The Chicken

This Week’s Post is Written by WordsfortheWeary’s Editor, not Author. 

A two week trip to East Africa is always memorable, but Uganda is particularly so. What began with a breakdown ended with chasing a chicken, and nothing but adventure in the middle.

It began with a week in Tanzania. When our car broke down in the dark on some lonely roadside within a couple of kilometres of the airport, our family laughed. We truly were back in Africa. A friendly driver was flagged down by our driver/guide/general-care-taker Chris, and we were taken along random back routes to find an isolated but stunning coffee plantation that hosted us the first night.

The rest of the trip in Tanzania was spent driving across the country to enjoy safari, as well as tour Olduvai Gorge – actually pronounced ‘Oldupai’, but was misspelt by a European explorer in their letters and was named incorrectly. The ‘cradle of humanity’ is host to dozens of early hominid skeletons of varying ages and species, with layers of rock dating 2 million years back. To get there from our hotel, we had a Maasai guide walking us across the bush for 2 hours. It was how he began the walk talking about possibly seeing leopards whilst on foot, or showing us the track of a hyena that had been there “a couple of hours earlier”. Looking at the large knife he had tied to his waist, I suddenly found myself concerned about this walk in the wild. Happily, the most adventurous thing we saw was the afterbirth of a wildebeest, and herds of them and Zebra wandering about the plains.

Uganda hosted the usual assault of brilliance for the week after Tanzania. Within an hour of landing we were reunited with old friends and chatting to the later evening – which later proved a mistake, as mosquito bites coated us the next day. We spent our time catching up with our community and the clinic my parents had built and being roasted by the sun. Occupying a strange place in time, not much had changed. A few new high rise buildings and some new roads, but the same people, places and beauty.

The best story from our week in Uganda would be that of the chicken. Some years ago, dad had come home with a goat in the back of his car. It was meant to be a very fresh gift of food, but with a vegetarian mother and sister, that wasn’t a preferable option. Gerald was adopted and lived with us until he ate my dad’s beloved roses, at which point he was sent to a farm for breeding purposes. It was perhaps, then, predictable that a Ugandan family friend would bring us a cockerel. Large, white and pooing on the veranda and gardens of the Makindye Country Club, this chicken presented a problem.

He came to us with tethered legs, but slipped his tether and was running around at full speed. Despite numerous offers from the kitchen staff, we did not want him slaughtered for us. Dad decided he wanted to try and catch it. For a surprisingly stupid animal, the score was 4 – 0 in its favour. Dad merely caught feathers. It was only when our former househelp-turned-chicken-farmer came to visit that the chicken was successfully caught and gifted to another Ugandan friend with a farm. And we came back to Europe, sunburnt and aching for Uganda.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]