I returned this Saturday from Uganda and it was a truly
incredible experience! This was an AMS Directed Public Health Research Trip and consisted of 2 professors, Ellen and Pete, and 6 students, Lauren, Megan, Suzanne, Zunaira, Kirsten, and myself.
 |
| A map of Uganda with our route drawn in purple (cred to Megan). |
We traveled across Uganda with our two drivers, Sam and Brian, stopping at Entebbe, Kampala, Mbarara, Buhoma (Bwindi National Park), and Queen Elizabeth National Park. Here is a play-by-play of the trip:
Monday1/3-Tuesday 1/4 (too many time zone changes to distinguish the days!): We flew out of Boston around 6 pm to connect in London. After a 4 hour layover in London, we flew 8.5 hours to Entebbe, a city right outside the capital of Uganda, arriving at 1 am local time. We met our drivers, Sam and Brian, at the airport and drove about 45 minutes to a Sheraton in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. After sleeping about 2 hours on the first flight and 5 hours on the second flight, I barely slept that first night in Kampala and felt very jetlagged.
 |
| Suzanne in our Sheraton Kampala room the first night. |
Wednesday 1/5: We woke up around 6 and had a great breakfast buffet feast at the Sheraton. After packing up the cars, we stopped at the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA) where Pete and Ellen, our professors, met with someone they used to work with at Bwindi Commnity Hospital (BCH) and got our permits for our mountain gorilla tracking in a few days! We were then off to start our trek to the southwest corner of the country! Today's ~5 hour drive was broken up with a stop for pictures and coffee at the equator.
 |
| The group at the equator! |
We finally made it to Mbarara! Our first stop here was the Epicenter, an epidemiological research center funded by the Belgian MSF (Doctor's Without Borders). Pete and Ellen presented on their research in Uganda and then we toured the grounds. We even were taken through their level 3 biohazard tuberculosis research lab--scary! Then we went back to our motel where we had drinks and dinner. Suzanne and I were a little too distracted by the huge mosquito nets in our room that we forgot to lock our door...oops.
 |
| Suzanne posing under our mosquito nets at the Mbarara motel. |
Thursday 1/6: We woke up around 8 to get an early-ish start on the rest of our drive. Today's drive was really cool because the scenery is so fascinating. A few hours in, we stopped at the Kingfisher Lodge and it was easily the prettiest hotel I have ever seen and has an incredible view, overlooking the Queen Elizabeth National Park.
 |
| Megan, Suzanne, and I at the Kingfisher Lodge. |
We continued our drive, passing through Queen Elizabeth National Park. This was really cool because we saw so many animals as we drove through: cobs, monkeys, crested cranes, waterbucks, etc. The rest of the drive took us through little villages and we got many playful "mzunga" (white person) shouts from children as we drove by. After a long day of driving on very bumpy dirt roads, we finally made it to the Engagi Lodge at Buhoma, a village on the outskirts of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Each roommate pair got our own little cabin, complete with a porch overlooking the beautiful forest. Colgate sent a photographer, Samite, on our trip for some admissions publications so we met him tonight.
 |
| Suzanne and I on our porch at the Engagi Lodge. |
Friday 1/7: We were awoken by an Engagi staff member knocking on our door with a soft-spoken "good morning" and coffee and biscuits. After a delicious Engagi breakfast, we made it to the hospital by 8 for morning prayer. One of the heads of the community health outreach at BCH, Reverend Sam, presented to us an overview of his work and then we got a great tour of the BCH grounds.
 |
| Part of the BCH grounds. |
We spent the rest of the morning hiking around Buhoma with Rev. Sam to collect drinking water samples, the "research" part of this trip. This was so fun because we were constantly walking through people's backyards so we met so many local people and got a great sense of the local community.
 |
| The group and a few friends we picked up along the way at a water sampling site. |
We went back to Engagi for lunch where, in Engagi style, we were served a 3 course meal. Then we set out for more water sampling around Buhoma, even visiting a Batwa (pygmy) community. We ended our day at BCH were we plated our water samples and played some volleyball.
Saturday 1/8: Today we went mountain gorilla tracking! There are only 2 sites in the world where you can see mountain gorillas (here at Bwindi and another place in Rwanda) and permits are extremely expensive (around $500) so this was truly a once in a lifetime experience! Our group consisted of the 6 of us students, a guide (a woman named Florence), a German couple, and all of our porters (this is a great job opportunity for local people). We were out hiking from about 9 am until 3 pm (and at a pretty fast pace!) so this was a pretty strenuous, but extremely fun day. We saw 5 gorillas, including one baby and one silverback.
 |
| Mountain gorilla! |
We walked back through the upper Buhoma handicraft village and then had an early night after drinks at a fancy lodge called Volcanoes and dinner back at Engagi. We were served traditional Ugandan food at dinner tonight, which consisted of matoke (like plantains except starchier), groundnut sauce, goat stew, and sweet potatoes. The theme of Ugandan food is REALLY starchy. Even the potatoes were SO much denser than anything I've eaten before.
Sunday 1/9: Today was a really long day because we were out hiking around the surrounding communities for about 8 hours collecting water samples. Even though it was pretty exhausting, this was one of my favorite parts of the trip. The scenery is so beautiful and there is really no better way to become engaged with the local community! We met so many people and had a constant following of 5-10 kids!
 |
| At one of the water sampling sites. |
After plating today's water samples, we went back to Engagi for dinner and passed out.
Monday 1/10: At breakfast today we tried jackfruit for the first time. Its unlike any fruit I've had before--it kind of tastes like a citrusy banana but with the texture and shape of calamari. That doesn't sound too appealing but I really liked it! After watching Ellen present some certificates to BCH sexual and reproductive health staff for focus group training, we spent a good portion of today working on our water quality reports for BCH. In the afternoon we went back to the upper Buhoma handicraft village and did some souvenir shopping. We all bought some hand-carved mountain gorillas.
The highlight of today was our football match against Colgate FC, the local football team. A few years ago, we donated some Colgate jerseys to the community so that is where they get the name from. The football pitch was really hilly and uneven but it was so fun! Thanks to some help from a few Colgate FC boys and Megan and Kirsten's great soccer skills, we tied the game 2-2.
We had another traditional Ugandan dinner tonight. I liked this one better because I really liked the vegetable and bean dishes they served this time.
Tuesday 1/11: We spent alot of today working on our water reports again. We went down to BCH to count the bacteria from our water samples and hand-delivered some clothing donations to patients. We got to walk right into the maternity ward and pick out outfits for the beautiful newborns! After lunch, we went on a great hike around the hills of Buhoma. We hiked to the top of one of the bigger hills and had some incredible views of Buhoma and the DRC (Congo). This was our last full day in Buhoma, which was pretty sad.
 |
| The students and Sam and Brian at the top of our hike overlooking the DRC. |
Wednesday 1/12: After attending morning prayers and saying goodbye to our new friends at BCH we started our drive to our next destination, Queen Elizabeth National Park. While driving through the park we saw some tree-climbing lions!
 |
| Great shot of the lions thanks to my new camera's great zoom. |
Our first stop in Queen was chimp tracking...definitely one of the lesser exciting parts of the trip. We hiked down into a canyon that was a really dense rainforest and had SO many bugs--mosquitoes, flies, and red ants. We hiked at an annoyingly slow pace for almost 4 hours and didn't get to see any chimps...but we did see alot of chimp poop, monkeys, and hippos. It was actually pretty scary because hippos begin feeding around 5:30 and our guide took us right next to the hippos around 5:15 as they were starting to migrate out of the water for dinner. Hippos are really aggressive and fast when they want to be.
 |
| Hungry hungry hippos. |
After the tracking we made our way to the Mweya Lodge, where we spent the night. This was such a different experience because it was a fancy and touristy resort. We had a
delicious four course meal and hung out at the bar for a while and then the 6 of us retired to our 3 bedroom private cabin.
 |
| Lounging in our "royal suite". |
|
|
Thursday 1/13: We woke up very early to have a huge breakfast buffet feast and go on a morning game drive. Sam and Brian drove us around Queen for about an hour and we got to see some elephants and bison!
 |
| Elephants! |
The drive was followed by a boat cruise through the Kazinga Channel, which was right outside our lodge connects Lake George and Lake Edward. We saw many hippos, crocodiles, bison, and lots of other wildlife!
 |
| The 6 of us before our morning boat cruise. |
After the cruise we packed up the cars and started our long drive back to Kampala. The drive took about 8 hours. We stayed in the same Sheraton that we did the first night and went out to dinner in the city. It was so weird to be in a city again!
Friday 1/14: Today was our last day in Uganda as we were flying out of Entebbe at 12:40 am so we spent the day exploring Kampala. After a huge and great Sheraton breakfast, we went to a local food market. It was so overwhelming with so many people and so much food. I was a bit grossed out by the live chickens being sold... Kirsten, Lauren, Megan and Suzanne even tried fried grasshopper!
 |
| Adventurous eaters with their grasshoppers at the food market. |
Next we went to a women's craft market where we spend a while souvenir shopping. This was really fun and I bought so many great souvenirs for
so cheap. We ended our Kampala exploration with a stop at 1000 Cups, a world famous coffee shop. We had some delicious coffee and bought some freshly ground beans. After showering back at the Sheraton, we packed up our cars one last time. We enjoyed a delicious last dinner at a pizza restaurant on the beaches of Lake Victoria with the whole group, including Sam and Brian. It was a great last night in Uganda!
 |
| Everyone on our last night. |
After some goodbyes with Sam and Brian, we started our travel home in the Entebbe airport. We flew Entebbe to London, had a 4 hour layover in London, and then flew London to Boston. It was a really long series of flights but with all of the time zone changes, we landed in Boston at 1:25 in the afternoon on Saturday.
It is weird to be back in America and even weirder to think that I am going to Wales in less than a week! I doubt I will be posting in this much detail from Europe but I am home now procrastinating packing and missing Africa very much...
Reflections
In one of our many car rides, Lauren and I made some lists of our new experiences
- Animals we saw: cows, goats, cobs, waterbucks, heartbeasts, baboons, red-tailed monkeys, black and white collubus, elephants, mountain gorillas, tree-climbing lions, water buffaloes, hippos, crested cranes, fisher eagles, chameleons, mongooses, warthogs, chickens, pigs, spitting snakes...I'm sure there are many more missing but these were some of the highlights
- New foods we tried: jackfruit, matoke, cassava, Ugandan sweet potato (very different than our sweet potato!), goat, greens, groundnuts, lots of juices of different varieties, plain pumpkin, passion fruit, sugar cane, waragi gin, Krest soda (tart lemon-lime flavor), Stoney Tanawizi (ginger beer), Bell beer
These simple catalogues of food and animals begin to demonstrate how many new things we experienced on this trip but it is
so difficult to put into words most of what we experienced. I think my English major roommate, Megan, says it best in her blog:
I don’t feel completely comfortable calling a trip like this “perfect” or “really really fun!” when poverty, disease, and corruption are so clearly issues for the region. One night at dinner we talked about what we would say when people would ask us about our trip. How do you correctly describe a place that looks like paradise and yet contains people whose stories can break your heart?
In short, this trip was
incredible for so many reasons and I really hope that I have the opportunity to return to Africa in the future!!!
