Just some photos

Thursday 29th August- Mosque and going home.

I woke up early along with Dec, Samir, Sarah and Zeddy as we were going to go visit the mosque and try and visit Zeddy's family's old factory.

The 4 of us walked out of the hostel and waved over some Boda-Boda riders. Boda-Bodas are basically the Ugandan cab service. It's a motorbike where you just sit on the back and cling on for dear life as the driver drives like a mad man through the city. We all hopped onto the back of our bodas and asked to be taken to the mosque. Thankfully the journey to the mosque was pretty much just a straight line, so we weren't whizzing around corners everywhere. Although my Boda did speed across a road narrowly missing oncoming traffic before pinging between a couple of vans.

View from the Mosque

The Mosque which had started being built during Idi Amin's reign is huge, dominating the centre of Kampala. At the mosque we were given a private tour and Sarah and Zeddy had to cover their heads. The inside of the mosque was huge and incredibly intricate  and we were able to go up one of the huge towers on each corner of the mosque. At the top of the tower we had an incredible view of the whole city. On the way back down the tower Dec was allowed to drop a shoe down the staircase to see how long it took to reach the bottom, . As we were going back downstairs I felt my hand brush against something on the banister, I turned to look at what I had touched and saw the biggest bug I have ever seen, it must of been some kind of cricket.

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

From the Mosque we got Bodas to where Zeddy's old factory was. The journey was longer than the last one, and a lot scarier as it was going through unbuilt roads and through some of the less developed parts of the city. Sadly at the factory they wouldn't let us in to have a tour and seemed to be extremely worried when Zeddy mentioned that her family had used to own the factory.

After our rejection from the factory we got Bodas again back to the hostel. On this Boda, I shared with Samir and I had to sit on the back and cling on to barely any seat until we got to the hostel. We were back at the hostel by 9:30am where I quickly went to finish packing and say goodbye to the volunteers as I would be heading to the airport with some others.

After dropping the earlier bunch off at the airport, the rest of us went to a nearby restaurant for a pizza as we didn't have to be there for another couple of hours. At the restaurant the other volunteers who we had left at the hostel turned up and had a 'last supper' with us before we headed back to the airport.

There really isn't much to do at Kampala airport so after much sitting around and waiting, the small group of us boarded our first flight to Dubai. I had booked my seats home with Kit and so we spent the journey watching 'The Internship' and 'Monster's University'. At Dubai airport, myself and Kit had 4-5 hour stopover while the girls had 10 hours or more. We all first went to a restaurant for a free buffet, because if you are stopping at Dubai for more than 4 hours you get food vouchers and other discounts. After the meal and some wandering around the airport, Kit and I said goodbye to the last few volunteers and headed back to our flight home to Gatwick.

Spending 6 weeks in Uganda has been by far the best summer I've ever had, and the best thing that I have ever done, made a lot of friends that I hope I will keep in touch with. And I hope that one day I will return and hopefully see my P4 class again.

Wednesday 28th August- Hungover and Kraft market

I found myself in the early hours of the morning running to the bathroom to be violently sick for a while. It wasn't great. As a result of being so hungover and ill, I decided I wouldn't go to visit the Kraft market until later the afternoon.

Around 1 ish myself and a group of others went into the vans to head to the kraft market which is only a half hour journey away. Along the way we had to stop off at a petrol station to refuel and to use the cash point. While queuing with everyone for the cash point I had to quickly leave the queue and throw up again all over the floor by the gas pump. A lovely fluorescent greeny yellow puke. I got some strange looks from the Kampala locals who would be greeted by a puking Londoner when they turned the corner by the petrol station.

Eventually I felt good enough to get back in a van and go to the market. At the market I instantly went to the cafe and stayed there basically passed out on the seats for a couple of hours while everyone else went around the market. After I had ate a toasted sandwich at the cafe I felt good enough to walk around the market for an hour or so. I bought a North Ugandan tribal mask, a yellow Ugandan national football shirt, some kind of goat skinned harp and a Ugandan bottle opener.

After the market we went back to the hostel for dinner, chilling out and to wave off a group of the volunteers who were leaving.

Tuesday 27th August- Night out

I stayed in most of today, just going online and catching up on things that I have missed. The other half of the volunteers arrived in the afternoon. Once everyone arrived, Caz and Laura began handing out the shirts that we had all ordered, which would have a number of our choice on the back, and something written on the back, chosen by the other volunteers. I was number 15, and on my back was, 'Idiot Abroad'. Super.

In the evening, myself, Pav, Rachael and Ella headed off on our own into Kampala to try and find a film festival that was supposedly going on, while the rest of the volunteers headed to a restaurant. The 4 of us turned up at where the festival was supposed to be finding absolutely nothing there other than a lot of lorries and cabs. Pav then started going up to everyone who walked past asking them about the festival, but no one knew anything about it. We called a cab to take us to where the rest of the volunteers were at the restaurant and got something to eat. I had a spicy beef dish, which was really nice.

After the meal we headed to a night club for a few hours. At the club Dec and I got a big apple Shisha and started smoking it for an hour and a half with a load of Ugandan guys and some other volunteers. The drinks in Uganda are pretty cheap, a pint only costs roughly £1 and as a result a lot of the volunteers, and myself were pretty drunk. By midnight, there was only half a dozen of us left in the club as the rest had gone back to the hostel. When we had finished all the shisha, I headed off to get another and on my way over, I must of somehow angered some bloke as the next thing I knew I was being lifted into the air and was being yelled at by a couple of blokes, before being thrown to one side. I wasn't 100% sure what had just happened, but I didn't stay around to find out and went back to the bar to get another drink. Around this point I randomly hear a geordie voice blaring out over the sound system, I went up to the DJ booth to see Paige DJing and yelling random stuff in the microphones.

Towards 1am when the last of us were thinking of going back to the dorm, Me, Dec and Paige got a last drink. Immediately Dec and Paige started being severely ill, Paige especially so. It was quite difficult getting into the van to go back to the hostel because of it. We think that we had our drinks spiked due to how quick it happened after getting the drink. Eventually we made it back to the hostel and collapsed in our beds.

Monday 26th August- Journey back to Kampala

At 5am in the morning half of the volunteers woke up to begin the long journey back to Kampala, the other half of the volunteers would be leaving the following day.

15 minutes into the journey, Ross pipes up and exclaims that he left his passport back at the lodge, so we have to go back and get it. As a result we bullied Ross for the rest of the journey. 

A few hours into the journey before we got to the equator, a few of us in the van needed to take a short break, our driver pulled over in a village and asked the man outside if we could use their toilets. The toilet, as we expected, was a hole in the ground, but was thankfully clean. By the time we had all finished and were piling back into the van, a small crowd of locals had gathered and were waving at us and pointing at us.

We arrived at a nice small hostel where we set up our stuff in our new dorms and tried to use the wifi to watch the Chelsea Vs Man Utd game before going to bed.

Sunday 25th August- Last day of safari

Dec and I woke up in the morning to the sounds of Rihanna blasting through our tent from behind us, assuming that this must be the alarm we thought it was 5am and time for us to get up and dressed. It was just before 4am and was in fact the alarm for the staff, so we tried to go back to sleep, but were woken up again by the sounds of hippos. We both got up kind of worried and got out of the tent as quickly as possible; as there was no way that I wanted to be trampled to death in a tent by hippos. The hippos were clearly very close as the sounds were really loud and had woken up a couple of the other volunteers. We wanted to go to the toilets but they were a short walk from the camp and we would have to go with a security guard. Walking along with a guard who was panicky, shining his torch in every direction was both worrying and amusing. As a result me and Dec began laughing at the whole situation we were in, which angered the guard who started angrily whispering at us ‘STOP LAUGHING, WE IN A LOT OF DANGER RIGHT NOW! HIPPOS ARE BAD AND DANGEROUS!’ Straight after, we heard Hippos again and rushed to the toilets and got out of there as quickly as possible.

By 7am we were in the vans and heading out for the morning safari, our van was the 2^nd to leave, we caught up with the first van which had stopped and were apparently yelling something about seeing a leopard, we (…) decided that they were trying to trick us so we carried on past them. Along the main road we saw ahead of us a herd of elephants crossing over the road. We sped up so that we could watch them cross the road, at the point where they were crossing there were still some elephants in the foliage who hadn’t crossed including a huge angry elephant. The Elephant suddenly trumpeted at us which made us all jump, other than Dec who for the whole safari had been begging for something to ‘KICK OFF!’ We were all standing in the van 15 metres from the elephant when suddenly it properly ‘KICKED OFF’, we were watching it and from it casually watching us and eating, it did a fake charge at us. Everyone practically wet themselves, and was yelling for Aggrey our driver to drive away, Robyn managed to film our terrified cowardly reactions, and screams of terror.

The Elephant that 'KICKED OFF!'

Later we arrived at a small touristy place looking out over a lake, when we were there we found out from the other van, that there was in fact a leopard, that we had chosen not to see. At the touristy place, there were a group of Asian tourists posing with this huge camera that they had bought. Afterwards we went back to the campsite where we packed up all our stuff, got back in the vans and started the journey back to the lodge. On the journey back my red hat which had been on the floor of the van, must have been against some metal, as the front of the hat was melted. For some of the way back I sat on the back of the van with Dec and Robyn, my other hat which I was wearing suddenly blew off my head, never to be seen again. Somewhere in Uganda there is now a really cool Lion wearing my hat.   

Look at the size of that camera.

Driving back to the lodge we went over a large a pot hole where we all jumped up from the impact. I turned around to Robyn to see if she was OK and she was holding her head. She took her hand away and it was like something from a horror film, there was a thick red line of blood going all the way from her forehead to her chin. She had managed to smack head on a nail hanging from the ceiling.

That night was mine and several other’s last night at the lodge so we had some drinks and said goodbye to everyone as I and some others would be going to Kampala a day early.

Saturday 24th August- Safari

We woke up at 5am to be on the sunrise safari but didn't see much bar more cob, some bucks and monkeys. Our van decided to play a joke on the van behind us by pretending we could see a lion. We suddenly stopped the van began pointing in the distance towards a group of cobs while pretending to take photos. We told the van behind us that there were lions under the tree to the right of the group and then they all started saying how they could see them and how amazing it was. Apparently there was a male and two females watching the Cob, even team leader Graeme (TLG) was claiming he could see them. We played along for 5 or so minutes more before announcing that there was nothing there and then driving off.  By 9 we had gone back to the campsite, packed up the tents and were on our way to a different part of the Park that we would be spending Saturday night at.

The journey was about an hour and half long, on the way we saw baboons on the road so we pulled over and Aggrey (my van’s driver) threw crisps at them. The baboons were huge and some of them had babies clinging to them. After watching them for a while we carried on down the road before coming to a huge lone elephant standing facing the road half submerged in the trees.

Before getting to the new campsite we got to a restaurant where I had pork and chips for roughly £5, the majority of everyone else had fish and chips. The meal was actually really good despite it taking about 45 minutes for the food to arrive. From the restaurant we drove through the safari to the campsite, along the way we saw more elephants. We must of seen roughly 20 of them just strolling around and eating, but we couldn't stay too long as we had a boat safari at 5pm.

On the boat we went along the lake to the opposite bank where we saw loads more hippos, fish eagles, cobs and lots of buffalos as well as some crocodiles.  A lot of the buffaloes we saw were ‘loser’ buffalo which meant that they were outcasts from their herds which explained why they were on their own; it also means that their time is running out because isolated animals don’t usually survive long.

After the boat safari we headed to a Ugandan 5 star hotel for our dinner. The meal was a really good buffet with fish and a lot of meat. After all the food that we had been having (not that it was bad) everyone was going mental for the food. I as well as a lot of others went up 7 or more times for food which annoyed some of the hotel residents, but we were hungry. After the meal we hung out in the bar for a bit where Pav decided to buy a £25 bottle of wine. Sometime later the vans arrived and took us to the camp site for bed.

Friday 23rd August- Goodbye Kindergatten, hello Safari

Some of my class who had came in to say goodbye.

After breakfast Katie and I headed to Kinderkatten to see the teachers and some students one last time. Summer school had finished yesterday so only a few students were in so that they could collect their reports and exam results. At school I helped to remove desks from classrooms that had been leant by nearby schools in order to help Kinderkatten accommodate the large influx of students coming for the week.

The majority of my P4 class had turned up to say good bye to me which was upsetting. My favourites Maxim, Shivon, Moses and Martin were all there. I had written a message on the board to the class saying thank you to the class. Shivon had given me a bag of 18 avocadoes and Moses’ father came in to thank me, and the rest of my class gave me goodbye letters. I played football with Maxim and Owen for a bit before I went to the hall to check out the reports and exams.

Goodbye

At 12 o clock the VU van arrived to take me back to the lodge and then to the safari. Before getting in the van I said good bye to all the teachers and students and gave Martin my old Barcelona shirt as thanks for bringing my bag to me yesterday. I’m really sad about leaving all the staff and students but I will write to the school when I’m back in the UK.

Avocados

Back at the lodge we had a quick lunch before getting into the vans to the safari. The journey was roughly 2 and half hours and on the way we stopped off at a supermarket where I bought some cheap interesting looking alcohol. We arrived at a campsite owned by a nice but odd Kenyan guy. We set up all our tents and had a quick drink before going back into the vans to start going around the Queen Elizabeth safari. We would stay in these vans for the whole safari, I was with: Dec, Kate, Alice, Robyn, Erica, Freddie, Kya and Team leader Tom (TLT). After roughly 20 minutes of seeing nothing but Cobs (gazelle) we came upon a tree under which was a small pride of lions, we were only 10 metres or so from the pride. We stayed by the tree for a while but the lions were just lying around, occasionally yawning and rolling over. A cob came into view roughly 200 metres from the pride which attracted their interest, but they were clearly not hungry as they only stared at the Cob and made no move.

Lions

From the lions we headed to a river bank where we knew hippos would be bathing. We all got out of the vans and sat on the grass by some bushes watching the hippos in the water 20 metres from us. From the hippos we carried on driving around seeing buffalo and cobs until we went back to the lions which had only moved a few metres from the tree.

Back at the campsite we got ready for dinner which would be a BBQ on the side of the river which goes through the camp. We had mash, spaghetti and lots of goat skewers before going to bed around 11pm due to the 5am start tomorrow.

Wednesday 21st and Thursday 22nd August- Summer School and sports day

On Wednesday we continued with Summer school. I played football with my class and after lunch we had brick laying and continued with making rockets from the previous days. Maxim from my original class and from my summer school class randomly walked out of our last lesson and didn't explain where he was going. 5 minutes later he turns up and hands my a hot hard boiled egg. He had brought an egg in from home and during the lesson had gone off and cooked it and brought it to me.

Brick laying

Maxim and the egg.

On Thursday we had sports day between the houses of the summer school: Hippos, Lions, Gorillas and Elephants (my house). By the time sports day started the Elephants were doing pretty badly, sitting sadly in last place, but sports day was the chance for us to turn it around and win. The sports day consisted of races: sprint, javelin (throwing a ball) , skipping, egg and spoon race, wheelbarrow race and a couple of others. Each race was competed between 2 of each house between each year group. P3 would race each race first and then each year after wards. The Elephants were winning almost every race they were competing in, and in the javelin the Elephants came first in literally every year for it, with an impressive win from Maxim.

Close race.

The elephants had been absolutely dominating the sports day and coming towards the end of the day we looked as though we were in the lead. But we hit a snag, for the last couple of events we couldn't seem to find the students who were supposed to be competing, they had either decided they didn't want to compete or had accidentally sat in a different house, not knowing they were in the wrong one. As a result we had no one competing 3 or 4 races, the difference between the houses was tight. But the last race of the sports day was a race between the volunteers, representing the Elephants was myself and Kya. The race was reminiscent of the great race of 1872. Prayers were made, curses were uttered, our loved ones cried as they waved us off and then we had, begun. It was weird as I was actually genuinely scared and nervous about  the race, it was like the beginning of an exam. At the end of the race both I and Dec were running off to our respective houses celebrating winning the race. Confusion was rife, nails were bitten, questions were asked, what was to happen? And then someone came forward, the race had been filmed, we would find out who won. Even when watching the race on the camera it was almost impossible to tell who won, buuuuuut it was voted that I won. SO SCREW YOU DEC! ;) ;)

Handing out medals.

After the race was the ceremony to show who the winner of the Summer school was. Annnnnnd, the ELEPHANTS WON! To be honest I think myself and the other Elephant volunteers were more happy than the actual elephant students. We were told to bring up 2 students from the house who had made a massive contribution and give them the trophy to lift, Freddie chose one of the students and then I chose Maxim. They both came up, medals around their necks and then lifted the trophy to the cheers of the Elephant house. After the celebrations where the trophy was toured around the elephants we said goodbye to our students and Moses gave me some sugarcane and some other students gave me some letters. On my walking down the road into town where I would be playing a football game, I start hearing someone yelling 'TEACHER ADAM!' repeatedly, I turned around to see Martin sprinting barefooted down the dirt road with my back pack on his back. Seems I may of left it at the sports day field.

ELEPHANTS!!!!

None of the volunteers bar myself, Dec, Sam and the team leaders were in the mood for the football game so we only had 5 or 6 players, as a result we were made to take some of the opposition players onto our team. The game was a pretty tough one, the guys we were playing had boots and shin pads while we were all just in our trainers, which put us at a slight disadvantage. The guys were going in pretty hard for what should be a 'friendly' game and as a result after being 2 goals down I may of slightly lost my temper at one guy who had been kicking me for the last 30 minutes and may of been told to calm it slightly by the referee. Suffice to say we lost 3-1, and were mightily pissed off for the journey back to the lodge.

Ramsen in his new shoes and Sheffield shirt.

Dec and I asked to get out the van on the road leading up to the lodge as we wanted to go and see Ramsen and give him my old pair of converse and Dec's old Sheffield United shirt. We walked down to the football pitch hoping to see Ramsen to give the gifts, but he wasn't there so we tried to go back to his village to see if he was there. Along the way we saw Ramsen and got to give him the things, he was delighted with them and was really thankful.

Back at the lodge we had some drinks and started packing to get ready for the safari tomorrow, before going to bed.

Best photo ever (courtesy of Freddie)

Tuesday 20th August- Summer school and a walk with Ramsen

Our first lesson today began pretty poorly as we didn't have any A3 paper which we really needed for the lesson. Our topic was the ‘Perfect home’, so the class could provide some ideas for what they wanted their perfect home to consist of, the only issue is that the children aren't very imaginative; ‘fertile soil’, ‘no pests in the house’ being examples. However for the second half of the lesson the children were put outside in their groups where they started drawing and designing their ‘perfect home’ which was really good.

Kit teaching.

After the lesson, appropriately was brick making. Martin, one of my favourite kids helped me to make a brick which we wrote our initials in. Making bricks was a lot messier than I thought it would be and I ended up with clay all over my arms, but it was really fun.

The lesson after brick making was maths which was led by Melissa (northern Mel), her lesson was on space rockets and how to construct them from shapes. I sat in on the lesson helping out whenever needed but mainly spending the time sat at one of the benches with some of the class working in groups. The group I was with (Maxim, James, Ronald, Alvera) made a rocket called ‘shooting star’.

After lunch I went to P4a’s lesson instead of P4b as I wasn’t needed in the science lesson. Mel, Charlie and Emily were doing P4a’s lesson which was on our ‘Pulses’. This entailed us having to count our pulse for a minute and then going outside and doing games and exercises to see how our pulse changed.

The final lesson was ‘tutor group’ which is basically like Circle time for our classes. During this we continued designing our rockets, which basically consisted of kids going mental with glue and glitter and involved my face getting covered in glitter. The last half of the lesson we played football and netball until the day finished.

The view from the village

When we got back to the lodge, Dec and I left straight away to go on a walk exploring areas that we hadn't been to yet. We walked in the direction that we went when we got lost on our run and when we saw a turn off we decided to follow it. After turning down the corner we bumped into Ramsen (a local lad who we play football with regularly) who said that he lives up the road and would show us the village. On the way up the road we came across a huge ant nest that was spread across the path which we looked at for a while but myself and Dec got bit a lot as it turned out the ants were dangerous red ants. We continued up the road and into a small town where we eventually got to Ramsen’s house, at his house we met his family and village elders who were gathered together to sort out the budget of the village. We took some photos which the villagers were ecstatic at seeing and found absolutely hilarious. The elderly woman kept hitting and pulling the children out of the way so that she could look at the photos. After 10 minutes Ramsen said he knew another way to the lodge instead of the way that we’d came, so he led us through the rest of the village and through another village where his sister lived with his aunt before leading us though some woods and land after which we arrived at the top of the hill overlooking the lodge, from there we walked down to the lodge.

We arrived at the lodge just in time to write on Katherine’s 21^st birthday card and for dinner. Afterwards, there was birthday cake and some drinking and celebrating for her birthday before we all went to bed.

Ramsen and Dec

The village

Monday 19th August- First day of summer school

Today was the first day of summer school, I along with Erica, Ella, Mel and Caz were given P4b. Our class is supposed to be around 45 people, but ended up being around 34.  All the classes were made up of several schools, not only Kindergatten. One of the key problems of having all the schools together was the distinct difference in ability from children from different schools, especially the ones who went to schools that volunteers don’t work at.

In my P4b class I had half of my original P4 class from Kinderkatten including my favourites Maxim who was wearing my Charlton shirt and Martin. All the children in the school were divided into 4 houses; Elephants, Gorillas, Hippos (which suck) and Lions. I am in the Elephant house, in each class the students are all divided into these houses and compete against each other in the whole school. I rigged the way the houses were divided in my class and ended up with the best kids in Elephant (Maxim, Martin, Ronald etc.) and the less good kids I put in the Hippos.

The first lesson was pretty chaotic as it was hard to work out who was supposed to be in each class, as a lot of kids have very poor English skills. A lot of kids also look too old for their classes; there are at least a couple of 15/16 year olds in a class which should be 10 year olds. The activities were also really good, one of which being the weaving which involved giving kids machetes to cut very slim bits of wood. Maxim was a pro at doing it and had clearly done it before but still managed to end up with his hand covered in blood, he acted as though he couldn’t even feel it and was practically laughing at me while I’m sprinting around trying to find a plaster. But all in all everything seemed to work very well and it was very enjoyable.

Once we were back from Summer school I, Dec, Kit, Samir and Freddie jogged down to the local football pitch to see if anyone was there up for a football match. On our way to the pitch we saw some kids from the school that were still walking home despite school having finished 40 minutes ago. As we walked with them we got surrounded by a dozen or so goats as well as a couple of dozen cows and bulls with horns as long as my legs. Some kids were just walking along with huge sticks beating the cows ahead of us and occasionally trying to leap on them. It was the weirdest walk I have ever been on, 20 minutes of the 5 of us being surrounded by 20 or so Ugandan children, a dozen goats and masses of huge cows being beaten with sticks.

At the pitch we managed to organise an 11 vs. 11 match, with the 5 of us volunteers and 6 locals on one side vs. the others. Kit left the match after 20 minutes or so as he was exhausted but the match was one of the best football games I have ever been part of. On one side of the pitch there lots of cows occasionally being hit with sticks so that they didn’t interfere too much with the match. The match finished 6-6, I scored one and got the assist of 3 (I was pretty happy), the game was taken very seriously by everyone involved, it lasted roughly an hour and a half and involved one of the most controversial tackles I have ever seen. Ramsten (a lad who we have met several times and had been scouted by the local football teams) had the ball and was one on one with the goal before the mighty Samir absolutely wiped him out. From one side the tackle was amazing as the ball was won, but on the other hand it was absolutely brutal, I have never seen someone’s head hit the floor so hard and was genuinely worried for Ramsten’s health before he clambered back up.

After the game we went back to the lodge showered and had dinner before chilling and going to bed. 

Sunday 18th August- Lazy day

After having a lay in until 9 we had breakfast of dough balls and then I, Dec, Sam and Pav played darts in the sun for an hour and a half. Around 12ish it started clouding over so I did some lesson planning for my English lessons at Summer school tomorrow and Tuesday.

Ross covered in Jam

Lunch consisted of rice and g nut sauce which is basically a peanut sauce similar to a satay. Just before 2 o clock a group of us headed to town to watch the Spurs Palace match. Instead of going to ‘The Cave’ like yesterday, we went to ‘The Corporate’ which is just across the road. After the game we headed back to the lodge where we had dinner followed by a small talent show, which consisted of dancing on tables and lobbing jam at each other.

Saturday 17th August- HIV talk in Kanungu

This morning we did some more prep work for the HIV talk in Kanungu town square before we piled into the vans and headed off. We arrived at the square where stalls had been set up for us and there were already a lot of locals milling around. My group put our posters out and started trying to hand out leaflets straight away.

HIV presentation in Kanungu

The main issue we found was that the majority of locals didn’t have a good enough understanding of English for them to comprehend what we were trying to inform them. However they understood when we stated that there were free HIV tests for those that were interested. Overall we handed out a lot of leaflets and did a lot of demonstrations; we also managed to get just over 150 people into a tent for HIV tests. We later found out that 5 of those 150 were HIV positive, which is supposed to be an extremely small amount compared to previous years in Kanungu centre.

At 2:00 once the HIV activities were done, we headed to some bars; I and half a dozen others went to a pub called ‘The Cave’ where we watched the Liverpool vs. Stoke game and the first half hour of the Arsenal vs. Aston Villa game. At the bar we ordered a load of drinks and dishes of chips, chips only cost 50p in English money. We also met Ian again, our favourite lad in town who we always see walking around selling peanuts. We invited him to sit with all of us and bought him some sodas and bought peanuts off him.

We got back to the lodge around 5pm and then I went straight for a run with Samir before doing a workout with him and Tom. By the time we had finished and had a shower it was time for dinner; goat, rice and potatoes today. Afterwards we just chilled out before going to bed.

Ian