Photos: Arrival and Entebbe

Note: This post was written about four days ago. There are only four computers with Internet in Kaberamaido (Population: 146,000), and the one that I have some access to has only been working some of the time.

After 48 hours of travel, our group arrived in Entebbe, Uganda. The airport is on the shore of Lake Victoria, which I've been told is the mouth of the Nile and the second largest lake in the world. As we were landing, I was struck by how lush and green the land was. We had just made a stop at an airport in Ethiopia, where the land was patched with different shades of brown and there was no green in sight.

The airport in Entebbe:

The Asayo's Wish staff who had traveled to Uganda last year told us that part of the airport had been a tent. Now, it is a humble building that smelled strongly of paint thinner as we waited for our passports to be checked and our visas to be granted. We were amused by some of the advertisements on the carts and walls, many of which reminded Ugandans to pay their taxes to support Uganda's development:

A member of our group was dehydrated from the plane. We asked one of the women who worked at the airport to bring us water. One of the Asayo's Wish staff went to get Ugandan shillings to pay for it. To speed up the process, I tried to pay in American dollars. "For water?!" the woman asked, dumbfounded. I knew this would take some getting used to.

We had just spent a 12-hour layover in Dubai. It is one of life's ironies that Emirates, one of the most luxurious airlines in the world, was our least expensive option to travel to Uganda, one of the least prosperous countries in the world--and that we passed through Dubai, one of the richest places in the world, on our way to Entebbe.

When we arrived at the J Courts lodging in Entebbe, we took our suitcases full of medical supplies out of the vans. Amazingly, all the suitcases had arrived except for one:

Our group split up. Some of us went to get hour-long massages (for $15), which were a bit more full-body than we were used to. Some went directly to the beaches of Lake Victoria, where we were instructed not to swim. Five of us went on a walk along the dirt and gravel roads of Entebbe with Harman, a man from the Congo who was in Uganda to work as a mechanic for the UN.

Harman, Bona, Liz, Stef, and Sarah walked along the dirt roads of Entebbe:

The children we ran into thought we were hilarious. Once we showed them pictures of themselves, they were very enthusiastic about our camera:

The fish market on Lake Victoria:

We spent the evening hanging out and eating fresh, local Tilapia, chicken, cooked vegetables, and rice. A few of us went out to the Knight Riders club to check out the nightlife in southern Uganda. It was a small, casual nightclub with disco lights, different from something you could find in New York City only in that the patrons were virtually all black Africans (we got a lot of attention), the toilets were holes in the ground, many of the people elected not to drink alcohol, and there was a sudden, minute-long power outage in the middle of the night.

Some of us were sleeping in beds for the first time in three nights, so we were only briefly awoken by pouring rain. In the morning, several from our group went to Church, which they reported was small with concrete floors and folding chairs on the inside, but otherwise identical in terms of services.

We are now headed to Kaberamaido, the 17 of us and some of our luggage packed into a van. The paved but potholed roads will soon give way to dirt roads, and we expect the journey to take about seven hours.