Welcome to Kampala

On Tuesday I arrived in the Entebbe airport, where Ignitius and Shari greeted me. Ignitius has been working with the Rural Agency for Sustainable Development (RASD) since it began almost ten years ago, and Shari has been in Nkokenjeru with the Peace Corp for the last 15 months. For the next two months I will be working with Ignitius and the other wonderful people at RASD on various project. Lauren is the other student who will be working with RASD this summer, and we arrived in Entebbe on the same flight.



We met up with four other Duke students for a three day orientation in Kampala, which is the capital of Uganda. Here the roads are always busy with taxi vans, motorcycles called boda bodas, and pedestrians. In one of the markets we had the fortune to taste roasted grasshoppers. They look like little shrimp, but they taste like Doritos! They are also nutritious: http://www.ent.iastate.edu/Misc/insectnutrition.html
I strongly recommend trying them if you ever get the chance.



We also attended a dance troupe's performance, during which the entire audience took the stage near to the end of the performance to dance. We also visited Ignitius's alma mater: Makerere University. Although Uganda offers accessible public primary and secondary education, essentially all the students here come from private schools. This is one of the premier schools in Uganda, and has a beautiful campus.




To get rides to outside of the city there's two taxi parks in Kampala. The taxi parks are crowded with commuters and lots of people hawking small items such as candy, jewelry and calculators. We learned that "I don't want" in Luganda is "sagala", which was useful when approached by these vendors. The vans themselves are usually considered full enough to leave the park once they have 15-20 people aboard. Although most of Kampala is paved, once out of the city the roads are dirt, and the van is always bouncing. On the third day in the city we got a taxi van from one of these parks to Nkokenjeru.