More Pictures

Well - pictures don't require much effort and as I am working on a proposal, this is my default right now!! I have just come back from a week of Security Training in Capetown and am in love with Capetown and want to move to South Africa right now - it was like being at home (the shopping! drinking tap water! good roads!!!). The training was intense but incredibly valuable - I will be writing about that at a later point. But for now - on with the pictures...

At a food distribution - true to form, the women do all the heavy lifting
while the men stand around supervising...

Bob putting on a bullet proof vest for the first time ever - whilst IN a moving car in convoy. We didn't know he had never put one on - they are murder to get into and you really need someone to put you into it whilst standing up. Anyway, his efforts provided much hilarity to the rest of us in the car (and took him about ten minutes) - I have a sequence of photos that are increasingly funny (including Walter, next to him, theoretically helping him, but really laughing too much to be anything more than a hindrance) but due to the difficulties of uploading, you only get the final one, with his look of triumph. He then proceeded to take the remaining vests and build a little wall of Babylon all around him as well...

The thriving metropolis of Pader ... seriously folks, this is it. This street.
I'm not leaving anything out. What you see is what you get...

Bettina and I (in traditional dress) with Dez at his traditional wedding, in his wife's village. That day was an amazing saga - I should try to write the story sometime as it was surreal...

There and Back Again

So much to say, but so little reader-attention-span to not abuse!! I must be succinct (you can all stop rolling your eyes now!) here and see if I can fit it all in.

So – it’s February already, which is truly terrifying – where is the year going? Where is my life going? I turn 30 in a couple of weeks and as far as I’m concerned, that is officially OLD. So I’m bracing myself. My plan was to be skiing on my birthday, but due to our organization being audited, and my presence being required (my project is one of those being audited) I have to stick around and will have my birthday in Kampala. However, a few days later I am heading to Chamonix to ski and then spend another week rocking around Europe so I’m pretty excited about that. I just booked my flights and am making arrangements – can’t wait. Mum and Dad are currently skiing (well – Dad is skiing, Mum is nursing a broken arm) in Aspen with a bunch of friends. They have terrible weather and I think they are only getting to ski half the days, but the thought of them out on the slopes has given me itchy feet and I can’t wait to get back onto skis.

In the meantime though, I have plenty of work to occupy my time! I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions any more, but I did vow to try to work less this year. However – I think we can put that under the heading of ‘pipe dream’ at this stage.

Home leave continued to be brilliant. My parents had a party for my 30th while I was still home which was totally awesome and I got to go to the first day of the Australia Open (love me some tennis) which rocked (thank you Mike!) Other than that, the time was filled with usual things – lots of eating out, seeing friends, trying to stay cool in the heat. I seem to have improved at poker – I won a few games (pity we don’t play for money, hey?) and adored getting quality time with Phoebe, who has to be the naughtiest dog alive (Mum is making noises about boot camp – if only there were such a thing for recalcitrant dogs!) I also got up to Queensland for a week – a few days in Brisbane, running around madly seeing people, then Noosa for a few days, to say a final farewell to the house as my parents are planning to sell it. Sadly, the weather in Brisbane was insanely hot and humid – real Brisbane summer, and then there were storms and rain the whole time at Noosa – I got one quick run on the beach in between the rain and enough of a break for Kara and I to check out Hastings St., but it wasn’t a great goodbye to a house that I have adored for over ten years. There are so many happy memories in that house, so many people have visited, so many great times – it has been a haven many times, for me to escape to when everything was too much. So I am really sad to part with it…

Emirates put on its usual production of debacles (which reminds me that I haven’t written my nasty letter yet – I need to get on to that!) for my return, so it was delayed by a couple of days while they tried to get their act into gear. When I finally did get away, my flight from Melbourne was delayed by three hours (gave me time to buy a watch in duty free, which was a birthday pressie from the paternal family) so by the time we landed in Dubai, my connection to Entebbe had already left. More lack of customer service ensued, and finally, I was rebooked onto a flight leaving Dubai that night at 18.00 and going via Nairobi (there’s only one flight per day to Uganda). Luckily, before I got on the flight, eventually some bright spark at the airport noticed that they had scheduled me to arrive in Nairobi twenty minutes AFTER the connecting flight to Entebbe took off. Not such a good plan after all. So I wound up spending the night in Dubai and flying out to Entebbe the following morning. That was okay – I got to see Gabriele (known to us all as Mama) from the Afghanistan office, who was in Dubai (and meet the new National Director too). I haven’t seen Mama since I left so that was all kinds of awesome and I loved catching up on the news. And then I finally made it back to Kampala – two days late!

So now I’m up in the north again – Kitgum today (up close to the Sudanese border). I have a week or so traveling around monitoring the landmines project (plus a little School Feeding in Pader) before heading to Soroti to check on the flood response. I can’t wait to get to Soroti – my friend Eli has relocated there from Gulu so she has a house I can stay in, and I can’t wait to see her. No more Soroti Hotel and two hours wait for dinner for me!

And on that note – I think it’s lunchtime….

Alive and Kicking

I actually wrote this over a week ago, but have had extremely limited internet access, and this is my first chance to post it. Apologies for the delay - the family will also understand the extenuating circumstances...

No – I haven’t died. Although I have been insanely busy for the past week and have, at times, felt dead on my feet! But I am still alive and kicking and checking in…

Last weekend I finally moved into an apartment – it is fairly nice – has a kitchen and living and dining areas, so I am self sufficient. The complex also has a pool and a gym, which is great for my workout-obsession and makes it easy (except for the strange opening hours. What kind of gym closes at 3.00p.m. on a Sunday?) Also – another Program Officer lives in the complex, which has been fabulous.

Terri is an intern Program Officer from Canada who has been a godsend. During my first week here, she was up north, but the day after she returned, she gave me a call and helped me to find places to go, etc. She also took me to church with her on Sunday, has been showing me how to get from apartment to office and has taken me out to lunch. After the fairly dismal first week, where I received very few pointers about anything, it has been fantastic to have someone take an active interest in welcoming a newcomer and helping me settle in to Kampala. Plus, she’s a real sweetie!

Unfortunately, my weekend was marred somewhat by work. At 4.45p.m on Friday afternoon, I was handed a food security project that was not performing well, and essentially told to ‘fix it’!! I therefore spent half the weekend working and frantically finished the documentation by Tuesday afternoon to send to America (we are asking for an extension to finish the work in). Then Wednesday morning, I left to come up north.

This is my first trip to Pader, an area that was chronically insecure during the insurgency. Peace is holding now and people are beginning to move out of the large mother camps into smaller satellite camps – the first step towards moving home and a very positive one, as it expresses confidence in the future of the peace process and of their area.

I’m thinking at some stage, that I need to provide a full explanation of the situation and history in northern Uganda, but I am incredibly tired now, so this will probably not be the day! Suffice to say that the region is emerging from twenty years of war – battered, bruised and pretty uncertain, but determinedly striding forward. The scars are everywhere – driving north, once you cross the Nile (interesting fact: the Nile has its source in Uganda) you are officially in ‘northern Uganda’ and basically, up until six months ago, in a war zone. There are memorial sites and IDP camps everywhere. (IDP stands for Internally Displaced People, who are basically refugees who have not crossed an international border – pretty much the entire population of northern Uganda are IDPs). Some of the IDP camps are beginning to be dismantled as people move to smaller camps closer to home (but still near army barracks) so there are stretches of land with the remains of huts on them.

Today we went out to a distribution at one of the camps – we do feeding programs up here, and today we were distributing seeds and tools to people. Today’s was reasonably small – I think there were less than 1000 people receiving goods. But apparently our food aid program is massive – there will be distributions covering 40,000 people – this blows my mind and I can’t wait to see how the logistics of such a large distribution are handled. I am not sure how many people we are feeding up here – from conversation I have heard it is at least half a million each month. Pretty huge numbers for a chronic campaign…

I am literally too tired to type anything else right now (too hot to sleep up here – just like Afghanistan!) so will end now. I can’t even post this because the internet isn’t working. So I will save it and post it when I return to Kampala.