Long, long story short, I got to go gorilla trekking, only because a woman at the tourism office took pity on me and let me stay in her house, eat her food, and get a ride to the park for free. It was incredible. The hike there wasn’t bad either, only an hour, but it was fraught with stinging nettles – nasty and painful plants everywhere on the volcanoes. We spent exactly one hour with the Umubano, meaning friendship, group of gorillas: one silverback, a couple adolescent males, a couple females, and two five month old babies!! What was amazing was not how human they looked, that I already knew, but how human they acted. Small gestures and interactions between the gorillas were just like those in a human family… just with a few more wives and a LOT more hair.
I went back to Kampala afterwards, planning on going hiking or to one of the various game parks in Uganda (the fact that my wallet had been stolen kept slipping my mind).
But I ended up just staying in a hostel there for four nights. I was, I admit, a bit reluctant to go back to less-developed Gulu, especially as I was so enjoying the company I met in Kampala.
I talked to a soldier in the Indian battalion of the UN mission in the DRC, who told me that the conflict there will never end until the nation’s mineral stores are depleted, and that the UN soldiers are essentially useless with such a weak mandate. An international photojournalist who had just been to the Congo and is now headed to Southern Sudan. He also told me journalism school was useless, which was a bit disheartening. I met a Dutch woman working as a counselor for HIV patients, a European musician who volunteered in a grassroots campaign to save chimpanzees in an unprotected area of Uganda (the #1 place in the world he wanted to visit was Nashville, TN!), a preacher who had the humility to say that missionaries and humanitarian workers in general often go about helping developing countries in unhelpful ways, and two guys my age who were traveling and making a video about the on-the-ground effects of NGO’s and missionary work.
Africa turns out to be a great place to meet very cool non-Africans. Interesting…
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