After a week

Hi everyone and welcome back! Having survived one week, I started to feel like maybe some of you would like to hear what I've been doing out here, so enlightened you shall be!

So much has happened in just under a week, it's quite unbelievable. It's currently 3.30pm Uganda-time, which means that literally 1 week ago I was piling into the car for the journey to the airport, and now I'm actually here and (relatively) settled. The first thing that hit me when we swooped in to land is how incredibly green Uganda is... it's hard to imagine there ever being any rain here because it's so hot and dusty. I am told, however, that it won't be long before we enter the rainy season, and it will be as extremely wet as it has been hot! In fact, I saw my first African cloud today, and felt my first drop of African rain. Just the one though. It was quite uncanny! I've kept a totally clean sheet with the mosquitoes here so far, but I'm not sure how long that will hold out when we hit rainy season...

Jinja is a city that is very much alive, busy and bustling at all times of the day! This is partly due to the fact that it is actually hotter inside the house than out. I cannot emphasise how ridiculously HOT it is here, especially at night when the breeze just seems to disappear. So much for all the "polar fleeces" I was advised to bring by the shop attendants in all the outdoor adventure shops! In Jinja, we have found some great places to eat, and I was surprised to find that most cafe's have wifi. I haven't brought a laptop myself, but would thorougly recommend that any traveler should bring one out, as you'll find it very handy. This is mainly because the computers out here are very slow by our standards back home, and you may come back with a few extra grey hairs after waiting over a minute for the internet browser to even start each time!

We have been welcomed warmly by Lords Meade and the community at large. Mark Malinga has been very helpful to us so far, taking us to exchange money and buy new SIM cards on the first day and being generally very supportive ever since. Everyone at WGS should look out for him as he is planning a visit over to the UK later this month - you'll enjoy meeting him and shouldn't hesitate to ask him any questions about Uganda and LMVC. Another (pleasant) surprise is that calls out here are very cheap (in fact, everything is very cheap) so it costs as little as 3p to send a text and is only about 10p a minute to ring the UK. The ironic thing is that all there money is issued in laughably large denominations, so that you find yourself paying 1000 shillings for a Coke, and then realise that it's only costing you the equivalent of 30p!!! I feel bad because I've even had to become quite stingy, but in the market they all see you as a rich white person and try and rip you off with a "mizungu price". (Mizungu means white man). All you have to do is hit them up with a bit of their local Lugandan lingo and they realise that you're not going to be such an easy nut to crack. Then comes the amusing part when you're bartering over a mango, heatedly challenging the stall-holder and arguing over about a 10p difference in price. Sounds small, but then you have to remember that this is practically a 50% discount! They're all used to it though, and it actually adds a bit of excitement to the grocery shopping.

I realise I haven't gone into too much detail here about what we've been getting up to- it's tough because the 7 days kind of gloss over and it becomes tough to pick out particular things. I'll try and get to a computer more often so that I can tell you all about some of the specific things I and the other 11 at the guest house have been doing, but until then, it's goodbye from me.