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Camping in Uganda

Page history last edited by Henry Hamburger 10 years, 7 months ago

 

 

Murchison Falls Elephant Story

 

Gene Child

 

          In 1969 my family and I were participating in the USAID sponsored Teachers Education in East Africa project in Nairobi, Kenya.  I was assigned at Kenyatta College, attempting to prepare Kenya-born students to teach physics in secondary schools.  Prior to that time, most of the secondary school teaching positions had been staffed by British expatriates. 

 

            During the Christmas break, we attended a TEAA workshop in Kampala, Uganda.   After the workshop, we decided to tour some of the game parks in Uganda with our friends, the Bierstekers and the Cutlers.  We drove north out of Kampala toward Murchison Falls in the north of Uganda.  The first night, we camped in a campground along the banks of the Victoria Nile River.  Our rather large two room tent was pitched next to that of our friends, Alex and Ruth Cutler.  The tents were spaced only about five feet apart with the tent ropes crisscrossed.

 

          That evening, we popped some popcorn on the open fire in our newly purchased wire basket popper.  I burned the first batch because the flames were too high so discarded it next to the fire pit.  The second popper-full was done to perfection.  We finished off that popcorn quickly before we retired for the night with our son Dee and daughter Colene, who were eight and six years old at the time.  As we were preparing for bed, we watched the hippopotamuses emerge from the river to browse on the lush vegetation.

 

          In the middle of the night, my wife, Arlone, nudged me awake and asked, “Do you hear something strange?”   In my groggy state, I sat up to the sound  “snuffle, grunt, snuffle!”  I picked up the flashlight at my side, got out of my sleeping bag, and shined it out the front window of the tent.  All I could see was an apparent wall of grey.   An elephant had found the discarded popcorn and was snuffling it up as fast as he could.  Arlone asked what we might do.  I replied, “There is not much we can do.  Relax and go back to sleep.”  We cowered tensely in our bags for what seemed an eternity, but eventually the snuffling stopped and we were able to get some sleep.

 

          In the morning, when we tentatively emerged from our tent, we found all the burnt popcorn was gone, but the most amazing thing was that there were elephant tracks in the soft earth between our neighbor’s tent and ours.  The elephant had stepped gently across the ropes and not disturbed a single one.  The Cutlers were surprised to hear of our visitor during the night.   They had slept through it all. 

 

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