Blogs from Kampala, Central Region, Uganda, Africa - page 15

I'm sorry I haven't been diligent with my blogging--work is busy and, to be honest, I just don't think about it often. Thanks to my wonderful parents, I was reminded that it is something that I should actually keep up-to-date. I have been editing a lot of papers for work; some for a Parliamentary Symposium on Oil in Uganda, which I will get to attend in June, and some focusing on the best ways to distribute oil wealth. I now know (almost) everyone at work by name, and the majority of us eat lunch together every day. Speaking of eating... The food here is good, but monotonous. Basically every meal consists of starch and a meat (or beans for me.) Sometimes there are also greens--like kale, but slightly different. The starch could be matoke, which is ... read more

After having four weeks of holidays with the kids, yesterday we saw them back at school. Over the past week, we have been busy organising their school requirements as well as placing two kids into boarding school, the youngest into kindergarten and another boy into day school. This is a direct result of the money that we raised before we left. We would like to comment on the two boys who we placed into boarding school. The decision to put them into boarding school was to prevent them from returning to the slums and to give them the best chance of a successful future. Both boys had the tendency to return to the slums due to external influences and we all saw that it was necessary for them to be away from Kampala to give them ... read more

I get up at 4:45am to get ready and I wanted to wash my hair for maybe the last time in a while with nice shampoo and conditioner, unfortunately I’m so tired (and, as Tim says, blonde) that I end up using liquid body soap instead of shampoo - at least I used conditioner and not body moisturizer! GOODBYE GORAH Andrew meets us at our tent at 5:30am to take our bags and us down to the car, remember that we can’t walk alone in the dark. While Andrew and I were having a bit of a chat (as you would expect at that time of the day) Tim tells us to be quiet and listen. Nearby we could hear the lions roaring and the Hyena’s howling, it also explained what the noises were we could ... read more

I just wrote a whole entry which was promptly deleted. Awesome. I have arrived safe and sound in Kampala. I almost didn't get out of JFK due to an unfortunate Delta Airlines policy that states that one must have the credit card they booked their ticket with with them at the airport into order to check in to discourage credit card fraud. That is all fine and good - except that I didn't have the card with me. This lead to a two hour ordeal in which I talked to a number of Delta employees trying to convince them to either skip over the check (who was going to know anyway) or to refund and re-sell the ticket to me on a credit card I had with me. The supervision informed this could be done but ... read more

This is the venue through which I hope to keep in contact with people in the US and Europe. If you subscribe to the blog, you should get an e-mail when I update it, or you can just check it every once in a while. If you do subscribe, make sure that the e-mails don't get trapped in your spam folder--when I tried it out, they got stuck in mine. I'll try to keep this updated at least twice a week, but I can't make any firm promises... ... read more