Wildlife

I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited two national parks in the last month and had the opportunity to see lots of African wildlife while on the game drives and boat rides. Here are a few miscellaneous items to share from those experiences:

-The cliché that elephants have good memories is not that far off, apparently. The park ranger we hired to guide us around the park at Murchison Falls told us that the elephants in that park are more aggressive towards humans than the elephants in Queen Elizabeth Park because of the greater incidence of poaching and the longer history of conflict in that region.

-I was awakened around 4:00am one morning by the sound of something very large eating grass and breathing heavily outside the banda (a small cottage) I was staying in. The man at reception when we checked in had told us not to go outside after the generator was turned off for the night and the lights went out, because the cape buffalo come through and graze on the grass in the lodge compound. Cape buffalo are considered to be the most dangerous animal on the savannah in terms of the danger they pose to humans. Needless to say, I was very glad when the generator came back on and the lights encouraged those big fellas to git movin’!

-While on the boat ride up the Nile to see Murchison Falls, we got very close to a male elephant that was eating on the shore. The driver turned the engine off and we watched this guy for a while. It is quite amazing to be close enough to hear the sound of his ears flapping. However, when he turned, looked us square in the eye and made a few threatening lunges in our direction, I didn’t feel the need to hang around!

-A lot of the hippos we saw had huge scars and/or open wounds on their skin. Male hippos are very territorial and they fight each other a lot; their large teeth can do a lot of damage, apparently! Also, I learned that a group of hippos is called a “school.”

-We watched a large baboon in the parking lot of the lodge we were staying in, go over to the garbage can, lift the lid and peer inside to see if there was anything interesting inside. Those animals are quite habituated, obviously!

You see and learn a lot in a couple of days while on safari and it is a truly remarkable experience to see these animals in their natural habitat. It’s a great blend of fun tinged with very real danger. That park ranger we hired as a guide? He had his gun with him in our vehicle....just in case!

Nostalgia

We just spent the afternoon visiting with one of our friends here in Masaka. He is an Indian Ismaili Muslim who was born in Masaka and fled to Canada with his family during the Idi Amin years. He returned to Uganda as soon as it was safe to do so and has since reclaimed his family’s farm and has almost single-handedly worked to rebuild the mosque in town that had been nearly destroyed by neglect during “The Troubles.”

This mosque restoration has been a labour of love for him and he proudly gave us a tour of the building and the gardens that he has spent years working on. He was telling us stories of the way Masaka was when he was younger—perfectly paved streets, beautiful gardens, 900 Ismailis living in the area, operational sugar and coffee factories and a vibrant social life centred at the mosque. He then took us outside of town a ways to his family’s 300 acre farm that used to produce sugar and coffee. There had been a house on the property, but it was destroyed and now the property is basically just a beautiful garden.

Things have really changed in Masaka since the days he remembers. There are only a handful of Ismailis that live in town now, the streets have gaping potholes and those coffee factories are empty and derelict. However, this man remains committed to the community. He cares for two young Ugandan boys and pays for their schooling, he ensures his workers and their children get proper medical attention when they’re sick and he continues to restore the mosque.

I should also mention that he is an absolutely amazing cook, and he frequently drops by our place with some kind of delicious Indian treat for us to enjoy. When he had us over today, he whipped up some kebabs and served them with freshly made mango chutney. It’s people like this that make my experience here so rich and it is so interesting to listen to his stories of another time.

Clinics

So imagine the confidence with which I entered a local clinic seeking treatment for malaria. The sun had just gone down, and as we parked the car outside we saw no lights coming from within—clearly the power had gone out in town. Armed with the feeble flashlights on our cellphones we ducked beneath the ratty beaded curtains hanging in the doorway and entered the lobby. A voice told us we “were welcome” and so we sat down on the benches in what appeared in the dim light to be a waiting room. Several people came over to greet us and shake our hands and finally someone said that they were just going to get more petrol in order to start the generator. Yes, I was feeling pretty good about the kind of medical attention I was to receive!

The lights came on soon after, and to be honest, it might have been better to have been kept in the dark! The lights just showed how grubby a place it was! However, seeing a computer at the registration desk did give me some hope of respectability. The doctor ordered a malaria test and the nurse directed me to the lab (while her cellphone was to her ear)—outside, in the next door, up a dodgy flight of stairs, down a hallway where I was told to wait on a bench. I passed a filthy sink that wasn’t equipped with faucets, sat on the bench outside some rather smelly toilets and waited alone on the bench.

A lab tech came soon after and took me into the lab. I tried to block out most of the scene and just concentrated on where she was taking the needle from; she opened a new package, so I could (almost) ignore the rest of the surroundings as she went about her task. I had the results in about three minutes and went back through the maze to the doctor’s office where he wrote a prescription for malaria medication. The whole process probably took half an hour at the most.

Two days later, I determined that the meds the doctor had given me were only making me sicker so I returned to another clinic for a second opinion. This one is far more reputable, but it’s only open during the day, so we hadn’t been able to go there in the first place. A second doctor’s consultation, some glucose injections, some kind of rehydrating IV drip and a new prescription seemed to make the difference and I’m thankfully feeling much better now.

Say what you like about the waiting lists, the bureaucracy and even the occasional user fees associated with the Canadian Healthcare System, at least the generators are always fuelled up!