This weekend, Haley, Kellie, Ari, Kevin, and I took a couple taxis up to Sipi Falls. We left Friday afternoon, and arrived Friday night at around 10 at the hostel called the "Crow's Nest". I thought a hostel would be a lot sketchier than it actually was. It was really fun! We got up to the main entrance, and there were all these foreign kids, kids from Wales, England, and a whole group of kids from the "American Jewish Society" (weird), yamikas and all. So the kids were all just hangin out, playin mancala, and sitting around talking. We sat down, ordered some french toast, and ate while watching this group of kids play this game. We started figuring it out, and its such a cool game! It's like human-musical-memory. Like the card game memory, each hand of each person has a different song associate with it; and there is a match with another person's hand. So there were 2 people in the middle, and they had to tap two people's hands, and they sang a little bit of their song; and then it was the next persons turn, and they basically just tried to find matches. It was fun; i hope we can play it sometime. So we went to our hostel room, and it was just a small room with 3 bunk-beds. We woke up in the morning around 6 to climb to the top of a little hill to watch the sunrise... But it was cloudy so we didn't seen anything. Right before heading up, i was standing in the doorway, and the door came in and slammed on my heel. It was a pretty big bleed... And wearing my chacos were hard because it was rubbing up right on the cut. So that was fun... After the hike, we went and had breakfast at the main room of the hostel. And then we set off for Sipi Falls! It was pretty crazy... We got to the top of the falls, and probably about 10 yards away from it, we started getting strapped in our harnesses. The people that were there didn't really tell us what we needed to do... it was hard to understand their english anyway. There was no form of consent, or release waiver... We just went repelling down Sipi Falls! At first, it was scary as heck... Especially because it was misty in the morning, so we really couldn't see our way down. Kevin went down, and then I went second. The weird thing about the whole thing was that we ran out of rock probably about... 1/8 of the way into it. After that we were just dangling, letting ourselves down little by little. But the view was pretty incredible. After you got out of the mist at the top, it was like being in a helicopter. (I think... I've never actually been in a helicopter). The rope was kind of twisted, so you were spenning around... Not really fast, but just slowly spinning around so you could see all the different views... I wish I had my camera to take some pictures, but the guys said it would get wet. Anyway, it was a total of 333 feet. Probably the scariest and the craziest thing I've ever done. But so worth it. We hiked back up to the top of the waterfall, up to the 2nd waterfall, had lunch, and then went back to the hostel. Packed up our stuff, and headed back to Mbale, then back to Jinja. At Jinja, we met up with kirk and Jesse... A note about Jesse. Jesse is our country director, and he has been lying for the past 3 months about his birthday and his age, so that no one would celebrate his birthday. He told Ari it was in April, he told me it was in October, and he frequently switches back between ages 26 & 27. The weird thing was, nobody really got suspicious, just confused. But one day, he asked Kirk to bring is passport up to Kampala where we were at, having just come back from Igara west. And Kirk looked in it and found out his birthday was July 31st, 1982. So, naturally... we had to celebrate his birthday! We went out to an Indian restaurant... and then decided to go out for dessert, and buy something and ask the waitress to just stick a candle in it. Well first, the place we were going to go to was closed, and so we decided just to buy some ice cream at home, but then another cafe was mentioned, so we went there. We ordered at the counter, gave the waitress some candles, telling her that it was for our friend's birthday. When she comes out with it, she places it in front of me, with no candles, and is just like, "he'll be so excited!" Wanji??? So all of us are cracking up, just because this is kind of awkward, so I run back behind the counter, grab some matches, and pull some extra candles out of my backpack and quickly light them & stick them in the dessert (pancakes and ice cream- it was actually really good!), and we just all started singing happy birthday. It was the best. face. ever. His mouth was just wide open, clearly confused, and I kept asking, "who has my camera? who has my camera?" But Jesse was holding it, and was kind of frozen, so i didnt get a picture of it. Anyway, it was a good schnike, he didn't even see it coming. We headed back home... And... that was pretty much it for the trip. Sunday, we went to church, and... ok this was weird. At the end of church, we were supposed to head down to the Mt. Lebanon church for the Happy Child meeting. Before we could get out of the church, there were 2 men who just came up to introduce themselves, and were asking if they could help in our Humanitarian Aid, so I invited them to Happy Child, because they seemed nice enough. One of the guys I had met earlier, his name was Mathais, and he inherited like... 100 acres from his grandfather, and wants to build some kind of community center, like a hospital or a university on it. So I thought it would be cool if he could talk to Francis from Happy Child, because Francis is looking for a place to build his recreation center. The other guy's name was Benny. Oh Benny... he is probably the weirdest person I have ever met. He had conducted the music in the combined 3rd hour, and we were singing "Master the Tempest is Raging" And on all the fermatas, he would hold them out SUPER long, with ridiculous vibrato... long after everyone else had stopped. So weird. So we all set off towards Mt. Lebanon, and Mathais is kind of a spoiled man, and is like, "let's take a boda boda" Because we were going to walk for like a whole 20 MINUTES. THE HORROR. Benny... is asking all these questions to me, finds out i'm from texas, and starts naming off all these things about texas that he knows (none of which were true), and comes to "Carrie Underwood!" All of a sudden, we hear, "She was driving last night on her way to cinncinati on a snow white christmas eve..." Oh no. It only got louder, especially during the chorus: "JESUS TAKE THE WHEE-EEEEEEEEEEL!" He's belting Jesus take the wheel in the middle of the street... people are staring, Haley is laughing so hard she can't see and is triping over every rock in sight, I just look incredulous. Wanji?! So he finally finishes, and we get to the church, and Mathais wants to run to get some lunch, and never comes back. Benny is introducing himself left and right, trying to convince Francis to let him sing for the kids, asking me to marry him, asking Haley to marry him, asking me on a date this weekend when i said no, giving hard candy to kids left and right (He tried to give one to like a 2 year old... had to stop him there). And then he's all obnoxious towards Ari for not going to church... I swear, I've never met a psycho at church before, but that streak was broken today. When we start the happy child program, Francis starts introducing everyone to the kids, but then Benny jumps in and tries to take over, so i have to pull him aside and tell him to knock it off. And then he wanted to sing, and Francis said ok, just to shut him up. So I convince him to do "Do as I'm doing" instead of "My heart will go on" from titanic. Happy Child was fine, and it was fun, we taught the kids about bathing and other tips on being clean in the home. Then we split into groups again, and I taught them how to play "duck duck goose" and they played a couple of other fun games that I had never heard of. Afterwards we said BYE to Benny, and had a little meeting with the leaders of Happy Child. We decided to set up a training conference for all of the volunteers for happy child, teaching them different skills like, counseling, different topics for teaching lessons, talking to kids, childrens rights... etc. So that's going to pretty cool. Ari had the idea to create a manual, so we are going to do that, and try to set up the whole thing in 2 weeks.
Pictures:
Myself, repelling
Jesse glaring at Kirk for telling everyone when his birthday was, while Kevin eats his birthday pancakes and ice cream
@Happy child, doing 'head shoulders knees and toes' with the kiddos
No comments:
Post a Comment