sean and i have successfully made it to our destination: uganda. we ended up spending a couple more days than expected in kenya because our host there was so damn cool. so we hopped on the bus (a very old version of you standard greyhound bus) at 7am and got to jinja a long and scenic 12hours later. it's absolutely beautiful here. i was expecting to be surprised at how it is here, but the image i had in my mind before leaving canada (pieced together from random stories, textbook case studies, and all that...) was pretty much right. i didn't expect, though, all the "towns" that were basically rows upon rows of 'houses' constructed from odds-and-ends materials... corrugated metal, some brick, some mud... with a bunch of 'shops' along the street. sean says they're called trading centers. there are a few companies that advertise by painting these shops in bold colours. so every village we went by had these hot pink buildings, painted by zain, and lime green ones, painted by safaricom, and in uganda there's also bright yellow ones. i think it's the only time that i've seen attractive advertizment... it adds so much colour to these otherwise brown and metal places. well, i guess the orange soil does a bit, too. the contrast bt the blue sky, rich green landscape, and bright red soil is beautiful.
so today sean and i had a couple of errands to run. i got a phone. (my number is 011 256 779 350 898, call me!!!). we're about to get me some malaria pills (there's no shot, so you take preventative pills). we had some breakfast...
we're staying at the busoga trust house, and sean's on the prowl for a cheaper and nicer place for us to stay. we went out last night to meet with a couple of his friends at a restaurant called Two Friends. it's owned by elin's mom, and apparently she offered him a job there. inflation has made things more expensive than we previously thought, so we're on the look out for payed work.
overall, i like it here a lot. jinja itself is a more modern town, by african standards. it takes ten minutes to walk across the town, and another ten to get to where we're staying. it seems to be very touristy, there are many shops with doo-dads... carved stuff, clay stuff, woven stuff... all very nice in the way that tourists like nice things. there are also way more mzungu's than i expected. we see them on the street now and then, and there are a few at the guest house where we're staying.
i should run for now, and get some malaria medication.
lots of love!
1 comment:
So glad you guys arrived safely and all is well! Tell Sean that I'm reading a good book that he'd probably appreciate: Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel. Interesting thoughts on development in there. Have you read it? It opens talking about what coffee growers in Uganda get compared to what people pay for the processed stuff.
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