Jinja for the Weekend

We had a wonderful weekend in Jinja, which is about 50 miles east of Kampala and has the Nile River running through it. We were a bit adventurous Saturday and did extreme whitewater rafting down the Nile (pictures coming soon!!!), which was highly recommend to us by our flatmates and a couple previous classmates. I had never done rafting before, but consider myself a decent swimmer, but I must say they really do mean EXTREME! These were level 4 and 5 rapids, our whole raft flipped twice, and we got a bit bruised up and a bit sunburned, but it was a lot of fun!!

We spent the night and the next day at a beautiful resort called the Jinja Nile Resort. We had this beautiful villa overlooking the river.

This was our view from the villa.

The resort had these adorable vervet monkeys running around all over the place. They were playful and causing all sorts of trouble for the staff, but for us it was so much fun to watch.

There was also a beautiful pool with a swim-up bar which we relaxed by today after the beating we received from the river yesterday.

You will regularly see these nets in this area of Uganda which are blue to attract the tsetse flies, known to cause African Sleeping Sickness. They are similar to horse flies, and cause a febrile illness, often mistaken (and mistreated) as malaria, which worsens to a coma state, hence the term sleeping sickness.

So back to reality tomorrow... We are off to the smaller community hospital again, St. Stephen's Hospital, and hopefully some more home visits...