Plan A: 6 months in Uganda

I've almost finished reading The Bottom Billion . I may not finish it - it follows the familiar formula of the pop-business books that keep airport bookstores aloft: a provocative thesis clearly presented at the start, then chapters of anecdotes and supporting information that, more often that not, fail to maintain my interest. But Collier's thesis is compelling: certain countries get stuck in poverty because they succumb to one of one or more of four “traps:” bad governance, conflict, being landlocked, and (somewhat counterintuitively) having natural resources like oil or diamonds. Collier and his colleagues use statistics to show these conditions tend to keep poor countries poor, while countries that escape these traps manage to grow, albeit slowly, out of poverty. The world's bottom billion live in “developing” countries that, in fact, are not developing much at all. Coincidentally, one of the author's frequent examples is Uganda. I wrote a little already about t...

I hear some of you are wondering what I'm doing with my time. Actually, I get that a lot lately. Apparently, no one knows what it's like to take a 6 month sabbatical in Uganda. To begin with, in an epic struggle against my very nature, I am attempting to place some limitations on sleep. The alarm on my cell phone is set for 7am M-F, and if the battery is charged, and if I remember to put it within earshot, I might get out of bed by 8:00. Whatever the time, the first business of the day is making tea, without which, I've decided, life would have little meaning. I'm still hunting for a local source of what I consider “real” tea, meanwhile sampling every available Ugandan brand with continual disappointment. Mornings can be lovely here, with cooler temperatures, clearer air, and the sounds of some of Uganda's 1000+ bird species ringing through our courtyard. I was in the habit of taking my tea and some breakfast on our deck, which looks out over the neighboring h...

For all the wonderful differences between the world's cultures, a few elements of the human experience are so fundamental as to transcend nationality, place, and local custom. A few essential elements, unalterable, as if preordained by higher powers. I am thinking, of course, about the procedure for repairing a road: assemble a dozen able-bodied men, a few pieces of heavy equipment, two signs, and a flag; position all the above to allow a single lane of alternating traffic to pass nervously between oscillations of said heavy equipment; finally, put one or two men to work. Indeed, this was the scene recently on what Emily and I call “bad road,” the more traveled of two roads running to the nearby commercial area in Ntinda. Traffic in and around Ntinda, which is smack dab between our apartment and any probable destination, is notorious even for Kampala, a city of two million with fewer than ten traffic lights, just a handful of multi-lane roads, and, I would guess, even fewer traf...

Of the nine numbers saved in my phone, five are for drivers of “special hires,” local parlance for taxis as we're accustomed to at home (versus the public mini-buses, which are called “taxis” here). One evening, as we idled in the usual traffic near our house, our driver Mark explained the economics of his job. For a ride to our apartment, we typically pay Mark between $6 and $9. Of this, half goes to his employer, Yellow Cab, for the car, insurance, and dispatching. With the other half, Mark buys fuel, currently at around $5.50 per gallon, and the remainder, probably amounting to $150 or $200 a month, constitutes his earnings. In Uganda, that's a living. But Mark, who holds a college degree in economics and a professional certificate in accounting, could be earning a lot more if he could find a job in his field. He's not alone. In fact, Yellow Cab is known for hiring over-educated drivers, like Mark. They do, I suppose, because the foreigners who typically pay for...