Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary, Part 1
After our Africa introduction in Nairobi, we were ready to head to Uganda. We had one night in Kampala before we were to be picked up to go to the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary where we were to stay for four weeks volunteering at the sanctuary. The one thing I had intended to do in before arriving in Africa was to get a haircut. Buenos Aires seemed too early to get it cut, and my Spanish would only get me to a place to get my haircut, not how to have it cut. Paris seemed like the perfect place, but we were too busy enjoying the sights to take the time there. London would have been great, but we weren't there during any business hours. So, now we had arrived in Uganda, and it was very hot, and the hotel we were staying at had a hair salon next door. So, like all good US tourists to Uganda, the first thing I did was get my hair cut.
It was truly an amusing experience. I was the only white person there, and probably the only white person who had been there for a while. They took one look at me and called for a different guy to come to cut my hair. I only wanted a haircut, but he insisted on washing my hair first. This was clearly for his entertainment and not to make my hair clean. Then I told him how I wanted it cut and he told me that my hair was too pretty long to cut it shorter. We agreed on two inches and away he went. He cut at least five inches off from the bottom- ok, maybe four inches on one side and five on the other. When he finished with that, he looked at me very seriously and said "can I please put in a few layers?" It was as if he had been waiting his whole life to cut layers in fine hair. How could I refuse? So, now I have a few layers on the back of my head. Finally, he insisted on blow drying my hair- more play time for him. He curled it up (Jackie O style), curled it under, put it all on one side, then all on the other. He was having a great time and was so proud of his work. After charging me only for the haircut (the shampoo and blow dry were complimentary as it turns out), we parted ways with his declaration that everyone will want to know where I got my haircut. After telling him I loved it for the 20th time, I headed back to the room. Larry was quite surprised at the results- it was actually the first time I ever had my haircut that he noticed a difference! It was fine, it was much cooler which was good for the hot weather, and if I tilted my head, it looked almost even on both sides. It may not go down in history as the best haircut, but it certainly was amusing. How many mzungus can say they've had their haircut in Uganda?
We spent the rest of the evening "hotelling." This is our new verb which means spending time in a hotel, particularly when it is a nicer hotel, doing hotel related things... showering, watching TV, lounging in a temperature controlled environment, and/or using whatever facilities they happen to have- pool, gym, room service, etc. It's a great way to totally chill out and relax.
Our four week volunteer experience was well, the best way I can describe it is that it was all over the place. I'll start with the ending first. In the end we researched, wrote, photographed, designed, and developed a new website for Rhino Fund Uganda. It went live on January 1, 2009. The website is www.rhinofund.org. The website will give you lots of information about the organization, what it is doing, the programs, and give you a taste of what it looks like. It was a good volunteer project- it was something that was needed; that no one there had the skills to do, and it is a completed product in the end that is already in use. We feel really good about our project. Go check out the website!
How our time started there, however, was quite different. We found the project on the GVI (Global Vision International) website which is a clearinghouse of volunteer projects. We booked our volunteer project through them after reading about the program. We wanted to be somewhere with an established volunteer program that had both experience in working with volunteers and a plan for what to have the volunteers do. This was the same organization that Larry used to go to the Scheychelles, so we felt pretty good about it.
Rhino Fund Uganda is the organization that established Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary and in addition to the rhino reintroduction program, it runs some other education and community programs (which you'll know if you check out the website). Anyway, we had been trying in vain to get a hold of someone at GVI to confirm our pickup and transport to the sanctuary for several weeks and finally found an e-mail address for Heidi, the executive director at Rhino Fund and contacted her directly. We got a reply back that the executive director had been in a car accident and that she was in the States, but that they could accommodate us and would arrange for pick up. We were a little apprehensive about the exec director not being there, but life happens and off we went.
We were met upon arrival by Angie who introduced herself as the executive director. Over the next couple of days we learned that the car accident, which we assumed had happened very recently, took place five months ago, and that Heidi resigned and went back to the US three months ago. Angie, a friendly and direct South African, told us that she knew Heidi casually, as they were both from South Africa and both white women and saw each other regularly in the marketplace. Heidi asked her if she would take over at the sanctuary. Angie said she visited that sanctuary and decided to take the job. We had assumed that Angie must have been at the sanctuary with Heidi, but as it turns out, Heidi and Angie had part of one day together as a transition and that was it. Angie also told us that she had never heard of GVI prior to the email being sent a couple of days ago and that they had no formal volunteer program at all. In fact, the last volunteer that was there, shortly after Angie took over left several weeks early and Angie had decided to not have any further volunteers for at least six months until she got things running in a way that she wanted. Our biggest disappointment was learning that the schools were closed for the entire month of December and January. One of the most attractive things about this program was the opportunity to go to local schools and teach about rhinos and land conservation issues. This was also described as 50% of our volunteer time and now it didn't exist. This was particularly frustrating as we had asked GVI if the school program would be any different in December and were told there were no changes.
Anyway, at the same time, Angie was very welcoming of us and was having Ann put together a volunteer plan for us for the next few weeks. She also made it clear that she was open to ideas and suggestions as well. Ann is Angie's son's girlfriend who lives at the sanctuary and supposedly helps her. She is 19, sort of pretending to do some online school work, and spends most of her time either sleeping, attached to Angie's hip, on her cell phone with the boyfriend, or playing with her parrot. It did not reassure us that Ann was working on a plan for us.
Anyway, after settling into our very very small room that first day and learning what an ablution is (a detached toilet/shower building), we met a few of the folks around who all seemed very friendly, happy to meet us, and we took a drive around the sanctuary in the back of a pickup to check out a dead bushbuck. It was very hot, very dusty, and very pretty. This was true African bush country.
The next day our plan was to meet the rhinos. First thing in the morning, we visited them as tourists with a couple of visitors from Italy. The rest of our day was to do "rhino monitoring." That sounded like fun and we were excited to get going. Let me tell you, rhino monitoring is not nearly as exciting as it sounds. Rhinos sleep most of the day in the shade to try to stay cool. We hiked out to where the rhinos were and joined the ranger and the askari (like a junior ranger) whose job it was to stay with the rhinos all day. The rhinos are monitored 24 hours a day and the rangers work in 12 hour shifts. We watched the rhinos for a while, talked with the ranger for a while (the askari didn't speak English), and rested in the shade while the rhinos rested. That was the first hour. We were supposed to be there for seven hours. They say (whoever the they is) that to be in Africa is to learn to be patient. Larry is patient by nature. I am not patient by nature, nor do I sit well doing nothing, so this was a VERY LONG day. Even Larry thought it was painfully slow. We really wanted to show an effort and not quit early, so we sat and sat, looked at the sky, looked at the random bird, and sat some more. The rhinos are amazing and very big creatures. Watching them eat and move around is entertaining, but really, how long can you watch a sleeping rhino? The most exciting part of the day was the 10 minutes in which a couple of visitors came to see the rhinos. They took some pictures, looked for a couple of minutes, and then left. Part of the reason it was so painfully slow was that we weren't doing anything or helping in anyway. The people who were monitoring the rhinos were still there, and there was literally nothing for us to do.
When our time was finally up, we walked back to the headquarters area absolutely exhausted from doing nothing. We took a cold shower, with almost no water pressure, but plenty of bugs watching us- spiders, mosquitoes, centipedes, moths, ants, and several things we couldn't identify and didn't really want to. We had dinner, and crawled into our very small separate beds, tucked in our mosquito nets, and tried to relax while sweating from the heat. African bush life was tough and we needed something more to do. We decided we would have to talk to Angie about working some kind of a program out if this was going to work, but we decided to wait at least until we saw what Ann had come up with as a plan for us.
The next morning, while we were having breakfast, Ann came to give us our schedule. She literally walked in, dumped a piece of paper on the table, and said that if we had any issues to let her know, and turned to walk out. I couldn't let her get away with that, so I asked her to come and explain it more in detail to us. Today's project said "tree identification" and nothing else, for example. She did the best she could, although on the schedule there were days listed as "community upliftment," and Ann had no idea what the "education ladies" actually did. Our schedule was really terrible. We had four days of bird or tree identification with no information at all as to what they wanted us to do or why. There were six more days of rhino monitoring and several days of fence patrolling. This was not looking so good. We had talked briefly with Angie about her desire to have a handout of bird and tree identification for visitors, so we decided that we could work on that. We also decided that we needed to talk to Angie today. She was leaving for Kampala for a board meeting tomorrow and we wanted to chat with her before she left. We really did want to work something out partly because there were some really nice things at the sanctuary and we wanted to give it a good shot and partly because we didn't really know what else to do.
We actually had a good time that morning taking notes on different trees, taking pictures, and pretending to know what we were supposed to be looking for as identifying features on trees. That afternoon, Juliet, one of the "education ladies" joined us and we went through a tree book and identified at least some of the trees correctly, we think.
We had our serious chat with Angie that night and talked about where we were coming from with the information that GVI gave us, how frustrated we were with GVI, how appreciative we were that she was open to working with us, and that we did want to figure something out with her and Rhino Fund. She thought for sure we were going to tell her that we were leaving and she acknowledged that the volunteer schedule that was set up for us was pretty much time filling crap. We chatted for a long time that evening about Rhino Fund, what she wanted to do as new executive director, what was good, what needed work, etc. It was good. We came up with a whole variety of possible projects to think about. We left it that we would make a new project plan from scratch and go over it with her when she got back.
As it turned out, the project that we decided to do and that was Angie's top choice was creating a website for Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary. It was little bit of mind twister to think that here we were in rural Uganda, probably almost as far from "real civilization" as we would be, and there was a couple of laptops, satellite Internet connection, and the most needed thing was a website.
Life in the 21st century... there is almost no electricity or home phone service anywhere in Uganda, but everyone has cell phones and people have access to the Internet via satellite. Most people charge their cell phones by going to a little shop for phone charging where they attached the chargers to a gas powered generator. At the sanctuary we had some solar panels, to help with power, but when we used a computer or the Internet, we needed to turn on the generator. We did have hot water, but that was done by making a fire under a steel drum of water about 1-2 hours before we wanted to shower. It was a labor intensive, low cost, generally low tech lifestyle
Anyway, we set up our schedule for the next few weeks with a combination of days working on the website, and doing community visits with Juliet and Florence (the “education ladies”). Our first community visit was set to go to the Ksozi community, a neighbor to the sanctuary. We learned on the way there that this community was particularly hostile to the sanctuary because they thought there were animals that came out and ate their crops and there was a dispute about a road through the sanctuary that Ziwa thought was theirs to manage and the Ksozi folks thought should be open to them at all time. More interestingly, we learned that this was the first community visit they had been on in over six months due to lack of funds. Apparently they used to go 2 days a week to the communities and 3 days to the schools, but they hadn't been anywhere for six months. I wondered what in the world they have done with their time as they live at the sanctuary and work there. I asked and got a vague answer that they read and waited. This is my definition of an African moment- when something just doesn't make any sense to a typical Westerner and doesn't even make the typical African blink an eye. It's mindboggling, really.
This was also our first visit to a small village. There were lots of children who were interested in us, some brave enough to greet us, and some eyed us from a distance. It is quite an event, especially for kids, when there is a muzungu around as it is something that they rarely see. They were both interested in us and scared of us funny looking white people.
They held their community meeting out under a big tree. The men spoke, and the women sat behind watching, taking care of the kids, and talking amongst themselves. The women all wore dresses, nice party looking dresses, which were mostly tattered and torn in places. The boys wore t-shirts, mostly with English on them- YMCA shirts, sports teams, Aid group slogans, etc. Again, most of the shirts were torn and dirty. Some of the kids looked like they were in need of medical attention as well. Kids helped take care of the younger kids and seemed to be helping with carrying water, food prep, etc. Most of the homes were small empty looking concrete buildings or Adobe like mud buildings with straw roofs. They cooked in outdoor mud huts using firewood or charcoal, and I'm still not sure where they went to the bathroom. In many ways it was pretty much exactly what I'd imagined a poor rural African village to look like, except most of them had cell phones.
Anyway, the visit went well, from what we could tell since everyone was speaking Lugandan. They were talking about what to do if an animal from the sanctuary killed one of theirs, and at one point, they looked to Larry and I to ask us what we did in our country. This was pretty uncomfortable really as I knew whatever we said would be taken as officially what happened in the States, and we were in no position to answer that question. We did the best we could to say that we didn't really know and that it varied in different places, and we knew that people had similar issues and discussions in the US. That seemed to be sort of good enough.
On the way back to the sanctuary, we stopped at the roadside (as people called it), which was really the town of Nakitoma, a few strip mall like buildings with businesses in front, and people living in back. Juliet, Florence, and Godfry, the head ranger who went with us, went inside the hotel, which was a restaurant, not a hotel to have their lunch, and put out a couple of chairs in front for us to sit and eat the packed lunch they had made us at the sanctuary. After they returned, I told Florence next time I would like to try the local food as well. She seemed entertained and surprised, and agreed to take us next time. It made us uncomfortable and very out of place to be so clearly separated for lunch, but it wasn't intended in a bad way, they really thought we would be more comfortable with packed food outside than local food inside.
That weekend was totally open and free with nothing to do. Angie and Ann were in Kampala, and we hung out at the sanctuary. With the Madame gone (how the staff refers to Angie), things were a little more relaxed. We asked Francis, who was the cook, to eat with us, and we enjoyed getting to know him. We wondered if he would still eat with us when Angie was back, but we doubted it (and he didn't). We really didn't do much of anything those two days, but it is amazing how the time passes anyway- we took some walks, ate some meals, read some, slept some, and then it was Monday. It was a weekend on Africa time (slowly, slowly).
That Monday, Angie took us with her to do her shopping and errands in Masindi, which is the nearest bigger town about an hour away. We had a good time shopping in our first big African market. We were the only white people and pretty much everyone stared at us; but it was also very comfortable at the same time as people were friendly and interested, but not pushy or in our face in any way. We bought a soccer ball for the kids at the sanctuary. One of the housekeeping staff had four small children living there who always waved at us and smiled, but had yet to be willing to come any closer. We thought they'd enjoy having a ball to play with, so we found one in the market and bought it. I also tried to find shampoo in the market, but there was only hair gel and nothing for white people hair. One place did have a bottle of shampoo. It was a gallon sized container that looked like it had been there for years, and it was surprisingly really expensive (muzungu priced). I figured I could just water mine down and make it last.
We also went to the gas station in which there was no fuel and hadn't been for a couple of weeks. Just part of life in Uganda, you just can't assume that you will be able to get what you want when you go to a store. You either have to work around it or live without it. This is one of the biggest differences from life in the States. If something breaks, or you run out of something, you just go to the store and buy another one. It is very rare that something is out of stock. In Africa, if something breaks, you fix it- one way or another.
We got back to the sanctuary and gave the soccer ball to the kids. They were very excited for about one minute until Jesse, the resident dog, came and took it away and proceeded to puncture it. It was very sad and it was pretty clear that the kids were confused by the course of events. We took the ball to try to fix it and then asked Florence to explain to the kids that we would try to make it better. It was a good thing that Florence talked to them because they thought we had given the ball to the dog and not to them. Yikes. So much for trying to do something nice. Everything is harder in Africa! Fortunately we were able to patch the ball and gave it back to the kids a couple of days later without Jesse at our heals. We gave it to them and then went away so that we weren't responsible for anything that happened to the ball after that. We heard from Florence a couple of days later that the older girl punctured the ball again, just to see what happened- and that was the official end of the soccer ball.
Our typical day at the sanctuary when we were working on the website was get up, and do some exercise while the local staff watched us. We were the prime morning entertainment. Why these muzungus would sweat unnecessarily was simply beyond them. One particular older ranger would count off when he saw us like we were in the army (1,2,1,2,etc). I think that may have been the only English he knew. We would then shower, and if they had pumped water from the well, and if they had built a fire for water, we had hot water and some water pressure- it takes a village for muzungus to shower. All our meals were prepared for us by Francis and Joseph, the two very friendly cooks. Sissy, the head of the housekeeping staff would check on us and see if we needed any laundry done. We'd try to get some work done, some days more successfully than others. In the later afternoon we would go for a walk, take another shower, have dinner, and climb under our respective mosquito nettings. On some levels, it was living in absolute luxury. At the same time, it was pretty challenging with the heat, bugs, food stress, things not working, and a wide variety of "African moments."
Our second trip to the Ksozi community was a day filled with African moments. Juliet wanted to show us the presentation she planned on showing the community. They had no funds to go do any visits for six months, but they had two laptops, a digital projector, and a full size projection screen. Juliet eventually showed us the power point presentation they had on introducing the sanctuary to communities (after the power was sorted out) and it was amazing. It was a professional, pretty, informative, well written presentation. We were amazed it existed. Our theory was that at some point, this project had a lot of money, and now the money was pretty much gone. Anyway, we were very impressed with the presentation and were looking forward to using some of the materials on the website.
While Juliet was off getting some other things together, Larry and I looked on the laptop to see if there was anything else we could use for the website. We were quite surprised when we found an entire folder of trees and flowers from around the sanctuary labeled with what they were. Then we found a handout with pictures of the trees and descriptions of them. This was the first project we were working on because Angie thought it didn't exist. Juliet even sat with us trying to identify trees and never mentioned that there was a completed handout on her laptop. When I asked her about it, she just smiled and said they needed more trees. They weren't even using what they had. Every emotion seemed magnified at the sanctuary (kind of like camp- high highs and low lows), but this was SO FRUSTRATING. Juliet sat there with us struggling to do work that had already been done and she knew it. The most frustrating part is that Juliet didn't seem to see why that would be frustrating or that there was anything wrong with that at all. It wasn't like she was trying to trick us or be mean to us in anyway, it was just, well, an African moment.
Shortly after that, Juliet brought out the portable generator to test the set up. It immediately overloaded the power blew up the power block, smoke came out, it was hot, and the power block was finished. After trying a variety of things, it was determined that the portable generator was not working well. It didn’t have enough power to run the laptop and the projector at the same- except when the power would surge, but that wasn’t any good either.
The solution was to go and rent a generator from the roadside. I wasn’t convinced this was possible, but off we went. Godfry bargained with a guy who ran a barber shop to take his generator for a couple of hours. He agreed, closed down his shop, and gave us the generator. We got to the community an hour later than we were supposed to, which didn’t bother anyone at all. We were on Africa time! Quite a crowd was forming as we were trying to get everything set up. It was quickly determined that the barber shop generator wasn’t going to work either, and a couple of the village guys went off to try to find a third generator. After an hour or so of playing with the kids in the village by taking pictures and then showing them the pictures, a third generator showed up. They plugged everything in on this new unknown generator, and promptly the projector popped, smoked, and was finished. Another African moment. I would think maybe they would try to test an unknown generator before plugging in the expensive equipment, but they didn’t think that was needed.
After the projector blew up, Juliet, Florence, and Godfry decided it was time to leave and they would reschedule. I asked Juliet on the side if they could just talk through the presentation since they had such a good turnout, but that was not possible according to Juliet. I didn’t understand and we left. A day filled with African moments.
We were pretty frustrated when we got back to the sanctuary, but not overly shocked- a clear sign that we were adjusting to life at the sanctuary. Angie was pretty livid, but fortunately not with us. We were heading out the next morning on a mini break- a three day trip to Murchison Falls National Park. We were excited and the break was coming at a good time.
Stay tuned for Part Two….
Hope all is well with everyone. We are enjoying Aussi Land very much! We will be back in the States in a month, just in time to go to CAMP (check it out www.campdaydreams.org)! Then it's all about the blog- and catching up with all of the people we have missed.
