10:15pm     As I lay in bed all I hear is the humming of the swarms of mosquitoes waiting to devour me if I go outside my net. 

(Mugingo Photo Album)

 Another amazing day, this one sure made the record books…literally.  We (Elphas, John, Justus, Musa, Chris, Caitlin, and I) went to Mugingo, a small island in Lake Victoria.  Up at 6am and pay a small fee to have a crew take us in their boat.  After 2 hours of choppy water we can see in the distance 3 islands; the largest is Tanzanian, the middle Kenyan, and the smallest (Mugingo) is Ugandan.  The other islands are green with vegetation and have a house or two on them.  We drift up to the smallest, pretty much just a pile of rocks.  And it inhabits about 700 people.  We are stunned, tin houses cover the entire island; it smells of fish and rubbish (there’s trash everywhere and we never did see a latrine).  4 Ugandan police take us to their office (a bench and table on the edge of the island).  My first thought: “Oh crap…”  They said that as Americans, we are very important and we should have notified them that we were coming (this would have been almost impossible with no contact information or way of communication).  This is to protect us from pirates on the Lake they said.  I asked if I could photograph the island and the people, it took a minute then they agreed but only if they could get copies.  So I explained how I would print them out when I returned home and I could mail copies, but they just laughed because they don’t get mail there, duh!  They make us sit and take sodas and we watch Ugandan music videos on a small TV and are then told that we are the first muzungus to ever visit the island.  These people have never seen a white person before, that’s why they were looking at us like we were aliens.  Unbelievable!  Words cannot even come close to describing this place.  On the way home John asked me what I thought of the people on the island; I said they are crazy.  “But they are living, and surviving,” John replies. 

“God gave man all the materials to survive, but it is up to man to share them” – Mountains Beyond Mountains