Day 14 -26th June 2007
Seeing as I had the best night’s sleep since arriving in Uganda, it came to no surprise that I slept in! I woke up rather late and stumbling from the tent with a toothbrush in my mouth, I managed to make it in time for breakfast! Pancakes with honey cooked by Issac. He’s da man!
Nothing much happened today as we are starting to get settled in a routine of concrete breaking and knocking out walls.
As Phil’s birthday is on thursday I started to think what I could give to him as a pressie then the answer came to me. He loved cheesy chat up lines and the cheesy jokes so thought I would make my mini notebook to create a handbook haha. So I started to think them all up and people kept asking why I was enjoy breaking the concrete with a grin on my face.
Unfortunately, the good mood was affected by the constant dropping dead of bats from the rafters to the ground outside. I didn’t like that they were in agnoising pain as evident in their twitching. So a couple of us made the decision to make it quick for them by slamming our spades on them to kill them quickly. It was a very gruesome task and it did upset me.
At lunchtime, Boydy, Jonesy, Dan and Mel decided to sing a song to the kids. This was called the Daffodil song. It was neat at first then it slowly entered our minds to rival the Na na na na na na softpower song. Pretty soon it became annoying! I would find myself singing it and then end it with a scowl.
After an afternoon of more concrete bashing, we had a very chilled night as we brought the thin mattresses out onto the grass and chatted to ourselves in the warm night. I started Phil’s book and I half listened to other’s life stories.
Phil, Siobhan, Fraggle and Matt returned from their trip north to try to get travel permits to access a wildlife walk this weekend but the permits were all gone. Drat! Looks like another wait.
Then came the night! Even after a great night’s sleep the previous night, I knew something was going to happen. And I was proved right. While we chatted amongst ourslves in the dusk, there came a massive loud crack of thunder and the rain literally threw all its contents from the clouds onto us within a minute and more clouds came! After stuffing everything in hut, we all ran to stay in our tents. After half an hour, there were a lot of shouting going on outside. Donning my waterproofs, I ran out and saw that some people’s tents have collapsed and water was slowly pouring into them. These tents are unreliable! So a few of us ran back and forth to the hut from the tents to take people’s stuff to store in a dry place. My trousers got really soaked so had to strip them off and continue running in my underwear! From a distance, I’m sure it must have looked weird that a full grown man was jumping about in his underwear and possibly doing the rain dance!
Because of tents collapsing, Phil and I squeezed in Orla and Jaimie with us so another night cramped! Phil and I joked that we managed to get girls in our tent due to our raindance. They weren’t amused and swiftly warned us that if we continue to annoy them even further, they would see us out of our tent! Oops!
As the rain continued to batter the side of our tent, Phil turned over and hit into me and my head got pressed into the tent wall thus soaking me again! Argh! When will the rains stop!