The chimp house is a zoo despite Debby’s departure. Liz returned from Congo, Ben and Claire, his honey arrived from the U.K., Stu is here from Caniyo Pebidi and Freddy is still here. Now Alice and Rachel who will go to Busingiro came for their volunteer gig. The end result had Ben and Claire sharing the floor in CSWCT, Freddy and Stu in a tent, and Carol went to the Golf View Hotel last night.
With all these people the cistern went dry so I used the opportunity to replace the sink faucet before everyone got up. Then Freddy and I fixed a hose to the cistern so it would fill more quickly. So now we can s--t, shower and shave courtesy of J&F.
Carol and Stephanie gave us an exit interview and we unloaded on them – but in a nice way. I’m glad Carol was there because she transcends the education/conservation gap and doesn’t have any axes to grind. We hope that the volunteers that follow, especially those on the education side, reap some benefits from our experience.
We are hanging out and writing e-mails. We did get some disturbing news, not totally unexpected, from Kara. The new company at Kinyara is buying out what remains of the Booker-Tate contract, so Richard, Kara, Chris and Rose will be forced to move on. And JGI will have to start at square one with the Indian company who we are told, are not good stewards of the environment. Maybe Chris and Rose will meet up with us somewhere in Egypt or Jordan.
I took a boda to the airport for a final withdrawal of shillings. We will need about 500,000/= to send our stuff home and another box to Cairo. We haven’t had rain in more than two weeks but I got caught in a storm on the way back. Not too bad but the skies reallyopened up once I returned.
The tent that Freddy and Stu were sharing, which is in sad shape to begin with, gained nothing from Freddy’s inexpert installation (I hesitate to use the word ‘erection”!) and the wind blew the fly completely off. What to say about Freddy? He was ‘fired’ from CSWCT by his orphan chimp and just sits about. He’s hoping to find another position at Lake Mburo but missed his appointment today. He wants to own – not work at but own – and adventure travel company despite the fact he doesn’t participate in any of those activities. I think he’s an un-ambitious dreamer who can go nowhere sans computer, music and cell phone.
Our plan is to mail things off on Monday and hang out in Kampala Tuesday until our bus departs. It’s an overnight journey about 18 hours via Nairobi to Arusha so we won’t see much. But it is much less expensive than flying.
