Monday was my birthday, I'm now 21 and old enough to drink!
We went to a restaurant called Open House for Indian food and cake. I had the chicken tikka masala.
followed by some cake!
Joiining me was (left to right below: Merab, Immaculate, Poover, and Susan)
There's a few more pictures here if you can't get enough pictures of me eating: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlhaynes/sets/72157594365155629/
enjoy! Maybe it'll finish loading in the next couple days and I can watch it too!
Well it looks like I didn't make the cut...however some of my pictures ended up on the website so at least that's something!
Here's the site specific to our story, it says the video of the show will be up November 7th.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/index.html
Don't forget to watch Frontline World on October 31sth, the title says Burma but we're in there somewhere, there's three short documentaries, one is about Kiva.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/burma601/index.html
Let me know if you see me!
I have yet another new house. We decided we wanted to be closer to the city so we moved to an area in Kampala called Ntinda. The house is an older house with three bedrooms and maid's quarters (which I'm not sure what I'll do with yet, maybe turn them into offices)
I'm within easy walking distance of a nice little market for buying fruits and veggies as well as several small supermarkets. It's also the crossroads for two different taxi routes so I can get to either side of the city in just a few minutes which is nice.
The other nice thing is that where we were living, the taxis stopped running about 8:00pm so it was impossible to eat out or see a late movie (at the one movie theatre in Uganda). The taxis run late to Ntinda so we can go out on the town and still make it home in one piece.
The front of the house.
and the back with the maid's quarters
This last week, Matt & Jessica, the guys who started Kiva visited so that they can be filmed here by Frontline. I got a fair amount of camera time as we tried to get blogging by cell phone working. I'm now hopeful that I may actually rate an appearance in the documentary.
We had a nice dinner where I was able to order Mac & cheese and it was taaasstttyyy!
It was Susan's birthday so we headed to Jinja for a relaxing weekend at one of the nicer resorts in Uganda, The Jinja Nile Resort. The resort is made up of a bunch of cottages right on the Nile. We were well protected as the heads of the armed forces for Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania were all in town for some military exercises. There were no shortage of soldiers around, though we had to make sure to hit the dinner buffet early because once the soldiers arrived...bye bye food!
Most of my days were laying by the pool drinking Stoneys (ginger soda):
and eating:
and drinking passion fruit juice:
and swimming:
and Susan went swimming for the first time in her life:
And after 6 months in Africa, I finally saw a monkey (actually a whole family of them)!
This weekend I traveled to Mbale with the crew from Frontline. They were filming some of the businesses funded through Kiva via The Women's Initiative to Eradicate Poverty.
There weren't too many shots of me, I spent most of my time ducking so I wouldn't get in the way of the shot. I think if I make it in the documentary, I will be "Van Passenger #2". Still it was fun to watch the shooting and all the people interviewed were good sports even when they had to stop and ask the same question multiple times to get the shot right. Of course we drew a crowd everywhere we went!
It'll be fun to watch to final product and see if any of the footage I watched get filmed actually shows up on TV.
Lots more photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlhaynes/sets/72157594299646824/
This weekend a film crew from the PBS show Frontline will be visiting to do some filming for a segment they are doing on Kiva. They will be traveling around filming some of the IDP camps and businesses funded by Kiva. Hopefully, yours truly will get to make an appearence if I don't get left on the cutting room floor. The segment is due to air on Halloween.
Here is are some pictures of my house in Mukono:
The Street leading up to our compound, they are building a school in the background. The compound has 5 houses, two unattached and 3 attached, I'm in one of the attached ones.
The front of our house.
The view from the porch:
Our water tanks:
Now I'm understanding why Uganda Telecom has stopped selling the internet phone I am using, they no longer work!
I've had about two usable days since I've got it back. The problem seems to be on their back end, I can connect to them no problem but their proxy server kills connections constantly so I get a bunch of empty web pages whenever I look at anything!
Its gotten bad enough that I am now looking to either move to a house with a phone line or try to rent a small office. I looked into satellite connection here but they are ridiculously expensive as opposed to ISDN which is just expensive! Both are equally slow.
Anyway most of my time has been spent trying to get East Africa Tech Ventures off the ground. When my connection works I am going to try to start updating my blog there with the business side of things and leave this to the more sporadic personal side of life here.
