Nnina Ocwee

"Nnina Ocwee" means “I am Ocwee” in Acholi. In other words, not only did I see tons of cool animals this weekend, but I also finally got an Acholi name. and it’s AWESOME. “ocwee” means “you make it.” when we were driving to Murchison falls, we were driving with a ugandan woman who works at a hotel in the park. She asked us what our names were; Courtney and the Italians already had acholi names, but I didn’t have one yet. So the woman asked me about myself, and when I told her that I had 3 sisters and no brothers, she named me ocwee. Basically, when a couple has children of all one sex and people ask them why they don’t have any children of the other sex, they say “ocwee” to mean, if you want children of that sex so badly, then “you go make it.” great, right???

We saw SO MANY ANIMALS this weekend. We saw TONS of elephants and giraffes and antelope and buffalo and hippos and 3 lions. Considering the number of lions in the park has dwindled to less than 100, 3 is pretty good. unfortunately I left my thingy for transferring my pictures to my computer in kampala, but I got some of courtney’s pictures and I’ll put those on here for now. I took a bunch of videos of elephants and giraffes, so hopefully I can get those to upload next week when I’m back in kampala.

So we left at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning. It took about 3 hours to drive there. Once we arrived, we checked into our hotel (called “the red chili”, a.k.a. muzungu central) and proceeded to try making reservations for the 2 pm nile river cruise. We were soon informed that it was all booked, and our only option was to hire a private boat which would cost $200. we were pretty peeved and really didn’t want to spend that much money. Then we learned that there is a small boat that only costs $125. at first they told us it was too dangerous to take the small boat because of the hippos, but then we decided they were liars and told them we wanted the small boat. So we’re getting ready to go and they inform us that, in fact, we’re going to take the medium boat and we’re going to pick up 5 other muzungus on the other side of the river who will join us on the cruise. Peeved again, but oh well. So the 4 of us get into the medium boat, head out, and soon realize that we are NOT picking up the other muzungus and we have the medium boat all to ourselves. YES.

It was a 3 hour cruise and it was really beautiful and peaceful and we saw basically everything except lions SUPER close up. We probs saw like 50 elephants, cause they were all traveling in huge herds, complete with tons of little babies! At one point a group of 10 elephants came right up to the edge of the river and stood there drinking for like 5 minutes while we floated about 10 feet away and watched. It was INCREDIBLE. I got a video of that, so I’ll upload it next week. Then we saw the falls, which were beautiful. There was this disgusting, dirty foam floating in the water from the falls and it really made me mad. I don’t know why.

When we finished the cruise, we went back to the hotel and ate lunch and I got a SUPER YUMMY carrot burger. Then we went and hiked to the top of the falls. It was beautiful and SCARY. I’m discovering that my little ledge incident has given me quite the fear of heights. Driving back to the hotel, it was just about dusk, and all the tsetse flies came out and they SUCKED. They were huge and disgusting and their bites hurt like hell. And they transmit sleeping sickness. :)

Now we come to the night. Saturday night was the most T.I.A. night I’ve had so far. It was HORRIBLE and it lasted an ETERNITY. There were 3 rooms; 2 with single beds and 1 with a huge bed called the muzunguton. We flipped a coin and Courtney and I ended up in the muzunguton bed. I was fine with everything until I was getting ready to go to bed and realized the bed was crawling with bed bugs. I really, really didn’t want to deal with that, so we considered sleeping on the dinky little wicker chairs in the sitting room area. Then we remember, if we don’t sleep in the bed, we don’t have a mosquito net. We check the mosquito net and it’s crawling with bed bugs too. So we have to choose our poison: bed bugs or mosquitos and tsetse flies. Here’s the rationale that leads us to choose the mosquitos and tsetse flies:
(1) if you get bitten by mosquitos and tsetse flies, there’s medicine to deal with sickness. If you get bed bugs, they follow you around wherever you go and continue to bite you.
(2) If I slather myself in bug lotion and wear clothes that cover my body completely, maybe I won’t get bitten….? (or die of a heatstroke?)
(3) If I do get bitten and do get malaria, the malaria symptoms won’t show up for at least a week. So, if I work really hard on my research and my report this coming week and get malaria the next week, it’s not going to pwn me too much, right? (sad thought process, I know…)
(4) Even if I decided to sleep in the bed, I don’t think I’d be able to fall asleep knowing that the little shits are crawling all over me.

So we sleep on the chairs. I wake up pretty much every half hour in total misery and discomfort. Then at about midnight, I wake up to the sound of rustling outside the cabin. I lay there in terror for about a half hour, not wanting to move and not wanting to wake up Courtney for fear that she’ll freak out in her half-asleep state. (she had already woken up screaming once from a dream that the ceiling was crawling with bugs. I didn’t have much hope of falling asleep after that little incident.) of course I’m laying there imagining all of the horrible things that could be about to happen (LRA rebels, bandits knowing there’s a bunch of muzungus with money sleeping inside, etc., etc.), so finally I wake up Courtney and we realize it’s WARTHOGS. Goddammit I hate those warthogs. They’re so ugly and annoying and they roam the hotel premises freely because technically it’s park land. (Disney definitely did a good job of cute-fying pumba but they also did a really impressive job of capturing exactly how warthogs move and run. Fyi.) Finally I fall asleep for about 2 hours, and then up at 6 for the game drive. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper.

But the game drive was totally awesome and we got to stand up in the bed of the truck with the wind in our faces and giraffes running like 10 feet away. (my body is so sore today from being jerked around in the back of the truck, but it’s okay, it was worth it) Oh my god it’s SO AWESOME to watch giraffes run…they look like they’re going in slow motion but actually they’re covering a ton of ground cause they’re so big. I have a video of that, too.

Then we drove home. While we were driving a stupid car passed us really fast and splashed through a puddle of mud and it flew into our truck and all over my face. That was cool.

I feel like this post has been boring and full of insignificant details. Hopefully the pictures will suffice to make it worth reading.

Also p.s. the guy at the internet café where I always come just told me that his friend has a new baby and his friend asked him to name the baby and guess what he named it? yep….Ashley. oh, Uganda.


this tree has these tube-shaped goo-filled things hanging from it and when elephants eat them they get drunk.


these are buffalo, but i think they look like old men with combovers. right?










this is the view from the top of murchison falls.


me and courtney in the middle, the italian girls on either end.