Ruboni Community Camp

This is a banda at the Ruboni Community camp, we stayed in this one and there are several bandas, safari tents and a camp ground. The view from the restaurant is amazing and you can go on walks in the RDF community land on the edge of the national park.

Market

This is a photo of of the market in Mubende between Fort Portal and Kampala. The fruit and veg are amazing especially the advocado. This is a popular stop on the bus for a bit of food and rest.

It's all drawing to a close, now all I have to do is write!

Its been a briiliant week, I collected Mum and Dad from the Airport last Thursday and drove all the way back to Fort Portal that day. From there we went on a game drive and launch trip in Queen Elizabeth National Park, stayed in a Banda in the foothills of the Rwenzori's and a treehouse in the middle of Kibale Forest National Park, where we saw dozens of monkeys. At Mweya we saw many elephants, hippos, birds, water buffalo and gazelles.

It has been very busy driving ourselves around and we have had an amazing time. I have just seen them off on the bus to Mombasa for a week on the beach. I am back in Kampala doing some final packing and sorting out before catching a plane this evening.

Now all I can think about is getting back and writing and packing my house up. It is going to be a busy few weeks and I am totally focused on that 20th September hand in date! Don't worry Judith- I am also coming to your wedding and am very excited!

Rushing Round Fort Portal

Well it has been a very busy week, after getting the bus (which took even longer than normal) to Fort Portal on Tuesday. I have been rushing around meeting people for research and other meetings for RDF work. On Thursday, Rogers and I visited lots of the schools we have been working with took some video footage of the buildings we had built and other things like books that RDF had donated. The plan is too edit the footage and put it on the website for you all too see. In the last few days, I have been transcribing the interviews and pulling all my thoughts together. Yesterday I started pulling all the various parts of my dissertation together into one document which felt good and adding more.
Today I have a meeting with Rogers at the office to go through all the new financial procedures we have designed and have a major catch-up with Gorretti over accounts etc. I only have a few more days before Mum and Dad get here, in which I plan to try and sort the new office space out and pull my research together as the next time I look at it will be when I get home!

Rafting the Nile!

25/07/2010
I’ve come to Jinja this weekend, which is a couple of hours ride from Kampala by Matatu. I’m staying in a hostel and the whole place is really chilled out compared to Kampala. It’s really nice to get away from the craziness for a few days. Yesterday, my friend, Maja and I went rafting, here on the Nile is an amazing place to go white water rafting because there is a huge volume of water which makes really amazing grade five rapids and amazing waves. The Rafting was amazing and the we also spent a lot of time flipped up and swimming, however we also negotiated a lot of the really crazy rapids successfully as well! Today we have just chilled out and paid to go to hotel pool near where we are staying, we also went down to the Bujagali falls to watch today’s rafters go through. I am quite a glad I didn’t do that before as standing on the rocks at the side actually makes it look a lot scarier than when you on the river. We watched lots of rafts go through and a few flip! Tonight its back to Kampala for some last minute rushing around interviewing before heading out to Fort Portal on Tuesday.

The Amazing Resource Centre at Anti-Corruption Coalition Uganda!

A huge thank you to the staff at the ACCU for letting me use there amazing resource centre and spending hours helping me find and photocopy some really unique resources.

Nando's (sort-of) is everywhere!

Tuesday was a very busy one, in the morning we went into the city for a 10am meeting with Transparency International. It was a really good meeting and the African Education Watch Co-ordinator Frances, answered all my questions and told me all about the three phases of the research they were undertaking. After that meeting we walked down the road to the Akamba Bus office, to book Mum’s and Dad’s fare to Mombasa. We managed to book the Royal Service changing at Nairobi, so it should be a pretty comfortable trip.
After this we were pretty disappointed because we went in search of the Hari Krishna restaurant, which Rachel was particularly excited about however it turned out to be a sham and just a front for a profit making outfit. So Rachel said she would take me to Nando’s because it was BOGOF day on Tuesday. The Ugandan version of Nando’s was an interesting experience, they had many different counters and sold pizza, fried chicken (KFC style) and had a bakery and internet cafe attached as well. So not quite like out version of Nando’s although all branding was the same (see photo) due to the non existing property rights laws here.
We sat there for a while after our pizza and did some work and reading as we had a while before our next appointment. In the mean time Rachel’s friend Alfie rang and offered to come and meet us and take us to the next appointment as it was quite far out of town. It was a pretty good job he did because it was a very difficult place to find if your assuming that a government office would be in a built up or developed area you would be wrong because this office was very nice when we found it but down a very rough dirt track. Luckily we weren’t too late and Mary Frances the School inspector I was meeting was incredible helpful and I found out a lot of interesting facts for my research. After this Alfie dropped us in Garden City the shopping centre because Francis had referred me to some books I should get in the book shop there. We also wanted to investigate the cinema there, as Rachel thought that it was half price on a Tuesday. It was so we went to see the ‘The Back-Up Plan’ this was an interesting experience because I found out that Ugandan’s laugh at everything even the things that aren’t meant to be jokes or funny.
We were about to head home when Alfie rang and said he would pick us up again because he had finished work. So we walked out of Garden City to wait outside a hotel because there is always a massive queue round there. We were sitting on a massive rock waiting when a policemen came up to us and asked us ‘what we were planning?’. Initially we were quite confused and assured him we weren’t planning anything, another policeman from the ‘riot police’ arrived and this was when we discovered we were sitting outside the hotel were the African Union Summit was going on. When the police realised that we weren’t planning anything and obviously no risk to the summit. They were more friendly and in the end told us a lots about the summit and what was going on. Eventually Alfie appeared and we went for a drink on the way home as we didn’t have any interviews so didn’t need to be up early.
We got up pretty late on Wednesday as we ended up having a few more drinks than we planned. I did some work and preparation in the afternoon and then we headed out to meet a friend Maja who I had met on the plane and was doing some volunteering as a Nurse for a month. We ate in the food court at Garden City because it was easy for Maja to find and there was lots of choice. We also wanted to meet because we are planning to go to Jinja together this weekend and wanted to make some plans for Friday. It was good to get to know her some more and find out about what she has been doing. After dinner I was keen to get home and get to bed as I had a very busy research day planned for Thursday.
Today has been going really well! I got a lift to my first meeting this morning with The Ugandan Debt Network, unfortunately the person I had came to see had had to rush off but that didn’t matter because another lady Rebecca that works there helped me find lots of reports and the best part was they had a huge board in there reception area with masses of newspaper clippings relevant to my research, so I spent several hours there making notes etc. Just before I left my contact there came back and I had a brief chat with him before going to my next appointment.
At the moment I am at the Anti-Corruption Coalition Uganda, where I met with the Executive Director Cissy, who was able to help me a lot as well as tell me about all their initiative in the education sector. I am currently in their resource centre which is a real find as it full of reports and books on corruption in the education sector. The resource manager is currently photocopying some things for me, so I am just finishing my blog while I wait. After this I have another organisation called the Federation of Education NGOs to find, which I know is situated round here and then I am going in search of some wireless internet to post all this and catch up on emails.