Chickens and buses make good adventures...

Hoi!

I’m back! It usually takes a while to get my stories written and uploaded here… As ‘powerful’ days are quite rare in our house. And I’ve been ‘up country’ the last few days, so… I must warn you, this is gonna be a long story again. I can’t help it, I just go through so many adventures here, that I could even write a book everyday...

Thanks everyone for all your sweet messages, it’s really good to read them

My research, the reason why I’m here, has finally started to look like something. Last week we were invited for a workshop with all the head teachers from the schools involved in the ‘World Starts With Me’ program and were asked to give a presentation about the evaluation study that we’re doing. So, alright, we prepared some power point slides, sent them to Allen, our supervisor and went to the workshop. During lunch, Billie asked what time Allen would arrive. ‘Allen? Oh Allen isn’t coming! She’s very busy’… Eh, okay, but she has our presentation.. ‘Oh yeah, well just make a new one’. Sure, why not?! So, an hour and a brand new power point presentation later, we went back to the workshop and who do we see there?! … Allen! Huh? What’s going on here?! Allen never told the guy she wasn’t coming, he just somehow thought she wasn’t gonna make it and told us that. Great. Anyway, we did our presentation and when we spoke to some teachers afterwards, met Justine, a really kind woman from Soroti, about 6 hours North-East of Kampala. She told me that I was very welcome to come to her school to do some of my class observations. So well, a few days later I found myself in a bus on my way to Soroti, somewhere in central Uganda… And of course, this trip produced enough story material to fill a whole book, but due to electricity and internet restrictions I will only give you the ‘short’ version

The story began already a day before I wanted to leave. It was a Saturday afternoon and just for your information: Saturday afternoon + bus station in Kampala = chaos big time. Fortunately I took my friend Jamal with me, cause otherwise it would have taken me forever to get what I wanted. ‘Mzungu! Where are you going? Come here!’, ‘Madam, need a ticket?’, ‘Look, mzungu! Come with me, I’ll get you a ticket!’, ‘Sister sister!’. And here at the bus station they didn’t only try to get my attention verbally, no, they also tried to pull me to their place all the time. Pfff, quite tiring, especially if the place is filled with gases, fumes and lord knows what other disgusting smells… But eventually, after having crossed the place for at least 5 times, it seemed not possible to buy a ticket already… So, we got a phone number of one of the bus-ticket-selling-guys who said he would organize everything if we gave him a call the next day. Alright, organized. At least, that’s what you think. But.. it’s still Africa and things just go slightly different here. So, the next day when we called him, his phone was off. Hmm, now what? We ound a bus going to Soroti pretty soon, but now the next mission was to get some front seats. Cause according to Jamal you really don’t want to sit in the back of a Ugandan bus and according to my car sickness front seats were the only option. Our ‘bus guy’ promised us some front seats, but this guy was of course no where to be found. So after a big discussion in Luganda we did get our front seats (later to find out that someone had to move for us, which made me feel really bad…oops).

Anyway, it was 13.00, the time the bus was supposed to leave. Surprisingly enough we only left at 14.00. Not bad actually, only an hour delay. After another half an hour stop at the gas station, we finally took off. That is, we tried to find our way through Kampala center, which is absolute madness around lunch time…But well, I was not in a hurry, so who cares?! About an hour and a half later we finally managed to get onto the main road, leaving Kampala behind… Hallelujah.

Aftersome hours of driving I thought I heard a baby crying, or actually I was hoping hard that I heard a baby crying… But… Jamal confirmed my worries straight after he saw my face: ‘yes, those are chickens screaming’. Hmm, okay. Well, I gotta get used to it, there’s just a bunch of chickens sitting behind me… No big deal.

Of course the bus stopped in all of the small-middle-of-nowhere-towns we came across. And I can tell you, just stopping there is a happening itself. When you enter the town, there’s already a bunch of kids running along the bus and then, when you’ve almost stopped, the place suddenly fills up with hundreds of people running toward the bus, yelling, trying to get your attention with their bananas, mango’s, corn, soda’s, cow livers and other name-it-they-got-it-stuff. So I thought, cool, let’s try this out. I saw it before in South-America, but never bought something out of a bus window… So I chose one of the kids with the waters and soda’s: ‘yes, a Rwenzori water, please’ 1000 shillings. ‘Okay, I got it, thanks!’ (while hanging half out the window to catch it). But now the money, how do we do that? I’m short, she’s short, will she catch it if I drop it? Or will some of the other 20 kids grab it?! Hmm actually, they must be better catchers than me, haha. So, just drop the money and that’s it Quite easy, I think we should introduce this way of selling stuff in Holland as well…

Eventually, after having driven through a dark Africa for at least a few hours, and you’re just at the moment you think you’ve lost civilized world forever, some distant lights popped up. Soroti, Finally! Now the next step was to find a hotel. Andof course it wasn’t hard to find people who wanted to help us with that. ‘Sister, sister, boda?’ ‘Mzungu, you sit here!’ ‘Hello, hello, I’ll take you, no problem!’ Here in Soroti they used more bicycle boda boda’s than motorcycleboda’s, so I could finally try out these boda bikes. And seriously, my legs were itching to ride the bike myself! I almost asked the guy if I could ride, but I think he would feel a bit offended if I did… After having seen a hotel with dirty and stuffy rooms and no power, we decided to take the best hotel in town, with HOT water! Wow, is it really gonna happen?! … My first hot shower after 2 months?! Yesss

The day after I had to start my work at Teso College Aloet, a secondary boarding school with 1323 boys to be precise, only boys... I was going to do an observation of one of the ‘World Starts With Me’ lessons (sexual education), so you can understand I was very curious to see how that would be, and how they would react to a mzungu girl… So went to the school, and if you visit a school here in Uganda, you first need to go to the head teacher to ask permission to visit the school ánd to sign the guest book (very important). But all was good.. Justine, a music teacher, who also teaches the World Starts With Me program, showed us around, showing the dorms of the guys, the rooms for the oldest students of school, the 7 (!!) football pitches and the cows of the school,haha.

The lesson was hilarious: 44 boys, 1 female teacher, a Dutch girl and a Ugandan guy. Good for a lively and funny class. Justine did a great job, she managed to get a good discussion started about puberty, friendships, love and relationships. And to my surprise those guys weren’t shy at all. Many people here in Uganda seem to be very shy at first sight, speaking with a soft voice, looking away… But these guys loved talking about these kind of things. It was fun. The best part came after the lesson. Vera, who is administering questionnaires at the moment, asked me to hand out the questionnaires to these guys. But as it was getting to 19.00 already, it was almost dark. And you know what I mean with dark here: pitch black. Of course, there was a problem with the power, so half of the school did not have electricity. Shit,what to do? We need light! So Justine ran around the place trying to find the electricity guy, who eventually turned on the generator,and managed to turn on 1 out of 10 lights in the assembly hall… But well, it was enough.

The guys really didn’t want to leave after they were done. They kept hanging around me and Jamal, asking us all kinds of questions, of which the best one was: ‘So, tell me, how do things go in your country, with your people? Do young people growing up also face these challenges we talked about today? Do you people also get pimples?’ … Haha, awesome. And of course these questions were followed by the inevitable returning question: ‘I want to be friends with people from your country, can you help me with that?’ Which is basically another way of saying: ‘Can I get your phone number?’. Eh, guys, I’m not gonna give out my phone number, but you can get my email address if you like. Not knowing that in 2 seconds I had like 30 hands handing me pieces of paper to write down my email address… But at least I can now say that being famous is not really my thing

The most exciting part of the story is about to come now. It happened on the way back to Kampala the next day. We woke up at 5.00 totake the 6.00 bus. But… reception was closed, we hadn’t paid yet and the gate was closed and locked… Okay, back to bed then. Next bus goes at 9.00, plan was to wake up at 8.00, but only got back to this world at 8.45. Shit, too late. Let’s call the bus guy we met last night. ‘Sorry, this number is unavailable at the moment, please try again later’. Aargh, okay, let’s try the reception guy. Yes, he knows someone, next bus leaves at 12.00, front seats, yes, okay, thanks. When we entered town the bus had just arrived. But jeez, what a chaos. First letting people get off the bus is not very usual here. Why would you, we can just all enter and get off at the same time, right?! Man! But at least we still managed to get our front seats And we even left at 12.10, which is perfectly in time considering African time rules… So far, everything went well, but not even an hour later, things got worse and worse. The whole aisle was already full of people when we left, but the conductor and driver were in desperate need of money or something, cause we stopped in évery bloody town on the way. And although everyone started complaining after a while, they kept letting people in… And when we got to Mbale, about 2 hours from Soroti, things became really scary.. Apparently, a bus was being cancelled and the driver and conductor somehow thought that the 60 people from that other bus would easily fit into ours (already carrying about 90 people). So… People started screaming and yelling at the driver, but he still didn’t really see a problem with it. I got a girl with a one-week-old baby next to me and felt so bad for her and the baby that I also started screaming to the people that came too close to the baby. After this had been going on for about 30 minutes, Jamal didn’t trust the whole situation anymore and as I was really starting to get claustrophobic (already had my flight route figured out…), we decided to go. Once we got out, steam was really coming out of my ears and I wanted to speak to the driver, who, of course was no where to be found… (which was probably better for both of us in the end )

Well, we decided to get into a smaller bus that would go to Kampala directly. They assured us we wouldn’t have to stand. There was just a small but… Because of the school holidays coming up, they needed to stuff in ‘just a few’ more people. Which meant: 6 or 5 (when you were lucky) people on a row of 4. The bus seriously contained about 40 people, while built for about 25… And then I got a seat in the middle, having two men next to me, basically sitting on my hips. Great... I was so fed up with this whole bus stupidity that I became really grumpy toward one of the men next to me, who was kindly asking me how I was doing. ‘Not good! Can’t you see?!’ I feel quite bad now, the poor man couldn’t help it either… And when both of these men started to fall asleep after some time, they both leaned toward me with their heads falling on my shoulders… Aargh! So I leaned back, pushing them away with my elbows, but unfortunately they fell back to my side a few minutes later… Aah, just leave me alone! Thank god things like ipods exists at these moments

But then, as if I hadn’t had enough excitement yet, I again heard some chickens screaming… No, not again! And they sounded close. Shit, they might be under my seat! Poor things! When some people got off in Jinja, I moved a seat to the back and yes, what did I see under the seat I just sat on…2 big chickens with their paws tied together… Oh no! Maybe I should feed them? They need food and water! We had some biscuits which we gave to them and to all the children in the bus, but I think the chickens were too numb to eat anything… Shame. Well, I think I have to accept that people here aren’t really animal friendly. Cause when in the previous bus an old woman walked in, carrying 3 big bags and holding a chicken on its paws, Jamal grapped her chicken telling her she shouldn’t hurt it so much by holding it like that. But all she said was: ‘It doesn’t know it's getting on a bus, just let it suffer…’ And when you see people selling live chickens at bus stations and in towns, just throwing them to the buyer through the bus window, you know there’s not much you can do…

Anyway, I focussed on the beautiful green landscape outside with sugar canes, teaplants, banana plants, mango trees, etc. for quite a while, until I got such a fright all of a sudden… One of the chickens tried to escape and wanted to fly off, making a lot of noise while doing this. So, me as a stupid mzungu, yelled because I got such a fright… Not knowing that every single person in the bus would turn his head around to my side, looking at me with a face like: ooh, one of those mzungu’s again… ‘Eh sorry guys.. I’m just not quite used to have chickens lying under the seat in front of me, and I’m totally not familiar with the sight of chickens trying to fly around the bus I’m in…’ Forgive me.