U-gan-da Come Back Now, You Hear!

With the end of Dad's trip drawing near, we figured the best way to end an African adventure is to experience some culture.  We went to the Ndere Cultural Centre to see some cultural dancing and music and eat some local food.

Ndere Troupe performs a repertoire of more than 40 authentic Ugandan dances and songs accompanied by various indigenous percussive, string, and wind instruments.  The performers do not only do Ugandan music and dancing, but other African countries like Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania.  It was a fun show and the performers were awesome.  African dancing has a lot of jumping and swinging of hips, though I have no idea how they move like they do sometimes.  The coolest part of the music portion was the Burundian drums which range from tiny to almost person size.  The large ones must have been really heavy but the drummers carried them on their heads with ease while they walked around and continued to play, also sometimes reached up with their legs to kick them.

The Ndere Troupe performing some Ugandan music before the dancing started.

Shaking their hips!

The drums, later they put them on their heads and played.

Rwandan dance.

We left a bit early because unbeknownst to us we went to the children’s show.  We didn’t realize this until they asked all the kids to come down onto the stage floor to sit around an elder as he sang a song.  Really nice, but it went on and on for a long time.  After that, they wanted to sing happy birthday to one kid.  But you can’t just sing it to one kid, you need to sing it to all of them with birthdays around that day.  It started out okay, but 20 minutes later we were done with happy birthday and heading on out.  We could still hear happy birthday being sung as we got to our car, and were happy we left early.

That was the last big activity for Dad on his big Uganda trip.  Over the three weeks that he was here we checked just about everything there is to do in Uganda off of the list.  It was an action-packed trip and we were really happy to have him with us.  Unfortunately, he had to head back home, but he’ll just have to start planning to visit us again at our next post!