Hockey, Monkeys and Mangabeys

There are a few things we found here at Uganda Christian University that we didn’t expect to see!  On Thanksgiving weekend we were invited for a hockey game and dinner at the home of another Canadian family living on campus.  They are great hockey fans and love to play, so they have actually built a paved ball hockey court behind their house (complete with stone stands as seating for fans).  It is the best they can do in the tropics where there is no ice!  Karl has played goal in the past for ice hockey teams, so he was conscripted and did a great job---their team won!

Now, of course, monkeys are more what you would expect to find in Uganda…but we were surprised to find so many living right in our yard at the university!  In fact, we have seen many more here in the last couple of weeks than we normally see in a game park!  And these are not the usual vervet monkeys that can be quite annoying, stealing food and hanging around houses.  We have a whole extended family of red-tailed monkeys that are amazing acrobats… jumping and swinging in the trees in our yard and onto our roof.  Sometimes it is actually hard to concentrate in my office with all their banging around up there!  Then we have the mangabeys (which are supposedly rarely seen) grunting and whooping and ‘gobbling’ in the trees and eating the leaves off our papaya tree.  They are a kind of monkey closely related to a baboon.  These must be what the little Ugandan neigbour girl told us about when we first came.  She told us there are gorillas in the trees here!

Red-tailed monkey

Mangabey