Update on Doreen

Doreen, the young lady who is being sponsored to attend university by friends, family and us, has been accepted to two programmes. Unfortunately, the competition for the law programmes was fierce and she was not accepted to either one. She has chosen to accept the Bachelor of Business Management programme at Makerere University.

I will add details later as typing in a moving car on bumpy roads is getting to be a bit too much!

Holiday and other stuff......

For the past two weeks my family (brother, his wife, 2 kids) toured Uganda with a safari company. Memorable (and forgettable) experiences:

• Lake Mburo National Park - great game walk with more animals than we've ever seen on a walk - many buffalo, zebra, impala, waterbuck.....
• Arcadia Cottages, Lake Mburo - nice rooms, good food, very nice staff
• Great driver and guide - Lamech - from Churchill Safaris
• Lakeview Hotel, Mbarara - stayed too long due to food poisoning - no one was crazy about the menu options
• We had dinner with Doreen, the student we are both co-sponsoring for university. She enjoyed her first time in a swimming pool and splashed around with our niece, Gracie.
• Visited our college campus and house
• Had to miss out on Ishasha and the Ishasha Ntungwe River Camp due to illness
• Queen Elizabeth National Park & Mweya Lodge - good boat trip, good food, game drive but with sparse animals. On the way back from drive saw about 40-50+ elephants of all sizes!! (see pic below)
• Kingfisher Lodge - great view but lacking good menu
• Lake Albert Lodge - a stopoff on the way to Murchison Falls - nice but not spectacular
• Paraa Safari Lodge - on the Nile - good pool with a poolside bar - varying opinions on whether the food was good or not - good desserts - good game drive - did a follow-the-leader of other safari vehicles in pursuit of views of a leopard - brilliant!! giraffes, oribis and others - boat trip was very long and boring (agreement by all), we saw few crocodiles, the tail of a leopard, way too many tsetse flies, the falls were not very impressive.
• Roads from Fort Portal to Murchison were pure hell. Next time we would take the good road from Fort Portal to Kampala, stay one night, then go to Murchison via the good road through Masindi.
• Airport Guesthouse Entebbe was our accommodation for our first and last night since it is about 10 minutes from the airport - good place to hang out.

Will have news on Doreen's status with all the universities she applied to quite soon.
Our airline tickets home to Scotland have been booked and we fly out on Oct 2nd.

On a totally unrelated note...we went shopping in Kampala today and went into a new shop. I saw paper towels (not common here) and began to grab a roll even though I've done fine without them. It was a jumbo roll and I happened to notice the price was 8,000 shs (the equivalent of $4!). For one roll!! Yes, I put it back.

Mixed emotions

3 months from today we leave Uganda to return home to Scotland. As happy and excited as I am about going back to Scotland after being away for 2 years, I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness. Aside from missing Ugandans in general, I'll also miss friends we've made, the landscape, the weather, even beans and matooke and posho, and karo.

If I still feel sad on the flight home I've decided to play some of my favourite Dougie Maclean tunes!