches of a tree.
I was all prepared to rough it while on safari, but the showers and beds were actually the most luxuious that I've expeienced in Kenya! There was one kind of scary night though where a lion was heard eating something, and an elephant (apparently much more liable to kill us according to the Masai warrior watchman) outside our tent area.

After the four day safari, our last few days were spent in Nairobi, and within the fist 24 hours we had made up for a month of no shopping. Also, we treated ourselves to a delicious meal at Trattoria - deep fried cheese-coated artichoke in the yummiest spicy tomato sauce eve (wayyyy better than mozza sticks), followed by the best pasta of my life... home made shells with garlic, mushooms, zucchini, asperigus, feta, etc etc.... and then fo dessert, a cake that I will never forget. It was called chocolate meringue cake and it was a cross between a chocolate moose and a really rich dark chocolate cheesecake with the bottom crust made of flaked dark chocolate, and the top cust made of chunks of chocolate meringue cookies with a hot chocolate cocoa sauce in a jug to pour all over it (Karlyn, I think I know what you're getting for your birthday this year!). It may well have been the best dessert I've ever had - I'll have to visit the Olive Branch and have a piece of the raspbery amaretto cheesecake with brandy sauce drizzled on top before I can confirm that.

Anyway, we just got to Uganda and so far I love it! There's this big CHOGM razzmatazz happening here soon where all the commonwealth heads of govenenment (52 of them to be exact, with ove 5000 delegates and her the Queen of England herelf) will descent upon Uganda for their bi-annual meeting... why they chose this country I can't be sure, but it's worked out well for us so far as it is the eason why many of the roads we drove on were so well paved and the aiport we landed in was barely two weeks old. I thoroughly enjoyed Kenya, but I am happy to escape the random election-related riots and from what I've seen so far, the people are somehow even nice, the sceney more breathtaking, and the food more delicious! Apparently it is also much safer here. Magz and I wouldn't (/would) be caught dead out and about after dark in Kenya, but apparently here the threat is nowhere near as high - we've been told that this has always been the case as the tribes from which most Kenyans come were notoriously violent in comparison to the more merchant-driven histories of those here in Kenya. Also, I've noticed the sense of humour is much more compatible with our Canadian one. Today we were taken to the school where we'll be volunteering and it just happened to be the big annual shindig where the kids sing and dance for all the teachers and parents, and it was so much fun - those kids can move!

We lucked out as far as accomodations go - we've got the only placement with a western toilet, internet, and (gasp!) a fridge! It makes the bathroom cockroaches easier to overlook...Our host parents are a newly wed couple and they are amazing., Valence is the director of the local organization we're working with and Dorine is the best cook ever. We had pumpkin for dinner last night and it was delicous!! ...Although it looked and tasted suspiciously like squash. One of the other girls living here is in the Peace Corps and they gave her an awesome cookbook that shows you things like how to bake a cake on a propane stove - it should prove priceless. The dialect here is Lugandan, and is a mixture of Swahili and Arabic, so I know just enough to feel totally confused. We're not exactly sure what our day to day volunteer activities will be here but I'll keep you posted!

~Julia

P.S. For the downsides of Uganda, it is way hotter here, and there are so many more mosquitos, who apparently find me a very tasty treat, but so far no malaria
=:0)