Villages in the mountains

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Introduction to today's journey

The Pygmies rely on the forest for their very life. They know everything about finding and using plants, animal behaviour, and forest survival. Working with these wonderful people has been incredibly valuable.

- Corneille Ewango

Today's trek takes us along the Rubugiri Valley passing two small villages before reaching a very remote pygmy settlement at the edge of the Congo.

Today's Journey

Distance trekked today: 7.4 kilometres.

Total distance trekked to date: 7.4 kilometres.

IT WAS still dark when my alarm went off in the morning. I was quite stiff from having slept in such a lumpy bed and I was reluctant to get up because it was quite cold outside, being perhaps seven or eight degrees.

I finally motivated myself to get up and turn on the light. I looked outside through the bathroom and saw the sky was beginning to get light somewhere above the foliage. I got dressed in time for breakfast. By now it was getting light. I was the first to arrive as usual, but Sandra (a lady in my group in her early 50s from Canada) arrived shortly afterwards. Our tour leader and driver Travis and Jeremiah showed up a few minutes later, followed by the boys - two best friends from Amsterdam travelling on a gap year. The six of us had met in Kampala and travelled across Uganda together.

Emma arrived taking our orders for breakfast. Essentially it was eggs (the choices were fried, scrambled, or omelette) with toast. I ordered scrambled eggs with toast, assuming it would be one piece of toast under scrambled eggs. He returned a short time later giving us a plate each of banana, pawpaw and pineapple.

Finally my scrambled eggs on toast arrived, and then he produced another plate with two pieces of toast on it. The top piece was a regular size, but the bottom one was a good three centimetres thick. I seriously wasn’t hungry, so I offered my spare pieces of toast to the others. I think someone took them – one of the boys no doubt.

Once breakfast was finished, we collected our gear for the day. I made sure my washing was hanging outside under the awning to ensure it was going to be dry by the time I get back.

I met Sandra back at the dining room, and the boys came shortly afterwards. Travis arrived and led us out to the front of the lodge to where several other people were waiting. Our guide for the day arrived. Peter was very short and for a while I thought he may be a pygmy. He was wearing a chequered blue and white shirt with a denim jacket on top, and long cream trousers, and running shoes. He had a long triangular face and was carrying a book “birds of Africa”. Peter was quite well presented definitely looking the part as a tour guide.

He led us walking through the small village, consisting of a few shops along one stretch of gravel road, once more reminding us that we were in a very remote area. The lodge had its own generator and one or two of the other shops may have had their own generators as well, but otherwise there was no electricity in this village. We passed one shop which seemed to be the general store, called “Monday and Sons Shopping Centre”. It was little more than a corner store. I imagined the owner of the store was perhaps born on a Monday.

Further along the road in the direction from where we had come from yesterday was another shop where the road turned a corner. It didn’t have much of a sign out the front, and upon entering we came to a rather dark and bare reception area where a lady asked us to sign on for the tour. There were a few old posters hanging up, but otherwise the setting was very basic.

Once we were all signed in, we walked a few doors back down the road to the entrance of a small school – Rubuguri School. The school’s principal arrived. Marie was an overweight lady in perhaps her late forties. She was carrying a very small baby on her back held on by a cloth wrapped around her body. The baby was asleep.

Before entering the school, we looked up at the trees to watch some large grey birds with white faces building their nests. They brought in large twigs they had found and lined them in their nests. I did a quick change of lenses to my telephoto to get a few good shots. At least that will justify me bringing it.

We entered the school yard. The buildings were all unpainted and rather derelict giving a sense of abandonment despite concrete plaque on one of the classroom saying it was built between 2004 and 2005. The building standards here were obviously very low. There were a few schoolish propaganda signs around such as “Stay safer”, “Say no to gifts”, “Mission – bind together our efforts and place the pupil at the centre of event”, and “Avoid indiscipline”. I thought perhaps these would work well in a socialist urban society, but were they relevant here in this remote wilderness?

There were several shrubs all surrounded by a fence of thin logs to keep the children from harming them. Looking beyond the school was a very attractive valley it was a very picturesque setting.

Marie the principal led us into her office. Now this definitely wasn’t what one would normally expect with a principal’s office being large and exquisitely furnished. This office was perhaps five or six square metres, with just a single door entrance and a small window. It was furnished with just a single small solid timber desk that had obviously seen many years’ service and a basic wooden chair. The walls were plastered with large pieces of butcher paper with school results going back to the mid-1990s, mission statements and all sorts of other things that you would normally see printed off a spreadsheet. There were no computers here though. It was all hand written and pasted to the wall.

The office seemed to double up as a music storage room, with several very crudely built guitars and drum instruments, which I had guessed had been made at the school. They couldn’t afford real instruments.

She then led us into the next room, operating as a classroom. It was pretty dark inside with no indoor lighting, though there were plenty of windows around the room. The smell was a bit ripe as well. There was a group of young students obviously of different levels in the classroom. They were all very happy to see us – these strange foreigners from around the other side of the world.

We were only in the classroom for a couple of minutes before heading back outside again and further through the school into one of the small fields behind the classrooms. We crossed the short distance and our guide approached a high fence loosely constructed from timber poles with wire in between them. He reached a log frame and removed a couple of horizontal logs so we could walk through. Once we had passed through, he put the logs back to keep any livestock unseen out of the school.

Beyond the fence was a small orchard. We walked along a path in between the orchard trees for about a hundred metres before reaching a clearing. On the right hand side of the clearing was a small round thatched hut. Further down the gentle slope was a large semicircle cut into the ground ready for something else to be constructed here.

We gathered around in a circle and the principal told us about the village, and more about the school. Here we all introduced ourselves. There was obviously the five of us from our group (including Travis). There was also a young couple perhaps in their mid-twenties from Germany dressed in very bright contrasting clothes. They mentioned they had just arrived here to work as volunteers for nine months. Today was their first day in the village. Now that’s one way to experience a culture!

There we left Marie to return to her school and continued on our journey through the village. The baby on her back hadn’t stirred in the whole time that we had been with her.

Our guide Peter led us along a muddy trail through the orchard, passing a fence that had sprouted into a thick hedge. The track suddenly went downhill towards the bottom of the valley. There was a small wild pig nearby eating the thick grass but it seemed to ignore us. It must be domesticated.

We passed a small thatched hut into a small clearing with several small muddy dams. A couple were full of murky water and others were drained. Our guide told us these dams held water so the locals could breed fish to eat. Uphill from the dams were small fields where vegetables grew.

We negotiated our way around the dams. It was very boggy thanks to the recent rain so we ended up having to take a different route to the one our guide usually took. We went through some more of the orchard before coming up on a road. From here the walking was a lot better, allowing us to quicken our pace.

The road started climbing gradually along the side of the valley of rolling hills. It didn’t seem as rugged as the terrain we had driven along yesterday. The road rose faster than the bottom of the valley, so it was not long at all before we were getting spectacular valleys across to the other side where vegetable farms clung to the sides of the hills ready to wash down at the next flood.

In between the farms were small remnants of the jungle that had covered the entire area, part of the Congo. Strictly speaking we weren’t in the Congo yet, that was just over the end of the valley now about eight kilometres away.

We continued following the rough metalled road passing a few houses clustered close together against the edge of the steep valley. The houses were made from mud bricks and small logs with thatched roofing. No doubt they would have to be reconstructed every few years. Most houses had several banana plants growing around them, and most had their own vegetable patches.

At one house there were five young boys wearing rags all standing outside staring at these strange pale foreigners walking past them. The children followed us for several hundred metres keeping five to ten metres behind us.

We passed one small field with a weedy plant similar to dock which had long stalks of small red flowers. He explained they were very useful to the people here, creating some form of food and also a dye.

Just past the field was a large opening in the ground, where the clay was removed, shaped into bricks and fired all on the same site. They dried stacked up high underneath cheap blue tarpaulins, then put into a hut in another hollow in the hill to be fired. Curiously the firing hut was thatched. The bricks were a bit irregular in shape but I guessed that didn’t matter here where the locals didn’t know any better.

The young children were still walking with us when we arrived at another main settlement in the village, which now seemed to sprawl up the entire length of the valley. We were a couple of kilometres from the school now, and no doubt the children from up here would have to walk all the way to school every day. That being said there were a lot of children up here in the valley.

One woman came out and showed us a little doll she had made by wrapping some swamp grass up to create the head, arms, and legs. Then she had clothed it in the plastic from an old plastic bag. It was very innovative.

One boy, aged around eleven or twelve, had a little scooter made from wooden logs. There was a flat stick which formed the chassis, a log which formed the handle holders, then a narrow stick for the handle bars. Finally the wheels were made from cut pieces of log. The axels would have been dowels. He climbed onto the scooter, and with one quick push he stood on the rickety frame whilst it tore off down the steep gravel road we had just climbed. It was very fast and I thought this was definitely an accident in the making. He whizzed past a local woman climbing the road. Somehow he managed to jump off near the bottom and run to a stop whilst the scooter crashed but came out unscathed.

We reached a substantial village at the top of the road. There were numerous houses, some with corrugated iron roofing and others with thatching, some with tarpaulins over the thatching to reduce leakage no doubt. The village was perched on the a small spur on the side of the mountain.

We reached a small mud brick house with corrugated iron roofing, perhaps with three rooms in it. Outside there was a man who had an old metal cup full of a yellowish brown liquid. Rodney told us that this was banana beer. The sheer thought of drinking fermented banana, coupled with anything called beer sounded absolutely gross. Travis smirked and I recalled his comments on the local bananas here being an aphrodisiac. This stuff certainly looked potent.

I tried it. As expected it was disgusting tasting and smelling like rotten bananas. Everyone else tried it and really didn’t like it, so it must be pretty horrible.

By now a large group of locals had congregated, including a lot of small children. Most of the women had small babies tied around their backs. Obviously the banana beer works wonders here. Rodney liked it. Perhaps he needed to get a bit of alcohol in him for the next part of the tour as we will soon find out.

There were numerous houses and what appeared to be a small store. Below the road was a communal toilet. It was made from mud brick and had two doors leading into the separate long drops. It had a thatched roof and floor boards keeping the building above the large hole dug underneath it. Below the toilet down the hill were more vegetable patches. That can’t have been too healthy. Thankfully I didn’t need to go.

The children here followed us and one very noisy little boy kept yelling ‘hello’ no matter how many times we said hello back. Most of the other children there joined in the chorus.

Here everyone lives so closely together in a tight knit community. They were all very grubby, particularly from the knees down which was plastered with dried mud. Their clothes were very old, threadbare and torn, but they seemed to be very happy. Obviously they didn’t know any other life. They didn’t have any contact with the outside world apart from the pale tourists who would venture through their village each day.

Once finished in the middle of the village, Rodney led us further along the road, now no more than a motorbike track.

The trail continued around another two spurs and gullies before we heading up a side track over the hill. The gullies were full of scrub and ferns whilst the spurs had a patchwork of vegetable fields in the poor clay soil recently cleared from the felling of the rainforest. One gully had a small herd of white and brown spotted small goats.

Apparently this was some kind of short cut. We were making rather slow pace being at about 2300 metres above sea level now. The trail through the banana foliage was rough and steep. Finally we reached the top, where we briefly stopped before heading back down the other side to meet up with the motorbike track once again. I’m not sure if there was any purpose to the short cut, but I thought it would have been quicker to have stayed on the track.

Upon reaching the trail we continued walking along it, seeing a group of four young boys sitting in the grass above us. They followed us a short distance before dropping off behind, leaving us on our own again.

I was now a good hour or two hiking into the rugged wilderness from the remote ecolodge where I was staying. Out here the terrain was becoming increasingly mountainous. We were still in steep farmland where the occasional woman would be tendering the very steep fields, but a few hundred metres ahead of us was the start of the rainforest – the edge of the Congo, the second largest forest in the world. We were still in Uganda, but the official border of Congo was just four kilometres away beyond the end of the valley.

There were far fewer people and no houses here. We approached a gully, and saw the ever roughening track approach a small hilltop at about our altitude.

On top of the hill I could just see a couple of very small crudely constructed thatched huts. They were of a far lower standard than the shack houses we had seen earlier. The huts were surrounded by a few banana trees and what appeared to be piles of straw about a metre and a half high. A small group of curious children were just below the summit obviously waiting for us.

We walked down the gully over the small saddle that separated the top of the hill from the rest of the ridge. We climbed the hundred metres of gentle slope up to a cleared area where the children were rehearsing obviously for a cultural show they were about to put on.

Then I realised they weren’t all small children. The taller ones were fully grown adults standing about 1.3 metres high. This was a tribe of pygmies – the smallest peoples on Earth.

We briefly rested on some crudely cut low benches where Peter briefed that this village was one of three pygmy families who had been located here. Traditionally they had lived in the forest and hunted its natural resources, but the government had in recent years removed them from the forest and gave them this small remote parcel of land.

There were three generations to this family. An elderly woman aged around 65 (though looking much older) was the obvious matriarch. Adimu had three daughters (or perhaps they were daughters in law), and numerous children. All the men were away from the village often weeks at a time to work. Nobody seemed to know where they worked, or even if that actually worked at all. For their long absences the men brought back very little money when they did return.

I looked over at the pile of straw vegetation nearby. Then I realised it was a small hut. Two of the children were sitting on small sofas built from some of the vegetation with some old blankets put on top. Rodney told me this was where they slept. The tiny hut had a couple of bundles of long grass tied up on either side of the tiny entrance which they could draw shut when they sleep to keep out the worst of the weather. I imagined though that when it does rain heavily, these crude huts would leak like a sieve making for a miserable sleepless night.

Below the hut was a very crude vegetable patch. Well I assumed it was a vegetable patch as the ground had been roughly dug up, but there weren’t any living vegetables in there – maybe a few dead ones, or were those weeds?

There were a few of the red flowered plant growing on the hill, and apart from the forest just behind the huts, it was the only healthy plant in existence here.

I looked at a fancier hut nearby. It was an upended cylindrical shape nearly two metres high. It was fairly recently made from dead sticks and was quite a good construction. Some of the twigs had started sprouting.

I posed with one of the pygmy women outside the hut. I think it was her hut. Like all of the other women, she had very short hair and covered her head with a woollen hat, no doubt her hair having been shaved off regularly to minimise head lice infestations. She was wearing very old ragged clothing starting to decompose in the jungle humidity like all the others. Standing in front of the hut, and next to this woman, I felt like a giant.

This had been quite a change from feeling rather diminutive next to all the other men I had seen on this trip so far. Africans are much taller than people from other parts of the world, but here in this tiny remote outpost at the edge of nowhere it was different.

We walked up the final few metres up the hill, passing a group of banana plants without any bananas on them. Once past the bananas we had a very good view across to the forest covering the hills from here onwards. A short distance down the hill was another straw hut that was mostly camouflaged by some large bits of vegetation that had sprouted and growing about two metres high, the shoots now dwarfing the hut. It seemed the perfect place for a snake or other dangerous creature to be lurking.

A few more metres up the hill stood another conical hut made from sticks fairly recently. It had two large sections of log length blocking the doorway and a plastic bowl and a metal bowl outside the entrance, perhaps for washing up before you enter.

Further up the hill we approached some of the larger huts. The small huts at about 1.2 by 1.2 metres and 1.3 metres high were for the single women. The larger huts were about the size of the Masai huts I had seen in Kenya. The main difference though they were round with a higher roof. We crammed into the largest hut with the old lady Adimo who showed us around her meagre possessions, mainly small metal cooking pots. It was very dark inside.

There was one small wooden pen made from small branches with a thatched roof. Apart from the thatching it was open to the elements. Inside the hut was a small herd of goats. There were a few outside as well. This was obviously where they spend the night. The pen was tiny, but perhaps this was how they were kept here. I imagined they used the goats for meat, milk, and for keeping the grass down.

There was a small clearing around the huts where a large grass mat was laid out and covered with the red flowers we had earlier seen. They were actually small berries and no doubt for sale.

By now though, I realised these people were clearly segregated from the rest of the village. They would find it hard to sell anything here. In fact the atmosphere here was very sombre in sharp contrast to the jovial atmosphere of the main village. Here the villagers showed obvious signs of smoking dope, though they weren’t doing it in view of us. Their fields were unkempt and overgrown and unproductive. The sheet with the red berries was the only sign of any productivity here. They clearly showed they had lost their will to exist since being evicted from the forest.

All up there are about 3000 pygmies. They had been evicted from the forest about fifteen years ago by the government as a measure to conserve the wildlife. The government has attempted to train and fund their new lifestyle as part of the attempt to integrate them into what they considered acceptable society, but it is very difficult to them to accept as they have no concept of money. They have intermarried with other locals so there could very well be just thirty real pygmies left.

Adimo was the matriarch of the village, and she allowed us into her hut – the only mud brick house in this village. It was a lot smaller than the huts in the village back along the trail, but it had a circular thatched roof and was a lot more solid than the other huts up here. A pole stood on the ground to support the top of the roof about three metres high. This must be a mansion by their standards.

Three small boulders were sitting on the floor in one corner of the hut. The stones concealed the ashes of what was obviously a very crude fireplace. A plastic container of water was sitting in the corner no doubt for if the fire were to start getting out of control.

The woman showed us some of her ceramic pots and utensils including a sickle, but she was obviously too doped up to be able to put any kind of structure into her presentation.

We returned outside to where the blanket of red seeds was. We discussed that for a white before returning down the hill for a short cultural display. We took our seats on the rugged plank benches. In front of us was a blanket containing small bowls and trinkets mostly made from reed grass and wood. Australian customs definitely won’t let these through, so I didn’t buy any. I would have like to have bought some, but then again they weren’t really helping themselves. No doubt most of their cultivation activities were the dope they were growing hidden in the jungle.

The village women and children lined up in front of us. One of the young women had a stick and a plastic water can which was used as a drum. The older woman took to the front where she explained in a slightly drugged manner that they were going to perform a dance to celebrate the harvest. What harvest I thought.

There were four young women, one holding a baby who, judging from its squeals, clearly didn’t want to be there. There were nine small children. I’m not sure if the older children from here were attending the school. It would have been a long walk for them each day if they did go.

The drum started beating a steady strong rhythm and the old lady started her dance. Then some of the children joined in performing a rather chaotic dance. They were jumping up and down and flaying their arms around. As each would grow tired they would go back to the stationary line and someone else would take their place. There was a lot of unintelligible yelling chanting. The baby wasn’t at all happy and started screaming in the midst of it all.

Finally the dancing stopped briefly and Rodney discussed a bit more about their culture, how they had lived in the Congo for thousands of years and were now living here helped out by the government. To be honest I thought they would have done better back in the jungle where they had their old customs and values that had kept them going for so long. Now they were on the verge of extinction.

The drum started again and Adimu started dancing and chanting again. Some of the others joined in as they had done before. One of the ladies had large breasts and was obviously not wearing a bra, but that didn’t seem to deter her.

The young lady banging the drum seemed a lot nicer than the others. Although her clothes were ragged, they were of a pretty blue colour with patterns that made her look really pretty. Everyone else was dressed in old rags. Everyone else was now clapping the rhythm.

A couple of the children were losing interest and they slunk off into the tiny grass hut nearby. How two of them fitted in there I had no idea. But then again they were very small people.

The lady on the drum handed it over to the lady in the dirty cream top and big breasts whilst she disappeared towards the forest – probably to have another joint. Five minutes later she returned and abruptly took the drum back whilst everyone was still dancing. They continued singing and chanting and clapping songs, no doubt traditional folk songs that reminded them of their days back in the jungle.

The young ones would have always lived here. The young women probably wouldn’t remember life in the jungle, but the old woman Adimu definitely had memories of her old life in the jungle. She recollected how wonderful life had been where they were all able to sustain themselves. Getting evicted had changed all that. This was her way of telling the world about their situation.

We left the Pygmy village and returned along the long trail back towards our camp in Rubugiri. A couple of hundred metres along the trail we saw the three small boys we had seen earlier, holding a couple of water bottles they no doubt had for sale.

On the way back I started to get to know our guide Peter. He is not a pygmy even though he was very short. He did seem a bit racist in the tone in which he had said they spend their money on boozing. We all discussed their obvious signs of a drug problem, and that they seemed to have no idea on how to live outside of the jungle. It seemed very sad that they would have been very successful in their lives in the jungle and yet they were doing so poorly here. That sounded very much like some of the Australian Aboriginal communities I have heard about. We had tried to assimilate them into the Western mind-set, but that had failed miserably. The same seemed to be happening here.

We crossed over the little short cut and around the next two gullies until eventually returning to the main village. As expected there were eight children very keen to see us, including the little boy who kept repeating “hello” at the top of his voice no matter how many times we said hello back. One of the girls was holding a baby. She couldn’t have been any more than ten years old.

Now that we were back on the road, we followed it down from the village centre for a hundred metres before turning off to the right and following a narrow path between the mud houses. Some of them had an obvious framework of sticks somewhat similar to the construction of the cow dung huts of the Masai, though a little more elaborate.

We walked around one house and saw four three men sitting in front of a small fire. There were a number of small pots and other metallic things around. This was the local blacksmith. They were all wearing black apart from the man who started a presentation to us. He was wearing a white shirt.

One of his assistants leant over his small fire and put a piece of metal bar in hammering it into shape. His baggy hat hid his head. The presenter told us he was making a spearhead. He produced one on a two metre long pole. The spear was sharp. He then showed us all sorts of other things they had made, everything from a small mattock to watering cans and cooking pots. They were all crudely made, but fully functional. They would have been pretty impressive in this village.

Behind us around the corner of the house were about ten children staring. I’m not sure if they were watching the presentation or just staring at the pale strangers in their midst. Every time we turned around whenever they made a sound, they would all run away behind the house. Then they would tentatively come out again.

The old man in the daggy hat then stood up. He was quite old and wrinkled. He had a small stringed instrument with a small hollow drum in the end and what looked like a small hacksaw. He scratched away a tune and started singing a folk song. It was a lot happier than the sad songs of the pygmies.

He then produced a much larger instrument made of wood. No doubt this was also unique to his invention. He performed another scratchy song on the larger instrument.

We returned uphill to the road, and then continued walking along it. The road made a good downhill walk to warm us up for the gorilla trekking tomorrow. We walked past women and children and even a few cows perambulating along the dirt road.

Finally we were back in civilisation. We were at the main village again. There were shops and even a church. There was even a bank – the Rubuguri Co-operative Savings Credit Society Ltd with a bakery next to it. The village was very quiet. No doubt everyone was still out at work.

We arrived back at the Wagtail Eco-Safari Camp, our eco lodge. There I posed with Peter, the tour guide of the day. I had initially thought he was a pygmy, but he was just a short man. He didn’t like the pygmy, and I now assumed that it was because he was so short that a lot of people in the past had ridiculed him to that effect and he now disliked them.

Tired from the long walk this morning, we returned to our tents for nearly half an hour before lunch. Everyone else was already there when I arrived. We sat down and ordered a large spaghetti bolognaise served by Emma.

Following a relaxing afternoon at the ecolodge, the sky quickly darkened and it grew cold as the evening drew. The sun had long set when we arrived for dinner. As usual we started with a small bread bun. Then we had yet another really nice soup. This time it was a brown vegetable soup that was really delicious. I mentioned that I liked to photographically document the meals so I could later write it up if relevant. I mentioned that I had a hard time remembering a lot of the meals I had eaten in my earlier trips through South East Asia. That had been a real shame because the food was always fantastic there.

Travis took my credit card camera and photographed me in between a couple of sauce bottles. I gave my big camera to a guy I had met this afternoon to photograph our group. Then the main meal came out. It was a couple of chicken steaks, some vegetable casserole and rice. Then we had pancakes for dessert.

We discussed our cultures. Jeremiah revealed he was a Masai Warrior from Kenya. I had wondered where he was from. He told us that for a Masai Warrior boy to become a man, he has to kill a lion. Jeremiah did that some years ago, so he definitely was a man. He had done it using only a small spear – as the Masai do. There was no technology involved, just some cunning and brute force. It was hard for us to believe that this really nice man had killed such a beautiful creature.

He then told us about his two wives at home. In Masai tradition, he was polygamous. It was hard to imagine what life would be like for the wives, living in the same village, and he being away for up to a month at a time working running tours around East Africa. They would get very lonely.

Then he told us that he was looking for a third wife. This time he wanted a Westerner, probably an Australian. Now the cultural differences really were coming out. I told him that I couldn’t possibly imagine any Westerner wanting to marry someone who already had two wives. It was totally against our culture. It was hard enough with today’s standards for a woman to accept exclusive rights to a man in our culture, and impossible to accept someone who was already committed. Travis just didn’t understand the cultural differences, but he was still keen to find a Western woman.

Travis our driver had been sitting there very quietly. He had obviously adapted to the Western influences a lot better than Travis. He mentioned he had one wife and now a baby. He won’t marry anyone else. He had never killed a lion before but he still considered himself a man.

We were very full from dinner. Emma came and announced there was a cultural show put on by the local orphanage. It was a free concert, so I thought cool.

We walked out of the dining hall and there were numerous seats set up around a campfire all facing towards some trees in the thick darkness. The camp fire consisted of a few large planks about two metres long crossed over with the middle burning. It was quite a large fire and I wondered if it would get out of control. We sat in the seats – they were the uncomfortable ones that had been brought down from upstairs.

The group arrived. There were eighteen people of different heights, mostly teenaged. It was very dark with the only light being from the dim smoky campfire. They performed some amazing group dances that they had obviously put a lot of practice into. The dances told stories which I didn’t understand much as it was very dark. Before each dance though they told a brief story about what the dance was about. They were leaping about all over the place and had the dances well-coordinated.

At the end of the show they passed around a small basket for donations, and then we all turned in for the night. It was very dark in the tent. Once I put my light out I could see faint flashes of lightning. Then later I could hear the thunder echoing through the valley. A big storm struck but thankfully it was mostly rain. There weren’t too many lightning strikes too close, and there wasn’t much rain. I then realised that the ground will be very boggy tomorrow. What if it was going to rain tomorrow? Will that mean we won’t be able to go out gorilla trekking?