I went to Uganda and I have a lot to say about it, so sorry for the long post.
The main reason I’m in Africa is because my friend, Holly, has an NGO that’s based in Northern Uganda in a town called Gulu. It’s kind of funny because when I was reading the Lonely Planet on the way over and they specifically mention that a tourist shouldn’t be going to Gulu. Which is true, after spending five days there I can say that they’re right. But I totally enjoyed going somewhere that tourists don’t typically visit.
We’d booked a flight from Nairobi to Entebbe, Uganda for 6:45 in the morning on Nov 25th. But when we actually looked at the tickets the night before, they were booked for the 5pm flight. After calling them up and reserving the morning flight, again, we headed to the airport at 4:30am (awesome). We waited around for about an hour for the check-in gate to open only to be told the morning flight was cancelled, way to notify your passenagers Fly540!! But to their credit, they changed our tickets to the evening flight and put us up in a hotel in Entebbe. We didn’t want to make the four hour drive up north to Gulu in the dark.
The hotel in Entebbe was a little surreal, you could tell that at one point it was a fancy hotel, but it was stripped to just the essentials in its post-war condition. But I wasn’t worried as people in UN SUVs were staying there as well, so it must have been safe.
The next day we headed to the bank and grocery store before heading on our four hour journey up north. It’s not that Gulu is that far, but more so that the roads are in terrible condition, so it takes a while. The trip up was pretty uneventful with the exception of on matatu accident (matatu = 12 person taxi) that had flipped over and the driver was dead on the road. We’d arrived before the ambulance, so the body was still lying in the open. Luckily there were no passengers, that I could see, so he was the only fatality. That takes the dead body count on the trip up to two, we saw one in Nairobi on our first day too.
On our first full day in Gulu (Nov 27th) we wandered around it get some bearings. It’s not a big town, but it’s definitely hosting most people that it can accommodate. There are people everywhere. After walking around for a bit we came across a graduation parade snaking it’s way through town. There was a marching band, little kids in caps and gowns and proud moms wearing their most colourful dresses bringing up the rear.
Holly’s NGO is empowering some of the women in the war stricken area of Gulu and giving young mothers and HIV+ ladies a job so that they can support themselves. What she is hiring them to do is make paper beads and then plans to sell the necklaces and sending the money back to the ladies. While Holly hadn’t hired the ladies yet, we went to a small IDP camp to visit some other ladies that made the beads. They were spectacular! You wouldn’t think about it, but they made some seriously nice and colourful necklaces from paper. It was also good us to get some photos and videos of people making the beads so that we could see the whole process. The ladies were a lot of fun and accommodating to all our photography/video requsts.
The next day (Nov 28th) we did our first trip to a big IDP camp. IDP camps are a scary concept. Think of them as an in-country refugee. During the war people left their villages and moved to these camps because they were protect, for the most part, by military from the rebels during the times of conflict. So instead of being spread around the land in little villages, they’re in a few concentrated areas. The camp we visited was Camp Away and they had just over 24,000 people and the largest one had 60,000 people living there are its peak. It’s crazy. Everyone was living in these round mud huts that were about 15′ in diameter and they were all about 1 to 5 feet apart from eash other. So these places were crammed.
Nothing can really prepare you for what it’s like to visit one of these camps. The photographer in my wants to take photos of everything, but I also don’t want to taken advantage of their situation for my own personal gain. We were lucky enough to visit and get shown around I wanted to respect them and take it all in. That being said, I still took photos because I want to be able to show people back home what’s going on. Plus, it was an interesting experience because the kids were curious about us (b/c we’re white) and followed us around the whole camp. Sometimes as many as 20-25 kids were following us! Whenever you pointed the camera at someone to get them in a natural environment kids would jump into frame and pose. So much for getting natural photos.
The next day we went to a camp that was a little further away called Camp Attiak. This was the camp that Holly would be starting her beading project. This camp took about 4 hours to get to, not because it was far away, but because the roads were in such bad condition, but if you ever have to take the trip, i advise you us a van that has shocks. Ours didn’t and it was the craziest ride!
Attiak Camp is one that has suffered a lot due to the war. At one point nearly 300 people were killed at the hand of the rebels in the span of a few hours and after being greeted by the chairman of the camp, I was humbled by the grandeur of what Holly was doing. When we first met the women that would be participating in the program, we were greeting with song and it was really awesome. You could feel the excitement in the air. The camp had rounded up 27 women who would be employed by Holly. It was almost a 50/50 split between child mothers and HIV+ ladies. I had a task of getting their names and finding out their status (HIV+ or child mother), how many kids they had and taking their portrait for the website. It was a little unnerving meeting them all and finding out their status. Once I was done that, I went to the field in the middle of camp and played with some of the kids. I needed something to take my mind off the situation.
Manny and I ended the trip to the camp by gathering some of the kids and teaching them to play ultimate with some discs we’d brought. We must of had about 40 or so kids running around chasing discs. We ran a couple basic throwing drills with them and some of them were naturals. It must seem weird that I’ve gone from talking about women with HIV and children to playing ultimate with kids, but Manny and I are avid ultimate frisbee players and thought it would be good to bring a new sport to the kids. The kids in these camps don’t have much to do when they’re not in school and there are a lot of sports programs that try and help them out. So we thought why not introduce them to a new sport, so Manny and I went to a non-profit Ultimate organization in Toronto (The Ultimate Experience) which is run by some of our friends and we managed to get some discs and t-shirts for us to use. The kids ate it up and loved it. It’s always good to see kids smiling.
The next day (Nov 29th) was our last day in Gulu and we had an off day because we finished everything that we wanted to accomplish. But this day proved to be quite eventful even though nothing was planned. I’d gone on one of my usually morning walks (from 7am to about 8:30am) because it was a perfect time to take photos. It was cool, there were few people about and the light was really nice for photos. On this morning I met up with Manny at the field/stadium to watch some kids play some soccer. There were a couple kids behind us just passing the ball around and one of their passes went off course and smashed right into my camera that was hanging at my side. Needless to say that when I looked down, part of my primary lens was attached to my camera and another part was on the ground. Crap. They rushed over to inspect the damage and thought it could all me put together again with a little glue, fat chance, it was busted. (Thankfully I have travel insurance but it still sucks because upon returning to Nairobi I was unable find an equivalent lens, so I have to spend the rest of the trip shooting with a 50mm lens, which isn’t a good tourist lens, I need a wide angle!)
When I got back to the hotel, Jaret was all pumped because the Arch Bishop on Uganda was in town to lead church that day, mainly because the rebel leader was supposed to sign a treaty the previous night but he backed out last minute for the third straight time. While he went back to take more photos of the Bishop, the rest of us went to check out Gulu University. It’s cool to see that a town once torn apart by war is rebuilding and now has a university, even though it had been around for only 7 or so years, it had 5,000 students.
That
evening we had to pay for the hotel because no one would be working the desk at 6am the next day, which is the time we had to leave to catch our bus back to Kampalla. So at dusk Jaret, Manny and I set out to the bank to get some cash because they don’t take credit cards and the sun was starting to set. This is not a town you want to be out in when it’s dark. We hit up a couple banks and their bank machines were not working, we started to worry but eventually found a third bank with a working bank machine. Once we’d gotten our cash we started to walk back, as we crossed the street a random guy came running out of nowhere and threw an empty tetrapack (a 1L juice box) at Jaret’s head. Then he proceeded to empty his pockets staring at Jaret. He wanted to rumble. Jaret did the smart thing and just walked away. This was interesting because Uganda has been through so much bad times that they are generally a peaceful community now-a-days. Thieves have been known to be beaten within an inch of their lives.
But that’s not when the fun ended that night. Upon getting back to the hotel, we found that they’d put us in the nice rooms during our stay there and not the cheap rooms that we’d asked for ($26 per night vs $41). So we brought it up to them saying that they shouldn’t charging us for that rate when we’d booked something else, and it wasn’t like the hotel was full, it was virtually empty. They kept on insisting that since we’d stayed in the pricier room that we had to pay that rate, even though they admitted to the fact that they had made the error. The problem with trying to argue stuff like this with Ugandans is that they don’t like confrontations and won’t say anything, so it’s like talking to a wall. Eventually the owner drove to the hotel to help resolve the issue but he would only meet with his staff and not us. After over two hours of talking we cracked and paid to an agreed upon in-between rate. Something like this wouldn’t happen in the Western world where customer satisfaction is an important aspect of a business. What can you do when after two hours of arguing someone isn’t willing to budge. I guess would could have just left the cash at the rate we wanted to pay, but since Holly is running an NGO she needed a receipt. So long story short, if you’re going to find yourself in Gulu, Uganda, don’t stay at the Hotel Pearl Afrique.
The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful. We made it back to Entebbe just fine and could our flight without and issue.
I gotta give a big thanks to Richard who is Holly’s local representation in Gulu. He bent over backwards to make things work for us and acted as a translator when the people we were dealing with didn’t speak good english. He was genuinely happy to show us around and was well connected, mainly because he grew up in the area and works with other NGOs.