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Hey how are you guys? You good? I hope you are. I've spent the weekend in Rakkai. It was...an experience...
Overall it was amazing and different and incredible. BUT there were a few times when we found ourselves in insanely bizarre situations thinking WTF is going on!?
So for millenia the debate to definitively prove the existence of God has raged on. Here in Uganda God is big. It is difficult to understand why he is so big here when the process of worshipping him is so labourious and tedious and all around there is starving and dying and malaria and AIDS etc. Rakkai is rural. Very rural. It is also very poor. Very poor. Very hot. Very dry. Yet despite all these setbacks, God is still very very big.
Last saturday we found ourselves sat inside a tightly packed tiny church enduring a 3 and a half hour religious celebration dedicated to the welcoming of a new bishop. The bishop was a friend of James and a very nice man. But the torture we sat through made me contemplate; if God does indeed exist and makes himself very abundantly known, it's still not worth sitting like herring in a sweat box listening to a constant drone of garbled language for endless hours. If that wasn't bad enough the whole ordeal melted into a dragged out community meeting; consisting of every individual with the slightest bit of drab news, to long-windedly divulge unto the whole village about his little certificate plans, or the current state of the local communal goats. Hellish would be a good way of describing the experience we sat through.
But the bishop was a nice enough gentleman and was still settling into the newly aquired expectations and routines and schedules. We were even lucky enough to visit him in his 'palace'; a beatiful terrace overlooking Lake Victoria. Not many people can say they have found themselves in similar circumstances.
The drive to Rakkai was thoroughly interesting as well. The journey itself was a blur of spectacular scenes of rolling hills and dense forests and papayrus plantations. The smells and colours would change and reappear as quickly as the speed James persisted on travelling at. No seat belts. No manual stick-shift. Just put your seat back and watch the world change outside your window.
Halfway into the drive we stopped off at a curious service station; it just happened to be THE Equator. To prove the phenomenon a man showed us threee bowls placed in different positions according to the line's position. He presented us with the water spinning trick; South of the line the water rotated anti-clockwise as it plunged down a plug-hole in the centre, and the opposite direction occured for the bowl representing North. Slap bang in the middle, on top of the painted line running along the floor that indicated the otherwise invisible equator, the water shot right down the hole, along with the pettled flower the man used to help demonstrate the spectacle. I found this quite an incredible incident to add to the collection of wonderfully bizarre moments I have encountered in this startling and beautiful country, and journeyed on with a pleasant sense of wonderment. Masaka was the next stop off point. This was a simple but charactered town full of waving children and marabu stalks gorping at rubbish like starved grubby circus acrobats on stilts.
We even entered another African country during our excersion! We walked into Tanzania for about half an hour. We walced past the laissez faire roadblocks and immigration checks; through the booming markets accommodating the 300 metre long, several mile wide strip of 'no man's land' - seperated into 2 halves according to the country who does not own the strip (very confusing I know); and sat in a Tanzanian bar and drank a very Tanzanian 350ml Cococola bottle as oppossed to the typical 300ml Ugandan version. So now we have stepped foot in 2 East-African nations! Pretty damn cool!
Oh, and we quickly visited a rainforest-like national park where we saw red-tailed monkeys and ancient looking aviathan trees of collossal power and beauty. But I'm not going to bore you any longer with the stuff we did for fun...
Rakkai lies like a struggling slab of Earth; desperately thirsty and painfully stretched. Poverty and starvation has long been encapsulated within the genes of this region. We stayed in a simple farm; an original base during Calm Africa's early days. Little electricity. Wobbling first story balanced on which were our beds. The farm itself is located deep within 'the bush'; the featureless un-navigatable network of trees dust and rocks. We were, in every meaning of the phrase, completely and utterly in the middle of nowehre. Getting there was like a safari expedition. And the stars that shone during those evenings were was bright and blindingly clear as the stars I saw with mum in the middle of the Egyptian desert.
The people we encountered reflected the land; desperate and alienated. We are used to children staring at us and reacting to our colour. But here children and workmen alike would stop whatever chores they were doing, and remain transfixed at us for as long as we could let them. It went from interest to bewilderment. White people!? What are they!? This continued throughout the outreach programme, on which we met a medecine woman who showed us a grotesque dirty bottle of old wiskey that contained her very own herbal remedy for malaria. We also saw a family living in an actual grass hut, as if the nomadic lineage their tribsepeople had transended from, prohibitted them from consiously building a more permentant structure. It's not hard to understand why. More evident than anywhere Rakkai in struggles to catch up with the modern and the changing, even by Ugandan standards. Even by AFRICAN standards.
The luxuries we took for granted exploded in value during our time there. Not just at home home but even in our familiar bubble of Kampala. Easy access to water. Moderately reliable electricty. The capacity to even have electricity. A flushing toilet as oppossed toa s***-stained hole in the ground. Not having to walk for at least 3 miles to the local shop. That weekend was profound and an amazing eye-opener. Living is simple in Rakkai. Therefore life itself is a whole lot more complicated and struggle-worthy. There are still so many problems in our own vicinty of Kampala. Trying to help Rakkai is unfortunatley stifled with the overwhelming sense that it would just be pissing into the wind.
Long one over - so much to get down. Will be continuing with progress of 3rd latrine in next blog. 40 feet is deep I can tell you that for nothing! Missing home so much more than last time round. You're all in my thoughts. Much love
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