A Drinking Couple with a Traveling Problem: Life in Kampala

After our 12-day trip around the country, it was unfortunately time for Greg to head back to work. That meant I got to take Dad around and show him my daily life in Kampala. He got to experience all the normal things, like going to 3 grocery stores and the butcher/bakery just to get everything needed, plus some of the more entertaining things, like experiencing Owino Market and bartering for shoes.

My good friend, Amanda, also had family visiting (we did Ziwa with them) and they wanted to experience volunteering at Kids Club Kampala. First, we had to make a pit stop at Owino Market to buy more shoes (I don’t know how I missed a blog post, but I helped out at Kids Club with more than one shoe giveaway and have volunteered there a number of times with Amanda now). Owino Market is the largest, and probably most chaotic, market in Kampala. We were on a mission for children’s shoes, so we headed to our normal lady. You pass by rooms/stalls filled with people sewing, piles upon piles of clothes, mounds of different herbs and spices, any kitchen gadget you could ever dream of, and for that matter, just about anything and everything you can think of is sold at Owino Market. As we haggled on prices of shoes and searched through burlap bag after burlap bag, other Ugandans ran to different stalls in search of even more shoes for us. Once we had enough, it was time to do a little shopping of our own. Dad was already downstairs haggling over a few pairs of shoes for himself. Once we settled on a price that was no longer the mzungu price, we were on our way to the Katanga Slum. (Sorry, no pictures of the market. Not the safest place to pull out a camera.)

Since we had some newbies with us, we were given another tour of the slum. I think Dad had a similar reaction to my first time, where you just can’t believe in this day and age people are living in such horrible conditions. But, as always the children all started coming out to follow us around and before long we all had kids holding both hands as we walked around. This time, we even got to see where the group of ladies grows mushrooms (another small program run by Kids Club) and we got a preview on how they make the beaded necklaces from paper.

This little guy was too cute.

3 best friends.

This is the slums source of "clean" water.

The kids wanted to hold our hands on the tour.

They grow the mushrooms in a dark shed in bags with cotton.

One of the ladies showed us how to make the beads for the necklaces.

Once our tour was over, it was back to the classroom to see the kids and distribute some books that had been donated. Dad made the mistake of picking up one of the kids, and next thing you knew there was a whole line of kids waiting to be picked up and swung around. He made a lot of new best friends that day. I think by the end of the day he was rather beat and we were ready to head home, tomorrow we are headed to the Ugandan Wildlife Education Center so we needed to rest up.