Blogs from Queen Elizabeth NP, Western Region, Uganda, Africa

It’s me again! I am not on the road to Kampala, but I still need to catch up on my blogging. My last post finished when I returned to Rugazi to begin our community placement (the real deal this time). Divided into the groups Rugazi A and B, twenty of us packed into a MUST bus and sped down the speed-bump-riddled roads to the Rubirizi district (we call our roadtrips African massages since you get shaken up pretty well). Upon arrival, we realised had no running water again. No big deal, because it will come back on right away right? Not so this time, and our custodian/babysitter (because we’re clueless as babies) Martin recruited the guys haul 20L jerry cans for our water needs. This is when I learnt the interesting way that Ugandans close their ... read more

Agandi, and welcome back to the pearl of Uganda! Another couple of weeks down in Rugazi, and we've successfully hashed out our team community projects! The supervisor finally paid us a visit, and gave us the OK for our "plan A" topic on menstrual health. We bought and brought over 300 packages of Afripads (Ugandan-made reusable cloth pads) with us and are looking forward to distributing the pads in the coming weeks as we educate girls in primary 4 - 7 (approximately ages 10-16) about menstrual hygiene and how to make their own cloth pads from the resources available to them. By giving the girls the skills to make these pads for themselves, we hope that this project will be sustainable and have an impact that goes beyond just handing out donations. Thanks to Halimah, the ... read more

Agandi! It seems that I'm beginning to run on Ugandan time, so my apologies if you were beginning to feel impatient waiting for another delayed post. This blog post will be brief--which may end up becoming the Ugandan sense of "brief" which probably means that it will take longer than you would have anticipated even before I mentioned the word "brief". Sorry, but not sorry. ;) If you want to get a better sense of this Ugandan time I have been mentioning, here's a quick and dirty summary on our experiences with the lingo regarding time: Be there in five minutes means "I haven't left yet". It takes about ten minutes translates to a range of anywhere between 30 minutes and 3 hours. Soooo the pace of life is definitely slower here, which I have come ... read more

Hey hey, and sorry for the delay! Agandi (how are you)? Plans shifted a lot since my last post--so if you're confused by the progression of events I am about to recount, don't worry, I'm just as confused as you. instead of going through training all this week, we did a one day orientation on Sunday. Although we were a bit apprehensive of the orientation since we only found out about it the night before, it ended up being incredibly engaging and helpful. Together with some of the local university students, we discussed and participated in several activities about what "development" means to us, our core values, barriers to communication in cross-cultural work, and how to acknowledge our privilege and blind spots. It was a little embarrassing to go through a variety of case studies taken ... read more

The drive from Bwindi to Kibale (where we have a permit for Chimp trekking tomorrow) takes us up the western side of Uganda through the Queen Elizabeth National Park. We don’t expect that much from the park, but do want to try to find the tree climbing lions in the south of the park. The lions are actually quite easy to find – there are 6 in one tree but these are the only ones we see. I manage to bog the Rav4 in a boggy part of the trail. My travel companions are a bit worried about out pushing us out as we have just seen lions up the road, but another vehicles comes past soon and it doesn’t take too much effort to push us clear. We drive along the main road through the ... read more