September 3, 2006: “Welcome to Uganda”

Hello all! I've now added weeks worth of Vietnam posts that have been sitting on my laptop for various reasons and the copy of my Chronicle column the way I would have liked to see it had editing across time zones not interfered. Below is the first entry in my Uganda blog. I realize that South Africa is sadly, completely absent. I was so busy trying to use every moment by day and meet people at night that I didn't get to journal. At some point here, I plan to go back and add at least some kind of reflection (or at least type up my research notes!), but for now, enjoy the present adventures! To all abroad, stay safe. And good luck Emily with the college adventure starting tomorrow :)

My best from Kampala!

David

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We were on the ground in Kigali, Rwanda when it hit me. I was staring out at the dirt roads of the capital city surrounding us while pondering why the rusty carcass of a long decommissioned jetliner parked forlornly in front of us on the runway hadn’t been moved. It began to sink in that I was sitting in East Africa on the site of a city where just a few years ago genocide killed thousands and thousands of innocent civilians. I was about to proceed to Kampala, Uganda, where in the country’s north, a similarly deadly genocide was currently still taking place.

Africa has always been a land of mystery, exoticism and phenomenal natural beauty, but it is also by far the least developed continent and the most enigmatic and frustrating target for development experts. I’m not new to traveling, even in the developing world, but at this point I still really do not understand why some countries in the world have prospered so greatly while citizens in others still don’t have food and clean water. The dull book of Ugandan history I had finished on the plane hadn’t done anything to clear up the mystery for me.

I realized that I knew nothing about what Kampala would look like, or how the people would react to a white visitor, or really anything beyond the primer I read that’s narrative ceased in 1994. I don’t like feeling ignorant and it was striking hard. I gulped. Whatever happened, it was going to be an exciting semester.

Uganda’s main airport is thirty kilometers away from the capital in a city called Entebbe. This runway featured an emblazoned UN jet, but little other action. The airport was actually very, very small, and even the flat screen arrivals monitor couldn’t hide the fact that the facility was old and quaint. The creaky baggage conveyer belt finally spit out my backpack and I got ready to brave the journey to the city.

Hiring a private taxi would be forty dollars, and I wasn’t about to spend such obscene sums on day one, so I got directions for using public transport and set out for the packed minibuses that seem so ubiquitous in the developing world. As in Vietnam and South Africa, way more people than comfortable or safe were crammed into a large sixteen passenger van. In addition to the driver, a conductor sat by the door, wagging his head and hands out the window, calling out our destination and waving down additional folks to squeeze in. Embarkation and disembarkation were almost constant on the forty kilometer trip, slowing our average pace to only about twenty kilometers per hour.

Much of the scenery along the highway route reminded me of Vietnam. The road was running through a thick jungle (Uganda is the home of the impenetrable jungle), but the road was densely packed with shacks and huts that doubled as family residences and small shops and providers of every imaginable service. Many of the huts did seem to all be constructed of solid bricks or concrete blocks, though some were patchworks of tin and scrap metal.

People and dust were absolutely everywhere. The air was heavy with smog and thick red dust, rising and swirling from the road and everything surrounding the road. There were hawkers at formal and informal markets, women walking with children on their backs and jugs on their heads, men working at stands along the road, and children playing everywhere. All along the route people were standing to wait for a taxi or a friend or some other means of
transportation. I didn’t see another white face on the entire drive.

Finally the skyline of Kampala came into view. The city limits hold 1.5 of the 27 million inhabitants of Uganda, but it is a relatively compact center built around seven hills, provoking a shortage of flat ground. It was not an especially impressive skyline, with a few very scattered tall buildings (but nothing seemed to be over twenty stories) and lots and lots of smaller buildings and shacks spread to the tops of the hills. I could tell right away that there was no grid to the streets—they meandered to torn apart traffic circles and spiraled into thick traffic jams. Since our van wasn’t moving, I had plenty of time to look around.

Eventually we emerged on the Old Taxi Park, the central transportation hub of the city. The pulsating veins traversing the city all emptied into this wildly pumping and seething heart. There must have been more than five hundred vans with conductors shouting destinations, calling for passengers, and weaving in and among the parked vehicles. How anyone ever gets anywhere is a great mystery to me.

From the taxi park it was only a short hired car trip to the Jeliza Hotel. We are staying at a modest hotel in the center of the city. The rooms are bare but certainly sufficient and have ample mosquito netting around our beds. On the occasions when there is power, I was even lucky enough to have an air conditioner! The guard with an large rifle definitely made me feel safe.

The book I read about Uganda included a description of the aid provided by each country each year. Dominating every list was military assistance, with thousands upon thousands of armed rifles. With so many munitions floating around, I expected the country to seem well armed, and it certainly did. There were some soldiers on the streets, but it was mostly private security guards boasting large weapons sitting around. I sort of wonder what these guards expect to do with their weapons—does one get shot for attempting to shoplift? In any case, it is generally comforting as I walk down the street at night.

Shortly after midnight the rest of the group arrived, absolutely exhausted from the journey from the US. There are fourteen girls and two guys on the trip; having never traveled with a group of girls at all, this could prove interesting. However, everyone going to Uganda must be pretty cool, and most of our girls have professed not liking groups of girls either!

The first day was spent taking care of logistics; we changed money, checked e-mails quickly, and registered at the US Embassy. Not surprisingly the compound was the nicest building structure in the city, with everything looking state-of-the-art. We didn’t actually talk to anyone, simply registering as US citizens living in the country. The questions were all about what would happen in case an emergency evacuation became necessary, offering a very real reminder that we are in a part of the world where politics and stability can quickly degenerate and violence is not at all uncommon.

That being said, the city seems remarkably safe. Pickpockets and robberies are constant worries, but that is true anywhere in the city. Violent crime here is nothing like in South Africa, and it is so refreshing to be able to let down my guard just a little bit and smile and chat with people on the street.

The rest of the afternoon and really the next two days were filled with briefings about the semester. I really like the way the program is structured, gradually moving us towards independence and self-sufficiency. For the first two weeks, we are all taking classes as a large group to understand the basics of Ugandan life and history and development politics. Then we will travel to Western Uganda and Rwanda for a week excursion. When we get back, we will break into smaller modules to study development topics thematically. Two more weeks of study will be followed by a trip to Eastern Uganda, where we will stay and work in pairs to complete a rural economic appraisal, live with a rural family, and practice research in the field. We will return for one more week of final preparations for our independent internships and research projects in the city before we are off. Up to this point, we will be living with host families scattered around the city and surrounding area. However, for the final six weeks, we will work and research anywhere in the country (with the exception of active war zones) and live on our own in whatever arrangements we desire, from apartments to squatter camps. Then, for the final week, we will all reunite and travel to an island on Lake Victoria for presentations on our work and program conclusions.

While we have learned about the semester, we have been encouraged to do as much as possible on our own. The “city drop off” placed us in pairs to explore topics in the city and report back to the group. Krista and I found out all about media in Uganda, from newspapers to radio and television to DVD rentals. Talking to people was pleasantly easy. Most of the people we met were happy to answer our questions and share information with us. There was a language barrier, as a lot of street vendors speak only rudimentary English and communicate in Luganda, but it was quick and fairly easy to learn a lot.

As we walked the city, I was really impressed with how quickly neighborhoods changed. Walking the seven hills requires constant changes in elevation, and it seems that there are different worlds each time we go up and down. We went through a busy car parts market stretching for blocks with mechanics working busily away, but just a few steps uphill we were in a leafy neighborhood of modest homes and boarding schools. The city center does feature some luxurious hotels and restaurants, with the skyline dominated by the Kampala Sheraton, but unlike Saigon, you could never for a minute forget that you were in a Third World Country.

To ease our stomachs into African food, we’ve eaten at some very nice Ugandan
restaurants, but even with fancy food, the cuisine is not particularly exciting. Meats are popular, but starches dominate each meal. My dinner last night had flat bread, rice, potatoes, and French fries, and this has not been at all uncommon. Keeping weight down will be a challenge! There are lots of peanut sauces and curries as well, and there is a good mix of spicy and savory, so nothing is bad, but it is easy to see right away that variety is not a strong suit.

In order to get a bit of a feel for the countryside (Uganda’s population is 85% rural), yesterday we drove about sixty kilometers west to Jinja, famously known as the source of the Nile River. The sight was anticlimactic for two reasons: it is not actually the source of the river, which starts in Rwanda, and it is also not a source, but merely the ambiguous point where Lake Victoria ends and the river begins announced by a British explorer to be the river’s head. However, it was good to see the countryside. I’ll write much more later as we do more work rurally, but there was a good mix of thick jungle and roadside markets and shacks.

Through all the dust pervading every speck of the city atmosphere, I have been hugely impressed with how clean Ugandans are. Looking “smart” is an absolutely essential prerequisite for being treated with respect, and we have been warned that our clothes should look clean and neat every day, our shirts and pants should always be pressed, and we should not rewear clothes. As laundry will be incredibly labor-intensive, it seems to me that the people could find a little better use for their time, but the pride in personal appearance is a deeply seated cultural tradition that will require me to reform my somewhat slobbish college personal care habits!

In just a few hours now we will depart our hotel to meet our host families. All I know now is that I’m living with a single mother and her five children, though four of them are over eighteen. The average number of children in Uganda is around seven and some of the families have eleven or more, with crowds of small children, so I guess I got lucky on that front! I really have no idea of what to expect and or course the initial introduction is a source of anxiety for both sides, but I am ready to get out and really begin Uganda living.