Jinja Trip!

This is for everyone who has complaned about caf food. =) Point Loma has an amazing caf. And mom, you have amazing food =) Not that I don't it, the food is actually very good. But no variety. Eating something once a week would not be considered repetitive, it would be considered rare. This is our lunch pretty much every day. The Matoke (yellow stuff: mashed plantains steemed in banana leaves) could be exchanged for rice and the g-nut sauce (purple stuff: basically a peanut sauce) could be beans or this green pea sauce and the posho (white stuff: corn flower and water) is always there. And that is our lunch basically every day. And our dinners are very similar. G-nut sauce is very good though, I really like it. We have it at home alot.

Now for our Jinja!!! It's about an hour away from Mukono, but has such a different feel to it. It looks like a big city but feels like a small town. It used to be like the Beverly Hills of Uganda. It has these beautiful huge homes everywhere and nice roads. Indians and British really built it up, and then Idi Amine kicked them all out and took all there money and gave the homes to the people (who didn't know how to take care of it) so now all the beautiful homes are just run down and grungy. It gives this weird feeling to the town. It almost felt like a ghost town, but not because people still lived in it.

Africa is so randomly amazing. Here we are going down the road, there is all this pretty scenary and trees and fields and then there is this huge billboard advertising Nile Beer. It was pretty hilarious. And then when we were on our tour of Jinja, there were all these birds in the sky, but they weren't birds, they were bats! Everywhere! One of the trees was just full of them. Apparently they are a delicacy here. People will catch them and then sell them for like 6 or 8 thousand shillings in town. That is either three or four american dollars, which is alot for food over here.
Houses along the way! (this was not the way the Jinja houses looked though) This is more of a typical African home, or even maybe even a little nicer.


Traveling to Jinja! We had 26 people in that van, African heat and no air conditioning. It was beautiful. When your traveling it's okay but when the van sits in the heat for awhile and we all get on and it's not moving yet... wow, that's 26 very sweaty bodies.



Are these not the coolest hotel rooms or what!?!?! They are actually little honey moon sweets. They are super cute but I wouldn't want my honey moon there, it would definitely be a very bonding experience though. There is no door on the bathroom, and our toilet didn't flush. Denise (my roommate for the trip) and I had some fun =)

This is the source of the Nile! Where it meets up with Lake Victoria. Some of the water here was running and some of it was still, so I'm not sure if that caused it but there were a lot of spinning whirl pools in this area too. It was so beautiful. Later that day we got to take a boat ride into it. So beautiful! One of the guys in our group drank the Nile... not sure how smart that was, but he hasn't died yet and it was a few days ago, so he must be okay.

We got a devotional tour of jinja by missionary Ben Langford. It was really good. This was my favorite stop. He talked about how the Nile provides life for millions and millions of people, that the water from the Nile is so important to Egypt (The Nile supports like all of Egyptian Life) that if Uganda does not let enough water out of the dam, Egypt will send missles over and blow up the dam. Intense. He also talked about how important finding the source of the Nile was. How many explorers died in search of it. And the little devotional he did with it was just like, what are you searching for? What have you set your life's goal as? And what are you doing to get there? It just seemed so peaceful there. It seems like this whole trip I have just been bombarded with all this information, all these new ideas and such. It was just nice to sit back, and think -so what am I searching for? And honestly, at the moment I have no idea. But in that moment, it seemed okay. I don't really know how my life's going to look, but I'm just going to keep going. Being around the Nile, floating on it, hanging out there, just helped me to relax. I finally felt like I could breathe. It doesn't really make a lot of since, but just being in the presence of something so important, something so crucial to so many peoples lives. It was just really cool. And I can't wait until we go rafting on it in a little =)

Oh and just so you know, there are three monkeys in this picture! The first monkeys that I've seen in Africa so far. I promise you they're in there. Three of them. They were pretty cute looking too.