Volunteering in uganda

hey everyone!

I arrived on Monday into Bujagali Falls, a very small area outside of Jinja, where I'll be volunteering for a bit of time. Bujagali is a tiny little place but is known for its grade 5 rapids, supposed to be some of the best rafting and kayaking in the world. They are on the Nile River which begins very near to here in Jinja. There is one big company that offers the white water rafting/kayaking etc. and they attract all sorts of travelers. Most of the people I've met are young Australians or Brits who are here on vacation to kayak the rapids.

I am staying in a hostel called Eden Rock Resorts which is pretty nice. They have options to camp (didn't bring my tent, darnit), sleep in a banda, or in a shared dormitory. I took the dorm and I'm rooming right now with 2 australian girls that are here to volunteer as well.

I am volunteering with an NGO that has goal of refurbishing the government owned elementary schools. For the past few days we've been painting both the inside walls and outside walls of the school. Its a simple one-story school with about 10 classrooms. There is one office, principal's office, and a staff room. That is all there is. There's no library, gymnasium, cafeteria, etc. Students come back for the new school year starting on Monday. I'm hoping to be able to get inside the classrooms to see how these teachers teach, they must be incredible to be successful in these conditions!

The NGO, Soft Power also has a health department that distributes mosquito nets to families in need in the surrounding villages. They instruct them on how to set them up properly and how to treat them( with deet or somtehing similar). Malaria is one of the largest health problems in this area. I think one day I'll hop on board with them to see what its like.

Well...I'm off...
Thanks for reading!

Love,
dana

The next step...

Oli Otya!
This is my last day in Kampala, for a couple of weeks. I am leaving early tomorrow morning to go to Jinja and Bujagali Falls (about 40 miles east) to work with a British/Ugandan NGO called Soft Power Education. Projects that I could be doing include a wide variety of educational related things, not sure yet what I will be assigned to. I will take my bike with me because the area is supposed to be pretty calm, compared to Kampala's bustling streets. Jinja is where the local beer, Nile Special, is brewed and it is also where the the source of the Nile River is. There are lots of fun things to do in this area such as mountain biking(hooray!), kayaking, and white water rafting. Hopefully I will have loads of opportunities to experience these things!
I will stay in Jinja for almost two weeks, then I will head back to Kampala again to meet my bike tour leader Patrick for another bike tour, but short one. I'll join a group of Germans for 5 days to tour another area of Western Uganda that I didn't get to on the first bike tour. After this tour I will probably head back to Jinja for 2 more weeks of volunteering, but who knows where my bicycle tires will take me then!

Well, I hope that this message finds you all in good health and very happy! I'll try to post more pictures when i get settled in in Jinja. ;-) Cheers!

tracking Dana

Here is a little rundown of the places I've visited on the bike tour if anyone wants to see it on Google Earth :-)

Fort Portal
Kibale National Park
Nkingo
Kasese
Mweya
Ishaka
Kashenyi
Rukungiri(now)
Kasizli Falls (tomorrow)
Ntungamo (Thursday)
Kampala(Friday)
Jinja ( I'll be taking a taxi here next week to start a volunteering gig!) I'll post more about this later. :-)
Hope all is well! Thanks for the comments and e-mails, I really enjoy reading them!!!

updates

Just a quick note as it is getting late and I am desperately in need of a bucket bath...
Highlights of the past few days:
1. chasing a nile monitor around the backyard of our hostel in Mweya ( ha ha scott!)
2. biking through muddy rocky roads for 55K yesterday and today, getting covered in gunk!
3. Teaching a crowd of young smiling Ugandan faces a new song in English.
4. Arriving in Rukungiri today to find a room with a toilet and a big plate of Vegetable curry with chapati!
5. thinking about Obama's innauguration tonight! Woohoo!

Pictures

Hand washing my clothes outside of my own personal "banda", mud hut. Inside of this little round house is a bed with a mosquito net, and a small table with a chair. No electricity or running water, but that was okay! The bucket bath was kind of refreshing and humbling.
This was a little lizard checking out one of our modern bicycles. He was checking it up and down trying to figure out what the heck it was and if he could climb on it!
Here I am with one of our German travelers, Gabri, eating fresh sugarcane that our leader, Patrick had just cut up with his machete! Wow, this was such a treat. But also the reason for lots of little AFrican kids getting tooth rot...from sucking on the sugarcane non-stop.

This is the view we have had for most of our days of riding so far. Directly behind me are tea plantations. The scent of the tea is pretty strong when riding right by. When this picture was taken I think I had just passed a heard of cattle. hehe.

Muzungus on Parade!

Hey! We've been on the road now for four straight days and it feels so good! This is the best way to see someplace, I am seeing every little nook and cranny village, every blade of grass, and hundreds of groups of kids coming out to see the Muzungus(white people) on bicycles!

Yesterday we tromped around Kibale National Forest for 4.5 hours tracking chimpanzees with a guide. We only walked so long because the monkeys kept teasing us! We heard them hooting close by so we would plow through the brush to find them, but then they had gone. We saw their tracks, urine, poo, and remnants of fig fruits to see where they had gone. So finally after 3.5 hours we saw two big boys! It was the most beautiful sight in the world to see them in their natural habitat. That was better than seeing a million chimps in a zoo. Truly magnificent. We've seen other little monkeys all around in the trees. In some places that we've ridden through they are just as common as squirrels are at home. I wish my brother Scott could have experienced this hike through the forest. He would have been in heaven...

Last night we stopped in the best little place to sleep. It was right on a little lake with a dock and so I bathed in the lake and we all went swimming for a bit before dinner. There were cute little white monkeys swimming with us in the water too!

I haven't really eaten anything too bazarr-o yet. All lunches and dinners so far have been: rice, beans, peanut sauce, beef stew, and matooke (the national dish which is mashed plantains). So, the meals are filling and quite delicious.

We have a rest day tomorrow so i may write more then. Thanks for reading!

a moral dilemma

There is something that always conflicts me when traveling to places outside of the U.S. I encountered that conflict here yesterday walking through the city. Children no older than 4-5 years old came running up to me begging for money. I was not shocked as this happens all over. Although every time I am faced with these young, cute kids with snotty noses, my heart breaks. I do not give money or pay them any attention because the locals say they are begging on behalf of their parents. But, then I think about how desperate their family must be for parents to send off their 5 year old to run the streets unsupervised without even shoes on their feet. So, while they may be begging for their parents, maybe the parents are using the money to feed them...so I have always felt very sad and almost on the edge of tears when I see these kids, babies...

But, this time I do not feel sad because I know that I am now in a place where I can give the kids something better than money, I can give them an education. I can not only give them "a fish to eat for one day" but I can teach them how to fish to eat for a lifetime. So cliche, but true. So, maybe this is an idealist's way of masking my guilt of being a foreigner with money to blow on a bicycling trip for fun around a poverty stricken country. But at least it is true. If their parents asked me to provide them with an education so that they would not have to send their babies off to beg, I would in a heartbeat with no questions asked.

Also, I noticed some young Ugandan girls next to me in the internet room using facebook. Funny how my American friends were probably on facebook the same time that these Ugandan girls were. The internet is pretty amazing.

Just so everyone knows, I feel safe, am eating lots, and have just met four other Americans that will be doing the bicycling tour with me. There are still 2 to come who should be arriving tomorrow. We venture away from civilization on Monday morning. I will try to upload a photo sometime, maybe later today or tomorrow.

Lovies to all! Thanks for reading!

Kampala, Uganda!!

I made it! I just paid 30 US cents for a half hour of using the internet. I am sweaty, hungry, thirsty, and smiling. I made it through two days of traveling, airplanes, one overpriced hotel room (but super swanky) in Dubai, and the craziest cab ride of my life (well maybe motorcycle taxi rides in China were equally as thrilling:o)

I am staying in a hotel in downtown Kampala. I have a twin bed and my own bathroom with a shower that has hot water, sort of. Breakfast this morning was complimentary on the hotel and consisted of wheat toast with jam, a Spanish omelet, fresh pineapple and I think papaya, and a teeny cup of Ugandan coffee. It was delicious! The bread was very thick and moist, almost like it had just been baked. It was not like the dry, flat wheat bread I eat at home.

I feel like there is so much I could be writing about so I'll just pick out a couple things that stick out in my mind after only one day of being here:

1. My biggest challenge here is crossing the street. The boda-bodas(motorcycle taxis) and the other auto-vehicles(90% toyotas) have no fear. They are lawless drivers and will even go into the on-coming vehicle lane to pass aruond a slower moving vehicle. This traffic is much like what I experienced in China and sometimes Mexico, although being in the US for 3 straight years now I have forgotten how brave I need to be just when crossing the street.

2. My mosquito net is not 100% mosquito proof. I woke up at 5am this morning to a battle against 3 little pests inside the net. By 6am and lots of adjusting of my net, I came out victorious and got another hour of sleep, wee!
Mosquitos-0, Dana-1. I am thankful I am taking those malaria pills.

Well, that's all I will write for now. I don't want to overwhelm anyone!

I should be meeting some other bicyclers tomorrow afternoon/evening...

Don't forget to email me with news of home-happenings! Starting on Monday I will be away from internet access for most of the 2 weeks while on the bike. I hope this finds you all well and safe wherever you are!

New Year's Eve 2008/09, Packing!

Packing the bike...

So, if anyone is wondering what a bike looks like packed up and ready to be flown to Africa, here is what it looks like in the box. The box is a Thule bike box, or travel box that you can also put on a roofrack for travel. You can't see the wheels because they are in the layer below this one. Taking the bike apart was fairly simple after a couple times of doing it. The seatpost, pannier rack, pedals, and handlebar came off easily. Hopefully they go on just as easily in a few days! Ha! At least I have four days in Uganda before the bike trip starts to figure this all out and to make adjustments. After I took this picture I went out and got a load of bubble wrap to smother the parts with for extra protection, I'm not sure how it will get handled by the airlines. :-)

Happy New Year!

Steven and I stayed in Cortland for New Year's Eve and ran downtown at 11:55 to see our infamous ball drop, slowly. I think it was about 10 degrees outside, brrr!