Plan A: 6 months in Uganda

Where the grass is tall it would be possible to pass within 50 feet of Chambura Gorge and miss it entirely. Long ago a trickle of water began carving the path of least resistance through a flat, featureless savanna; and today, where you expect only more of the same amber thicket, is a gouge in the earth some three miles long and, you would swear, nearly as deep. At the bottom is a river, an elixir for life that falters elsewhere, and the gorge is filled almost to the brim with the most magnificent trees - iconic, flawless forms, like images borrowed back from a painting, a little more perfect than the real thing. A moment at the edge affords an uncommon view of dense forest from above; here, staring down at the mottled-green canopies, the columns of wood holding them aloft seem instead to dangle from them like thick roots reaching down into the void. We are here to track chimpanzees. Although overshadowed by East Africa's most celebrated primate, the endangered Mountain Gorilla...

I should have known it would come to this. Maxi and I were huddled around a couple of paint cans, using drinking straws and rusty scrap metal plucked from the ground to mix what we hoped would be the perfect shade of red-orange. Behinds us, my furniture was awaiting some unfortunate shop apprentice who would, for the second time, without pay, scrape off all the paint using nothing but a worn out hacksaw blade. The paint, which was special-ordered from the local paint dealer, wasn't curing properly, nor did the color match the sample card, and after two failed attempts Maxi was convinced we could do better with our own concoction of primer and pigment. But of course! The metal tube was cut by hand with a hacksaw, welded in the dirt by a man squinting behind mirrored sunglasses, tested for flatness on a nearby concrete slab - the flattest surface available - and squared with a metal casing enjoying a second life as a mallet. Painting would be a similar exercise in ingenuity. T...

It occurred to me recently that most of my posts about life in Uganda (other than my life) have been a little gloomy, so I thought I would share a few tidbits of optimism. First, our friend Mark, the accountant-cum-taxi driver, finally found a job at bank - at least hopefully. He has been invited to a week-long training, after which most of the participants will be offered jobs. Knowing Mark, I'm confident he'll be among them. Mark is always apologizing for the condition of his car - he gets low priority from Yellow Cab because he refuses to drive 7 days a week - but he's always quick to add, “It's the attitude that makes a man successful, not the car!” Right on, Mark, I couldn't agree more. Unless the car is a 2008 Audi TT coupe with 6-speed manual transmission, Pearl Silver exterior and black leather seats. In other news, yesterday I was astonished to see the road crew at work again on “bad road,” paving over the dirt, completing the job they started a few we...

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...

“The rainy season started yesterday,” said Vincent, proprietor of The Republic of Uganda Design Center - General Mental [sic] Craft and Civil Works, a metalworking outfit at the end of our road. His statement took me by surprise. Conventional wisdom - espoused by guide books, tourist web sites, all those who don't live here - brackets the rainy seasons between April and May, and October and November. The hottest, driest weather of the year? Well, right now. At the time, I was crouched inside the tiny shack which serves as the office for General Mental Craft. Crouched, to make headroom for the umbrella Vincent's assistant Robert thoughtfully fetched for me as water began to find its way through the patchwork of corrugated metal above us. Rainy season? An official declaration, no, but hard to refute. The night before we awoke to the crisp smell of ozone and the din of rain attacking neighboring roofs. It has rained once or twice every day since, unfailingly at the very m...

Ostensibly, we were headed to Jinja to visit the hospital. A few months ago, Emily was contacted by the family of an American woman who found herself in Jinja Regional Referral Hospital after her boda (a motorcycle taxi, ubiquitous here) collided with a mini-bus in the main traffic circle just outside of town. She was lucky: there are no 911 dispatcher here, no ambulances, no parametics; but a bystander put her in a car and drove her 2 km to the hospital, and she was eventually attended to by a Dr. Dean, who treated her for a concussion and then drove into town to find her family, who were riding ahead of the woman on separate bodas when the accident happened. Grateful for the care and kindness they received in Jinja, the woman and her family wanted to make a donation to the hospital. Since cash would likely disappear, they asked Emily if she would pay a visit to Dr. Dean, determined how best to spend $850, and arrange for the supplies or equipment to be purchased and delivered to ...

It's hard to believe I've been here just a week. It feels like a month, maybe more. Which is to say I'm getting to know Kampala and the way things work. My proudest achievement may be cracking the inscrutable taxi (or matatu) system. (More like a bus system....for a great description of how it works, read Emily's blog posting .) I know the basic routes and I can distinguish the hand signals the conductors use to indicate which direction they will go. I know the etiquette of loading and unloading, the best seats to have, the right words to say to request a stop at the next street corner vs. the next taxi stand. And, I'm starting to get a feel for what the fare should be from this point to that point. The challenge of knowing what to pay for things isn't limited to transportation. Outside of larger stores and restaurants, prices are rarely posted. There are some unwritten rules that generally hold for commodities: a samosa 200 shillings, a Coke 600 shillin...

I spent over an hour inside a sweltering internet café in downtown Kampala just to get those 4 tiny pictures uploaded to my last post. Emily likes to say the entire country shares a single dial-up connection, and I'm starting to think she might be right. I would look into it if I could get online. More to come when I get this situation sorted out.

Well, already I'm behind on my blogging. I've been here 4 days, and there is so much to talk about, I'm really not sure where to begin. Right now I'm sitting in O'Leary's Irish pub, a popular destination for the ex-pat crowd on account of the familiar environment and free wireless internet. Other than the patio adorned with flowers and palm trees, it looks like any Irish pub at home - a well-worn bar with a wide selection of whiskey and Guiness taps (not working today), sturdy wooden furniture, cricket on the television, a clock that doesn't work. I'm told the Irish stew (2-for-1 on Mondays) is excellent. Emily is back to work, so today I set out on my own with a modest goal: take public transportation to Nakawa, the site of one of Kampala's larger open-air markets, and buy a chain and padlock for my bike. Open-air markets like this one are where many Ugandans fulfill everyday needs - food, clothing, livestock, housewares, small appliances, hardw...

Until today I didn't really understand duty-free shopping. The guilty pleasure of shorting the government a few bucks never seemed worth the hassle of lugging around a bag full of items I could buy right at home - maybe even for less. But here I am, buying $87.53 worth of cheese in a duty-free shop in the Amsterdam airport. How quickly your perspective changes when home is a place where the small luxuries you enjoy routinely are harder to come by. In a few hours we'll be boarding a flight to Entebbe, the main international airport in Uganda. Emily has spent the last 4 months in Kampala, Uganda's capital, working with a local health and human rights NGO. This city of around 2 million people, and scarce little good cheese, will be my home for the next 6 months. Just a few weeks ago I left my job, my friends, and the majority of my possession in Seattle and began a journey that has been in the planning since May, when Emily accepted a fellowship with Physicians for Human R...