"Big Daddy"

We went to rent our gear for mountain climbing but it wasn't all ready so I had a couple more days to spend in Kampala. I had already told the girls goodbye so I felt like avoiding them but I ran into two of them right away including the one that wanted to travel with me. She wanted to go to a Cathedral on the outskirts of town so I told her I would go with her to see what traveling together might be like. It turned out that we got along just fine once she was away from the other girls. Around them she had been the quietest of the bunch but once alone with me she found her voice and she was fun to hang with. Maybe I could travel with her after all.

We had a good travel day. Renting a taxi to get there was easy enough and the driver was not a crook. We walked around the Cathedral looking at the gardens because there was a wedding going on inside the church. The priest told us it was almost over so we waited out in front for it to end so we could go inside. While we were waiting outside the front doors of the church a very large man came out the door. He saw us standing there with a camera pointed at the church and he flashed a big grin and posed on the steps for us like he was a boxer. We took his pic. He had on a military dress uniform. He must have been about 6'6" and close to 300 pounds without being overly fat. He was just very imposing.

He walked down the steps and went over to a waiting black sedan and sat there watching the door of the church. In a couple of minutes the whole church emptied out with a typical wedding ceremony throwing rice and all at the bride and groom. The groom was also in his military dress uniform. The Bride was beautiful in her classic white wedding gown. Lots of the guests were also wearing military dress. When they finished we went inside and toured the church.

What I did not know at the time is that we had just met "Big Daddy" Idi Amin the current leader of Uganda and his top military man was the groom. We would soon hear a lot about and from "Big Daddy."

We finished our tour of the cathedral and went back to Kampala to eat an early dinner. We chose a Chinese restaurant that we had eaten at a few times before and met up with some of the other Danish girls for dinner. We ordered our food and before it came we suddenly heard automatic weapons firing very close by. The girls started screaming. We looked out the window of the restaurant toward the sounds of the firing guns and saw some black sedans out in front of the bank and some men with machine guns standing on the steps of the main bank in town.

The owner of the restaurant had us move to the back of the building while he closed the front off with shutters. He wanted us to get on the floor so that we didn't get shot and most of us did. Our food never arrived. I think that the cooks fled out the back doors of the building. We waited for the police to show up and capture the bank robbers. We waited and waited and there was no sirens or any sign that the police were going to stop this slow time consuming bank robbery. They showed up with sirens blaring right after the sedans left the scene with several people shot on the streets and at least one woman was dead from what we heard. We got up to leave the restaurant and the owner gave us the bill for all the food we ordered. We did not get the food and we started to argue over being billed for food we did not get and his response was to sit back down and wait for it but we were going to pay one way or another. We ended up paying and leaving.

The next day we learned about other bank robberies happening the same day and it looked like every bank in the country had been or was going to be robbed. There were rumors that the military was doing it but they were only rumors. It was a long time before I discovered that the rumors were correct. Idi Amin's boys were robbing the banks to steal all the assets of the Indian people in the country. I will talk more about that later.

I spent the day finishing the prep for our climbing trip. Finally we were all prepared and the next morning we took off. Hopefully we would make it this time.