It all started on a sunny day on 4 January 2011
At 6am at the youth hostel in Kampala, Uganda. I showered under the trickel of hot water, not knowing when I will have hot water next. Scramble to pack my bag for probably the 10th time. Then I rushed next door to change the some what complex dressing on my squad mates leg before breakfast. We eat a lovely breakfast of a hard boiled egg, 1 slice of bread with butter and a baby banana. We cram 30 people and oversized backpacks into 3 mini van taxis, one has zebera strip seat covers this makes me smile. (two squadmates stayed behind so they could do a follow up visit to the hospital, all is well and they are in Rwanda now with the rest of the squad) We arrive at the bus station and are plesantly surprised at the actually rather nice looking busses that we will be in for the next 8+ hrs to Rwanda. A girl named Britta comes over, she is also Canadian, travelling to Rwanda to do volunteer work, but we are on different buses. We watch nervously as they strategically kick our bags into the under carriage of the bus. And we’re off.
Uganda is an absolutly beautiful country, green and hilly with little villages scattered throughout. 2 hours into our journey, at least 3 girls had to pee real bad. The driver said he would stop in 10min. He procceeded to pull over to the side of the road, 20 some girls, me included, are going because who knows when we will get another chance and a couple of the guys pile off the bus to and run to the bush. With alot of giggling and screaming from those who had never had this wonderful experience before, popped a sqwat and got the job done. Piled back on the bus at the honk of the horn. Now Sarah and I decided to make all the peanut butter and jam sandwiches on our laps for the 30 people on our squad. Ha ha with the combination of the extremly bumpy road and cramped quaters by the end of this we were peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Everyone enjoyed a bumpy lunch of PB&J and a banana.
Finally at the boarder of Uganda and Rwanda we fill out forms on the Uganda side, get our passport stamped and walk about 0.5km to the Rwanda side fill out another form, stand in line. Sarah my fellow Canadian is at the front of the line and they won’t let her in, so they call me up to the front. They tell us Canadians are supossed to apply for visas 3 days in advance and so now they can maybe give us a single entry visa and then once we get to Kigali we can apply for a longer one. Ok, thats no big deal. They instruct us to step aside and they keep our passports, Britta is here now and she joins us, I begin to pray. So we wait, some other guy, who’s higher up, comes and asks if we have invitation letters, we don’t. We give him phone numbers. He begins calling telling our contacts to phone the embasse , meanwhile our bus is wanting to leave. Our whole squad is praying now. They tell us we need to find our own way into Rwanda and our friends can take care of our bags. We have no choice, so Sarah, Britta, myself and Curt (a guy for saftey 🙂 are all stuck at the Rwanda boarder waiting for phone calls from our contacts. Finally they call, we have to go back to Uganda, find internet and apply for visas, it could take up to 3 days! Now we are kind of stressed.
So a boarder official walks us back accross the boarder – we all feel like bad kids or criminals at this point, what happened to the world liking Canadians? They are kind enough to cancel our exit stamp from Uganda so we don’t have to pay another visa fee to get in. We find a car taxi and ask him to take us to an internet cafe at the nearest town which is Kublai. By western standards the taxi is full, there is us 3 girls in the back seat all with our day packs on our laps and Curt in the front with his day pack. Half way into town the driver pulls over, my door opens, a women squeezes in next to me and a baby is put on my lap, next a man gets in the front seat along with Curt and the driver – apparently now we are full.
We get into town, he drops us off at an internet cafe – it is 6pm now. We go online – the application form says we need an invitation letter attached. None of us have one. So we find a place to stay, and eat a candle lit supper of peanut butter and jam sandwiches because the power is out. Call our contacts, ours says he will call back in 1.5hr, Britta’s contact says she should be able to apply without a letter, she decides to go try, Curt says he will go with her. We find out we are locked into our room, no one can hear us yelling over the generater, so we yell over the balcony to someone on the street to go ask someone to let us out. Next we hear this voice on the other side of the door saying “I open it!” We were laughing so hard at this point, at the ridiculousness of this day. Sarah and I fall asleep on the couch, cuddled in the candle light listening to music waiting for a phone call – we didn’t get one and when we tried to call the number is unavailable. Curt and Britta return, Britta says she was able to send her application without a letter – uh ok, I’m 100% sure that when we tried the first time it was marked as a required field. So off we go at 9pm back to the internet to send our applications. We get back to our rooms and they have a jug of steaming hot water for us, we wash our feet and face, Sarah and I pray over our rooms lock ourselves in, climb under our mosquito nets, Curt has a bright pink one, and pass out.
To be continued…
