In 1992, Melissa went back to Uganda for the first time since leaving in 1981. “I stayed in a hotel, the Sheraton, in which I had lived for about three weeks and gave up because at that point it was still trying – this was 1979 – it was still trying to be a hotel,” she recounted in the ADST Oral History website. “Squatters were moving in, chopping up the furniture, burning it to cook their food. There was no running water. I had to use the fire hose to fill my pail up once a day so that I could flush the toilet once a day. This is very healthy. Very healthy. Once you’ve been an ambassador you should trek up five floors with a bucket of water to flush your toilet once a day. It puts everything into scale. (…) And I recognized the hotel – same place and the lobby is all nicely done and I go up to the desk and ‘Oh yes, Ambassador Wells,’ and they give me a drink with umbrellas and cherries sticking out of it, a welcome drink. I go to my room and the first thing I want to do is find that fire hose that I used to use to fill up my bucket. I go back and they seemed to have moved it and it’s no longer accessible. It’s sort of locked up.
And then to go out and walk up and down the streets which was inconceivable in my day. I mean, there was shooting and looting. And just to absorb Kampala one evening with little restaurants coming back and people walking around at night. I remember sitting on that balcony and thinking, “I looked out at this scene.” It wasn’t the same room obviously in which I stayed in 1979, and it was so different.
Then the next day I had hired a car to go to the base camp for the climb, and I know the country well and I asked, ‘Could you take the Mubende road and then come back through Mbarara?’. ‘Oh, yes.’ So, we took the Mubende road and passed little villages – and I literally started to cry because I could see a post office, a PTT, and people were going in and out doing their post office business. This was inconceivable. I mean had I gone on the Mubende road in 1980, I would have had my water, my gas, my money, my food – a post office, forget it. There was nothing. (…) You had to have everything with you. Then of course topping that off was a climb of the Ruwenzori mountains. It was gorgeous. It was in Uganda that I was first exposed to the violence, the suffering, the tragedy of Africa, and it was in Uganda that I was healed. And I had the privilege of telling President Yoweri Museveni that story during a visit to Kampala in 1994 [when she was going to South Sudan, just north of Uganda]. I got to know Museveni quite well during that earlier period before he became president.”