FEB 19th: Entebbe and UWEC

Today Peace and I crammed into a refurbished minivan and headed to UWEC (the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre) in Entebbe - where about 3 1/2 years ago I had come for a whirlwind four-day workshop. It was such a wonderful relief to get out of the choking haze of Kampala.

Entebbe is on a beautiful green peninsula in Lake Victoria, and it's no wonder that this is the place the colonial government chose to put their offices. It was a pity that I really had no time to look around. Peace and I spent a fair amount of time in the office. I had a great talk with the gardener, Richard, about medicinal plants and witchcraft and shrines and traditional religion - balancing on all kinds of fuzzy lines that I realize make this project that much more difficult. He took a list of the plants associated with clans so that I could get their scientific names. Most intriguing to me is the Nvuma, the spiky-looking seed of a supposedly aquatic plant that nobody has actually seen. Hmmmm....

I worked a little with Peace on a set of activities she's writing up for Ugandan teachers to submit to WCS, as well as typing a survey for students and teachers asking them about their knowledge of the natural history of the organisms represented by their clans.

One question which (too late) I realized would raise some dander was "Have you ever been to an essabo (traditional shrine)". Later, I would learn that these things are closely associated with witchcraft, which in general seems to be associated not with healing, but exploitation, grifting, and fear. I guess essabos are constructions, like a church, but with altars to native gods. The irony is, most of the people who seem opposed to the idea of them have never gone to them, so I wonder.

Later, when we dropped off our first batch of surveys at the local Catholic school, we changed this to a less-touchy and more relevant term: obutaka - which means a clan's place of origin. - I can't help wonder if Mutaka, Butaka, Omutaka, Obutaka etc. are all related in their meanings - anyhow, this is generally a natural place where the ancestors are believed to be buried. Unlike essabos, which are more off-limits for good Christians, it still seems to be OK to visit the obutaka. It's also more related to the idea of relating nature, place and people through the clan system.

I didn't even have time to walk around the wildlife centre, just a brief look at Lake Victoria and some time watching the ever-present vervets before heading into Kampala yet again.