Monday, October 31, 2011

Weekend at Lake Bunyonyi & many ways to skin a cat


I spent the weekend at Lake Bunyonyi. I will resist the temptation to descibe the beauty of this place as I always fail to demonstrate it's haecceity, making it sound like the "other place" you visited. Objectively, it's the same combination of hills, lakes, foliage and avicular melodies which makes this place beautiful. Yet there is something in the early morning fog, the lone fisherman in his dugout boat and the reflection of the clouds in the calm waters of the lake that I would have been able to elucidate had I had a better mastery over the words.

Therefore I shall skip past the description of the place, leaving it for better men.

A lesson I learnt during my time in Ghana was that there are many way to live a life that can be labelled as fulfilling. I adduce the example of the Californian I met on Friday night. He spends 3 weeks at a time in Uganda (near Kabale) and Ghana (near Tema) teaching people to make bicycle frames out of bamboo. Check it: http://www.bamboosero.com/. He hires local craftsmen to harvest the bamboo and construct bike frames, imports and assembles the complete bike in the US and ships to a growing environmentally conscious market all over the world while making some decent coin. I was also reminded of the Czech ornithologist working at the foot of Mt Wilhelm in PNG. She had been there for 2 years researching the habits of a small bird with red plumage found only in those parts and seemed to have loved every day of it.

If my vernacular sounds abstruse, I attribute this to a book I am currently reading called "36 arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction" which has an absurd, though eloquent, character by the name of Jonas Elijah Klapper. Jonas has grown on me and, like everything I seem to read of late, is having a significant impact on me (though the only apparent symptom seems to be my pleonastic turn of phrase.)

I apologise for this discretion; it should be worn off by the next post.

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