Saturday, September 26th, 2009
Today Emily, Angelica and I decided to go to meet up with some friends at Aero Beach. It was our friend Maria’s birthday so we were all going there to celebrate. The beach was about a half hour from our house, right next to Entebbe International Airport. It’s on Lake Victoria – Africa’s biggest lake. The beach is called Aero Beach because an old “Ugandan Air” 707 crash-landed there a couple decades ago…and they just left it!
To get to the beach you have to drive down a long, windy dirt road. On either side there were goats and cows lazily grazing in the grass. We came to a huge gate surrounded by armed guards. By the way, guards with huge semi-automatic rifles are a common sight here – it doesn’t matter whether the venue is a play, a night club, super market…etc. I know NYC cops walk around with handguns, but the display of power with a semi automatic rifle is just discomforting.
When we got in we climbed onto the huge 707 and walked around inside and onto the wings. We walked all the way out onto the wing that lifted off the ground when one the guards (with a huge gun) sprinted over and started yelling at us in Lugandan. Jerry, our Ugandan friend, told us the man was yelling, “Don’t shake the wing! There is a killer bee hive in there!”
OKAY! We were off the wing in .5 seconds.
Afterwards we got some REALLY great pictures of the airplane and us all standing on the (non bee hive) wing. Then I took a picture with a group of Kenyans that wanted a picture with a mzungu!
Afterwards we walked to the beach and set our bags underneath a sprawling tree. We were there with quite a diverse crew…both career-wise and geographically:
- Angelica, Maggie, Juan Carlos, Me – American
- Emily – British
- Agnes – El Salvador
- Maria – Colombia
- Jerry (and some others that I don’t know their names) – Ugandan
- Johann – Swedish
That’s one of the things I greatly enjoy about Uganda – I am constantly exposed to other cultures, viewpoints and ways of life. I have always considered myself to be an open-minded person, and yet I find that much of my thinking was myopic and a result of essentially always living in the same place. I guess you are not aware of these things until you meet people from a broad spectrum. Just a further development in my psyche.
The beach was wonderful because it was full of indigenous Ugandans playing sports with mzungu’s from all over the globe. That’s the wonderful thing about sports – it doesn’t matter your background, your socio-economic situation, your religion, your sex, your language…etcetera…we are all able to enjoy playing sports because we all understand the rules of the game and the competitive nature inherent in human beings. It made me realize why the Olympics are so special.
Juan Carlos and I played beach volleyball with a crew of Ugandans that didn’t speak a lick of English and yet we all laughed, and patted each other on the back and slapped hands and had a great time.
Just another small, but interesting thing I noticed was that American’s are very selfish and interested in spiking the ball, scoring points and winning the game. The Ugandans were more interested in passing (they often passed 3 to 4 times before hitting it over the net), teamwork, and having fun. They didn’t even keep score. I never thought of myself as a “spike-it-in-your-face” “I-want-to-win-this-game-so-badly-I-can-taste-it” kind of guy – and in America I’m not…but relative to these kids I probably came off that way. I quickly altered my playing style and learned that passing was more important than scoring. One of life’s little lessons.
I also played Frisbee, soccer (wow the kids are so talented at soccer) and a few other sports. Lots of fun. There was a DJ on the beach and everyone danced and hung out all day.
Afterwards we got fried tilapia. Jerry (local Ugandan) told me it would be the freshest fish I ever tasted. He pointed out a boat a few hundred yards out with two men fishing on it. He said fish we were eating were swimming in Lake Victoria less than an hour ago. Pretty cool. We all sat around eating the fried fish with our hands. It was delicious.
I didn’t go swimming because of the risk of bilharzia – which is VERY considerable despite the size of Lake Victoria. The sand (which was imported) was littered with snail shells and bilharzia is transmitted via snail excrement. The locals made fun of me for not going in, but I wasn’t taking any chances. One of the girls who decided it was too hot to NOT go in told me that as a result of her swim she’d have to take vomit inducing bilharzia drugs for three days. Some of the people here are crazy.
The only damper on the day was that Maggie’s camera was stolen. Because we were a largely mzungu faction our bags were a target. Consider this…a $400 camera costs 800,000 shillings and most of Uganda lives on less than 2,000 shillings a day. So yeah…that phone is basically the equivalent of a years worth of wages. That’s the type of poverty you are constantly surrounded by.
And we WERE very conscious that there were lurkers near our bags…but we always made sure someone was watching. The thiefs were good…they managed to take Maggie’s camera which was ATTACHED to my bag. I am SO thankful they didn’t take my bag. That would have been very bad. I owe Maggie a camera.
Afterwards we went to Café Roma to get pizza. At night we went out to Iguana’s and then a local club (my first non-mzungu nightspot). It was fun and we danced the night away with the Ugandan people. When we got back to our car there was an armed guard standing by it.
“Oli otya sebbo.” I said. (How are you sir?)
He looked at me deadpan, “Soda.”
I tilted my head.
“Soda.” He repeated again.
We got in the car. I looked at Emily. “What does he want?”
“He’s telling you he guarded our car and now he wants enough money to buy a soda.”
Even though we never asked him to guard our car, I gave him 500 shillings and we drove away.
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