Rafting this weekend

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We are looking forward to this weekend in Jinja white water rafting. We have been quite exhausted recently, even now just letting out a big yawn at 10 past 10am. We are waking up at the normal work time of 6am on Saturday to get on the free transport to Jinja. The rafting comes with a free night’s stay in a dorm in which we are going to spend Sunday taking a day off relaxing trying to recover from work and rafting. We will book a separate weekend with the same format in a couple of weekends time but instead of rafting we will be quad biking with an evening of sunset cruise. With each weekend the travel is free, the night’s stay is free and with huge discounts if you book a combo deal, the 2 weekends are actually really cheap.

We stopped off yesterday at a local coffee shop (1000 cups) and had a nice afternoon speaking to some British and American friends pretending to be ‘normal’ with the smell of proper coffee (although I don’t like it). We then went home to do our ironing; the house help does our washing for, if it’s a small load, £1.20 and if it’s a big load £2.50 which is a huge help as we have tried washing our clothes and are rubbish at it.

Down the main road in Kampala there are lots of homeless children, they sit on the floor holding their hands up and asking for money from anyone who walks by. The child, seeing a white person, hopes to their feet keeping up with our fast pace walks trying to ask for money. We walk 10 yards more and realise there is now 2 kids running with us. The further we go we become a stronger magnet attracting more and more kids whilst saying genda (which is the only word I know that might get rid of them, which means go). They eventually give up and go back to their begging posts. This on one hand sounds quite mean although we have been told numerous amount of time if we give anything to these kids they will see white people more and more as money as they would a person. We also get told stories of their parents sending the kids on the streets to pay for their alcohol addiction. And along with each child there is usually a adult looking over them, presumably waiting for the cash that the 4-10 years olds get.

We see many wild dogs look scruffy with open sores, scabs, pussy eyes and very skinny. This one time, walking home, we saw this one dog with really raw genitals in which we pointed at and understood then why he was walking more like a penguin than a dog. He obviously also wanted something so followed us for 5 minutes, crossing roads, not stopping except for licking a certain area. Meg hates dogs anyway so one chasing us is a big deal, so we quickened our pass crossing roads and then hiding on the other side only to see the dog has also managed to waddle past the crazy traffic.

We are, with every passing day, getting more and more excited to see friends and family at the different countries we are going too.

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