Category: Life of a Volunteer
Our Stories:
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Background Story: Global Team behind the Video Map
Over three years, sleeping in grass-thatched huts and working in mud structures whose glass-less windows open towards a magnificent mountain lake, or from their homes across the globe, a small group of expert volunteers worked on a project like no other, the Gorilla Highlands Video Map. They cared about an outstanding region in the middle…
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Innovation: Budget Family Travel in Uganda & Rwanda
The Gorilla Highlands Team is co-hosting #Africhat, a monthly gathering on Twitter that will take place between 7:30 and 8pm this evening (Uganda time). The topic: Family Travel in Africa. The occasion calls for us to share our recent pioneering experience with budget family travel in our region… At the end of December 2015 an…
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How to Survive the Night
When you arrive to the Gorilla Highlands region, you will experience positive, colorful, and exuberant vibes. The people, the forests, and the calm, impressive lakes are right at your fingertips. Then comes nightfall. A comfortable breeze turns into a hollow, howling wind. The vivid birds seem to die out, and the obnoxious crickets make their…
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The Man with Answers (Volunteer Life Part V)
I only had three months… What can you even do with that amount of time? Some people who stay in great resorts and love spotless bathrooms with food service might have a hard time. The scrappy, adventurous and enduring backpacker will say that it just isn’t enough. It seems that I’ve been thrown to the…
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Mapping, Exploring, Adding Musanze
This time we are beginning from scratch.
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Hot Hot Kampala (Volunteer Life Part IV)
After many weeks of taking in the peaceful sanctuary of Lake Bunyonyi it was time to leave the nest… Just for a week though. I realised that I was getting very settled in with the region I’d been living in, and that I should experience more of Uganda. Katarina, my co-volunteer from Austria, was planning…
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Hilarious Arrival (Volunteer Life Part III)
It was hilarious to arrive at Lake Bunyonyi. I got out of the car around 10pm, and came down the large, stone steps with just a flashlight on my phone. It seemed like all there was to this place was a fairly big building for dinner, a kitchen, and some dorms. It was really dark…
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From Squirrel to Unicorn (Volunteer Life Part II)
When I arrived in East Africa on KLM airlines, I was excited/nervous/curious and really, really tired. I flew in with another student from my Carpe Diem gap year program, who was also going to volunteer in Uganda, at a special needs education centre. The interesting part about our situation of arrival was that we landed…
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Stubbornness for Clean Environment
You must be a stubborn person to clean a place knowing that some hours later it will be filthy again! But that is exactly what Keep Bunyonyi Blue has been doing from Kachwekano to Rutindo, two trading centres on the eastern shore of Lake Bunyonyi… Thrice in six months. “Oh yes, it will be dirty…
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