Rafting on the Nile and Other Adventures

Well, this weekend was really exciting! I left on Saturday morning to go to a place in Jinja where they take you white water rafting on the Nile River. The course has level 5 rapids (that's a high level), and some level 6 that we had to navigate around, because people have died attempting to go down them (one of the rapids was called "Dead Dutchman"). So Saturday morning they gave us breakfast at the hostel, then around 10 we set off for the river. I went with my friends from USP: Beth, Beau, Mary, and Katie K. We were put in a raft with two other people and our guide, who was named Paulo. Paulo is actually a two-time world champion kayaker, who's still trying to get into the Olympics! So we went down about 10 different rapids, had lunch drifting down the Nile on our raft (we had pineapple and biscuits), and ended around 4 o' clock for a barbecue back at the campsite. The rapids flipped our raft over about three different times, and one of the times I flew out of the raft and landed on a rock underwater! (I'm ok...not even a bruise to show for it). At one point we got stuck against a rock, and our raft was almost completely sideways, hanging over a waterfall! It's definitely an adventure!

Anyway, this past Friday I went on a class trip for East African Politics class to the Parliament building for the Buganda tribe, and the Kabaka's palace (the Kabaka is the King of the Buganda tribe). The Kabaka's palace was a crazy place. It sits on a hill overlooking the city of Kampala, and if you walk down one side of the hill, past a couple of houses, and through the banana trees, you come to something really unbelievable. It is a long stone corridor built into the side of the hill, with four large cells on the left side of the hall. Our tour guide said these were torture cells built by Idi Amin to detain all of his political prisoners in the 70s! The cells are about three feet off the ground, and apparently they would fill the corridor up with water, then kept a live electrical wire in the water. This was so if prisoners tried to swim away, they would be electrocuted. He said nobody dared come near the palace, so the torture cells were never discovered until after Idi Amin left. What would happen is that if you Idi Amin didn't like you, one day someone would just drive up next to you, shove you into the trunk of a car, drive in a circle for hours (so you thought you were going far away), then pull up in front of the corridor and walk you to the cell. Most people knew at this point that they were going to die there. It was a really sobering trip.

Ironic trivia: The word "Amin" in the Teso language, means "love"

Tonight USP is having a movie night in our lounge. We are going to watch the film Battle in Seattle, which is about the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's attempted meeting in Seattle. Activists and labor unions in the city had a huge protest that actually halted the negotiations scheduled for that year. It's a great movie, especially since we've been talking about the WTO (and IMF and the World Bank) in our Contemporary Issues Seminar for Faith and Action class. We've been debating over free vs. fair trade in relation to development in Africa (the WTO has done a lot of harm for developing nations). Anyway, I highly recommend Battle in Seattle. Also, if you watch one documentary this year, make it "The Corporation". Seriously, Netflix it. It is absolutely amazing, and its about corporate control over the world (I think Shane Claiborne named it one of his favorite movies of the month, or something like that, on the Simple Way website). Well, God Bless and have a great day!

P.S. sorry if you've emailed me over the past week and I haven't responded...the internet has been out for a while, and just came back on! Oh, Africa.