Blogs from Kabale, Western Region, Uganda, Africa

The final days in Kabale were starting to count down, before all of us MUST students would have to pack up our things, say our goodbyes, and head back to Mbarara. Work at the Kihefo clinic continued to be slow, and Leandra still had only seen one child admitted to the nutrition clinic the entire month we were there, so we decided to take matters into our own hands. After hearing the insanely disorganized and chaotic stories from the other U of S girls at the Rugazi clinic – dirty equipment, lack of supplies, severe acute cases, even helping deliver babies – we decided we need to see another hospital. So Monday morning we put on our lab coats, paraded up to the Kabale general hospital and walked in, pretending we were supposed to be there. ... read more

This post covers our second week at Kihefo, which was a lot more interesting than the first week, as we finally were able to get to the rural communities and make some progress on our group project. I started the week off spending some time with Alphonse and learning more about the rabbit-breeding project. In the morning, Alphonse came to Kihefo, picked me up on his boda boda and off we went to visit the farms of people who either had already started breeding rabbits or were just getting prepared to do so. I need to stop for a moment. I was so pumped to finally ride a boda boda here, aka a motorcycle! It had been years since I was on a bike, and I so badly wanted to try cruising around on one in ... read more

Geo: -1.25418, 29.9928The Mountain Gorilla!!It's an incredible feeling when you see a species that is considered critically endangered. It's an incredible feeling to stand within 5 meters of a 220kg Silver-back who feels comfortable with our close presence. It's an incredible feeling to even have the opportunity to visit these amazing creatures. It's a surreal feeling, especially afterwards, the time goes too quick and you're left thinking if it was a dream and wishing you could have spent a whole day with them, if not more. Pictures don't do the experience justice but they will always remind you of the experience.It took a full day to get to our secluded accommodation on the outskirts of Bwindi National Park.We managed in the late day to get a car from Kabale to Rushaga which felt like we were ... read more

After a great night’s sleep I got up fairly early and had breakfast at the Gorilla Rest Camp. After the journey I had on the boda boda to get to Ruhija from Kabale, I wasn’t exactly relishing the prospect of doing the same to get back to Kabale, particularly after the rain that had fallen in the past two days. So, when Wim and Annalise, the Dutch couple I had tracked the gorillas with, offered me a lift in their truck to Kabale, where they were going through en route to Kigali, I had to restrain myself from biting their hands off. Wim and Annalise had driven down from Holland in a seriously pimped out 4x4 truck that had a bed, cooker and pretty much everything you would need travelling through Africa. Even with the problems ... read more

Hello hello :) I’m still trying to catch up with photos and blogs around Uni work but my computer is just so slow and frustrating! Drew’s seems to do everything really quickly. I’ve been about to throw mine out of the window several times but luckily Drew has saved it by doing something that speeds it up. We think it’s a combination of my camera taking 14Megapixel pictures (I guess that’s good, but now there’s dust in the lens which appears on every photo so I’m not too happy about that) and the amount of stuff in my ‘Rubbish Bin’ (at 7.5GB of data it was more than everything else on my computer put together, not sure what it all was). If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know! Friday 11th May – KAMPALA ... read more