Page 49 - Demo

TourismISSUE 36 APRIL 2025 49A church builing in Jinja completely made of clay bricks (Unplastered)Image: Samuel PhillipsI took a night bus ride from Nairobi to Mukono. Mukono is a town just outside of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. I got to the bus station before 6 pm because the bus was supposed to leave Nairobi CBD by 6:30 pm, but ended up leaving around 9 pm or so. The bus company did not explain the delay, but I was just glad we finally started the journey after the long wait. We got to the Kenyan-Ugandan border on the morning of the next day, went for the various border checks, immigration visa clearance, and a few other things. The entire process for me took about ten minutes. So, I had enough time to look around while waiting for the other passengers to finish with the clearance.As I stood at the Ugandan side of the border just watching the various activities going on that morning, a school bus carrying school children drove from the Ugandan side to cross to the Kenyan side. That got me smiling. In my head, I was like, technically, these young school children should be considered international students. They go to school in the morning in Kenya and come back home to Uganda in the evening. It just sounded cool to me. But thinking about it, it also shows how much of one people we really are as Africans. We continued our journey into Uganda and were greeted with massive landscapes of rice farms, sugarcane farms, tea farms, etc. Something also stood out to me, which, for some reason, I had not noticed in my first two visits to Uganda. Every house I saw as we