Goodbye TZ, hello UG
This morning I prepared to leave Tanzania by saying farewell to all the folk at the mission base and the staff at the clinic. There were a number of people that I had to express my heartfelt gratitude for their wonderful friendship and hospitality, so the process of saying goodbye took a little more time than planned.
During the morning I was fortunate enough to meet a German man named Daniel, who operates an orphanage close to the mission base. Daniel, a charismatic, solidly built man with a handshake to match provided me with much encouragement for the vision I have for the infants of Africa. Due to time constraints we really didn’t have opportunity to go into great depths regarding the set up and management of a children’s home in Tanzania but he wrote out his email address on a crumpled piece of paper lying on the dashboard of his dusty four-by-four for future contact. He’s been in the country for quite a number of years doing this work and it sounds like he knows how to steer around the politics and red-tape. I was really glad to meet him.
Unfortunately my morning at the base and clinic had gone. It had raced away faster than my wild taxi ride to the airport. Before I had time to catch my breath I was already aboard my Air Uganda flight, bound for Entebbe. I was initially apprehensive about flying Air Uganda for various reasons but to their credit I have to say it was certainly the best flight I’ve had on this trip and close to one of the best flights I’ve had in my short time flying around the world. The aircraft was comfortable and spacious and the hosts were on their game. As the plane seamlessly glided over Lake Victoria and into Entebbe my heart gasped with joy. I was back.
My flight had arrived just moments before the daily Emirates flight, so the usually sleepy Entebbe airport was a hive of activity. Due to the recent bombing in Kampala, airport security was ramped up. Security insisted on screening every traveller leaving the airport, and with only one x-ray gate the bottleneck could only be compared to someone trying to pass a watermelon through the eye of a needle.
After leaving the arrival terminal (and ageing a couple of years in the process) I was greeted by Manzi, who is a friend of the Ward family in Kabale. He had come to collect me and drive me back to his family’s home where I would stay overnight before catching a bus down to Kabale the following morning. On the way to Kampala we stopped in at one of the resorts that are perched along the shores of Lake Victoria to catch up and kick back. We were still in Entebbe and where we stopped wasn’t too far from the final resting place of the Air France aircraft that was famously involved in the 1976 hijacking during Amin’s reign. Although you can’t see the remains of the aircraft from the road, I’ve always known it was there. In all my years of coming and going to Uganda I’ve never had the opportunity to stop, until today. It was such a great opportunity to see this amazing piece of Ugandan/Israeli history; particularly considering Operation Thunderbolt remains one of Israel’s most successful missions of all time.
Manzi had also bought his 18-month-old son, Jordan, along for the drive. Not long after we were back on the road after stopping at the resort Jordan became a little distressed. Although I tried consoling him it wasn’t much use. He wanted his daddy. Since Manzi was driving there was only one thing that could be done – to let me loose behind the wheel in Kampala!
Some people seek thrills by skydiving out of planes, bungy jumping off bridges, or spending a day at a theme park. For me however, nothing excites me more than driving in the thick chaos of Kampala. To mix it up delegates from neighbouring African countries were beginning to filter in ahead of the African Union Summit, which begins on Sunday. Unbeknown to me at the time, presidents from Malawi, Congo, Namibia, and Zambia had arrived around the time my flight came in. I spent most of the time looking in the mirrors for armoured police escorts. Every time one approached all vehicles had to pull off to the side of the road and remain stationary until the convoy had passed. Watching these escorts roar past was an amazing thing to witness. You have to understand that in Kampala there are more cars on the road than there are grains of sand on the beaches along the East Coast of Australia. It was like watching a hot knife slice through butter. The escorts miraculously were able to part the sea of cars like something out of the book of Exodus.
The agenda for the AU Summit is child and maternal health. There is a petition for governments to allocate 15% of their national budgets in a bid to reduce infant mortality. I guess it’s promising to see that African governments are starting to work together for the sake of their own health care. That said, I couldn’t help but feel this summit will be all smoke and no fire.
The next morning I will jump on an 8 hour, bone-shattering bus ride out of the capital and onwards to Kabale.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 6:21 am and is filed under Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
