Workcamp in Nansana

We wish you all a Happy New Year 2013 with many greetings from Kampala!

After we’ve been travelling Uganda throughout our two week Christmas vacation, we are back in Nansana.

During the last three days we joined a workcamp hosted in Nansana in the Central Branch of UPA.

UPA’s workcamps are a means to get a group of young Ugandans and international volunteers together to work on a certain project, thereby facilitating intercultural youth exchange.

Encouraged by one of the french volunteers we wanted to know how organized was a workcamp. Therefore, we joined the team and started to work on Tuesday. Aiming at the construction of a new office building for UPA our tasks where divided in three teams: two of them working on the construction and the other one was cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner for all the volunteers. These teams gathered volunteers from Uganda, Netherlands and South Korea live together for three weeks. 21 days sharing not only working duties but also day-to-day life, different cultures and language exchange.

For some of us was the first time that we really cared about learning some Luganda, for instance, Shut up! “Srika!” or Sorry “Golabie” and How’re you? “Oli otya?”.

One of the most intense moments of the day, one of the best, was the camp fire settled at night where we not only have dinner, but also sharing between each other our impressions about the day, our complaints and suggestions to improve the performance of the camp

African music, traditional drums and dance followed the dinner where everyone enjoyed. We liked so much that we’re going to keep in touch with the group for the rest of the time starting from this weekend, playing pool, dancing and having a drink all together.