Actually, it should be the week with all the party, meaning last week. Now, I know I'm not the biggest party animal in the world, there are people going out a lot more and longer than I do, especially with a little help from their chemical friends. But I think Ugandans could give even them a run for their money. Take my friend Lulu: I met her last week, just when I was despairing of ever discovering the mythological Kampalan nightlife. When I phoned her up, she said my life was going to change quite a lot - I didn't realize [View Full Entry]

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Ok, so I know Ugandans are polite. So much so that I usually feel like a badly dressed potato around them. But the amount of messages I got after arriving me to Kabale, asking if I was alright, seemed kind of extreme, even for Ugandan standards. But then my colleague Paul told that people weren't just polite, they were asking quite literally if I had survived the trip. Looking at Ugandan road statistics, actually not a surprising question. I know I'm a spoiled European and all that, and that I cannot expect the same level of comfort than at home, blablabla. [View Full Entry]

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Blog Entry: October 28, 2009/ Nov. 2nd It’s been ages since I last wrote! Things have really picked up here at work. Lindsey and I have had the opportunity to go out into the field more and we’ve expanded our health communication project. I think one of my favorite trips was visiting the beneficiaries of TASO’s “Trickle Up” program, which funds agri-business start-ups for HIV positive patients. We met one woman who had been given money to begin selling fruit at a roadside stand. She showed us how she invested her monthly profits back into her business because o [View Full Entry]

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yes mom and dad, i went to Uganda this weekend. =) and i'm now back in kenya safe and sound! but seriously, this weekend was probably one of the coolest things i've ever done. i went white water rafting on the Nile! i can't even begin to describe how amazing it was. first of all, we were in Jinja, Uganda and it was soo beautiful! ...huge hills, so much green, trees and flowers! we went through this company called the nile river explorers and there were quite a few people going rafting on saturday and also lots of kayakers . we [View Full Entry]

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I arrived at the Ugandan border with Rwanda and spotted three other white girls traveling in a group. They turned out to be canadian and, as a respite from being the only white person in sight, I decided to travel onward with them. In Kisoro we booked a shared taxi to the next (slightly larger) town, Kabale. On the 2+ hour ride to Kabale the three girls were irritable, impatient, angry, and frustrated (they had booked this taxi because they had not wanted to wait a few hours for the bus all the way to Kampala and thought - I have [View Full Entry]

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Here we are now, 2 weeks in. I’ve started to settle in, and got over some of the first time hurdle that await you in this city - find a room, drive a boda, get anywhere within a certain frame of time... My room is in Munyenga-Bukassa, which I’ve learned since moving there is not considered Kampala anymore. But at least it’s close to work, and I value my sleep in the morning! It’s a nice place, although it’s the first kitchen with an earth-floor I’ve ever had! The place is locked up like Fort Knox, even though there aren’t any [View Full Entry]

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The joy and excitement of being home with family and friends was all too quickly replaced with loneliness and exhaustion as I stepped off the third plane in 24 hours and finally set foot back in Uganda. I was thankful to have had the time at home with family and dear friends, and especially to have had time with my father during his recovery from surgery. Even though I was home for over a month, it went VERY FAST. Thank you to everyone who made my trip home such a blessing! The trip back to Uganda was relatively uneventful. However, the [View Full Entry]

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Well, the good news is, I'm alive and well. The bad, that I did get to put a single step out of my hotel room this weekend, seeing as I had developed a close personal relationship with the toilet bowl. Of course, every rookie newcomer has to go through this, and it actually happens every time I go to a hot country - but it doesn't make it any more fun. Actually, the only fun connected to me this weekend would have been watching me Sunday night, crouching under the sink, trying to hold it up with my head while disassembling [View Full Entry]

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So I really apologize to all my readers for failing to update this as often as promised. I have no good reasons, just lame excuses. But to be honest, Ive been so depressed since this horrible virus wiped out my computer and I lost all my files- most importantly my pictures form this year. Yup. I was Einstein enough to NOT back anything up. I get what I deserve what I suppose. But all those memories gone. I just couldn bring myself to post my blog without pictures. And my computer sits dormant, dead, or rather, just sleeping until the day [View Full Entry]

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So here I am, sitting in an office in the heart of 'the Pearl of Africa', hoping to finish my first blogging entry before the next power cut, wondering how in the Spaghettimonster's name I ended up a few thousand miles from home, at a desk in Kampala, Uganda. In the words of a British pop band (or several, for that matter): back to the start. I'm not your average bungee-jumping, sky-diving, overall adventure loving type of traveller. Overall, I can live without having had Malaria, I don't think getting stranded in the middle of a foreign country without money and [View Full Entry]

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