Tales from Africa

“I have a week left of my trip now... it’s been such an exciting six weeks. The project was fantastic. We were working at a school in a village called Bugana, on the outskirts of the Murchison Falls National Park. It was very, very rural – we had to drive for about three hours on a very bumpy mud road to reach the village. There are already three classrooms at the school (one of which we slept in for the month) and we were there to build a fourth. Over the four weeks we made hundreds of bricks, helped to dig the foundations, made foundation cages and laid the cement floor. It was all very physical work which was very hard in the heat. We worked in the mornings, had a very long lunch break when it was hottest, and when it cooled down worked some more. We were a great source of entertainment for the rest of the village, especially when pumping the water!

“The school apparently had 500 pupils, although nowhere near that many children showed up every day. We had lots of time to play games with the children, (the Hokie-Cokie was a favourite) and I taught some lessons which was quite an experience! Often there was just one or no teachers, and the children just sat around all day doing nothing.
At the weekends all three groups (we were working in three villages) met in the nearest town for fun and games. I went rhino and chimp trekking (although we were not lucky enough to see any chimps), visited the Murchison Falls, went on a safari and white-water-rafted down the River Nile. It was all so much fun!

“Since the project has finished I have travelled to Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. We have covered so much distance in such a short space of time! In Kigali (Rwanda) we visited the genocide memorial museum: it was very sad, and shocking to realise that something so terrible happened only fifteen years ago. In Kenya we stayed on the coast at a place called Tiwi Beach where we camped on a beach with white sands and beautiful clear, blue sea, and we spent a day in Nairobi which was surprisingly pleasant (we had been warned not to go there). Yesterday we went on a day trip to the Ngorogora crater which was incredible. We saw zebras, elephants, hyenas, hippos, lions and lots more.　 At the moment I am in Mooshi in Tanzania... tomorrow morning we are leaving for Zanzibar where we will spend the last week.”