More Safaris

 Rhona -

Our friends Donald and David from the UK have been here for twelve days and just left on Tuesday. It was great having them, and they packed a lot into their stay. Bobby was patrol leader and Donald youngest or “bim” scout of the Kingfisher patrol – I trust Donald was more deferential to his PL in 1964 than he is now! They arrived late at night so stayed in Entebbe and we drove down the following morning, delayed a little by torrential rain. However, the sun came out and we had a good tour of the botanic gardens with lots of birdwatching, then lunch in Gately Inn Entebbe (recommended) and then home to Kampala for walk through village and up the hill at the back of our house for an introduction to real African life and a good view over Kampala. On Sunday we had a trip into the centre of Kampala and the taxi park and market before escaping to the more peaceful Kasubi Tombs,

where the Kabaka kings are buried and their female descendants take turns to sleep even today.

On Monday they were off to Rwanda for gorilla trekking and returned latish on Thursday for a quick turnaround before we all set off to Lake Mburo for three days safari. On the road down we all had the opportunity to straddle the Equator.

Lake Mburo is very underrated, it has lots of wildlife, and is the only park in Uganda with zebras and impala, both of which were plentiful. There are no big cats, but we saw plenty of buffalo and 50 species of birds (Donald and Bobby were into making lists, maybe a throwback from the 1960s) - more photos at end of blog. We stayed in Mihingo Lodge which was very comfortable with fantastic food, which the owner attributes to the input of his Scottish mother-in-law.

 

Impala and Zebra at Lake Mburo

Yellow billed oxpeckers on a buffulo.

One of many Fish Eagles on the banks of Lake Mburo

 

 

[Note - Bobby is extremely jealous of Donald and David who saw this Shoebill on the way to Jinja last Monday] 

  

The only negative aspect of our trip was as usual, the roads. On the way down we had an accident in heavy rain when the minibus in front of us braked hard to avoid a  boda boda and we went into the back of the minibus. We were going very slowly at the point of impact and we, who were in a very sturdy Landcruiser with a driver, were unscathed, but three of the passengers in the minibus had minor injuries (two had concussion and one probable cracked ribs). They were on their way to Bwindi for gorilla trekking but neither they nor the minibus were fit to continue, and with the delays at the police station they would not have got there in daylight. They were a bunch of physicians and some medical students over from USA working in Mulago Hospital, the big and grim tertiary referral centre for Uganda, plus another American who is working for a few months and is a colleague of one our fellow VSO ers. They were getting more than their “fair share” or statistically anticipated of road traffic accidents; the weekend before they were on their way to Jinja and were involved in a much more serious accident, with one of their party sustaining a severe laceration to her leg down to the bone, and drivers of two of the three vehicles involved pinned down for hours.

 We are supposed to be in the dry season but the weather is unpredictable, often hot and sunny but with a fair smattering of rain, some long downpours and some cooler days and nights. There has been a mudslide in the east of Uganda, killing nearly 400 people, in a village where the population has doubled in the past two years. The mudslide is being blamed on intense cultivation of steep slopes and removal of trees and grass with subsequent loose soil which does not absorb the water. The average family has ten children but polygamy is common and fathers having 26 children is not uncommon. The only way to address the population explosion is to educate girls so that they get interesting jobs but education in these poor rural communities is very poor (typically not beyond P7), so it is a vicious circle. Most of our women colleagues in Reach Out have only few children, (they are the lucky ones who have qualifications) despite being Catholic, but upcountry it is very different.

We had a slightly guilt-ridden day on Wednesday, having decided to miss Reach Out’s quarterly spiritual retreat, which consists of spending all day in church, with breaks for morning tea and lunch. We went to one before and it was really just too much spirituality in one sitting, although many people do seem to get a lot out of it. There are two church services in the morning with very long sermons and a full mass in the afternoon. As Reach Out parties are memorable affairs with a good programme and lots of structured interactive activities which make use of our colleagues’ innate abilities on the singing and acting front, it is strange that the spiritual retreat consists of being talked at by a priest. Anyway, we got on with work of which there is plenty.

Between visitors

13th February, 2010

We are having a quiet weekend between guests - two have just gone and two more arrive next Friday. Trailfinders are having a surge of interest in Uganda as the hotspot destination for Scottish tourists.

We had a great time with Allison and Alison, who spent time in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and saw the gorillas twice, once on the official trek and once later as they and the gorillas were walking along a path. 

 We had a good trip with them to Jinja, and had  a great boat ride when we saw lots of colourful birds which seemed to be lined up for us at very close range. (I acknowledge that the better photographs on this blog are attributed to AW)

 The source of the Nile marker where the river starts its 4,000 mile journey to the Med.

 Giant Kingfisher

 Open Bill Stork (I was looking for Rod Hull!)

 

We stayed in Gately on Nile, a very nice homely hotel, with very fancy pebble showers.

We had a visit to the Ndere Centre to see dancing from different areas in Uganda which is always interesting, some spectacular. A week ago yesterday we had a class in Ugandan dancing in the VSO banda with the instructor who ran some classes for us before Christmas. They experienced all Kampala weathers, hot and sunny on arrival and cooler and wet when they left. On the way back from Jinja we stopped at Mabira Forest for a forest walk with Hussein, the same guide we had previously. We asked for a 2 hour walk. After 1 hour the sky darkened and the sky opened. Its amazing how we stayed dry for the first 5minutes but the forest canopy could not hold back anymore and we got seriously soaked. 

They had a morning at Reach Out and experienced the yoga and spiritual reflection and also spent some time in the clinic seeing a variety of clients. 

Then we had the usual late night departure routine of a trip to the botanic gardens at Entebbe, dinner at Gately Inn Entebbe before taking them to the airport. We had a relaxed evening at Sophie Motel and then drove back to Kampala the next morning.

Last night we joined other volunteers at the weekly rendezvous for drinks and a meal. It is a good opportunity to catch  up  with the other volunteers although we have not managed along for a few weeks.  Work continues to be very busy for both of us. I have been helping people to prepare and submit abstracts for an International Aids Conference in Austria in July. It was very time-consuming, and not helped by a very slow and fragile internet connection which made each on-line submission and  conference scholarship application a very lengthy process. However, it’s another good learning experience and either Reach Out staff have to learn how to do these things themselves, especially the managers and supervisors, or be very selective about which abstracts are submitted. However, it is difficult because they are just so nice and such wonderful nurses, and some of the best and most articulate are also unlikely really to be able to write English well and get to grips with modern technology. Also there is the usual issue of African time which in this case was at odds with a deadline given by super-efficient Austrians. Anyway it would be great if  we could see off a delegation of Reach Out staff, in their lovely African traditional dresses, from Entebbe airport. The somewhat dour and sedate Viennese would be taken aback I suspect. I am now agitating to fill the research officer post which I took over when I arrived. I am having to do the routine work with studies, abstracts and ensuring that the many students and some external researchers who come to Reach Out to carry out research conform to research governance procedures which I have strengthened and revised as well as trying to move the organisation forward. The way forward is to collaborate with academic institutions both local and international and there are March deadlines for outline proposals for two possible sources of funding, the Leverhulme Trust and Nuffield Foundation which both have international programme grants, the Nuffield specifically for Africa.

Bobby is meantime living and breathing databases. He is now being helped by a very able member of staff who has been transferred from the Reach Out Centre at Kasaala which was established one year ago. He is happy there are now a few very able members of staff to whom he can transfer skills and attempy to make a sustainable impression on the organisation. Wow 5 months down and 7 to go - time is flying by.

A good life in Kampala

Wednesday 27th January.
Well, after the excitement of Christmas things have settled down and we are both hard at work for Reachout. We are feeling very settled in Uganda and a lot of our earlier fears have diminished. We find the Ugandans to be a gentle and friendly people although some of the behaviour on the roads seems out of character. We are more comfortable with the routine but there are constant reminders that life in Uganda is harsher than back home –a member of the Reachout staff died over the weekend after a boda boda accident last Friday.

Last Thursday I enjoyed a trip out into the country. Reach Out Mbuya has four bases where they run clinics. Three are relatively close on the east side of Kampala (Mbuya, Kinawataka, Banda). The  fourth, Kasaala, is about an hour and a half north of Kampala just beyond Luwero. I hadn’t been before but a visit was required to understand what data recording was in place. Kasaala appeared quite idyllic compared with the busle of the city. Kasaala village, I think, has a population of about 1000.

There is a bore hole water pump in front of the clinic. This was in constant use filling up the stack of yellow jerry cans. 

The land is lush and green and I became aware of the abundance of fruit and vegetables as the pickup was loaded for the journey home.

Last Friday evening we enjoyed the monthly gathering of Kampala volunteers. This time we met for a drink and a meal at the Centenary Park next to Garden City.

Our Sunday routine, when there are no other commitments, is to spend the morning at the gym and swimming pool at Kabira Country Club. Last Sunday we were a little more adventurous and we visited the Speke Resort on the shores of Lake Victoria for the first time. The centre was built for the CHOGM conference a few years back. Apart from extensive hotel and conference facilities, there is an Olympic size swimming pool and a modern gym. The setting is very attractive with the view out to the lake.

On Monday night we were at the Caledonian Society's Burns Supper which was very enjoyable. It started at 7.30 and was attended by around 80 people. We left at 12.30 although the dancing was not near finished. It was a first for me to pipe (or bow) in the haggis on my fiddle. Conveniently, for Kapalian  Burns Supper goers the 26th is a national holiday - NRM Liberation Day.
The last few days have been very hot with temparatures in the low thirties. On Friday we are looking forward to welcoming our next visitors and showing them how we live when they are not watching the gorillas.

Back to auld claes an' matooke

Sunday 10th January 2010

After a great Christmas break, we are back to focusing on what we came to do here. It was good seeing everyone at Reach Out again. Most had gone back to “the village” for Christmas. Everyone seems to have a village of origin, no-one admits to being from Kampala, but while most people still have some relatives there, with the move to urbanisation, there is a gradual loss of connection with their roots and it may be that the next generation will seen themselves as city born and bred with no relatives to visit up-country. Kampala is still quite quiet and the traffic in the morning is very light, it may be because the schools are on holiday until 2nd February. Reach Out cut down its services more over Christmas than before, although there were still clinics for the acutely ill and very sick clients. Surprisingly, the clinics have been quiet this week, the nurses think some people may have travelled to their villages for Christmas and not have the money to travel back.
Bobby is back to being busy working with the IT consultant and the Monitoring and Evaluation Team to get the new HMIS completed and has started generating reports from the considerable volume of data that has been entered over the last six months. He is enjoying exploring and learning about SQL Server while depending on his MS Access to provide users with a more familiar front end to the data.I have been working on analysing data for a study evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention for discordant couples (one HIV+ve the other –ve)  so that I can work with clinical staff to submit an abstract for a big HIV/AIDS conference in July in Vienna. I am also working with another member of staff on another abstract for the same conference about the Prevention of Transmission from Mother to Child Programme. It would be great if they can go. They are all very good and confident at talking and have a charm and grace that I can only admire but writing is more difficult.
My main goal is to set up a collaboration between Reach Out, a local university and a Scottish University, which would provide the long-tern academic support needed to allow Reach Out to take a lead in setting the research agenda. The staff are very keen to use and do research to be able to show the effectiveness of their nurse-led model of care and all the other aspects which makes Reach Out so special. From an academic perspective, Reach Out is very dynamic and ready for change and innovation.
We are also making the research governance more streamlined, and this is particularly important because of the constant stream of students, some local and other from overseas (overseas from Uganda!)  who want to come to Reach Out to carry out research for their dissertations. I am preparing guidance for prospective researchers which we will put on the website to make it easier for them to understand the process involved before they can have access to staff and clients.
We also now have weekly meetings of the Research Capacity Group, and overall there is a lot of research being done, mainly by using data which is collected routinely for the reports which donors require quarterly. With the new Health Management System which Bobby is helping to design and implement, extracting this data should be easier than before.  Given the problems we have had in extracting and interpreting routine data in two recent community nursing studies I think Bobby could maybe show NHS boards how to do things the Reach Out way when he comes back to Scotland.
At the end of the week three members of staff left and we had a very African send-off - they just do these things so nicely. 

One was a long-serving nurse, and the nurses are a great team who recently won a Best Practice Award, so it was a very emotional send-off for Lynn. Towards the end of the ceremony, we were each served a soda (Coke, Fanta etc are collectively referred to as soda here) and a brown paper bag with a vegetable samosa and a bun, to finish off the party in style.
We have had lots of e-mails over Christmas, which we have appreciated, and some have included photos of the snow at home. We realise that the UK is having the worst winter for 50 years and  that the cold spell is far more prolonged than usual. We also read that the UK is importing salt from Africa for the roads - we certainly don’t need it here except for our rehydration therapy. By way of contrast I decided on Friday morning to work outside to get some space to spread out some questionnaires which needed checking before the data was entered. I started out on the bench outside the office but soon became too hot and had to move under the shade of a  large tree in the compound. I did think about the photos and reports in the Scotsman online as I worked – and I know we will dream of this climate next winter. 
It also seems strange sitting on our verandah in the evening with a waragi (gin at £4 a bottle and very acceptable) and tonic watching the birds as the sun goes down and knowing that we will not be doing that next January.

Our first African Christmas

31st December  -
We have just seen off our son Hamish and his partner Morven after a really magical Christmas, mainly due to just having Hamish and Morven with us and helped by having  a wonderful safari to Murchison National Park in the north of Uganda.
We met HandM at the Shell Garage up the road from our house on 22nd December as they were coming from Jinja just an hour and a half east of Kampala. They had set out for Africa from Aberdeen on 2nd December and had spent some time travelling around in Kenya with our niece who is based in Nairobi. It was great to have them staying with us in Kampala for two nights before we set off on our safari very early on Christmas Eve. We were picked up by our driver Emmy (Emanuel), who was excellent, and set off north to Murchison. The north is much less populated than the west and on Christmas Eve the roads west were very congested with people going back to their villages for Christmas. The road north was surprisingly quiet although we passed the scene of 4 or 5 accidents. 

The first three hours to Masindi was on good roads and then we had two and a half hours of “African Massage” on very rough unsurfaced roads with lots of potholes.

Just before Masindi we stopped at the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary and were very lucky to get very close to the White Rhinos because it had been raining and was still quite overcast, so they were feeding in the open. We travelled on to stop for lunch at a very nice hotel in Masindi.
 

After lunch we entered Murchison Falls National Park and travelled up to the banks of the Nile. We stayed at the Nile Safari Lodge west of Paraa which had very good accommodation and great food.

Each room/tent was on its own with a verandah overlooking the River Nile with hippos in abundance.
On  Christmas Day we went for a game drive in the north side of the Nile. We crossed the Nile at Paraa on the ten-car ferry and were joined by a park ranger who could guide us to the  likely places to see the animals. 

We saw lions, giraffes, elephants, buffalo, warthogs, Ugandan kobs, hartebeest, and lots of amazing birds, and Morven used her fancy new camera to take lots of photos. 

 

Northern Carmine Bee-Eater (above not below)

In the afternoon we had a drive to the top of the Murchison Falls a truly awesome sight as all the water of the 50 metre wide Victoria Nile is forced through a 6 metre cleft to fall 43 metres.

Unexpectedly we had a wet Christmas day but no snow! This created tricky driving conditions and  some vehicles could not cope with the muddy inclines.

 
On the morning of Boxing Day we went on a boat trip up the Nile to the foot of Murchison Falls to view from another angle. There was lots of wildlife to see – plenty of hippos, and crocodiles waiting at the foot of the falls for anything pounded unconscious on the trip through the falls.

 

 
 

In the afternoon another game drive on the north side revealed enormous numbers of hartebeest and three hunting lions.

 
 












On Sunday 27th  we departed before sunrise to travel home. However we still had one more adventure – chimp tracking in the Budongo Forest. The trek can be as short as 2 or 3 hours but nobody told the chimps we were coming and  they decided to have an “away day” outside the forest where they normally stay. 

However our guide,  armed with his machete,  led us out into the wilderness and tracked down the  chimps. 


We returned to base four and a half hours later tired but very happy with  our encounter.

 

The whole four days were really great and it was just nice to be together for Christmas. We had two more days in Kampala, exploring the local market, the craft village and central Kampala which is very busy and noisy. (We achieved another first during this period. When stopped at the junction at Garden City we have always declined to buy from the many vendors who approach the car. However when approached by one selling Scrabble Rhona could not resist.  In her best bartering mode and aided by the changing traffic lights she acquired Scrabble for 15,000 shillings)
Yesterday we spent the day in Entebbe before Hamish and Morven left on a late flight back to the UK via Amsterdam. Entebbe was incredibly quiet. We went for lunch to one of the big resort hotels which was deserted, went swimming in another big hotel which was also full of staff but no customers and then Bobby and I were the only guests in a small hotel (Sophie’s Motel) we found which is ideal (cheap, clean and friendly) for an overnight stay to avoid driving back to Kampala at night.