This post should have gone up two days ago. But packing can be such a demanding mistress. Have I put in too little? Too much? Do I really need an extra bandage in the first aid section? (yes) Have the extra batteries for the camcorder arrived? (No). And so it has gone. So these are the words that should have been. Not on time, and not as carefully wrought as I’d like. But I suspect there will be a lot written from the hip in the days to come.
In a few hours time, I board my flight to Uganda. If you are new to this blog, I am returning there after doing some documentary work last year. Mostly, I want it to be about giving back. Shooting audiovisual awsomeness that my host organisation can use to impress the people who have the money that vaccinates the kids and helps the women’s groups in their ambitious plans.
I’ll mostly be hanging around the town of Gulu in the north of the country. Enjoying warm light and the opportunity to sharpen up my videographic skills. I’m new to shooting video, but keen to see what I can create in the medium. Some of it for this blog, some for other channels too, hopefully.
Then it will be on from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri region. Traveling through the town of Bunia westward on a more curious bent. I’ll be going to see the Okapi in the Ituri rainforests, and then some far more interesting journalistic side projects. About more you will most certainly hear when they are in the proverbial bag, and I am back safe. There is every possibility that the Eastern DRC will be an internetless place. And possibly a little fraught, depending on how the elections go. But that is a call we can make in a week, when it is time to move from Uganda.
This journey is the first time I have ever returned to a place before. On departing, I always wonder what it would be like to return to a place – to have a new set of adventures playing out on the set of a previous one.
Gulu will be my first chance to find out. The DRC will be something else altogether.
Sunset on the way home from revisiting last year's haunt down at the kabero Opong market. This place really is just that beautiful.