From Heaven

08/26/05

Its an overcast morning but still beautiful, sitting here overlooking Bujagali Falls (which are really just class 5 rapids), listening to the power of the Nile and the birds chirping, drinking a cup of African milk tea. I can see how people could spend years here. Get a dirt bike, work for one of the rafting companies. I would be tempted if I didn\'t have plans.

I\'ll have to come back to East Africa some day just to enjoy all of the natural wonders. I can\'t believe how many people here smoke. And not just the tourists, the ex-pats and the locals too. The clouds look like they want to break. I\'d like to invest in a place like this one day. Its in the midst of a natural wonder, it draws tourists for adventure sports and so makes good money, it employs locals, and it gives back o the community (NRE supports Soft Power, a UK non-profit that rebuilds schools in the area and pays for kid\'s uniforms.) It\'s a good thing. I feel like the locals here are better off for having this tourism industry here. They seem to be good about not just exploiting the area, but actually giving back. Although, a rich white guy still probably takes the lion\'s share, but at least a little gets back to the people.

Its 4am, I\'ve been hanging out with a fellow from Ireland, a crew from S Africa and a girl from Mombassa. We played pool and listened to music and ate candy and fried ants. Before the S Africans and the girl came back from wherever they were drinking before, it was just me and the Irish fellow, he was very drunk and I was finishing his two open beers because the bar was closed. He was telling me about the volunteer work he was doing, and how he really felt it was a bit of a scam. He basically felt that they are taking volunteer\'s money and pocketing the majority and then taking the volunteers on a \'misery safari\' instead of actually doing anything to help. Which made me feel more confident in what I\'m working on. Before that was Fight Night. Just down the road from NRE at the Cool Breeze Hotel was the premiere of Jinja\'s professional boxing circuit. Watching boxers in a makeshift ring outside, with steam from the boxer\'s bodies licking up into the air to meet the drizzling rain, surrounded by hundreds of screaming locals, was quite the experience. The heavyweight battle, which started at 1am, was brutal. The Jinja Ninja took down the reigning champ from Kenya (who couldn\'t keep his hands up) by knockout. I got this incredible close up look at the guy just after he got back up to his feet, and the image of his face is almost like a dream in my head now. Earlier, I had talked to the only other muzungo, a guy named John (pronounced Yohn) from the Netherlands. He was back in Africa for the first time since he worked for MSF (Doctors Without Borders) in Rwanda during the genocide. Whoa. And he said that wasn\'t even the craziest experience of his life (!) that he had been on first response teams to Algeria and Kosovo and a bunch of other places. Now he runs a little theater in an industrial city south of Amsterdam. He was meeting with the lady who wrote Oboke Girls and offered to try and connect me to her, which would be fantastic. There were 8 fights in all, including two Olympic middleweights and two girls, but most were pretty sloppy slip and slide fests. The fights were supposed to start at 5pm, so I figured in African time that meant 6pm, when really it meant 9pm. On the way to the Cool Breeze, walking in a light drizzle, passing by a school, I distinctly heard a choir singing \'A Bridge Over Troubled Water\' in the local language. It was surreal. Before that was a boda-boda in the rain to get to Jinja Town to change $20, and before that was checking into this $5 dorm bed at NREB (Jinja location.) Before that was the boda-boda (which means piggy-piggy I guess) from Bujagali, and before that was a last swim in the Nile. Earlier I had rented a mountain bike for $5 to explore the area. I rode alone down dirt paths deep into the village, discovering kids and houses and secret swimming holes that only locals could know. Kids were so excited to see me, always shouting \"muzungo!\" and then \"how are you\" or \"what\'s your name.\" Always. And they weren\'t really phrased as questions, more like statements. A couple had stripped down to gleefully show me how they could swim in the Nile and swim against the current. Quite a childhood. I went a little too far into the village, and attitudes changed. The looks got ugly. One guy riding by growled and then barked at me. It was strange. I turned around and got back to friendlier turf. I stopped to talk to a kid, to look at the homework he was carrying, and soon I was surrounded by maybe 25 kids. After they asked for money, and then my bike, and realized they werenÕt going to get it, I asked if they wanted pictures. They were so happy. They were all smiles and laughs as I snapped two rolls. Its film, so I wont see the shots for months. They watched enthralled when I changed rolls. After we said goodbye, as I rode away, they chased after me, so I popped a little wheelie. They cheered, so I popped a better one, and they cheered louder. So I popped a huge one, rode it for a second, and then toppled over backwards. They cheered and screamed and laughed and some of them looked scared, like they would be in trouble for me falling. I laughed and jumped back on. They kept cheering and chasing and I kept riding wheelies down the road. Trying to find my way back to Bujagali I got lost and ended up in some guy\'s back yard where he and three friends were smoking a hookah. There were marijuana plants growing all over this village, in every shamba, so I assume that\'s what they were smoking. It was an odd scene, and the guy told me I should buy a piece of land along the Nile. I asked how much, he said it was negotiable. I asked what the negotiations would start at; he said 15 million shillings for an acre. That\'s around $8300. In any case, I got directions and got out of there.

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