The people of Jinja

After our adventure in the Nile we completed a series of interviews with the people of Jinja, Uganda. The first was with a few young men who ran a chipati stand (a type of tortilla-like food) just outside the hostel. They taught us how to make chipatis and told us about growing up in Jinja. There were a lot of young kids hanging about and we found out that they didn't go to school because the teachers would beat them so severely that they were too afraid to go. I suddenly understood why it was so important to Flo to be able to send her kids away to a better school. So, we ended up spending the better part of the afternoon hanging out with the local kids, going on bike rides and playing with one particular, adorably filthy toddler named Nathan who I met when a strange man thrust him into my arms and asked if I would like him to take a photo of us.

Afterwards, we went for an interview with a group called Soft Power. You will recall the name as the group who started the women's cooperative of which Flo is a member. You may well wonder what kind of name is Soft Power? Well allow me to explain by quoting Daisaku Ikeda:

The moving force of history was, in the past, "hard power"- in the form of military might, political authority and wealth. What we have seen in recent years, however, is a decrease in the relative importance of this factor, and in its stead a remarkable increase in the importance of "soft power"- factors such as knowledge and information, culture, ideas and systems.

Daisaku Ikeda at Harvard University, Boston, USA on September 26, 1991

I could talk all day about Soft Power... I was very impressed by them and definitely encourage anyone to check out their website at www.softpowereducation.com Their main focus is education. In 1997, the Ugandan government introduced free universal primary education and enrollment rose by millions in the following two years. Their infrastructure was entirely unprepared for this and many students received their education in unsafe, unstimulating, overcrowded classrooms. Soft Power builds bright, safe, fun classrooms for the children of Jinja. They also have a main education centre where kids can supplement their learning and where adults can come too. They employ nearly 100 individuals (all but 8 being Ugandan when we visited) at any given time and are all about sustainability. All of their funding is from private donors and they spend none of it on advertising, marketing or applying for grants. After meeting with Soft Power, I am so annoyed by big organizations like UNICEF, World Vision, Plan, etc. They will tell you that if you make a donation, 80% of it will go directly to the child, project, etc. That is 20% of your money paying someone's salary and for those annoying infomercials on tv every 20 minutes. At Soft Power, 100% of your money can go directly to the child, project, etc that you want to support. If you want to volunteer with Soft Power, you don't have to pay thousands of dollars just to be there (like someone I know did when she volunteered in Mexico). They ask only that you make a small donation to the organization.

We asked the woman we interviewed if she had any advice for people back in Canada who wanted to volunteer, or support a cause like Soft Power. She told us that the most important thing to do is ask questions. Ask if the organization is a charity or a business. Ask if they can tell you EXACTLY where each penny you give them will go. Ask them everything you can think of and if you are not 100% satisfied by their answers, move on and find someone who will. These groups may be harder to find but it will be totally worth the search in the end.

After meeting with Soft Power I can't tell you how badly I wished that I had known to ask those questions before I decided to "volunteer" with Projects Abroad the summer before. Projects Abroad is a business. I had to pay thousands of dollars to go volunteer with them. When compared to most businesses like them, they asked for a reasonable fee, didn't hide that a lot of the money went to administration, and when I complained about the amount of money my host family received out of my thousands of dollars, I got a phone call from the CEO himself. So, while I did chose wisely among these types of businesses, I wish that I had chosen a charity instead.

That night we sadly left Jinja to continue our journey to Rwanda. And in true Room for Improvement style, there was lots of drama involved. The hostel offered to drive us out to the bus stop but sent us 3 small cars for 11 people and about a thousand tonnes of luggage and not a single driver had a clue where the bus stop was. Furthermore, as we were driving to town, one of the cars ran out of gas and we realized that Alexis had been left behind. And Alexis was the only one who knew where the bus stop was.

But alas, luck was on our side and we found the bus station just minutes before the bus arrived and Alexis' car pulled up just as the driver was ready to leave without us. However, the bus was ill equipped for our mountain of luggage so we had to keep all our stuff in the aisles so every time someone got off or on we either had to lift or bags or have them stepped on. So, our plan to get a good night's sleep on the bus quickly turned into a nightmare. But it was all worth it when the sun came up and we found ourselves in the most beautiful place I've ever seen: Rwanda.

On the Road

On the first day of August we embarked on our journey across East Africa. We were up at the crack of dawn, hopped into our beloved matatu and arrived at the bus station just in time to catch Kampala Coach to Jinja, Uganda. As we lurched into gear, we began a journey none of us will ever forget. The engine of our bus roared as we bounced in and out of gear and just over an hour later we ran out of gas. A furious passenger nearly got into fisticuffs with the driver as we waited and waited some more for someone to come by with fuel. An hour later we got moving again only to stop two minutes later at the gas station and wait another hour while everyone argued about whose fault this was and who should pay for the gas. All the passengers on the bus were so embarrassed. They kept telling Alexis to make sure all us white folk know that this is not what Africa is like.
Shawn and Joe on Kampala Coach; the angry passenger.

The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful... I saw a bit of wildlife, met with some terrifying bathrooms, and didn't reach our destination (a mere 800-ish km from Nairobi) until 9pm. We did however drive across the equator and ended up at the source of the great Nile River.

We jumped off the bus at a gas station seemingly in the middle of nowhere and were immediately surrounded by men on little motorcycles. This would have been a desperately terrifying experience but my trusty Lonely Planet had informed me that these guys are the local public transit known as boda bodas.

We had about 8000 tonnes of luggage with us so had to embark on a bit of an adventure to find a couple of matatus to fit us. One driver tried to rip us off and was so mad when we went with two other drivers. It was rather dramatic. Shortly thereafter we arrived at Nile River Explorers Backpackers threw our stuff in our rooms and got to drinking the local brew as quickly as we could. A celebration of surviving the first leg of our voyage was very much in order.

The next morning Carolyn and Katie went whitewater rafting on the Nile while the rest of us nursed our hangovers and got to a whole bunch of interviews. We met some of the most amazing people. The first woman we interviewed was a lovely kindhearted woman named Flo. She was a member of a women's cooperative who sold their hand crafts at the hostel. They were started by a British NGO called Softpower but now run it all on their own. Flo told us how the cooperative had allowed her to make money of her own rather than just relying on a husband to provide for her. She was able to send her kids to a good school using her own money. She was clearly very proud of herself and immeasurably empowered.
The Nile

After our visit with flo, we all took advantage of the hot sun and went for a swim in the Nile. It was a little tricky getting down to the river. We pretty much had to slide down a cliff to get there. The current was super strong so we did more standing than swimming but it was a lot of fun. However, we soon realized that we hadn't thought about how we were going to get back up the bank once we were done. There was a staircase a little way down the bank but the current was too strong for us to swim there. We saw a young man out on the river doing some fishing in a little canoe-like boat. So being the adventurous folk that we are we called him over and asked him to ship us over to the stairs. He accepted and told us that he could take four of us in his boat at a time. This was not the case. We were far too heavy and had only inches between the water and the gunwale. We were also to heavy for the young man to navigate the currents and get us close enough to the stairs. So he decided that he would go out into the rapids to pick up some speed and swing us around. This was the most terrifying experience of my life. Not only were we sinking (our bailing efforts did not equal the amount of water splashing over the gunwales), the man's fish were still alive and swimming around our feet. In any case his plan failed and we had to go back to the beachy area where we had been swimming. In a panic we all stood up at once and immediately sunk his boat. We had a mad scramble to recover all his fish before they swam away. Even after this debacle, he was still willing to help us and took most of the group (two by two this time) over to the stairs. Alexis and Megali were even brave enough to go for a ride in the rapids. I was far too traumatized to get back in the boat along with a few others, so we managed in our desperation to find a way to clamber back up the bank. After this adventure we rinsed away our worries in the open air showers over looking the magnificent river.