Friday July 23 - Seminars, car evaluations, and getting to Rwanda

Friday July 23 - Seminars, car evaluations, and getting to Rwanda

This is going to be a busy day - read a few more gorilla slides, pack for Rwanda, give a seminar, check out the vehicle I’m meant to be renting, and get to Entebbe to fly to Rwanda. Phew. And mostly it works out. I spend a while getting frustrated over the fact that there appear to be many more tissues per slide than I think we trimmed, which means they may have labelled them incorrectly in the lab which means I may be mixing up tissues among cases. But Denis has the trim sheets and he in the field and I don’t know where the sheets are, so we will have to wait and see. I turn up at quarter to 10 for my seminar but apparently all the rooms are in use - I can’t quite figure out if we got bumped or the arrangement was a bit loose to start with. I suggest another day, but apparently “the people have been mobilized”, meaning they are expecting a seminar, so I’m told I will be contacted in an hour. So I have another hour to look at autolyzed gorilla guts and hope I know whose they are, before being informed that “we are ready”. The audience is set up in a small ground floor seminar room and are all set to go, so seminar time it is. I present work by two graduate students - one on chameleon reproduction and one on a parasitic disease in cockatiels. The talks go over well, stimulate quite a few questions, and I am very politely, formally, and profusely thanked.

And then it’s off to PREDICT to meet the crew and check out the vehicle which is being brought for inspection. Taxi Peter is turning out to be a godsend. I texted him this morning to come at 1:15 to pick me up, right away he called back to confirm, and there he was waiting in front of the Vet School just as planned. He congratulated me on being on time - I think we were both pleasantly surprised to see the other at the appointed time. So off we go with my suitcase, which somehow seems awfully heavy considering the amount of stuff I left behind.

And another pleasant surprise - Douglas from the car rental company turns up on time with a very decent looking Isuzu full size 4x4. The tires have good tread, everything seems to work on it, and there is no problem getting a high lift jack, fire extinguisher, breakdown triangles, and jumper cables. He prefaces a question with “I don’t mean to be forward” and then asks if by any chance I am at all mechanical. When I tell him “yes, I am mechanical” he says “now that is two women I have met” and says they will throw in a small tool kit. Not sure just what I might be fixing but can’t hurt. And the best part is they have a guarantee that if anything goes wrong they will send someone to sort you out, get you another vehicle, etc etc. Looks like I got a steer to a good company - in fact they are quite large and do short and longer term rental for many NGO’s and their people. Benard and Mike approve, we shake hands, and the deal is on. Some paperwork and money to sort out still, but the agreement is concluded in principle. Phew!

And so on to lunch - with Benard, Mike, and JBN from WARM. We eat at Crocodile, which I went to previously and appears to be Benard’s favourites. The pork chops with mushroom sauce are apparently the hot item, so we all have them. Dining is a leisurely experience here- the ordering proceeds fairly efficiently, but the serving takes quite a while (standard jokes about whether they have to buy the animals at market first), and then the paying almost even longer. It’s almost 5:00 when we finish, and get back to PREDICT just in time to pack up our stuff and get picked up by Julius, whose long-suffering brother is going to drive us all to the airport in Entebbe for our 9:30 flight to Rwanda.

5:00 on a Friday (probably on any day) is not the best time to be leaving Kampala. We sit in jams for about 30 minutes just getting a few km to the eastern edge of town. But it’s interesting people watching - what really looks like a drug deal is going down with a white guy in a tee-shirt buying something in a package that he sticks in his pocket from a black guy with shades and a motorcycle. Julius carries on a very long series of negotiations on the price of a watch - we are surrounded by vendors trying to sell us poster-sized maps of Uganda, boxes of kleenex, sunglasses and watches, fruit, mosquito nets, air time (both Julius and I top up) and miscellaneous small and useless decorative items and plastic toys. There is a big truck full of ankoli cattle in front of us, and a lot of cars! Eventually we get to the eastern edge of town and Paul (the driver) takes us on an incredibly roundabout route through all sorts of little roads and laneways wending among the residential areas - we go through a large police compound (camera down for this one), past lots of local markets, and in and out of what would be called urban villages. We are about to cross a main road when the sirens start - a motorcade is going by. The African Union summit ended today and there are a lot of VIP people going here and there with their motorcades. You can tell how important the personnages are by the number of vehicles, and whether or not they have motorcyles and the ultimate - an ambulance.

Eventually we pop out onto the Entebbe road well past the main jams leaving Kampala and it’s pretty much clear sailing the rest of the way. Just as well as it took us well over an hour to get out of town. But it was scenic! We have to pull over for a number of additional motorcades heading towards Entebbe, but lucky for us it turns out none of them are actually going to the airport so there is no issue with increased security etc when we get there. But I have never seen as many police as there are standing or walking along the Entebbe road, and piled into the back of pick-up trucks heading to or from their work places. I swear there were 20 people in the back of some of those trucks.

The airport is a breeze, my suitcase is too heavy (bloody books and papers) but the woman just puts on a small bag from Julius and says “it’s OK for two”. I like that attitude! Our plane leaves on time and, because we got the jet instead of the prop plane, the flight takes half an hour rather than an hour. Bonus. One of the first things we see on arrival is a big sign: no disposable plastic bags allowed. Rwanda is a clean and litter-free country. The driver is waiting for us, and another of Julius’ brothers is waiting for him, so off we all go. I sit in the back seat with the intention of sleeping, but I had forgotten about the state of the road from Kigali to Ruhengeri. Up and down, back and forth, and lots of potholes. About 3/4 of the way back I realized I felt a bit odd, and then it occurred to be that I was getting just a bit carsick. Note to self: do not let Sarah sit in the backseat when we do this part of the road. Sorry Elizabeth, but we can’t have her barfing in the pillows again. And shortly before midnight we were deposited in the MGVP courtyard (once we woke the guard up to open the gate that is), and I collapsed into the bed assigned to me!