Safari Part 2

Party Planner / Safari part 2

Friday morning I went into school very early; 7:45 to be exact. Not shockingly, my class had to take some sort of mid-term test (which I was not made aware of.) I was supposed to do my lesson on the Unification of Italy. I spent the entire night Tuesday night (while watching the Michael Jackson service) working on timelines to help the students understand dates and chronological order. I made a huge timeline of the history of the United States, I made a timeline of my personal life, and I made a timeline of our trip to Uganda. I then made a blank timeline of the unification of Italy, which they were going to fill in.

Things did not turn out so great because the mid-term lasted about 70 of the 80 minutes that I was supposed to have class. I spoke with the boys for the last ten minutes and introduced what we will be doing next week. I guess it is good because now I don’t have to plan for next week, but I was all ready for today, and I feel bad because this is the class that I have not been in too much, and we only have two weeks of teaching left. This is all part of the Uganda experience though and we just have to deal with what we are able to accomplish. Time management is a HUGE issue here and something that can really use some work.

We all keep asking each other if this experience is what we anticipated it to be before we left. It is a very difficult question for me to answer because I tried to not have any expectations before I left. I had absolutely no clue what to expect here. I have a few responses:

1) Safety – I feel much safer than I thought I was going to feel. The people in Uganda are so friendly, almost to a fault. I understand that we are different, and we are living in their home, but we cannot go ten steps without having to wave to people or say apwoyo. It sounds like a terrible thing to say, but imagine walking down any busy street in the States and every other person expects you to wave to them, or talk with them. I am not complaining, but I am just a little surprised at how much attention we get. I love these Acholi people though and feel just as safe, if not safer that I feel in a city back in the States.

2) Education – I NEVER thought that I was going to come to Uganda for six weeks and change the face of education. Never. However, I did not realize that I would learn so much from these people. I feel as though they taught me more than I taught them. I am sure they will disagree with that, but I think that is how most of us feel. I will take more back to my students and be a better teacher in the States because of these people here, and that makes the trip entirely worth it.

3) Poverty – I realized very early on in this experience that “poor” is simply a comparative word. These people are “poor” to US. They may know that they do not have much, but it is normal for them. They only need the necessities to survive and as long as they have them, they are happy. Everyone is “poor” compared to someone else. They may not even think they are poor until they see people that have more than they do. I do not know if I was expecting people to be begging, or to look unhappy, or feel bad for themselves, but that is not the case here, and that is awesome.

4) Overall experience – This experience has exceeded my expectations. My number one goal was to get to know these Acholi people, learn their culture and see and hear first- hand accounts of what these people have lived through. I have done that. I have also formed friendships with these Acholi people which will hopefully last a very long time. We are all better people for meeting these people and seeing their courage, bravery, determination, and strength is an inspiration to us all.
So anyway, obviously Friday was another easy work day, but I used the time to check out the sport championship at Pece Stadium which is right down the road from our place. This is the championship sport meet for schools throughout all of Uganda. There were thousands of people in attendance, but I think that John, Michael and I were the only Munu in the entire stadium. I actually felt like more people were interested in what we were doing than the actual races. John brought up the point that we are treated like a combination of a freak show and an “A” list celebrity. People were actually taking video with their cell phones of us just standing around. It was a little too awkward for me so we only stayed for twenty minutes or so, but it was something really cool to witness.

We went on the Safari Saturday morning so we decided we should stay in on Friday. Of course, it was not long before we decided to have people over our place as kind of a going away party for group 1. It turns out that none of group 1 even came, but we had one of the best nights yet. After we were done at our place we actually went to Da Pub to meet some of the group 3 girls. Nobody needs to hear any details about Friday night, but we all had a great time.

Safari Saturday

We piled in to our mutatus (which is never a good thing) on Saturday morning and headed off to Murchison Falls for Safari. Our mutatu consisted of myself, Michael, Tammy, Catharine, Mandi, Bill and Jon. As we pulled out onto the road our driver put a tape into the tape deck. For 3 straight hours there, 5 straight hours on the safari, and 4 straight hours home we heard the same 10 songs. This tape did not consist of unique Ugandan music, it was a compilation of great love songs. Artists included, Celine Dion (2), Backstreet Boys, Enrique Iglesias (2), Brittney Spears, and a cover of Bryan Adam’s “Everything I do, I do it for You.” Never again will I hear any of those songs and not think of this Safari and this group of people.
After the long trip to Murchison Falls we finally arrived at the gates of the Safari. We were literally red from the dirt kicking up from the mutatu in front of us. Our hair was red, our faces were red, our clothes were red, our fingernails were red. We were completely filthy, but very relieved to get to the gates. The Safari is broken up into two parts. Part 1 (which we did Saturday) is the water Safari on the Nile River (no rapids or anything like that.) On our way to the river we say hundreds of animals including giraffes, elephants, antelope, and other things that I had no idea what they were.

We finally pulled up to the docks and not long after did our boat pull up and we piled in. The boat was just for the 15 of us and our tour guide. The water tour was amazing; we saw hundreds of hippos, we saw crocs, and a bunch of rare birds (which I really couldn’t care less about.) Anyway, the tour took us to Murchison falls, which is a waterfall. We could only get so close to the actual falls, but the scene was incredible. We all took a bunch of pictures (I am sure together we have literally hundreds of the same picture) but it was really nice to look at. Not as amazing as Niagra Falls, but maybe just as beautiful. There is a bunch more I could tell you about day one of the Safari, but it was basically just us looking at a bunch of animals, and hanging out on top of a boat for a day. On the way back to our campground we were all pretty exhausted and were anxious to get to our tents (not to mention I had not eaten one thing all day and it was probably around 5pm at this point.)

We finally get back to the dock and it was only a couple minute drive to our campground. We chose our tents and Michael and I chose the first tent we saw (it was a great idea until 3am in the morning and the bar was still jam packed and our tent was right next to the bar.) We put our things down and went to grab a bite to eat. I had some sort of vegetable spaghetti but to tell the truth I would have eaten anything that was in front of me at that point. I don’t think that one person talked during dinner because we were all so starving. After dinner we all rushed to the showers to clean off the red tint on us. Even though the shower was still freezing, it was great to have a shower with water pressure. We ended up sitting around the campfire for a few hours, but were all in our tents by 10:30. However, there was a group of about 30 kids from England and they were partying all night (at the bar right next to our tent.) If I was not so exhausted I would have been a little more social, but I had absolutely NO desire to do anything except sleep. Unfortunately that did not happen, and I ended up getting about 3 hours sleep before we had to get up at SIX AM!!! I was less than pleased when I found out that we had to get up that early, but the tents were so small and so close together that I guess I would not have been able to sleep in much anyway, and in order to see the good animals we had to get a move on real early.

We piled back into our mutatus which was blasting “Escape” by Enrique Iglesias and drove back to the ferry to get to the other side of the river. One we were on the other side, we piled back into our mutatus and the safari began. I am not going to go into too much detail about this either because I am sure you all can imagine what a safari is and what it entailed. We saw a bunch of wild animals, and sat on top of a mutatu for about 5 hours. The best part of the trip was sitting on the mutatu; it was like being on a rollercoaster (a very dangerous rollercoaster with no seatbelts or protection preventing you from falling off.) We saw everything except Lions (which people were pretty upset about, but it did not bother me for some reason) and it was well worth the money spent.

The drive home consisted of 4 more hours of the same love songs and a flat tire. We had to wait on the side of the “road” until the driver fixed the flat, which was actually surprisingly quick. As we pulled in to our place “hero” was blasting again, and I got some great footage on my video camera of everyone singing along. We all know every word to all ten of those songs, and I will certainly be making a mix of all the songs and sending them to everyone when we get home.

When we got back on Sunday the Pabo guys left pretty quickly and the rest of us went to dinner then set up a huge poker tournament. There were 11 of us and the pot was a total of 130,000 shillings. This may not come as a surprise to anyone, but I won. It was a great ended to the weekend.

We have a lot of research we have to do in these next two weeks and they should go by real quick. We also will be observing each other in class this week, which should be interesting. I also would like to visit all of our participating schools and get some footage of each school and maybe even of all 17 of us doing something in the classroom. It will be cool to put together a video at the end of this of all we have accomplished and all we have seen and done. I know I have been talking a lot about all of the fun things we have been doing, but everyone here is doing great things in their schools and even though all of our experiences have been different, we are all making the best of our situations, and getting everything we can from the community and our surroundings.

I hope the group 1 girls (and Phil) arrive home safely and I hope that you all had a great time in Jinja and Kampala. It was great to get to know you and hopefully we will all stay in touch.

After a month here, we are all staring to come to terms with leaving Gulu. It will be real bitter-sweet. However, I am expecting Jinja to be one of the best days ever (white water rafting and bungy jumping into the Nile) and Amsterdam with Kevin and Bill to be a trip of a lifetime in itself.

Will write again soon,
-Ryan