Plan A: 6 months in Uganda

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...