An Inspiring Journey to Africa
By Garth Holloway
Garth Holloway reflects about his inspiring journey to Africa made as a participant of Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief (CPAR’s) Africa Village Tour- a two and a half week journey to Africa that allows visitors to see development programs in rural African communities.
The CPAR 2005 Africa Village Tour to Uganda was definitely ‘chicken soup for my soul’. All of my adult life I have had a strong interest in and connection to Africa, perhaps fuelled by reading National Geographic magazines in my public school library as a kid, and as a result of a two-year teaching placement in northern Nigeria as a CUSO volunteer in my mid-twenties. Since then, I have continued to read about sub-Saharan Africa, been involved in workshops, organized a conference connected to African issues at home in Toronto, and introduced African themes to the Ontario history curriculum during my teaching career. Despite traveling extensively for the past 30 years with my wife and children, I had never returned to Africa. We had always resisted, often citing concerns about the cost or the difficulty of travel, but I really think it was because we were afraid to see that things had remained the same despite the hard work of many Canadian development organizations over the years.
So the opportunity to return to Africa in August 2005 as part of the CPAR Africa Village Tour after a 29-year absence was an exciting one. We were a motley group: two students, two retired teachers, a banker, two physicians and a couple of film makers. My wife, Maureen, and I had started our teaching careers in Nigeria and, as she observed, to return to Africa just after we retired was like “book-ending our teaching careers”. Neither of us had participated before in an escorted travel experience in which others had set the itinerary, always preferring to travel our way and at our own convenience. What would it be like to have others look after our travel needs? Would we be able to get along for 16 days with the other participants some of whom were younger than our children?
Would we be inspired by what we saw or overwhelmed by the immensity of Uganda’s problems? Landing at Entebbe airport at dawn almost immediately lay to rest any anxieties that I may have had. Immediately, I felt like I was in a familiar place - the tropical light at dawn, the sounds and smells that I encountered, and the special African welcome that we received from the CPARUganda staff.
The next day, we embarked on a two-week discovery of Uganda. We met government and development officials who provided us with an insight into the unique challenges that they were encountering. We visited Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps where 1.4 million Ugandans have been living as refugees as a result of the 19-year civil war consuming the north of the country. We toured hospitals and medical clinics dealing with issues such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV&AIDS.
We met some of the ‘Night Commuters’ in Gulu – children who flee villages and seek refuge in towns to avoid abduction by rebel soldiers, visited rehabilitation centres which were attempting to re-integrate formerly-abducted children back into village societies. We saw programs to assist and re-train landmine victims. We also spent time with farmers learning new agricultural methods to ensure their family’s food security and visited schools involved in tree planting as an income-generation program. We saw water purification and sanitation projects, tree nurseries and schools and villages trying to rebuild after the destruction caused by the war.
The range of things that we saw and did in two short weeks was astonishing! No matter where we went and what we saw, I always felt well prepared and knowledgeable because of the preparation by the CPAR staff accompanying us. The de-briefing sessions at the end of the day with the other African Village Tour participants were a wonderful way of putting the day’s experiences into perspective.
Rather than simply feeling emotionally overwhelmed at the end of each day, I felt inspired by the remarkable industry of the Ugandan people in their own efforts to overcome the problems that they faced. I also admired the help that they were extending to each other with the limited resources that they had and what they were able to accomplish within the extraordinary conditions that they lived. I was humbled by the professional dedication, the knowledge and expertise of community members as well as the hard work of the CPAR-Uganda staff.
The itinerary established by the CPAR staff was intellectually stimulating and very well-balanced. Throughout the Tour, we travelled in SUVs driven by CPAR drivers and were provided many opportunities to sightsee, explore local markets, and visit tourist attractions like the "animal rich" game reserve, Murchison Falls National Park in western Uganda that was definitely an experience straight from National Geographic! Our hotel accommodations covered both ends of the spectrum ranging from the very simple at the CPAR-Loro base camp to the sublime Paraa Safari Lodge at Murchison Falls. I was also pleasantly surprised to find a wide variety of international dishes on restaurant menus.
Would I recommend participation on a future CPAR Africa Village Tour? Absolutely. For us, it was money well spent and an educational travel program that few have the honour and privilege to experience.