Makerere University Guest House and My Classmates

We are staying at the Makerere University Guesthouse in Kampala, Uganda for this dialogue trip. The Guesthouse has a dining area, lobby, two halls of rooms, and an annex. The two boys on the trip as well as our faculty leader, Dr. O’Neil, are staying in rooms down one of the halls. All of the girls are staying in the annex. The annex has one room that sleeps 4 people, one that sleeps 6, and one that sleeps 2. Between all of us we are sharing two showers and two toilet rooms. So far everything has worked out in terms of living arrangements and having enough time for everyone to shower and get ready each morning. The living conditions are certainly different than back home in Boston! The most obvious difference is that we must sleep under mosquito nets every night. At first this was a strange feeling, but now I can barely notice it. There are also some luxuries missing from Uganda, like constant hot water and air conditioning. I really enjoy having such big rooms and having rooms next to each other. It made getting to know everyone very easy. We have already had a few movie nights in the big room to watch Up and Inside Out as a group.

For our weekend overnight trips, we stay in other hotels that the tour company has arranged for us. We just got back from our first overnight trip, a day in Murchison Falls National Park, where we slept at the Sambiya River Lodge in the Park. The lodge was beautiful and well kept. The rooms were actually individual huts or houses. We had to be walked to our hut by couriers since wild water buffalo sometimes roam the area. The huts were nice, but they were very buggy, which made it quite uncomfortable for some people in the group to sleep. We only stayed at the lodge to eat dinner, sleep, and eat breakfast at 5:30am, so the conditions worked for that short time period!

This is probably obvious from my previous posts, but the group is getting along very well. All of my classmates are extremely open and friendly. We are all a very much out of our comfort zones on this trip and really playing each day by ear, but we have been able to lean on each other throughout the past two weeks. I spend all of my days eating, studying, working, or socializing with my classmates. We are doing everything is a whole group or in small groups, so I feel like I have gotten to know a little about each person on the trip so far. This is definitely a great group that works very well together and I cannot wait for the rest of the month with them.