It’s a Small World

We left the house at 5:30am and already the roads were full of kids headed to school. It’s a five hour drive from Sengera, Kenya to the Uganda Border and then five more to Kampala. That’s all very approximate in Africa, and the border was a huge unknown. Needless to say we left with prayers.

Forrest and Lance have been working on their worker’s visa’s for a year already and haven’t gotten anywhere. They have to exit the country every three months and each time they get more and more nervous. The amount of chai that’s been paid is somewhat astonishing, but in such a flawed system you do what you do. We had no earthly idea what this crossing would hold, but even on the best days that border takes from 1-3 hours by the time you stop at every slapping checkpoint, necessary or ridiculous.

There was a slight delay on the way when I suggested we take a route that supposedly saved 4 minutes. The road suddenly turned to bumpy dirt and after crashing for 19 km we were rejoicing that we were only 4.5km from the border. That’s when we saw that the only bridge on the road was a foot bridge. So much for our happy endings. I was ragged about it for the rest of the day.

When you reach the border you are immediately accosted by “helpers”, people who want to bring you from station to station and, more times than not, rip you off. I won’t lie, I all at once got quite mad at the one and told him to go have a good day somewhere else. It’s pretty much fun to just hand everything over to your son and let him deal with it. He was the one who had to trot around exporting and importing the car while we wallowed on the sidelines.

And then came the scary part. Would Uganda let the guys back in or would they pitch a fit at the pages and pages of visas and stamps, proving that they obviously stayed in the country. The four of us had East Africa visas stuck in our passports, but Lance and Forrest just had stamps. We tucked them between us and waited to see what the Lord would do. The border official got confused that we had one kind of visa and they had another and what do you know? That was what he picked on (it’s always something) and with a little help from the Kenyan side he stamped them in. We only spent 1.5 hours at the border and were so grateful it all went ok! And not a single drop of bribe money was left.

Of course that gave us an appetite, so Lance stopped at a Rolex stand so we could taste Uganda street food. It was delicious! Oh, wait, they didn’t actually have Rolex’s, so we just ate chapati and said we’d say we ate Rolex’s. In case you don’t know, it’s basically a chapati with eggs in it. There was a strange man named Moses hanging around the stand and he wanted to visit very much. He had some serious disturbances, and claimed he had worked for the USA Special Forces Unit 6. “I can’t lie, they trained me. I’m sorry, I can’t lie”. He asked me what was the most unique thing I had seen in Africa and I said I thought it was Moses. That really had him shrieking. He said the most unique thing he had seen was our Land Cruiser wheels.

The roads got long and we got weird, but eventually we reached Kampala and the restaurant Forrest had been bragging about, Meza & Salt. It was as good as he claimed!

We spent the night in Entebbe, about 10 minutes from the airport. That seemed the wisest as our flight leaves at 6:20am. It was a small guesthouse run by a sweet lady called Alivia. She thought I was a nun and all the males were Catholic brothers. I assured her it was somehow different. We were all so tired that nobody stayed up late.