#1 – May 17th 2007

Wasuze otya! (Good morning!)

I’ve landed safe and sound after what seemed like quite a long journey! I left Amsterdam on the 16^th, had a very long delay in Nairobi, Kenya, finally landing in Entebbe, Uganda in the late afternoon on the 17^th. I’m quite thankful all the flying is over, I’m not such a huge fan of take-offs/landings (especially when the plane ‘hops’ upon touching the ground, which one inevitably did), nor do I enjoy plane food, mmm mushy, slimy ‘meat-like’ substances…Other than a bumpy landing in Entebbe, the only other interesting occurrence was my being seated next to the previous President of Makerere University! The premier university in Uganda, Makerere is very beautiful (Mr.Shwerer showed me pictures) and had partnerships with many universities in Canada. I have it on my list to visit the university and maybe try to make some contacts there.

Natalie, Peter, and two people from Mengo Hospital picked me up in a Matatu from Entebbe Airport, unfortunately they had to wait three hours because of delays, but as is often assumed, Africans are far more laid back than Westerners, and no one minded a bit. I’ve got to tell you, the driving in Uganda is an entirely different thing that what we refer to as ‘driving’ in Canada. In Victoria, we could probably say 50km/hr with very polite driving manners is fairly typical. Not so much here (small understatement). First off, you drive on the left side of the road, as Uganda was colonized by the British and you still find remnants of this colonization everywhere. Secondly, passing when there is a car coming directly at you is considered normal. There are no stop signs or stop lights, you just sneak in. Yup, just ram your way into traffic basically. Pure insanity is all I can think of to describe it. I couldn’t even watch out the front window. Interestingly, gas is roughly $1.60/lt and the gas stations are constantly out of gas. There are people walking everywhere, more than you can imagine, and also people on little motorized bikes called Boda-bodas, all competing for space on the road. So far as I can tell, the people are lowest on the scale of what to watch out for. The near-misses I’ve witnessed in my first day here is more than I’ve ever seen in Victoria.

Natalie and Peter have it arranged so the three of us are staying in a house together on the Mengo Hospital property in Kampala. If you are interested, Mengo Hospital is pinpointed on Google Earth, you can actually see our place! It is quite cozy, all cement and plain, but still homey; hard to describe, I’ll try to get some pictures. We all have our own separate bedrooms, all quite large, I feel rather spoiled! The bathroom is what you would imagine at a campground, no hot water either, but nothing I can’t get used to! I was completely spoiled in the Nederlands with my family, so now I must acclimatize to this.

To celebrate the first night of our adventure, the three of us as well as a Ugandan friend of Nat and Peters went out to ‘The Ethiopian Village’ downtown. We bargained with a ‘taxi’ driver to get down there, a 15 minute ride for $10 (or its equivalent in Ugandan shillings (1400sc=$1). The food was AMAZING!!! There was an Ethiopian band playing, with an amazing singer (Erin, sounded like that girl of that movie), and we ate with our fingers. After dinner we went to the taxi park to get home, and wow, more craziness. Again, not even a picture will do it justice. Just imagine 400 white vans, thousands of people, all crammed into a tiny park trying to maneuver around each other.

I have no idea what my future holds, what lies ahead – I can barely comprehend what has happened these last few days, and have not yet accepted the fact that I am in Uganda, in Africa, that this is actually happening. Thank you all for your well wishes and encouraging words, that is what has gotten me here, and what will get me through. I can see already that its going to be tough being away from my family, and friends, and that there will be a lot of challenges for me here. I am ready though, it is certainly time.

Talk to you all soon,

Nicole Nelson

ps – for those that are interested, Natalie and Peter’s grassroots organization that I am now working for has a website, www.partnershipsforopportunities.org, and Natalie recently added her photographs from Bwera, which are absolutely stunning.

Interesting tid-bit:

The Commonwealth Meeting is being held here in Uganda in November. The Queen will be visiting and thus they are pumping money into cleaning up the city, but only on the roads the Queen will drive on!! Everywhere along there roads during the day you see hundreds of young men with big axes breaking up dirt and digging ditches to make room for a new sewage system. Interestingly, there are still thousands of Acholi internally displaced people (refugees) in the North coping with the end of a 20 year civil war who see none of that money.