By Caitlin
A female dancing group putting on a performance My enduring image of Uganda, the pearl of Africa, is rolling green hills and banana farms. After learning to love the scrubby bush and maize fields that dominate Zambia and Tanzania, I found these green hills of abundant bananas and plantains and the rivers and lakes in Uganda shocking. It seemed that they must be growing plenty of food in great quantity and variety. However, my observations were not the whole story, as we witnessed first hand that hunger and food security are still huge obstacles faced by Ugandans everyday.
 with some students By complete chance, we overlapped with my first cousin while he was in Uganda and so we headed to the eastern part of the country, not far from the Kenyan border, to the town of Mbale. Mbale is a bustling urban center, where the most common form of transit, other than walking, is the motorbike taxi (AKA a boda boda). The favorite meal in town is the "Rolex", a hearty, filling chapati filled with an omelet and which costs about $0.75. We spent our days in Mbale volunteering at a couple needy schools, giving us a new appreciation for the teaching profession and the challenges facing the Ugandan education system: untrained volunteer teachers, lack of teaching materials, the stigma of HIV, and inadequate sanitation. The toilet was literally one of the most disgusting toilets I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of makeshift toilets. Being given the reigns to teach kindergartners subtraction and 4th graders about negative numbers was a bit overwhelming, especially given the language difference and our complete lack of educational training. We tried our best though and I think they sort of understood a little bit better than before our lessons? | 
Riding a boda boda
Trying to teach negative numbers
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Our last day in Uganda we stood at the source of one of the world's most iconic rivers: the Nile. Outside the town of Jinja, at the juncture with Lake Victoria, the Nile is surrounded by Uganda's history in the form of huge rundown former colonial homes and even the former vacation home of Idi Amin. As with most tourist attractions in Africa we saw, there was much more thought to selling the trinkets than to marking the significance of the site. Slightly down river, a shrine to Ghandi stands, because part of his remains were scattered here at the beginning of the Nile. Just one of many things that surprised me about Uganda. We tried to balance tourism and experiencing local life here and found both to be even more rewarding than our expectations allowed.
Cruising the NIle with Caitlin's cousin, Caleb and his girlfriend Katie
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At the Equator. Did you know the equator only runs through 13 countries?
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At the source of the NIle River.
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