Lake Bunyonyi

Lake Bunyonyi in south-west Uganda is one of those places that defies description. I could try, but really there’s no point. It’s beautiful to an extent that few places in the world can be. I’ll just post a pic and be done with it:

It doesn’t really do it justice, but you get the idea.

The lake lies at 1,840m, which means it’s free of bilharzia and is safe for swimming (it’s free of hippos and crocodiles, too). The water is warm and calm – and deep, with local “knowledge” putting it at 6,500ft. I love swimming and have been lucky enough to do it in some nice places around the world, but I don’t think anywhere beats Bunyonyi.

The weather changes pretty quickly though.

Rain rolls in over Lake Bunyonyi

Bunyonyi is one of those places where all the hotels think they are “eco” because they have huts and thatched roofs. Bushara Island seems to have genuine claim – it’s quiet, unspoiled, and the birdlife is incredible. Be prepared to be woken early by a dawn chorus like you’ve never heard before. On the shores of the lake, it’s pretty depressing to find all the resorts fenced off, which means that access to the water for locals is patchy at best. Aside from that, Overland has a beautiful setting and an excellent restaurant (where Cosmos the waiter can give you attentive service African-style, by hovering at your elbow expectantly for hours on end). Crater Bay looks ok too, and was the preferred venue for teachers at our school to watch Premiership football, but a friend who stayed there when she was the only guest found it a bit too secluded for her to feel totally safe. Safaris is currently a building site; there are some ok cottages that are only about 15,000 Ush a night (about £5), but you’re in the shadow of a construction area that probably won’t look all that much better even when it’s finished.

View from Bushara Island

The centre of activity, such as there is one for somewhere that is basically a ribbon of development around the lake, is Rutinda, which is also where boats depart for the islands (including Bushara). The market on Monday and Friday is good fun – lots of sugar cane, pineapple, rice, beans etc, plus clothes and other nick-nacks. On those days the lake suddenly fills with canoes as people transport their produce to sell – it’s great to watch. It’s also easier to get to and from Kabale on market days – a taxi will charge around 3,000Ush. Unfortunately they’ll also try to cram about six passengers into a normal car, with four across the back and two in the front, which can involve someone sitting on the central console. With hindsight, it seemed a stupid risk to take and I don’t think I’d do it again. A boda-boda will be up to 5,000Ush. I’m amazed to find myself recommending a suicide-bike as “the safe option” when I’d previously said I’d rather jump out of a plane. Otherwise just pay extra for your taxi fare and insist they don’t fill up with any more people.

So yes – Lake Bunyonyi is everything it’s cracked up to be. Just a pity we had to leave so soon.

The history of a failure

In 1965 Che Guevara, bored of life as a minister in the Cuban government, wanted a new adventure, and joined the “revolutionary struggle” underway in the eastern Congo. Seven months later, disillusioned and despondent, he retreated to the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam, where he began his report on the events that had transpired with the words: “This is the history of a failure”.

This is the history of ours.

How many mistakes did we make? The first one – the obvious one – was travelling to Uganda on the recommendation of a friend, without even receiving a reply from the school at which we’d be teaching. This, with hindsight, meant that we’d offered ourselves unconditionally to said school. We were providing our services without requiring anything at all, not even common courtesy, in return.

The second mistake was not taking a holiday in between leaving London – which was surprisingly stressful – and beginning our voluntary work. When we arrived we were exhausted, and while we’d thought that we would be able to ease ourselves into teaching, in fact we needed to fight our corner from day one. No, we didn’t want to teach more lessons than any of the other teachers employed by the school. We didn’t want to start teaching before having some idea what was on the syllabus, or what the students had already been taught. We did want to see a Ugandan teacher in action before taking charge of a classroom ourselves. We wanted to support the English department, as we’d offered to do – we didn’t think we were capable of *being* the English department…

Perhaps we’d expected too much of rural Uganda, especially when the country’s educational system is going through a particularly tough patch. But what was clear was that rural Uganda was expecting too much of us, being that we were unqualified teachers offering to help out. That didn’t seem to warrant being given the biggest classes, and the most difficult. The headmaster asked us how we were getting on, and we said that we’d struggled with an early morning lesson of 72 students. The headmaster looked at us in shock. “72?!” He scratched his head. “You were supposed to have 80!”

The fact is that we weren’t going to be able to do a good job; we would barely be able to control that many unruly Ugandan teenagers, ages ranging from 12 up to 18, and at all standards of English, in a single class. It was going to be hard but perhaps we could have managed it – except that not teaching was even harder than teaching. Our accommodation was a damp concrete basement underneath a bar. Here we were, finally away from the noise and bustle of Hackney Road, somewhere so remote that it was a 20-minute taxi ride to buy a local newspaper – and we had banging (Ugandan) hiphop echoing around our room from ten in the morning until 11 at night. Worse still, the bar was always empty. We had evil (possibly satanic) caterpillars covered with venomous spines crawling out of the walls. We had to shake our shoes each morning because the little bastards loved crawling into them. It was enough to make you wish you were back in class – or, worse still, back in England.

Were we selfish to leave? Maybe. But we knew we had to make a decision quickly, because if we’d stayed for much longer then we’d have grown more attached to the kids (who, despite everything said here, were mainly really sweet), and then the decision would be made. But this may be our only chance to do something like this, with the only savings that we have, and we didn’t come out here to not really help, to hate every minute of it, and to find ourselves wishing that our money would be gone soon so that we could get back to England.

Will we find another project, another way to help? Don’t know, but we hope so.