The Stuff I Couldn’t Tell You

There are a number of things we aren’t allowed to do on an SIT trip: drugs, “relations” with our academic directors, riding boda bodas, rafting the Nile, Staying out after 7 p.m. in Gulu, using ISP money for alcohol, etc. This blog is about the times where we did some of the above, and lived to tell the tale. I have saved this post until the end of the trip because I have enjoyed my time in East Africa, and I didn’t want it to come to an abrupt end. Below are a few fun times we had outside the bounds of SIT law.

PIZZA

Pizza is something that I have missed immensely while here in Uganda and Rwanda. After months of eating rice, beans, and goat meat, little cravings for food back home start to come creeping. When we made it down to Kampala at the end of the Uganda section of our trip, we checked out Robbie’s guidebook and discovered that there was a Dominoes Pizza in town. Our travel weary bodies needed to at least make a slight effort to taste the delights of this pizza oasis. For God’s sake, they even offered delivery! So call we did. We ordered four medium pizzas and one large pizza. Our excitement was palpable. The delivery guy called us and told us that he was waiting outside the University. We scrambled up the hill to find our pizza messiah. He saw the approaching Muzungus and walked towards us, his pizza carrier looked thin, too thin. He pulled out one pizza. What! He recognized our order but said they only made one pizza. Damn. We begrudgingly sat down on the sidewalk to try our smaller than expected meal. It was out of this world delicious.

At that moment, it was decided that the rest of our order must be had. We elected two members of the group to head down town to find this Dominoes (not the American chain). So David and I hopped on a boda and sped into downtown Kampala. We reached the pizzeria and walked inside. We re-ordered our original order; the owner looked at us and said, “Oh, you are the order from Bativa hotel.” The guy knew our order from half an hour ago, but didn’t send the pizzas along. AWA. We waited thirty minutes and our order was ready to go. Five pizzas, two guys. Two guys with five pizzas are incredibly hard to fit on one motorcycle while maintaining the structural integrity of said pizzas. So we split up and snagged two bodas.

There are very few rules when it comes to negotiating the traffic in Kampala. People go when they want to go, motorcycles often use the sidewalk as a road and gridlock is frequent (locally known as “Jam”). This fine evening, traffic was heavy and any westernized rules for travel were well and truly disregarded. We zipped between big trucks that could have easily crushed us, not to mention the pizzas; we dodged other bodas; and we made great use of the sidewalks. At one point, we burst into an intersection and another boda stopped just in time to allow its front tire to rest softly on my calf. Phew. We finally whipped around the corner to our hotel and dismounted gingerly. Our lives and pizzas intact, we brought our Americanized feast home. Because it was the 5^th of November, we watched “V for Vendetta.” Pizza, a movie, and for some, a beer, life doesn’t get much more American than that.

DENIAL?

And by that I mean The Nile. On our last Sunday before our ISP we had a free day, a day to relax and work on our ten-page comprehensive Uganda essay. We had gone to Jinja the day before to see the source of the Nile, even swim in it a little bit. But for us, that just wasn’t enough.

Ever been rafting? It’s a pretty good time. When I worked for Overland Summers in Massachusetts I got to raft three times in one summer! We got to raft a nice gentle Massachusetts river with Class 1 to Class 3 rapids. The scale goes up to Class 6 (Highly likely death). Ever been rafting in Uganda? We got to raft the Nile, one of the largest and longest rivers in the world. Class 3 rapids are as low as the Nile goes. More common, Class 5.

We left our hotel early Sunday morning and were picked up my Adrift rafting Company and bused back to Jinja. A nice Belgian man joined us on our trip over. We arrived, checked in and grabbed our gear. Five people in our group decided that it would be a good life choice to go Bungee jumping over the Nile, more power to them, but I wasn’t even close to thinking that was a good idea. After they all plunged headfirst off of a metal platform over a cliff, we met our raft guides and set off down the river.

Meet Lee. He is Scotsman who works as a raft guide in Uganda for half of the year, and Canada for the other half. Tough life, right? He has been bitten by both a Sac Spider (?) and a monitor lizard in his time in Uganda. Why he still comes back is anyone’s guess. Lee was tasked with keeping our group fully alive for the entire day while also keeping us entertained. As someone who survived the day, I can say he did a good job on both counts.

We began the day by practicing strokes, capsizing the boat, and then hitting our first rapid. For some reason, the guides get a real kick out of flipping the rafts during the rapids. Apparently the Nile is “the safest rafting river in the world,” so they feel justified in this. And I will give it to them; the thrill of being tossed underwater by the full force of Nile and getting popped back to the surface safely is certainly exhilarating.

On one rapid our entire boat capsized and only Caitlin and I returned to our original boat with Lee. It wasn’t very long before we hit another rapid so the boat of Caitlin, Lee and I, in a boat built for 9 mind you, took the rapid on our own. We made it through no problem. The other boat that had taken our stragglers was now a boat of thirteen, they capsized again in no time.

Through out the day we dropped over an eight to nine foot tall waterfall and didn’t capsize, we rafted the largest commercially rafted rapid in the world, and we relaxed and floated down the River Nile. Oh, and in an earlier post about Jinja I mentioned Bujugali falls and the man who rode a jerry can down them. Well we ended up rafting down those falls as well!

Our day went as smoothly as we could have hoped. All thirteen of us had a great time. Our day ended with a strong row against the current to shore where we had a short walk to a hut where a meal of brochette (meat on a stick) and chapatti awaited us along with plenty of beverages. We perused photos of our journey and after a while boarded the bus for the ride home. The following day we all nursed our sunburns (mine were so bad one section of my leg blistered…)

During all of our fun I couldn’t help but notice the large amount of people that actually use the river as an everyday part of their life. Not a kilometer went by where we didn’t see at least 20+ people washing their clothes, bathing, fishing or cooking. We were accompanied by safety kayakers, all of who were local Ugandans. We were told that many of them joined the company because they make a lot of money compared to other jobs. As kayakers they get paid 25,000 UGX ($12.50) a day compared to a teacher who gets paid 5,000 UGX ($2.50) a day. For all the fun we were having rafting the river it was really important to see the way the river impacted the lives of the people of Uganda. With environmentally friendly and sustainable tourism like this rafting organization was providing, local Ugandans are making a great living while not taking too much away from the local environment. It’s unfortunate to think that they are soon going to dam a large section of this part of the river. I am curious to know how much the government has done to help relocate those who will be displaced by the reservoir. My guess is unfortunately not much.


-Muzungu currently in Notting Hill slowly easing his way back into the western world