Safari!

After arriving back from Goshem village on Saturday, we set off again for safari on Wednesday with us three gappers and Innocent . Thank you to my Dad who gave money for this trip for my eighteenth birthday! Since my birthday was back in April, I was very excited as I had been anticipating it for a long time.

We decided to do the safari trip at Murchison Falls National Park, which is in the north of the country at the northern end of the Albertine Rift Valley. It is Uganda’s largest and oldest conservation area with 75 animal species.

Our journey to get there was rather eventful. It started off with me standing out the top of the opening roof window of the van we hired, trying not to fall down over the bumps down the hill and waving back at the rather amused children looking on. Halfway through, one of our tyres came off so we had to go to a garage to get it fixed, which meant we were too late to get into the park on Wednesday as planned so we found a hotel called Global Village to spend the night at.

Eventually, we got into the park on Thursday morning and were treated to seeing elephants and giraffes within ten minutes of entering on our way to Red Chilli campsite! To get to the campsite, we had to cross the River Nile on a ferry and saw some hippos bathing in the water along the way.

On the ferry crossing

Red Chilli

Looking out over the bush

Camping

 After setting up our tents and enjoyed lunch there (I was very pleased to have mozzarella in my wrap because cheese isn’t common here), we set out on a Game Drive with a park guide. Our guide helped us to spot the different animals in the bush as we had to stay on the road and some of them were quite far away. We were lucky enough to see giraffes, elephants, buffalo, warthogs, monkeys, hartebeest, oribi and various types of birds. It was so fantastic to see the animals in their natural habitats. The highlight was seeing a herd of elephants and ten giraffes at once, one of which decided to stop inside of our van.

On Friday, Kate went on a three hour ‘water safari cruise’ up the River Nile up to Murchsion Falls waterfall, which was the highlight of my trip. I love boat rides anywhere so be able to spot wildlife on one was amazing. The cruise moved along the river banks, where we were able to see hippos basking in the water and elephants playing in at the shallow water's edge, as well as giraffes, crocodiles and beautiful rainbow birds. Murchison Falls itself was beautiful and massive even from a distance. We came back on the boat as the sun was starting to set and went back to the campsite to spend the evening talking and reading.

 Later we were joined by warthogs wandering around the campsite as it is an unfenced area and we were sure we heard a hippo outside our tent at night, which there were posters about on the notice board. Since I'm now writing this, we survived!

Coming up to Murchison Falls

We were able to get closer to the waterfall by driving to the top on Saturday afternoon. The falls is where the Nile river cascades through a narrow gorge before moving into a wide river. At 43 meters, it’s the tallest waterfall I’ve ever seen and it really was spectacular. It falls down at great power so when we came down from the upper viewing station, we were quite wet from the spray. We were also lucky enough to see a rainbow over the waterfall created by the water’s refraction.

Safari was a wonderful experience with great memories!

Game drive

Breakfast at Red Chilli

Goshem Bible mission

I have just returned from two weeks in Kuffu village at Goshem centre, running a Smile mission there with the children from the surrounding area. We spent the first week there with Innocent and our new team member Ronnie, who had previously done an internship with Smile and were joined by Gabit in the second week. It was so lovely to have a break from the city and spend some time in a more rural area with a new group of people.

The Goshem compound

Shade under the food tent

Me being silly posing in the compound

In the mornings, we ran a children’s holiday club with children from the Goshem Christian School and younger children from the village. We spent this time singing lots of songs such as ‘Our God is A Great Big God’, ‘Jesus Love is Very Wonderful’ and other Luganda songs, which the children seemed to enjoy and joined in well with loud voices. Gabit also run a praise workout on a few days in the second week, which I think I loved even more than the children! I even suggested to Kate that we do a worship workout in the compound before devotion one morning a week, which still sounds like a good idea in my head but it remains to be seen whether we will have the motivation to get up early enough.

Gabit's worship workout

Dancing to songs in one of the classrooms

Each of us took turns teaching Jesus’ parables to the children, for example I taught the Parable of the Persistent Widow and the Parable of building your house on the sand. We tried to make it as participatory as possible and get the children involved in the drama. On the last day, we divided the children into two groups and asked them to create a drama about what they had learnt from our sessions. They were really enthusiastic about the task and came up with great performances of the Parable of the Lost Son and the Parable of the Persistent Widow.

Acting out David and Goliath

The children's drama performances on the last day

Me teaching the parable of the vineyard workers

Teacher Stephanie

One of the things that we were able to experiment with in Goshem was more creative and competitive games than the ones we run in our Kampala children’s clubs because there were less children and they were of an older age. We particularly enjoyed playing games with water, blindfolds, word competitions for example but also our usual games like ‘duck duck goose’ and ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf?’  In the second week we divided the children into two teams which they named ‘Lions’ and ‘Tigers’ and ran games between them each day. It was fun to watch Ronnie and Innocent leading their teams to become super competitive. One particularly funny game was passing water from a bucket to a drink bottle along the line of the team using only cupped hands. . I got expelled from the line because I ended up spilling most of the water! Another was passing a tomato down the line as fast as you can by putting it under your chin to beat the other team.

Duck duck goose

Bear, rabbit, gun game

'Make something useful for the community'- this was our attempt at a bicycle

Cupping water game 

Catch the tail game

After the session finished, we gave each of the children who attended a cup of porridge for lunch before letting them play around the Goshem center compound. Many of them returned to watch the Christian films we showed in the compound every evening to tell people from the community more about Jesus.

Me giving out porridge to the children

Our afternoons were free so it was nice to have some time to relax after our busy January.  We were invited to the Goshem Creative Learning Center so I spent most of my afternoons there. The CLC is run by the charity Crane for teenage girls who have dropped out of school for different reasons to facilitate their return to education, either to mainstream school or vocational training. Kate and I went together for the first afternoon and enjoyed meeting and getting to know the girls whilst they taught us how to make bead bags. The bead bags are part of the practical skills that the girls are taught during their six months at the center, which they can use after they have graduated from the programme in order to earn money. 

I loved having the chance to spend time there chatting to the girls as I have a real heart for girl's education.

Making bead bags

Me learning how to make bead bags

Inside the centre

Playing netball outside

Netball

My friend Rose

We had several opportunities to share with the girls, for example Kate and I taught about the book Ruth on our second day at the center and I spoke about how I got to Uganda and how that taught me to trust God more on our first Friday there. I also helped the teachers there to type their monthly report as they are getting used to typing on the computer. By the end of the two weeks, I had started to get to know the girls so I was sad to leave.

On the first Saturday we also went to fumigate in the local community by spraying a strong insecticide inside people's homes to bless them practically.

Lois and Ronnie fumigating

Innocent and Ronnie with the fumigating pump

Local area

We were lucky enough that running water had been installed in the Goshem Centre since the previous Smile teams have visited so we didn't have to collect water using jerricans for washing. However, we did encounter some challenges that we don't have whilst staying at the Smile house. One example of this is that in the last few days, we ran out of the bottled drinking water we had brought with us and had to boil it to make it safe to drink, which meant meant we had to drink sparingly throughout the day and boil water several hours before we needed it in order to let it cool. On the last day, we ran out of boiled water by lunch and whilst we waited for a few hours to boil more by the time we realised, we were very thirsty. Luckily, I remembered a small shop that we had passed whilst we were fumigating so Kate and I walked there, precariously carrying back a fizzy drink and water bottle for us each. Another new thing we learnt was how to cook on a charcoal stove, which is a low metal cylinder with charcoal inside.

Charcoal stove

As a team we loved the two weeks that we spent in the village and although we are excited to be back to see our friends in Kampala and go on safari next week, we miss the Goshem children and everyone else we met there.

Please pray for:

-The work of the Goshem Centre at Kuffu

-For safety and a good time on our safari next week

- For the planning for our return to the projects 

-For peace in the build up to the general election in Ugandan on the February 18th