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Christmas!!!
So after a few days stay in Kampala and back at project we headed to the Ssese Islands for Christmas. These are a small cluster of islands in the middle of Lake Victoria. The ferry left from Entebbe - so the night before we left we decided to spend a night there. We went for the camping option and thoguht it would be fine if we used the rubbish tent with no pegs, as it would never rain....famous last words. Me and Sarah were sharing the tent. We started the night at the opposite edges of the tent wit a big gap between us but by the end we were huddled together in the middle as big puddles of water had come up under the tent and the roof was leaking onto our faces! We were lucky enough to find ourselves in the middle of a massive storm with lightining that lit up the whole tent and thunder which sounded as if a bomb was going off outside. That was a good night...
The next day once we'd dryed all of our stuff we took boda bodas to the ferry port. THis was quite a callenge as we had two people on one, each with massive bags - but somehow we made it. When we say the ferry port, it was actually just a little wooden building and the "ferry" wasn't much better. It beared a close resemblance to Noah's ark and there were loas of people stuffed into it's uncomfortable wooden benches - which made for a fun 4 hour journey!
Once on the Ssese Islands we stayed in a campsite run by a slightly crazed German man and his humungous dog. It was right on the beach and if I didn't know we were on a lake I would have thought it was beside the sea. We spent most of our time in the lake. Playing toss the mango and having seaweed fights. In hindsight, this was probably not such a good idea as we all ended mup infected with Bilharzia...
On Christmas Day, we expected it to be a strange experience spending it in the sun, but instead we woke up to....rain! And to make it even worse it wasn't even heavy proper rain but rubbishy drizzle that could have been in Scotland. To make the day even more interesting, our wake up call was the anguished cries of a pig as it was chased in between our tents by the German man trying to catch it and kill it for Christmas dinner!!! One of the other voluneers had been sent a little christmas tree, so we put in on a table and laid out our secret santa presents around it. We then all opened our things one by one - most of which turned out to be jokey t shirts - but I got a little drum!
Eventually the rain stopped so we got to go to the beach for some christma games. First off, we extended our previous repertoire of happy birthday, and learnt how to play Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer on bottles. Next, we did a relay race on the beach where you had to put on various clothes along the way and then take them of on the way back. This attracted quite a crowd, as about half the population of India had appeared from somewhere. After this we went for a swim in the lake and were joined by hundreds of Ugandan children. We all started splashing each other and somehow this developed into a full out crazy water fight with all of the kids that lasted a good 10 minutes and got a looot of water in my eyes!!
So all in all we had a pretty good christmas - if a strange one!!
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