Update 6:

My departure from Geneva, Switzerland, was an indication of how things can and can’t function African style. My itinerary was to be as follows, KLM all the way from Geneva to Amsterdam to Nairobi, Kenya to Entebbe/Kampala, Uganda. Shortly after boarding the flight destined for Amsterdam, we were told that mechanical failures would prevent the flight from departing.

I now sought a new flight plan, as I had consequently missed my connections (and judging by the facial expression of the fella behind the check-in counter, Entebbe, Uganda isn’t the most common destination, who would have guessed). Upon disembarking the plane, the line-up at the KLM counter had over 150 unhappy individuals. To me, it didn’t matter; I have been on too many cancelled flights to be affected by this development. Thank you Air Canada for teaching me patience in this arena, after all they are the Kings of cancellation and delays.

To make a long story short KLM really came through, and I had a new itinerary within an hour or so, oh and quite an interesting one it was. I flew Geneva to Frankfurt, Germany on Lufthansa, Frankfurt to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Ethiopian Airlines, and finally Addis Ababa to Entebbe, Uganda on United Arab Emirates. I arrived in Entebbe only 7 hours later than I would have by KLM, most of that time sleeping on the benches in Addis Ababa International. I will also add that in my limited global experiences, Ethiopian women are in the upper echelon as far as stunning physical beauty is concerned, so I was quite happy to have a stop over in an airport full of such calibre (even if they were the cleaning ladies).

The flights were more or less uneventful, with the only mildly interesting tidbit being the reactions of the flight attendants and the neighbouring passengers when I ate 5 meals on the Lufthansa flight, 2 or 3 on the Ethiopian flight, and 4 or 5 on the Emirates flight. Grandmama J and Oli, remember when we were 12 in Ottawa and I ate something like 13 or 14 croissants for breakfast because it was the first time I had encountered a “fake”/continental breakfast? If I remember right the waiter was Ethiopian. Do you remember his reaction to me devouring such a quantity? Well history repeated itself, again.

In Kampala, I found an envelope on my bed containing money and security protocols, as the office was now closed for the weekend that was to be my so-called preliminary briefing. I can’t upload pictures, and I also didn’t take a picture of this. But one image that will still in my head of Kampala, was a pickup loaded fully (cab and box) with plain clothed men armed to the teeth, with Kalashnikov’s and rifles of every sort. Apparently these were merely security guards getting picked up or dropped off from their shift. I wanted so badly to take a picture, but my intuition got the better of me and I am here to tell you about it today. I also decided that these “security guards” were of a different variety than the ones back home who tend to either be washed up 300lb football players who can’t run or 1st generation Canadians who probably would rather run than risk confrontation.

On my second day in Kampala, I went with a couple of MSF’ers to Entebbe’s botanical gardens. We saw monkeys, trees, jungle, termites, a flower called “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” and the Ugandan side of Lake Victoria. It was at these gardens where I was bitten by the Tsetse fly. What I didn’t know about the fly at the time was that these fly’s carry the disease called “Sleeping Sickness.” I won’t know for at least three weeks as to whether or not I contracted it though, apparently it can be latent and takes time to manifest itself.

Monday rolled around the next day, as it tends to do, and I was swamped with briefings; logistical, medical, administrative, social, historical and finally security. All in French, and especially of the historical I only gathered about 50% of the information, as the Congolese tribal names, warring factions, and locations were all jumbled together with my limited capacity for French. Ah, c’est la vie!

Tuesday morning I woke to a ringing phone telling me that I was heading to the Congo a day early, in fact in only a few hours. So all in a rush again, I packed up and boarded yet another plane. What I didn’t know at the time and wasn’t informed about until one of my many briefings in the DRC is the following story, although I doubt it would have made a difference in my decision to get on the plane.

MSF and other NGO’s sanctioned the services of a Canadian named Michael Moor (not the movie dude I imagine) to verify if any of the Congolese airlines were safe enough to fly on. Months later, two airlines (for shits and giggles I’ll call them “A” and “B”) were certified “safe enough” for MSF. This report came out on Monday, on Monday afternoon shortly following the report stating that “A” was safe to fly on, a loaded DC-9 (read big plane for Africa Centrale) from airline “A” with somewhere near 100 people on board crashed in a marketplace in Goma, DRC. The next morning I boarded a pond-hopper flight to the Congo on airline “B.”

That was Uganda, I haven’t even touched on my destination yet.