Hello all,
today is our last day in Uganda. Inspire of the exhausting day yesterday, we had to get up very early today. 7:30 was breakfast and at 8:45, we had to load the trucks with our luggage. After a church service of all participants and local staff, we had some time to discuss our experiences and impressions of the race and the week, within our team.
After lunch with the view on the lake Bunyonyi we started our trip home. Our flight back was from the capital of Ruanda Kigali, as its airport is much closer than the airport of Kampala. So we had to pass the boarder to Ruanda, which is a challenge for itself. It’s a border with still a real barrier and with a lot of bureaucracy.
They also don’t check the passport and visa only, they check each luggage very carefully. The customer officers don’t search for weapons, drugs, smuggle good as we would expect, but they search for every kind of plastic bag, as plastic bags are strictly forbidden in Ruanda. Even this was very time consuming, this wasn’t our issue, but our luggage truck. After endless checks and discussions, it turned out, that the truck was registered as stolen and the police didn’t allow us to use it further. So we decided to use one of our three buses as “luggage truck” and distribute the passengers of this bus to the other two. So we finally finish our trip to the airport in a typical African way, using 2 seats by 3 passengers.
With enough time we arrived at the airport and said heartfelt good bye to the Compassion-Team of Uganda, which escorted us. Especially Rita had become a very good friend of all of us and I learned a lot from her about Uganda and the complexity of poverty.
Good bye Uganda. We will keep you in our heart.
After a long flight, with stops in Kampala and in Istanbul, we finally arrived in Germany.
Regards
Andreas
