Kampala, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar

With my visa securely obtained, and no possibility of getting booted out of the country (just leaving voluntarily), I decided that being ahead on my pioneer time for the service year entitled me to take off two weeks to do an East African tour. As a "four-star" Chinese restaurant manager, I can benefit from my Rwandan work permit, which allows me to cross into Uganda and Kenya without paying a visa fee. The plan was that another brother visiting from the U.S. and I were to travel together. He was halfway through a worldwide tour that involved 27 countries. I went alone from Kigali to Kampala and met him there.

Here was the itinerary:

Kigali to Kampala (Uganda): 10 hours on bus

Kampala to Nairobi (Kenya): 15 hours on bus

Nairobi to Dar es Salaam (Tanzania): 17 hours on bus

Total: 42 hours on bus

Even just the thought of this is exhausting.

Anyway, we had a reservation to stay three nights at Kampala Bethel, which of course was a great experience. We also took some local tours, namely, to Idi Amin's torture chambers (seriously), and to Jinja, which is two hours away and where there is a place called "Source of the Nile."

In Nairobi, we had lunch at Bethel (their accommodations were full) and stayed locally with a couple who have an interesting history. The husband is Kenyan and the wife is Canadian. She attended Gilead School in the 1960's and was assigned to Kenya, where she served and for a time was also in Benin. But after only about five years, she married a Kenyan, had four children, and stayed in Kenya for the last 50 years, except for a couple of years when they went back to Saskatchewan, just so the husband could get a taste of those Canadian winters (no, actually, they were there for some other reason). Their oldest son and his wife are in Bethel (he is overseer of the Computer Department), and they attended Gilead School a few years ago. Another daughter, who is single, also works at Bethel in Sign Language Translation.

As far as tourist stuff is concerned, we went to the Giraffe Center in Nairobi, where you can stand on the second story of a round building and have giraffes literally in your face, eating pellets out of your hand. Or, if you prefer, you can place the pellet sticking out of your mouth and have a giraffe lick your face while trying to grab the pellet with its big blue tongue. They say that giraffe saliva is antiseptic, but I'm not sure.

Next was our leg to Dar es Salaam, which means "House of Peace" in Arabic. It was a quick overnight there, and then the next morning we took the two-hour ferry ride to the island of Zanzibar.

I have to say that Zanzibar is as exotic as its name sounds. Of course, there are a lot of tourists, but despite that fact, prices are very cheap. There is an area you can stroll through in the evenings that has stall after stall of meats on skewers, including fish of every type, octupus, squid, etc. And each skewer is less than $2.00!

Due to the Arab influence, Zanzibar is heavily Muslim. The architecture and the narrow alleyways take you back to the last century. We saw the sultan's palace and the outdoor amphitheater where the East African slave trade took place.

We attended a Swahili meeting in Zanzibar. There is only one congregation on the entire island. Due to the Muslim and government influence, the brothers have been prevented from having a Kingdom Hall for 30 years. So, the congregation has meetings on a brother's property, under what looks like a carport. Before every meeting, they have to take 80 plastic chairs out of a storage room and set them up. (We spent an hour helping to do this.) They also have to set up the entire sound system for each meeting. Then, after the meeting, everything gets dismantled. However, recently they finally got approval to turn the house on the property into a Kingdom Hall! Jehovah has indeed blessed their patience.

Of the three days in Zanzibar, we spent only a few hours on one day at the beach. That's because we were staying with a family of pioneers, which means that field service took priority. This was fine with me, because now I can say that I did cart witnessing in Zanzibar!

Okay, the return ferry ride to Dar es Salaam was unfortunately very rough. People on both sides of us were throwing up. We were spared that experience only because at the beginning of the trip, this guy was selling these large chocolate bars for 50 cents each that normally would cost you 10 times that in the U.S. So eating that chocolate actually helped us avoid seasickness. Good trick to remember.

Back on the mainland, we had only enough time to attend a weekend meeting and then go out to eat with the family that put us up.

But in case you thought I was willing to sit for 35+ hours on a bus from Dar es Salaam back to Kigali, fuggedaboutit! We had bought plane tickets for the 3-hour flight, including a stopover in Kilimanjaro Airport. My sanity was saved.