Photo: Mparo-Noozi Road after the landslide, October 17, 2026.

From the window of an Air Canada jet climbing out of Halifax on October 17, the land below was an unbroken tapestry of green, gold, orange and fiery red. My wife and I had just spent nine days in Nova Scotia as guests of Samm and Sylvia Bbuye-Musoke, who spared no effort in giving us a visual tutorial on this stunning corner of Canada.

On that same day, half a world away, a minor stream a twenty-minute walk from my home in Kigyezi became a torrent and swept away the bridge that links our community to its neighbours. The two scenes belong side by side, for they tell one story. Disasters like ours are made less by nature than by people.

Our drive to Cape Breton was the highlight of the trip. Winding through the highlands toward Port Hood, we were surrounded by the colours of fall, framed by rushing rivers and deep, clear lakes. But the island’s beauty hid a fierce unpredictability. When our GPS directed us left onto an unpaved road, the thick canopy of maples at first soothed us as we drove deeper into dark, uninhabited terrain. Then the GPS signal died. The track splintered into unnamed branches with no sign of human presence. We hit two dead ends but refused to give up. As the isolation pressed in, thoughts of bears crept into my mind, and I pushed them away only because I had to.

I was at the wheel of our hosts’ car, doing my best, but the forest fought back. The rocky track battered the car, tearing away its underbody shield and blowing out the exhaust. Their quiet car now roared like a diesel generator, echoing through the woods like a rally car in distress. Crippled, with darkness engulfing the canopy, we crawled back from our second dead end to a blind T-junction and debated our odds: left or right? We chose right. Minutes later, headlights cut through the gloom.

An approaching SUV pulled tight against the treeline to let our roaring car pass. We stopped, rolled down the window and explained our predicament. Without hesitation the driver told us to turn round and follow him. We did not know who he was, but his warmth dissolved our panic. He shepherded our failing vehicle and shaken spirits through the tangled terrain and onto the paved highway to Port Hood. The driver was Andrew Fedora, Board Chair of Nova Scotia’s Forestry Sector Council. His was a living masterclass in Canadian hospitality and humility.

It was fitting that we were led out of the forest by a man whose work is to look after it. In Nova Scotia, the forest is not something civilization has defeated. It is something civilization has chosen to live with. Halifax and the province’s other towns sit within managed woodland. Flying home over New Brunswick, Quebec and southern Ontario into Toronto, I saw the same pattern: even around dense cities, the trees remain, a natural armour that anchors the soil and moderates the flow of water.

Meanwhile, in Nyaruhanga cell, in the Kasooni area of Mparo, Rukiga, the modest bridge beyond Kasooni Church of Uganda and Primary School, which carried our community toward Noozi, was overwhelmed and washed away. Photographs taken the morning after show the road buried under boulders, the stream’s course choked with rock and red mud, and gardens smothered in debris.

The tragedy did not begin with the rain. It began months earlier, when a bushfire, deliberately set by a group of boys who have since confessed, swept through the valley and left behind a ruhiira, a scorched expanse of bare hillside. When the seasonal rains arrived, nothing remained to absorb them. Stripped of cover, the steep slopes simply let go.

It would be easy to blame geography: steep hills, heavy rain, bad luck. But geography does not explain the difference. Cape Breton’s highlands are rugged too, and Halifax receives roughly 1,400 to 1,500 millimetres of precipitation a year, as much as Kigyezi, if not more. Nova Scotia has been logged, farmed and settled for centuries, yet roughly 75 percent of the province remains under forest. Those root systems act as a giant sponge, slowing heavy downpours and holding topsoil in place.

Uganda inherited no worse a hand. Yet according to the National Forestry Authority, its forest cover has fallen from 24 percent in 1990 to about 13 percent, driven by agricultural expansion and dependence on firewood and charcoal. In the Kigyezi highlands, where slopes are steep and land is scarce, the pressure is extreme, and when those slopes are stripped the ecological buffer disappears.

The difference, then, is human behaviour and governance. Nova Scotia’s forests endure because the rules on how land is cut, burned and drained are written, funded and enforced, and because citizens broadly accept them. Ours are vanishing because our rules exist on paper and are quietly set aside whenever enforcing them becomes inconvenient.

The consequences reach our water itself. Canada’s landscape is defined by abundant lakes and rivers. Across Kigyezi, we are watching our rivers shrink. The cruel paradox is that a stream which dwindles in the dry season can become an engine of destruction in a single afternoon storm, because what we have done upstream has weaponized the weather.

The losses in Nyaruhanga ripple outward. Woodlot owners lost years of investment overnight to a single act of arson. With the bridge gone, children struggle to reach Kasooni Primary School, families are cut off from Mparo Health Centre, and farmers lose their path to market.

Reversing this demands urgent, deliberate reforestation of our naked hillsides. Total preservation is unrealistic where people depend on the land to survive, but we can move decisively toward community-led agroforestry, planting deep-rooted, economically valuable trees directly among our crops to lock the soil in place. Bushfire prevention must become a community responsibility, taught in our schools and churches and backed by local leaders.

We must also confront the elephant in the room: the destruction of our wetlands. The swamps that once defined and protected our valleys have been systematically drained for cultivation and ranching. Restoring them has been a convenient political talking point for years, and little more. Our leaders hesitate to enforce environmental laws for fear of offending political allies and voters. That timidity carries a terrible price. Valleys and wetlands are nature’s shock absorbers. Erase them, and flash floods tear unchecked through roads, bridges and homes.

As the green and gold forests of eastern Canada glided beneath our plane, the lesson became deeply personal. Nova Scotians enjoy a stable, resilient environment not because nature was kinder to them, but because they made a shared decision to let nature live alongside them. For us in the beautiful, cascading hills of Kigyezi, the path forward requires the same courageous collective agreement. To protect and replant the hills above us, and to demand that our leaders put long-term ecological survival ahead of short-term political convenience.

Rebuilding the bridge at Kasooni is a temporary fix. Healing our hillsides and wetlands is the only way to secure our future.

© Muniini K. Mulera