After yesterday’s washout, the final morning at Lugazi was devoted to a festival with a twenty team competition. The standard was high and the final was an exciting match fought out between two close rivals – Local Derby! Lugazi East Primary came out victors – by some margin in the end.
The competition was interspersed with more excellent entertainment provided by FASBEC – drumming, dancing, and, additionally, an excellent play delineating the ABC message in amusing and poignant style. These young actors really were very good.
At the end of the competition, thank-you speeches were delivered and each CWB team member received a beautiful bouquet of miniature roses – a lovely touch from our excellent hosts. Steve allowed us to share with him a final Indian buffet lunch – this time accompanied by beer and soft drinks at the insistence of Doctor Mishra – before we clambered aboard the bus for our journey to our next venue in Masindi.
The five hour bus ride was gruelling but the last our was spent travelling West into a gorgeous Ugandan sunset. As the forests and fields were reasonably flat here we had a box seat to view the subtly changing hues that painted the darkening sky. From pale yellows to orange to gold to pink to purple to rich, deep ruby it was like an imperceptibly moving slide-show on a giant screen. Once again, here in Uganda, Nature wins.
We had the warmest greeting at the New Court Hotel from two CWB veterans – Mike and Veronica Reeves. Having been a part of five CWB projects – three to Uganda – they have invaluable information about the local area, Uganda in general and how CWB operates. Sally had tapped into this rich seam of knowledge when preparing this project. They are here now as part of their Friends of Family Spirit charity and tomorrow we will be visiting the orphanage that they support – the Family Spirit Childcare Centre.
This hotel has rooms in separate huts and I wasn’t sure whether in the early hours the banging and scratching on my door was the infamous Ghostly Baboon at work again or just real baboons. I didn’t open the door to find out.
Tomorrow we are having a day off.
Oh… I nearly forgot. You are probably screaming at the blog “What happened to the Jinja Three!?”.
Well having been arrested, and harangued by one of the two gun-toting soldiers who had accosted them, with the word “terrorist” being liberally bandied about one of their number, Paul, was dispatched back to the hotel (!) to bring the manager to vouch for the fact that were actual guests there – the bridge in question being close to, and in view of, the hotel. It crossed Paul’s mind to make a run for it and escape the country as quickly as possible, but, Paul remembered the CWB ethical code which states: don’t leave your mates in the lurch if they have been arrested as suspected terrorists”. So he jumped on the back of a passing motor cycle (apparently!) and quickly got back to the hotel to summon the manager who quickly engaged the services of the local policeman – who stands guard outside the hotel with his own AK47.
Negotiations then took place and eventually the situation was resolved with Private Grumpy grumpily agreeing to release the suspected terrorists into the charge of Constable Friendly whose take on matters was “Don’t worry. This sort of thing happens all the time”.
Phil enquired, on the way back through some scrub, whether there might be snakes there. Constable Friendly relieved Phil’s anxiety by saying: “Don’t worry. If there are I’ll shoot them”. (I love a good snake story).
So the Jinja Three returned safely to the hotel, cameras and ‘phones in tact, having evaded the clutches of the Uganda prison system. Celebrity Sal has the distinction of being the first CWB Project Leader to be arrested for terrorism (we believe). Phil will dine out on he story for ever. And Paul, white water rafting one day, arrested the next and … oh dear … he’s on a safari drive today. Watch this space.
And the moral of this story? It really was A Bridge Too Far.
Peter Yates.
11/3.10.14