We left Entebbe on schedule at 7:00am on the 400 kilometer drive to our duty station at Kalinzu. Except for Kampala and some of the larger towns the road was pretty good. For some reason no road repairs seem to be made in the towns. This being Sunday there wasn’t much traffic but the roads were lined with people dressed in their Sunday best on the way to church. The women’s dresses had peaked shoulders similar to those of the Herrera in Botswana and the colors were vibrant. Young girls had on frilly party dresses and looked wonderful. All along the way we saw food stands and markets with literally tons of bananas and lorries loaded with more. We stopped twice, once right on the equator at the Equator Café for muffins and coffee and again for lunch (our last non-Ugandan meal) in Mbarara.
The environmental center at Kalinza will be our home for the next six weeks. It is surrounded by the Kalinzu forest and a tea plantation and banana farms. It’s lovely until you recall this once was all forest and home to many chimpanzees. Still it’s a nice setting and we were watched by four or five black and white colobus monkeys as we sat outside planning the week. Our welcoming committee also included Robert and Lawrence, our co-workers, several other Forest Service guys and about 50 local kids who were quite taken with Connie.
Our room is half again the size of our tent, none too clean and not terribly well ventilated. But I am sure it will be fine once we clean it up and get organized. There is no electricity as we knew but we have a two burner gas stove for cooking. A small shelf system, a single chair and a table complete the furnishings. The “shower room” has no water or even plumbing but has room to do the bucket wash routine. The pit toilet has no throne, just a rectangular hole in the floor. This will take some getting used to.
Tonight we are staying at the Park Hotel in Bushenyi, the town were we can buy most things we’ll need but we will get our fruits and vegetables from stalls closer to home. Emma and Jacque met us here. They came up by bus to do some Roots and Shoots groundwork and to accompany Steph home. The JGI rule is never travel alone which makes trips like this sound like the farmer with the chicken, fox and corn and the rowboat.
We have eaten dinner (rice and beans) and are in our room with the generator roaring outside. The electricity died around 6:30pm. I think we will appreciate the peace and quiet in Kalinzu if our neighbors are not too loud.
We learned a lot about Stephanie on the ride. She’s 29 and has always loved animals, majored in biology, just missed out on a slot in veterinary school and has been in Africa for six years. She taught school in Rwanda for four years before joining JGI-Uganda, first as a volunteer and now a major player. She is engaged to Petit, a black Rwandan refuge who at 26 is just finishing his education which was disrupted by the genocide in Rwanda. He lived for a long time as a refugee in Kenya before moving to Kampala and they are trying to decide whether to live in Uganda, Kenya or Rwanda when they get married. 