Bwindi traditional story telling

Volunteering in Uganda was quite the educational experience, but it was not always easy. Early during our stay, I had a nasty foot injury that basically prevented me from doing any serious walks (not that I’m usually a big fan of exercise, as you might now) – and I was really bummed that it would not be possible for me to see the mountain gorillas. In general, it was hard for me to get around and therefore spent most of my time behind my notebook developing the pictures and processing video we shot during previous days.

And there was a lot of material that needed to be processed. During our Uganda stay, we captured the local Bwindi culture by filming three school contests, dance performances, Bwindi traditional story telling and several other activities.

We spent some time with Mary Angela and Josephine, two traditional Bwindi story tellers, and listened to their stories while recording them. Joseph translated two of Mary Angela’s stories for us, and I had time during our stay to add English subtitles to two stories. Alas, we did not get translations of Josephine’s stories – we ran out of time. We wrote about Josephine’s Calabash story in a previous blog post.

Big Beyond’s volunteering efforts in Uganda were halted shortly after we left and we do not know whether the edited (and raw) video and pictures ever were officially handed over to the Uganda community. But fortunately, our blog, Flickr, and YouTube videos will hopefully be around for quite some time for anyone interested in Bwindi culture.