act 6 scene 1

Wow. We’ve just spent a weekend in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.  It was strangely awesome.

On Friday we said our farewells to the guys in Jinja.  It was a wonderful fortnight there with friendships made quickly and too many experiences to recount.  We learnt how to greet and how to wash clothes by hand, how to cook and how to buy.  Typical conversations go like this:

“Hello”
“Hello, how are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
“Fine”

Chapati is the food of choice of our team - or “rolex”, which is a fried egg rolled in a chapati.  It’s seen as very cheap food in Uganda where food is eaten based on quantity rather than quality.

Anyway - back to Kampala.  Aside from being bitten way way way too much by mosquitoes we have been invited into a few places to observe and minister.  On Saturday we went to an event called Prime Time.  It’s run at the swimming pool of Makerere University and is usually attended by upwards of 3,000 students.  The whole focus is to promote abstinence as a way of life - mirroring Uganda’s policy in their fight against HIV and AIDS.  For a university that is the largest in East Africa - home to about 40,000 students - 3,000 isn’t so many.  It’s still packed and when they actually advertise they attract up to 10,000 guys and girls to come along.  It seems to work pretty well and by focusing on the up and coming leaders of the countries I can see that they will influence for good.  Uganda’s fight against HIV and AIDS is unparalleled in all of the world with significant drops in prevelance rates over the last decade (sadly it’s rising again now though).  Kenya on the other hand continue to deny the problem.

We helped to set up their pretty decent sound system (for out here) and their halogen flood lights that were chained together in a hard-wired fashion and set up on the very edge of the swimming pool.  The 10 lights along there were then connected to the electricity by shoving bare wires into a socket - hardly professional, but when the lights are held up using steel wire wrapped around the base, nothing really is.  If it works, don’t fix it.  So that was Saturday night spent around a swimming pool until gone 10.

On Sunday we went to church for a four hour service on the University Campus.  There are two services, one at 7:30 and another at 12:30.  The first one is attended by those that have exams in the afternoon and the latter was the one we went to.  They really know how to sing and dance.

We eventually got home exhausted.  We had some food and watched Elf - a surprisingly good film.  Then bed called and, due to a small hole in my mosquito net, I got bitten a dozen times or so - awesome.
Tomorrow - if all goes to plan - we will finally move to Kitwe for the last 7 or so weeks of our time here.