… and now it’s all efforts towards writing, writing, writing. Last week we went to Kabale, saw the hospital and interviewed four more nurses. We took a Mutato (sorta communal taxis) which was a bit puzzling… Squeezing seven people plus driver in to a tiny car is the way to do it (kids doesn’t count, you can easily chuck in a few of them as well), the driver had a little hard time gearing. This seems to be not quite legal. Going to Kabale we were seven people in the car when the driver stopped and made sure we were sitting four in the back. He told one man to get put and jump on the back of a bike, so that they were only sitting two people in the front. We didn’t understand why this was happening until we had driven like 500 metres further and there was a policeman standing by the side of the road. He was checking the drivers’ license and looked in to the car. He didn’t mention anything about the seatbelts and the fact that we were still too many people in the back of the car. We drove on and stopped again to let the man who jumped on the bike earlier in to the front seat of the car again and then we continued towards Kabale. Everything in Kabale was bigger than here in Kisoro, the streets, the hospital, the shops (there were such things as clubs and bakeries), basically we felt like we were finally in something resembling a city. Linda was more than pleased with having proper soft bread! Spent most of our time in Kabale at the hospital and at our hostel, transcribing. This while people where playing monotonous drums next-door for three hours in a row. Enough to drive anyone insane…
Now we’re back in Kisoro after five days at Lake Bunyonyi. We were staying in a 12-bed dorm on an island surrounded by nothing but water and mountains. It was pouring down when we went there, the boat ride was wet and unpleasant, as was the first freezing night. We quickly realised electricity were even more of a rarity on the island than in the rest of Uganda, charging our computers were only possible when the sun was shining (only solar power available here!), was not exactly free of charge and took F O R E V E R. Now we might not now much about technically shit like electricity but something’s sure off when it takes five hours to charge a computer. Great for us, since we were there to get a lot of writing done… But then the sun started shining and things picked up. Turns out no electricity makes for brilliant concentration and no communication with the outside world was actually kinda relaxing. We spent most of our time swimming, canoeing (the effin thing was totally impossible to steer, so we didn’t get very far, though we had some fun…), eating, drinking wine, reading non-school related books and playing cards. And still we got a lot of writing done. Great success!
We just came back from Kisoro Hospital, having said or good byes we are now ready for a weekend of writing, washing clothes, taking walks and hiding from the never ending rain before heading to Jinja in the beginning of next week. It’s definitely time to get a move on.