No news good news

It has been silent from our side. Heleen has been working outside Fort Portal as tourleader. Nine Dutch tourists came for 23 days to Uganda and Gorilla trekking in Rwanda. At the start it was difficult to leave behind all the new exiting things in Fort Portal. But the very pleasant group made it easier. Also the visit to Rwanda was new to me, which was impressive. The country was very poor in the eighties and the genocide in 1994 has left the country devastated. A lot of donor money and a strong government has brought Rwanda further than most African countries today. Good roads, clean country, even plastic bags have been banned. The visit to the genocide memorial was something not to forget. The government planned the genocide a long time ahead. In 3 months time almost 15% of the population was killed.
The rest of the trip was more cheerful. Visiting the chimpanzees and gorilla’s is always a highlight. Trying to find a working television with satellite to be able to follow the world cup was a challenge. During the most important games we were in the most remote places. In the East (where we visited beautiful waterfalls) we had to travel 20 minutes to a big hotel in the next town. During the finals we were in a National Park and had to visit the staff canteen to watch the game.

In the meantime Michel was holding the Fort at home. Walking the dogs, making dog food, doing the dishes, cooking , fetching the water, doing the laundry is much more work on your own. Also the house hunting continued, which resulted in a number of good opportunities. Michel has also found a few jobs. He is repairing PC’s in two guesthouse, mainly cleaning the computers from viruses, and gives private science lessons to the son of a friend.

The internet connection is also a continuing story. We were using a dongle, but connection was very bad an maximum speed was 40 kbps. Downloading pictures or any software was a nightmare. But during one of our searches we met a technician of Uganda Telecom , who was testing the new wireless internet network. The new network is uses the wireless WiMax protocol that has a range of 5 to 8 km from the central base station. Michel did the configuration himself, since the service centre had not been trained yet. Since two weeks we are the first user in Fort Portal. When the connection is working it is very stabile at 128kbps (even with the outdoor modem attached to a stick in the house near the window at 6 km from the base station). For us this speed is acceptable, but as soon as we open up a internet cafe we will upgrade the speed. Unfortunately the network after the WiMax is down every other day, it takes some time before they discover there are real users behind it.