Leah’s Travel Page

I made it through the border in record time, didn’t even have to pay any bribes. That’s got to be a good thing.

We’re staying at another ICIPE station in Mbita, Kenya. My bedroom looks out onto the beach and Lake Victoria, and at night I can leave just my screen door open and hear the waves rolling up against the shore at night… So amazing, I wish I could go swimming, but then I’d get schistosomiasis, which would really suck, to say the least, because it’s about the grossest parasite ever. A group of 10 of us got to go on a boat ride in Jinja where we went down the Nile and into Lake Victoria, and we got splashed by water a lot and we kept on joking that we were on the schisto ride. Seriously, the odds of us getting schisto (aka bilharzia) from that is virtually none, so don’t you all freak out now. Anyways, it was worth it, getting to boat down the Nile. We didn’t get to see too much of Jinja, except enough to see what we thought were giant swarms of birds that turned out to be giant bats (they were even there at 10 am!). Kind of cool. Kind of creepy.

Today we went to another hospital, here in Mbita. It was in much better shape than the one in Fort Portal. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it was much less chaotic, and at least here patients’ families didn’t have to supply all their own food, bedsheets and mattresses (yes, that was how it was in F.P.). We also got to talk to some traditional healers, which was kind of a neat experience.

Oh, and I also wanted to make a comment about elections in Africa. It’s the national elections in Uganda on February 23rd, so it was totally amazing to be there and see all kinds of campaign posters for President Museveni and others. Just to put it in context, Kenya had a referendum on their constitution last year, and since many people are illiterate, they had ‘banana’ for yes and ‘orange’ for no. In Uganda, it’s a similar thing, but with hand gestures. As we were driving through towns in our big mzungu truck, people passing by kept giving us the thumbs up or a peace sign. At first, we kept randomly returning the hand signals and people laughed, until we realized that thumbs up is the symbol for Museveni and the peace sign (two fingers) is his main opponent (FDC party). There’s also a flat palm, for Milton Obote’s wife who’s running in the north (aka bad), and a clenched fist, for the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Party, very VERY bad). I just think it’s such a fascinating way of practising democracy so that all people can be involved…even if it is at the expense of the dignity of a bus-load of travelling mzungu.

Tags: Jinja, Kenya, Mbita, Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 12:08 am and is filed under Kenya, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.