Category: Life of a Volunteer
Our Stories:
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A Night Out with My Wife … or $100 Spent Changing a Life?
The wind and wonder of discovery engulfed me as I held on to my motorcycle taxi driver, Kacumbe, the consensus king of boda boda drivers in the Kabale square where I had travelled in southwestern Uganda. We were on our way to Lake Bunyonyi, a mystical highland lake that would capture a decade of my life with its people…
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“What’s a Gay?” and Other Ugandan Sexuality Questions
Weirdly enough, I didn’t sleep at all on the night of 31 May. I felt anxious, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was happening, I guess. I felt all befuddled in the late morning, but a text from my friend Kelvin immediately woke me up. It said that 44 people got arrested…
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Many Happy Returns
I’m Jon Lee, a consistent California connection, who has been writing, editing stories, and narrating videos for the Gorilla Highlands initiative for over a decade. I lucked into the discovery of these magical mountains. I was safely ensconced in a post-retirement life of plenty in a beach town, nursing an ember of long-ago third world adventure.…
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Reflections from My Mirror
Travelling to another country or region and encountering the people of those places, always comes with its own particularities and challenges. As a graduated anthropologist I’m supposed to be quite literate about “different cultures”. At least that is what I used to say when people asked me what it actually means to study Social and…
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How a Gracious Bird Taught Me a Lesson in Patience
Bunyonyi literally means ‘place of many little birds’, and everyone who has ever visited this lake in the southwest of Uganda, knows that that is not an exaggeration. From kingfishers who dive with their beaks straight down in the water, to the hamerkops waiting patiently on the riverbanks, to the gracious national pride of Uganda,…
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Kampala, Here I Come!
After my first month of exotic but basic living on the shores of Lake Bunyonyi I was ready for a deeper dive into Ugandan life. I’d occasionally visited the nearby town of Kabale for my supermarket needs or a change of environment, but I wanted to explore a bit. As someone who is used to…
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This Book is for Every Non-African in Africa
It is 23 January 2021 in the morning, I have to be at the airport in 2 hours. My luggage already weighs 25 kilograms, two more than the 23 that is allowed, but I am still standing there with five books in my arms that I really want to take with me. I love reading,…
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First GHE Interns’ First Ugandan Impressions
We are Mari and Niels, 25 and 23 years old and both students of International Cooperation at UCLL in Belgium, ready for our Ugandan adventure at Lake Bunyonyi. These are our first impressions from the country, after a week of acclimatisation in Entebbe and the first week on the ground at the lake. Mari: After a long but comfortable flight…
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Behind the Scenes of the Groundbreaking Pocket Guide
We feel that we have something world-class, a mini-magazine that has to stop being a shooting star and become the sun.
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