THE WHITE NILE

Post # 49: The City by the Bay

2010-06-12T04:03:00.001+03:00

Photos from my 24 hour layover in San Francisco

No green machines like this one cruising the financial district of Kampala, Uganda

On the right is a catholic church. On the left is the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Fitting.

Window cleaners looking like they're gonna log a few overtime hours

The farmers are in possession of the San Francisco municipal water supply!

Now this is the San Francisco I was expecting

Hilly city

Alcatraz

On Nov. 20, 1969 a group of Native Americans stormed and held the island for nineteen months

The federal government eventually got its land back, but publicity from the event pushed it to meet a number of demands made by the occupiers and Native American lobbyists for years to come.

Golden Gate Bridge

Three historic, beautiful, shiny cable cars sitting in front of a f---ing parking structure

Fisherman's Wharf

Great looking house on Lombard Street (the world's crookedest street)

This one looks like it is being squished by its neighbors

Great name for a playground

I stumbled across an old-world Yiddish wedding, emceed by this guy

Post # 48d:The lost, unfinished posts

2010-06-02T03:57:00.000+03:00

The poverty is real.

As you probably know, back in 2006 I studied for a semester at the American University in Cairo. One of the perks of attending this particular institution was its location. I was living and studying within the heart of one of the world’s oldest and largest cities. Eighteen million strong and growing at an astounding rate, Cairenes absorb any job vacancy faster than you can eat a falafel sandwich. Despite the joblessness, immigrants, mostly from Sudan and the Horn countries, continue to move into the city in great numbers. With the morning call from the muezzin’s tower, a dirty, uneducated, primarily male, and extremely poor mass descends upon downtown Cairo, where they will stay until sundown. Some hawk cheap plastic toys for kids, others wash the sidewalk in front of stores for a couple Egyptian pounds, some sit on main thoroughfares with their hand out, but mostly stand around doing absolutely nothing except smoking the occasional Cleopatra cigarette that has mysteriously appeared from I have no idea where.

Some of you might have asked yourself at some time or another when reading my blog, “Just how poor are Africans?”

The answer, very poor.

Top Ten Travel Books

1. Kingdom by the Sea -- Paul Theroux
2. Innocents Abroad -- Mark Twain
3. Catch 22 -- Joseph Heller
4. The Beach -- Alex Garland
5. Motoring With Muhammad -- Eric Hansen
6. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad
7. In a Sunburned Country -- Bill Bryson
8. Travels Through Egypt -- Gustav Flaubert
9. The Big Red Train Ride -- Eric Newby
10. A Year in Provence -- Peter Mayle
(11. Dark Star Safari -- Paul Theroux)
(12. Neither Here Nor There -- Bill Bryson)

Post # 48c: The lost, unfinished posts

2010-06-02T03:48:00.000+03:00

A few years back I coined my sister’s nickname “princess,” to widespread approval. Why did I arrive at that particular term, you ask? Perhaps my decision was based on her ability to turn on the sympathy waterworks whenever a traffic policeman approaches her, or her sensitivity to small, round objects sandwiched underneath numerous mattresses. Whatever the reason, “princess” was justified. However, I am happy to say, my sister is no longer deserving of that title, especially after what I have just put her through while she was out visiting me: African public transportation.

You may recall my post on African buses which I put on The White Nile after a business trip to Lira. I know realize that trip was about average.

The African is not a complainer. He is never defeated. While disease and climate beat back wave after wave of European colonialism, the African man continued to live like he had for the last ten thousand years. If something doesn’t work out as planned, he simply tries again the next day. He has a patience and a tolerance of unforeseen problems that we can’t even begin to come close to out in the West. It is therefore just as impressive as Germany’s railway system that leaves and arrives exactly as scheduled, a public transportation system that still manages to persist despite frequent problems, constant underperformance, and far too many casualties and fatalities.

Post # 48b: The lost, unfinished posts

2010-06-02T03:46:00.002+03:00

Mbale, 1965. The “Cleanest Town in East Africa” was a model city, and no longer reliant on the ivory trade from Karamoja to rationalize its existence. Immaculate streets laid out in a perfect grid focused everything on the central clock tower: a giant pink structure that resembles a Napoleonic souvenir fallen prey to a deco mind with a sense of humor. The people are cheerful. And they should be. Uganda had just been granted its independence from Britain, and the city was vying with Entebbe to hold the title of the newly formed country’s capital. Thanks to a good road leading to Jinja to the southwest, Mbale was directly connected to Uganda’s booming industry, outpacing other area townships to become the eastern region’s commercial hub.

The buildings are wonderful, a constant reminder of one of my favorite things about Africa, that colonial powers came, built hastily, then vanished. Instead of being undone, their work has just been Africanized. Old colonial façades hanging over every street, no longer imposing Khan and Sons, 1948, but instead Omoding Enterprises. Most of them still bare the year in which they were constructed, usually dates when WWII was just ending and colonialism in Africa, thanks to our good friend Woodrow Wilson and the nearsighted members of Britain’s Labour movement, was on its way out.

When I look past their rusted shutters and through their broken windows, I can sometimes see a fat old white man with a whiskey in hand and a lion’s skin on the wall behind him, gazing out over the African’s first foray into urbanization.

Reality hits hard.

The Mbale of today is a different place, and there is little to brag about. Though there is no chaos in the streets, abundant pot holes ensure every motorist inches along, zig-zagging like a snail avoiding piles of salt. Trash lines the street, and locals shamelessly toss their rubbish in the gutter. One building on Republic Street, the main thoroughfare, was caught in a terrible fire six months ago and has yet to be gutted and cleaned; one can still see the charred debris through the empty windows.

Post # 48a: The lost, unfinished posts

2010-06-02T03:39:00.000+03:00

Mbale Hill, Part II

A number of small villages line the only road that spans the top of the mesa. Most of them, consisting of no more than four or five little shops and some scattered homes, were just waking up when we strolled through. The men, already on African time while the women cooked and did their family’s laundry, were perhaps devising possible excuses they would tell their coworkers as reason for his delay that morning; standing around in shady spots talking. Children too young or from families too poor to send them to school were also out, playing together along the roadside, stopping mid-wrestle to stare at the passing white men with sweat pouring off of their faces. Once the shock of seeing us wore off, they would of course yell “bazungu” and, to our surprise, jambo, a Swahili greeting. Pre-Widowmaker we had been very enthusiastic with our responses to their calls. Slowly, as this hard stretch of road kept disappearing around bends in front of us, our replies to the children became more and more disappointing. No more waving back or trying to make goofy noises, just a grumbled “jambo” in between the swearing under our breaths. Breakfast had been an afterthought that morning, summiting and post hike beers being the real priorities, but you know that you are really hungry when you dream of eating local Ugandan food.

The Widowmaker persisted. For over an hour and a half we slogged through the equatorial sun at the top of Nkokonjeru with just under a liter of water and a half a PB&J sandwich between the three of us. We passed by a gorgeous waterfall, right by the roadside, but I was too tired to stop and do the whole picture routine. Punishment was lifted briefly, however, when a homeless guy decided to exchange his usual diversion, probably huffing glue and annoying locals, for harassing us for money. So we walked faster, but he kept up right alongside us. When he realized we weren’t in the mood to talk to our grandmothers nonetheless him, he began naming off types of food. At first this only agitated me, but, perhaps seeing the humor in the situation, I began to rattle off food with him. He absolutely loved this. Eventually “maize” was dropped and we all started laughing, our lethargic chuckles with his hoarse bellow, so we decided to name him Mr. Maize. Mr. Maize peeled off when we ran out of types of food to say or he spotted another collection of potential harassees, I can’t really recall which, but we should have thanked him before he parted; his initial panhandling proved to be a plus because it pushed us to walk faster than our tired legs had been willing to take us before we met him, and our destination was near.

Not the ration I had envisioned: three hours hiking up and twenty minutes of relaxing at the summit. Yes, the views were spectacular. Foreboding cumulus clouds dominated the skies to the north but halted right above us to be replaced by some more gentle stratus clouds. Below us lay Mbale and environs; the town proper was quite small, but civilization spread out like spilt water on a tile floor, very low and decreasing in density with each passing kilometer, until Mbale was reduced to long tentacles of houses and shops lining the major highways leading to other parts of Uganda. Metal roofs, usually unattractive from ground level, caught the midday sun and shone like jewels from a sea of green foliage. Behind us lay the Kenyan border and barely visible Tororo Rock, swathed in haze. A breeze moved past us, cooing us off despite the heat and carrying away the annoying buzz produced by the radio tower. Alas, it is the bane of the young adult male’s existence that yearnings of the stomach should take precedence over pleasant views, so, after snapping a few final photos, we headed back in the direction of civilization and nourishment.

During our descent we passed through a small town that had been rather sleepy during our first trip through, but now was alive with commerce and freshly released from school children. Ignoring their parents’ demands to get started on their homework, the kids began following us. Soon we had a gaggle of screaming and laughing African children following us down the mountain side, absorbing more excited kids with every house we walked by.

Post # 47: Fuganda

2010-05-31T15:27:00.000+03:00

“The situation is under alarm and there is no cause for control” -- Idi Amin

So I’ve entered the reflection phase of my sojourn to East Africa. For many of you, those not so keen on sentimentality, this means you get to tune out the rest of this blog. But for the remaining three readers, I’ll be filling you in on my trip here, and how it has changed the way I think about the world.

First things first. The Uganda that I have spent the past nine months experiencing is dying. Fomenting as I write are a number of alterations to the Ugandan political and cultural landscape that will leave the country a vastly different place than it is today.

1. The discovery of oil in the Lake Albert region has the potential to destabilize a country already battling the age old African foe to political regime: tribalism. But tribalism in Uganda is still a very real issue. Just last September, riots broke out around Kampala when disagreement between the Kabaka, the king of Buganda, and President Yoweri Museveni jumped from words to action. Although the riots were relatively short lived, dozens of people were killed in the reminder that the allegiance of many Africans still lies with their traditional rulers and not with the Ugandan government. Already we have seen an unfair focus of development aid and infrastructure spending funneled into Southwest Uganda, the region Museveni hails from and Jinja’s replacement as the industrial center of the country. As soon as the petrodollars start flowing into the country, the likelihood that the money is unfairly allocated across its tribal landscape is high. In addition, the environmental degradation (Do you really trust planners to heed strict environmental regulations when there is double-digit growth to be had?) of one of Uganda’s most beautiful areas may anger local communities and farmers. Oil legislation and an influx of petrodollars have the potential to disrupt Uganda’s relative stability enjoyed since Joseph Kony and his LRA were kicked out of the country several years ago, and create new avenues for corrupt purse bearers to extort money out of the arrangement. Extraction won’t reach full capacity (a predicted 200,000 barrels/day) until 2014 or 2015, but hopefully Uganda can figure it out and avoid the curse that has plagued countries like Nigeria and Iraq.

2. President Museveni’s hold on power seems to be slipping., suggesting next year’s April elections may produce some interesting results. This past February’s bi-election in Mbale saw both a shooting, an attempt at ballot-box rigging, and an unseating of the NRM candidate, a party that has traditionally enjoyed a very strong following in Mbale.

3. In two years rafting the White Nile will be a different experience with the completion of the Bujugali Falls Damn. A treaty signed in 1929 gives Egypt final say in the exploitation of the Nile River Basin’s waters. To this day, Egypt retains the power to veto any dam or barrage on Nile waters planned by its upstream riparian neighbors. But its historical control is waning, and upstream neighbors are moving to set up a Nile River Basin Commission to monitor the sharing of the waters. The countries that have already signed the new treaty, Uganda included, all have considerable plans to develop the Nile river, either for irrigation or power generation, and Egypt is furious. Cairo has already started beating the drums of war, claiming it would sever ties with any upstream neighbor that hindered its unilateral consumption of the river, but Uganda is responding. When pressed for the reason the government ordered six new Sukhoi SU-30MK2 fighter jets from Russia, a military spokesman told reporters that the jets had been ordered for the “defense of the River Nile.” But that’s not even the worst part of it all: Bujugali Falls, which sits 16km downstream from Jinja, will erase some of the best white water rafting rapids along the Nile River.

4. Southern Sudan is voting for secession next year, and, should the referendum succeed, may become the world’s newest country. Already, East Africa is preparing for this. The Kenyan government is building a massive port, one that will rival Mombasa, in Lamu, a coastal city in its north that is probably Juba’s closest access to the ocean. Independence means autonomy over Sudan’s oil wealth, which, means exports in the future will soon have to cross borders and pass through the northern neighbor. Talks of building a pipeline from Lamu to the taps in South Sudan have begun in an effort to reduce Juba’s dependence on a hostile Khartoum. Assuming all goes as planned and South Sudan gets its pipeline, economic growth will come to the country and, with it, increasing regional economic integration. Uganda’s northern territory, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of the country in terms of economic growth and infrastructure development, will be the most effected by this. The “backward,” poverty and famine stricken towns and cities I visited in the north this past year may be transformed, and with the transformation, experience commercial and cultural assimilation and its resulting loss of heritage.

5. The anti-homosexuality bill proposed by MP David Bahati has caused a number of foreign donors to threaten to cut off all aid to Uganda. With oil production still several years away, a donor-reliant Uganda will have to find a way to fill the gap in missing aid, probably by borrowing from domestic or international banks, which would raise interest rates and reduce consumption by consumers and businesses.

Post # 46: What I hope to leave in my wake...

2010-05-21T17:03:00.000+03:00

The rural farming community where I work, because of its location outside of a conflict zone or a famine or drought prone area, never sees white people. Thus, when I roll into town for the third time that week it is cause for enjoyment. Most adults look up and stare fixedly, while the more uncultivated individuals crack jokes about the way I ride on the back of a motorcycle or talk to my African friend. The children, unrestrained by their gawking seniors, drop everything they are doing immediately upon seeing me. Bags of beans fall to the ground, their contents scattering, younger brothers get momentary relief as their older siblings stop beating them in the head with an empty water bottle, plastic bags are pulled off of heads to improve vision and vocal projection, foot long sticks of raw sugar cane are ripped from the mouth. Their goal is a shared one, really: to say or do something to get the mzungu’s attention so that they can laugh and cry and cry at the response and tell their own children thirty years later awhile seated around a campfire about this one hilarious mzungu they saw when they were younger. The problem arises when you are not on a boda, but walking through the different houses where the young kids spend their days. Since no adult will make an effort to restrain them, the kids simply fall in line behind me. From over my shoulder I hear “Mzungu, how are you?” to which I respond “I am fine, how are you?” to which they respond “I’m fine, how are you?” to which I respond “I am feeling very bloodthirsty, how are you?” to which they respond “I am fine, how are you?”

Sometimes the children failure to dissipate after the fourteenth greeting, as happened in this one instant when Eddie and I were leaving a training session at a local church. The kids streamed out behind us, shouting greetings, unshaken by our growing strides. Eddie made and effort to clear them away by scolding them with a stern voice, but they were not rebuffed. I thought the barbwire fence surrounding the compound and the women cooking matooke might slow them down as well, but again, I was foolish. We were getting closer to our destination, now, and the pressure to shake these kids was mounting: if these children found out where we planned to eat lunch we may not receive the moment of solitude we needed to talk football. The kids were closing the gap, and their shrieking and jabbering was right behind me now. Then it struck me. Brad, while he was here, was on a brief quest to find the most offensive or inappropriate phrase in Lugizu, the local language. He shared his findings with me one dark and stormy night. I worked my memory hard for the wording and pronunciation, then, satisfied, turned to face the growing gaggle of children, cleared my throat, and proclaimed “Ngana kookooba mooka!” The kids immediately scattered, screaming, in every direction, clambering over rocks and boulders, sliding down cliffs, jumping behind houses, climbing the nearest tree. I turned to Eddie, who was bent over laughing. “Ngana kookooba mooka,” you see, means “I am about to pass gas.”

Post #45: Rafting the White Nile

2010-05-21T13:35:00.001+03:00

I discovered that I only need five more posts to reach the fifty entries mark, so I am numbering the rest. These are photos from a recent trip of rafting, a trip in which we brought our two Ugandan friends, Eddie and JB, neither of whom know how to swim. Sure, they look cheerful in the beginning...

Snack Pack! You're the coolest!

2010-05-17T18:05:00.000+03:00

It happens to everyone. Any prolonged period of time in a foreign environment is bound to kindle a strong desire for foods available only in the civilized, Western world. Bill Bryson, though only a week into his excursion to hike the Appalachian Trail, begins thinking longingly of any food that has never seen the inside of a bag, while his partner, a rotund man named Stephen Katz, opines strongly for anything of the Little Debbie family. African food, though filling, has done an excellent job of helping me to realize all of the excellent food I normally consume in large quantities back home. I wish I could say that the change in cuisine has helped me lose weight, but still evident by my belt shopping are the lingering effects of the “freshman fifteen,” or, in my case, the “first semester 25.” But I have found it quite possible to eat in equal proportions while still fueling the desire for Western food. I think the people that live with me have stopped using the word “cheese” in casual conversation, fearing the effect it will have on me: first comes the ethereal despondence, then the eyes start to glisten before I finally shake it off, realize where I am, and begin rattling off abstract statements like “I remember eating cheese” or “There are some great cheeses at this one place, I went there one time.”

The absence of good food, unfortunately, has this sort of affect over me that doesn’t fade but only strengthens with time. For example, the sentence “Golly, Brad, I sure wish that this pizza had real tomato sauce on it instead of this radioactive ketchup!” becomes “Why can’t these darn Ugandans make a proper pizza!” My venting target has always been the British, who colonized the world with their vast empire, and brought parliamentary government and terrible food to new subjects around the world. Ketchup is put on everything, including rice, people think herbs and spices are for people who don’t like bland food, fish generally comes either dried or fried, meet is cooked and cooked until a chainsaw and filed incisors are needed to consume it, and the bread resembles a rugby ball in several different ways. I thank my lucky stars that mayonnaise is expensive and hard to get, but I also become jealous of all those NGO workers who chose countries formerly colonized by the French. Rwandans, I have heard, enjoy a variety of excellent cheeses.

Oddly enough, foods that I don’t normally crave back in the United States have dominated my my dreams and wishes. Sushi, I always felt, was just a failsafe way to impress a date with your worldliness and refined palate. Yet, the more I eat steamed plantains and boiled vegetables covered with fake beef seasoning, the more I crave the Japanese delicacy, perhaps because it is so completely different from African food. Vietnamese soup, also, keeps me awake at night tossing and turning.

Unsurprisingly, it is the food from south of the order that I crave the most. Mexican food will be consumed in large quantities with my return to the United States. Slow roasted pork carnitas, fresh salsa, spicy barbecued beef, piping hot corn tortillas, all washed down with an ice cold glass of cinnamon accented horchata. I plan to drench my food with hot sauces of every variety, for Ugandans fear hot and spicy things. I may even try to find a Mexican girlfriend with a Mexican mother who loves to cook. If you have anyone in mind, I’d love an introduction, you’ll find me at the taco cart on Division Street.

That is how I feel about food right now. And for your own sake, don’t ask me about African beer…

Black & White Photos

2010-05-10T09:46:00.000+03:00

Photos taken during a recent auditing trip I made to our Lira program. Enjoy!

The group members trickling in before the start of their weekly training session

Winnie, our translator, studies the curriculum

Kelly and a young baby killing time before the session

A young boy sneaks a look at the mzungus over a wall

Betty teaching the group

My favorite photo. I'll let the readers caption this one.

Old woman learning new tricks

Building under construction, taken from my hotel room

Shot of the street leading away from the hotel

This isn't actually Lira, but an old picture from Tororo I had on my computer. Tororo Rock

Also not from Lira. Busiyiyi Falls

On the bus ride home from Lira

The same landscape but in color

Rift Valley Railway (Part 2)

2010-05-08T15:22:00.000+03:00

Before we boarded the train Ellen insisted we purchase a bottle of wine at a supermarket, though her cogency was unnecessary: this sort of thing I very rarely object to. So, giddy with anticipation, we tuk-tuked to the Mombasa train station and prepared to board the train. I enjoyed even the wait immensely. Rusting old train cars sat sporadically throughout a network of weedy tracks, ignored by everyone and everything save my camera lens. To the west, tracks pointed toward a setting equatorial sun. An old notice board, paint peeling and dirty, with departure times and passenger listings suggested a long lost popularity with rail travel or even an African administrator’s tendency to abandon organizational pedantry. We had some time to kill before the train left, so Ellen and I sat down on a bench outside and drank some water. A Kenyan man playing a guitar and singing soon made his way over to where we were sitting, and I offered him 100 shillings, which turned out to be one of the better decisions I had made in some time. Strumming on a guitar that outstripped the decrepit train cars littering the yard in age and wear, he belted out one of the greatest songs about Kilimanjaro I have ever had the pleasure to listen to. A few additional coins from our pockets and he brought out the big gun, a croony love song about two lovers who underappreciated each other. With his last note we boarded the train, and settled into our miniscule birth. I was hoping for mahogany paneling and a cabinet full of aged scotch, maybe even a chandelier, but was slightly disappointed. Our cabin was not the colonial relic I was hoping for, instead, that sickly orange paint only popular during the 1970s coated the walls and a miniscule sink area and cabinet offered, no, not liquor, but a drinking tap that didn’t work. Never mind, dinner was next on the docket; a promised three course meal with silver cutlery and china.

Dinner was quite an adventure. The train’s jostling seemed ill-suited for stemmed wineglasses, but we managed to finish off the whole bottle with only a little spillage. The cuisine was not spectacular, but the fact that we got three courses of mediocre food was enough to make me happy. Due to limited space in the restaurant car, we were obliged to sit with our fellow passengers. An elderly woman with a large splint on her forearm was directed to sit with me and Ellen at our table, but took one look at us and deemed us too young to engage in the type of sophisticated conversation she preferred. She eventually acquiesced, and joined us. We promptly offered her a glass of wine, which she refused, for she was on medication for her arm. Apparently an under-serviced matatu tire had spun lose from its axle and became airborne, hitting her in the wrist while she was in the village doing her PeaceCorps work. I can picture the scene in my head quite easily, actually, now that I have logged so many hours in public transportation in Africa. It is a rather funny image, I admit: the skinny, leathered American woman screaming in pain while the matatu driver and conductor simultaneously console her, apologize and repair the damage, and then offer her a free ride to the hospital in the newly fixed vehicle.

After dinner and the bottle of wine we retreated to our cabin, where a hand had made up our beds for us. They looked pretty inviting at first. Upon going horizontal, however, the train’s jostling became even more pronounced, and I suddenly understood why the upper bunk had a removable safety strap. Despite the rough ride, I managed to eke out a decent night’s sleep. Ellen, however, was not so lucky, and I awoke to a disheveled, bloodshot face gazing out the window. One of the great things about my friend is that she doesn’t require 8 solid hours to maintain her upbeat attitude. (Back in college I used to give my roommate Jim a lot of guff for sleeping in long hours on the weekends and requesting only afternoon classes, until I discovered that an unrested Jim is scarily silent and resembles a youthful mad scientist who has exchanged his bloody frock for sweat pants. Sleep away, Jim, please sleep away.)

Breakfast was also rather sad, as far as the palate is concerned. Toasted Wonderbread with strawberry jelly and long-life margarine, two eggs in the limbo stage between over-easy and scrambled, and, the centerpiece, a lone two-inch piece of defrosted sausage. The views over breakfast, on the other hand, were excellent. Unlike in Uganda where every square meter of land along a road or pathway is lived on or cultivated, Kenya still contains sizeable stretches of unprotected, wild territory. Form the train’s streaked windows we saw ostriches, zebras, waterbuck, and about 700 varieties of antelope. While breakfasting we were fortunate enough to experience another colonial fixture that has persisted to the twenty-first century: the ancient white European with an extremely young and beautiful African wife. Recall Theroux’s comment about train passengers. The couple that joined us is everywhere in East Africa, from the beaches of Mombasa to the trendy cafes of Kampala, it even shows up faithfully at the swimming pool in Mbale every Sunday with its two children. The wife is always dressed to the nines -- after all, if you have managed to land a mzungu husband and become intimate with the Pound Sterling, you must alert everybody’s attention to your good fortune. The husband is always looking rather pale and wrinkled, which he likes to advertise by wearing very short shorts and rafting sandals, and carries with him a very amiable character and lots of high-powered sunscreen. The children, though not accompanying their parents on this particular train ride because they are attending a fancy boarding school, are both the wife’s from a previous engagement.

Almost exactly as scheduled, the train pulled into Nairobi Central Station around 8 am. The giant, aging steel wheels came to slow but quiet halt. Tall skyscrapers, claimed by the Kenyatta International Conference Center, Barclays Bank, the Hilton, DFCU, even the elevated gables of the State House rose upward from just beyond the station fences only a five minute walk away-- the train had brought us to the center of East Africa’s most important city. It seemed odd that such a lumbering, relic of colonialism still maintained such excellent real estate. Surely, in any other city, a fledgling railway, struggling even to repair the ceramic ceiling fans in its restaurant car, would have no place in such an environment. Yet, surprisingly, it appears as though Nairobi Central Station and the Rift Valley Railway are there to stay; a testament to British Imperialism, yes, but, I think at a more deeper level, a statement to remind people that travel for thirteen hours doesn’t have to be a terrible inconvenience, it can be an experience. Just sit back, drink a glass of wine or two, and enjoy.

Kenya photos

2010-04-27T23:06:00.000+03:00

Fields of tea on Kampala-Nairobi Highway

Entertainment on board the Akamba Coach on the Nairobi-Kampala Highway? Why, Kenny Rogers, of course!

Just-arrived-in-Nairobi beers on top of our bed and breakfast.

Understandably, construction moves slowly in Africa, with a lot of deliberation. Notice how many guys there are on top of this building thinking things over

Nairobi skyline from our bed and breakfast

The same skyline

The Daily Nation building

Performers putting on a show for Africa-Middle East Microcredit Summit while the delegates await President Kibake and Queen Sophia of Spain, among others

Robert takes a breather during our safari in Mangelete

Passing out sodas to women who we interviewed to learn rural cooking methods in Mangelete

Robert and Phoebe posing by a couple of stoves on the research trip

Tylor couldn't make it to Erin's house and had to make a pit stop

The ladies, Erin, Ellen, and Rachel in Makindu

Makindu

The mosque in Makindu

Old Town, Mombasa

2010-04-25T12:25:00.000+03:00

The Lunatic Express (part 1 of 2)

2010-04-24T21:29:00.001+03:00

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of going to Kenya for a microfinance conference at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi. The trip also provided me with an opportunity to do something I had been dreaming about since I arrived in Uganda: ride a train in Africa. To be truthful, I had ridden once before the train running between Alexandria and Cairo, but the scenery wasn’t too spectacular, just perfectly flat Nile delta farmlands peppered occasionally by a rusting train carcass. Nor did it impress upon you a feelings of colonialism, the train was merely designed to take you from A to, in this case, C, and nothing more. The sub-Saharan lines are different, I was told. They are the ultimate colonial experience, I was assured, and the Mombasa-Nairobi line is no exception. I booked a ticket.

Train travel is also an exciting way to see a country. Paul Theroux, that tireless cynic and the most famous travel writer of the last thirty years, prefers the rail to all other forms. I tend to agree, it is easily the most relaxing way to move about. The course is set and so is the speed, with neither up to manipulation by the passenger, whose only task is to sit back, converse, sleep, eat, walk the compartments or just watch the country go by. To make it even more enjoyable, every railway trip is different. Northern Mexico’s Chihuahua train snakes through craggy peaks and over tall wooden bridges, with stomach-lurching drops on either side. In The Big Red Train Ride, a book about taking the Trans-Siberian Railway during the height of Soviet paranoia, British journalist Eric Newby tells of endless expanses of Siberian forest, broken occasionally by small stations seemingly miles from a phone line or cold beer. His photographer disembarks at every station and valiantly tries to photograph the Soviet peasant despite the near certainty that his roll of film will be confiscated by a policeman. Theroux provides an endless stream of extremely interesting characters described in his Great Railway Bazaar, including one man who proved so interesting that Theroux went looking for him years later back in Britain. Says Theroux, “I sought trains, I found passengers.”

I wanted to take this train because of what it stood for. I alluded to this in the first paragraph, and may have also in earlier posts, I have a guilty obsession of colonial relics here in Africa, and there is no more a physical fixture suggestive of colonial rule in East Africa than the railroad. Construction began at the tail end of the nineteenth century by the British, who wanted to link the port of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast with the commercial centers in the interior. Elsewhere in Africa rails were being built with the same intention. In the Belgian Congo tracks were laid from the port city of Boma to Leopoldville, two hundred miles up the Congo River, too riddled with cataracts to navigate by boat. Rubber and ivory would take three weeks to make the journey by porter, so the railway was constructed to shorten the harvest-to-bicycle tire process. East Africa’s RVR line was built with the same intention, ferrying goods (mainly coffee, tea and ivory) to port at a larger scale, and bringing inland heavy construction equipment. The ancestors of modern Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians had no system of money at the time of the construction, and coercion was out of the question for the British “moral” colonialist, so labor was sought elsewhere. Asians from the Indian subcontinent were brought in in massive numbers. (The Asians kicked out by Amin in the early 1970s were the sons and daughters of those laborers.) The workers faced hard times on the job, but a big danger came also at night. Hundreds lost their lives to the maneaters. One particular stretch of track, the bridge built over the Tsavo River, is Hollywood famous. In 1898, Engineer Lieutenant John Patterson was hired to oversee the construction of the span, when his workers began disappearing in the night. Two mane-less male lions were dragging workers out of the tents and devouring them at an astonishing rate, crippling progress and frightening the workers into mutiny with thoughts of ghosts and devils. Patterson eventually killed both lions, but only after, according to the foreman, they had killed 135 workers in one year. The Ghost and the Darkness, that 1996 masterpiece with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, is Hollywood’s poorly acted but nonetheless exciting take on the legend. In another legendary image, an Edwardian Teddy Roosevelt takes pot-shots at now-protected animals from a chair mounted to the front of the engine. In 1931 the railway was completed and the “Lunatic Express” made the 900 mile trip from Mombasa to Kampala . Lions or no lions, the British had to have their railway, and their empire. The feat is just as impressive today as it was at the turn of the century, as one African journalist writes “I was jarred out of this tragic amnesia by the sheer size of the 5930 Beyer-Garrat steam locomotive: Some 30 metres long and a quarter of a million kilogrammes in weight, the 5930 is a blunt, graceless dinosaur of the industrial age: Ugly yet charming, its driving wheels more than a metre in diameter, the body heavily riveted, fitted with giant water and coal tanks and an immense boiler, it is said to be one of the most powerful locomotives ever built. This was the concrete vehicle that brought the empire to us. Standing there, feeling slightly weak at the knees, I thought, “If you can build this behemoth, you can conquer the world…’”

In its heyday, the train took passengers from Mombasa to Kampala. However, many things in Africa are quickly reclaimed by the land if they do not receive a considerable amount of attention and upkeep. I am not sure when the last train passed from Kampala to Nairobi, but, gathering from the overgrowth of weeds and semi-permanent open -air markets covering the tracks on the Ugandan side, it was some time ago.

I had the perfect companion to accompany on my journey, an old friend from Portland. Ellen had grown up just a few doors down from me, and our families still see quite a bit of each other, though the same cannot be said for Ellen and me. Repelled by Southern California materialism and fast food chains, Ellen set off several years ago for the greener pastures of Montreal, where she has truly gone native. However, the stars have aligned here in East Africa: Ellen is currently working at a research station on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, and so we were able to get together while I was in Kenya. Ellen is great. She is very smart, a delight to talk to, well read, and has the admirable tendency to forget the fact that male friends become smellier with age and that sharing a miniscule, enclosed railway compartment with them for thirteen hours straight might not be the most comfortable thing in the world to do. We were both anxious and excited when our tuk-tuk pulled into Mombasa Train Station in plenty of time for our 7 pm departure.

I guess this African Time thing is starting to get to me

2010-04-19T16:29:00.001+03:00

I should begin by apologizing for my absence--I have been in Kenya amassing much fodder for the blogging cannon. Expect some posts to come about my trip.

I am sitting in an internet cafe in Nairobi at the moment, which has particularly sticky keyboards. This seems to be the norm here in Kenya, and I think it is kept this way to discourage political blogging,or perhaps locals just enjoy taking sugary drinks while they surf. I have found myself typing like I did in high school: two index fingers, hovered directly above the keyboard and perfectly straight, pressing with the ferocity of a concert pianist opening Beethoven's 5th. I think the people in the internet cafe are starting to wonder if I have some dexterity issues that require medication, so let me leave you for the time being. I shall return shortly with stories from Kenya, which include: arrests, stepping on freshly chewed gum on multiple occasions, buying the board of governors at a radio station lunch, and meeting a long lost neighbor from Portland.

That Terrible African Sun

2010-03-28T18:43:00.000+03:00

While reading one of my new favorite books, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for the first time, I came across this passage which I think accurately describes the transition between the only two seasons: the dry and the rainy. This takes place in Nigeria, I believe, but you get the picture:

“At last the rain came. It was sudden and tremendous. For two or three moons the sun had been gathering strength till it seemed to breathe a breath of fire on the earth. All the grass had been scorched brown, and the sands felt like live coals to the feet. Evergreen trees wore a dusty coat of brown. The birds were silenced in the forest, and the world lay panting under the live, vibrating heat. And then came the clap of thunder. It was an angry, metallic and thirsty clap, unlike the deep and liquid rumbling of the rainy season. A mighty wind arose and filled the air with dust. Palm trees swayed as the wind combed their leaves into flying crests like strange and fantastic coiffure.

“When the rains finally came, it was in large, solid drops of frozen water which the people called ‘the nuts of the water of heaven’. They were hard and painful on the body as they fell, yet young people ran about happily picking up the cold nuts and throwing them into their mouths to melt.

“The earth quickly came to life and the birds in the forests fluttered around and chirped merrily. A vague scent of life and green vegetation was diffused in the air. As the rain began to fall more soberly and in smaller liquid drops, children sought for shelter, and all were happy, refreshed and thankful.”

Cute African children

2010-03-12T19:56:00.001+03:00

I hope this isn't too creepy...

Pictures

2010-03-12T12:14:00.000+03:00

African building

Rachel and Esther. Esther is the owner of Cosy Pot, our favorite African restaurant

Fully loaded matooke truck returning from the market

One of our two Sunday groups

School kids playing with Rachel from a distance. Apparently mothers scare their children with white people, "Don't stay out too late or the mzungu will eat you!"

Eddie at his old primary school

Take me home country roads

2010-03-12T11:44:00.003+03:00

It all started with Brilliant Decision by Joel Hedges #436: Let me personally drive the entire field team to the village on Sunday in our friend’s Toyota pick up truck over rough African roads in the middle of the worst rainy season in years.

Fifty of the 57 kilometer commute was on tarmac, and pretty good tarmac by African standards. I think I only had to yell “Watch out!” four or five times as I noticed tire-shredding potholes too late to do anything. (My colleagues did not find this very amusing, nor did they join me in my nervous chuckles about how I didn’t think there was a spare tire in the back.) The remaining seven kilometers is your conventional African dirt road, maddeningly crenated, rocky, dusty, and without a single flat stretch, snaking its way from the highway junction to Kamu trading center at the top of a tall mesa. There had been no rains the day before, so this morning our only problem was the thick dust kicked up by other vehicles. We made it up with relative ease, and parked the car in the market area and went to our first meeting. Normally Eddie and I can walk from our first group to the Pentecostal church where we hold our second meeting of the day, a trip that takes about ten minutes depending on how many acquaintances Eddie sees along the way. This day, however, we were running a little late and so I drove us up the road a ways and parked in the flat area in front of the church , locked up the car and headed inside to do the training session. Eddie and I sat at a table in front while the adults gathered on the first couple rows of pews. My vantage, I noticed almost immediately, would allow me to keep an admiring eye on the truck while we conducted the lesson. I smiled at the thought of the truck’s performance and my driving abilities, but my pleasure was short lived. At the precise moment when Eddie began the lesson, essentially locking us in the church for the next hour, did twenty kids attack the car like a swarm of ants on a dead cockroach: swinging on the roll bars, kicking the tires, drawing on the doors with charcoal, disassembling the side mirrors, jumping up and down in the bed, sliding down the front windshield, and trying to reach in through the cracked window so they could play on the inside. One kid suddenly yelled something and ran off, the troop leader judging by the way the other kids halted their blitzkrieg, and I thought the truck would finally be left alone. Commander Matooke returned no more than five minutes later with thirty-seven more African children armed with plastic bottles, dirt clods, metal wires, sugar cane, long sticks and other implements of destruction. The second attack was much more coordinated, and they had just about breached the passenger door when the rains came. As quickly as they had come, the kids scattered. I breathed a sigh of relief, and was laughing at Commander Matooke’s defeat when I remembered I had left all four windows cracked for ventilation. Drat. I ran out into the rain.

After the meeting we got into the car to head back to the market area. As I put the car into reverse and looked over my shoulder to begin backing out, seventy-two people piled into the back of the truck for the free ride. I didn’t think of this being problematic until the extra weight of the car immediately sunk the back tires into the drainage ditch that lined the road. “Everybody out,” I yelled from the window, wanting to get out of the fix before the rains returned from their respite. With a face tomato red and sweat beginning to soak through my shirt I finally got the truck onto the road, and my audience returned to their positions in the back. We dropped the passengers off in town and began down the dirt road that would take us home and me closer to a cold beer.

A good way, I discovered, to get the passengers in your car to keep quiet on a car ride is to scare the living daylights out of them early on. I began down the hill at a pace I felt comfortable in, a pace not terribly fast, but, then again, there are six policemen in Oregon, California, and Washington who would argue that a pace I feel is comfortable might not be welcomed by the other motorists sharing the road. The truck began to turn sideways while continuing to move in the same direction. I tried tapping the brakes lightly but that only locked the back wheels, already caked with slick clay, speeding up their slide towards the port inside embankment. I could hear Rachel in the passenger’s seat inhale a very deep breath and hold it, challenging me to get us out of this predicament or she would asphyxiate herself. I slipped the truck back down to first gear, which did the trick, and I was allowed to bring the back wheels to their rightful position behind the front ones. Slowly I brought the truck to a halt, in the middle of the road, got out of the car to turn the hub locks on, secretly hoping my passengers would then see the previous 100 meters as motorized failure instead of human error and that all would be fine from then on. Pacification didn’t seem to have worked though; Rachel, I believe, averaged about one breath every two minutes for the next hour, choosing to go blue in the face rather than let me forget I had some very valuable cargo at my fingertips. After the first little slide I slowed considerably, and even began to regain the confidence of my passengers. Vocal praise began to stream in about my off-road driving capabilities, granted I was only driving the car at about three miles an hour. A barefooted man in the later stages of polio and an elderly women carrying a child on her back and three hundred sticks balanced on her head, visible in my side mirrors, were not growing any smaller. The man with polio might have even been gaining on us. But we were moving forward. After some time I began to get cocky again, enough, even, to try out third gear. Hey, maybe this won’t be so bad, I thought. We’ll get back much earlier than I predicted. Arsenal vs. Chelsea? Hah, I think so! Nope, just kidding, third gear was a bad idea. Downshift. Yep, lets go all the way back to first gear. Crap, that usually works. Tap the brakes, well, it was worth a shot. Pray? Phew, it worked.

The last stretch of the seven kilometer Hell Road is quite unassuming. The steep downhill that had challenged me so much gradually mellows into a much more gentle grade. The road is anything but flat,, mind you, this is still Africa. The road was very rounded, peaking in the center while each side fell away progressively steeper towards the muddy canals lining either side. Every time I tried to speed up along this four kilometer stretch, the back tires of the truck would start to fishtail, skating towards a mucky doom, and I was forced to limit our pace to second gear. Thoughts of speeding up and seeing if I could keep the truck on the road and out of the embankment crossed my mind a number off times in that last hour, strengthened by the image of a sun dress-wearing Rachel, with her shoulder against the tailgate and fancy shoes in her hand, pushing hard to free a stuck vehicle while wet clay from the spinning tires sprays her front. I thought better of it -- Rachel, after all, knows where I sleep at night.

We reached the tarmac of the main highway over an hour after we had set off from Kamu Trading Center. Rachel began breathing normally again, and conversation resumed in a rusty sort of way. I got out of the truck, soaked to the bone with sweat, and unlocked the hubs, first the right wheel and then the left. Before I stepped back into the car I turned to look at the dirt road winding up the steep cliff side behind us,almost like a successful emperor might look at a freshly conquered land. But I was distracted by something rounding a bend in the road in the distance. There, about a kilometer back, was a man with polio was hobbling up the road. I could just make out his bare feet.

Wine Movements

2010-03-06T22:33:00.001+03:00

NWPR article written about my cousin and his ScoREVOLUTION!

http://www.nwpr.org/07/HomepageArticles/Article.aspx?n=6949

Spread the gospel!

Alas, the wine situation here in Uganda is not so great. I have the option of a $30 jug of Carlo Rossi or a $9 bottle of mediocre South African wine that has been sitting in the sun in the supermarket so long that the coating of dust has been bleached.

This week in Africa!

2010-02-26T18:23:00.002+03:00

Interesting Newspaper Headlines

“Albinos demand special seat in Parliament”
“55-year-old dies in salon after haircut”
“Girl dies in school stampede”
“Hundreds attend Jinja anti-homosexuality rally”--- "Let them keep their homosexuality and their money as well”--Anti-gay protestor
“Bushenyi students cane head teacher"
“Woman arrested over trying to sell six-year-old niece”
“Dracula vs. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in Uganda”
“Polygamy is a necessary evil for African women”
“Connect Karamoja to fibre optics network"
“Climbing out of poverty with beans”
“18 ministries run out of cash”
“Chicken Pox strikes Pader”
"Man’s body found under impounded bus by police”
“2010: Gloom and more gloom”
“Teachers want social security investment not bicycles”
“Female officers control more than the flow of traffic” ---“Someone stops his car and tells you Afande you look smart, can I give you my phone number so I can take you out tonight?”--Bako, Traffic Policewoman
“This country needs my services”
“I will not use the youth as a Kiboko squad or teach them to shoot their brothers and sisters”
“The beauty of chandeliers”
“Celebrating 131 years of Catholic evangelism in Uganda”
“Nearly suffocated at the door of a Swift bus”
“Crocodile eats Mayuge pupil”
“Woman jailed for procuring abortion”
“No place for tribalism in modern politics”
“Only America can help 'humanise' the Saudi”
“Ray of hope in Zanzibar as govt moves to end power blackouts: The island has had a blackout lasting over two months”
“Surge in ivory poaching fuelled by organized crime, says report”
“The untold Jekyll and Hyde story of Idi Amin”
"Man cons village with hired car"
"Wife leaves hubby over Valentine's Day"

Vote for your favorite!

Mid Program Update

2010-02-24T19:06:00.000+03:00

So, I have now been here five months, and it looks like will be staying another five months.

No, its not because I was detained at the airport, married a Ugandan woman, or "thrown back in jail again." Actually, MAPLE, the organization I have been working for since September of last year, decided that my boyish good looks and suave demeanor must continue to represent its Uganda field operations.

My modeling studio will be the village, and my duds, once the rainy season begins, will be a $50 suit with the pant legs tucked into some big rubber rainboots. I will also get the chance to get out of Uganda. In April I am going to attend the Middle East/African MicroCredit Summit in Nairobi where people from all over the world will get the opportunity to rub elbows with yours truly. This brings to mind a conversation I had just this morning with my housemate and colleague Eddie.

Scene: Eddie hanging his clothes up out to dry on the line. I,
standing in the doorway chatting with Eddie. Rachel, sitting on the couch
eating her oatmeal listening.

Joel: Eddie, do you know where I could get some good dress shirts for
the MicroCredit Summit?
Eddie: Yes.
(Joel waiting for an answer that is helpful…..)
(Joel still waiting…)
Joel: Uh, where?
Eddie: Shops.
(Joel laughing)
Joel: Well Geez, thanks Eddie, what a helpful answer! And where are
these shops?
(In an air of “isn’t it obvious”? Eddie responds…)
Eddie: Town.

My Age in African Years

2010-02-18T18:44:00.000+03:00

"Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever."
~ Don Marquis ~

Three times a week, around 8 in the morning, I board a rickety (matatu) minibus destined for Sironko. Usually I just try and look as scary as I can so that no body tries to hassle me for seat space or money and I can settle down and read my book. Just yesterday, our matatu pulled into the town of Sironko to drop off two passengers and let another seventy-four on, when an interesting change was made. Our mustachioed driver, who had been with us since our origin, was replaced by another man. Now, at the time I was reading Sherlock Holmes, so my sense of observation was in full force. For instance, I deduced from his tattered, soiled shirt that he had been spending too many shillings of his daily income on moonshine waragi. The back of his head was slightly misshapen, which told me he had been born and raised in the village and had been subject to sleeping on the ground when he was of the age when the head is still soft and malleable. Yet he also had a watch on, a knock off Citizen to be exact, pointing to a period in his past when the times were good and he spent money more readily on his appearance. His long strides suggested a youthful vigor, and his lack of facial hair and smooth forehead were enough to give me a solid conjecture of his age, the number I arrived at being eighteen years. After all, young boys are frequently driving matatus here, and I felt quite comfortable with my guess--Dr. Watson would be impressed. To prove my keen observation skills, I told my friend Eddie, who was sitting next to me at the time, the age I thought the driver was. Much to my surprise, Eddie responded by laughing hysterically. This man, he told me, was not close to being that young. I did not believe him, maintaining full confidence my original estimate. Eddie kept laughing, though, so I asked him to ask the driver what his age was. A long conversation ensued, entirely in Lugizu but peppered sporadically with muzungus, that finally ended with Eddie falling back in his seat with a huge grin on his face and shaking his head.

"Well?" I said, "How old is he?"
" This man," Eddie said, "is born of 1972"
The driver turned around from his driving duties to repeat this information, "Yes, eh, born of '72!"
Then Eddie started to say, "That means he is 38--"
"I know how old that is," I interrupted.
Then it hit me, this might be a cultural thing, so I asked Eddie to ask the driver how old he thought I was.
The driver looked back at me for a longer period of time, and, after first consulting with the passenger sitting to his left, finally offered his guess: "40 years!"

More Nonsense

2010-02-16T09:04:00.000+03:00

While we were taking a soda the other day, an unshaven man in a dirty frock approached us and asked us if we were feeling alright. "Could be better, could be worse, I suppose," I replied. No matter, he said, he had the solution to all of our maladies. Only $2.50 to rid ourselves of all demons, ranging from Malaria to a deficiency of sexual power.

Sold, I said.

Later our waitress came up and saw us rereading the packets and laughing. It works, she averred, though she herself probably wouldn't take it for an "impaired neurons system."

Sooo...can I take any orders for people back home?

The antithesis of Uganda is 1970's San Francisco

2010-02-13T22:48:00.000+03:00

I imagine many bills in Ugandan Parliament collect a lot of dust. No, not because the potholes in the streets outside the statehouse are repaired with shovel loads of dirt, but because not much seems to get done here until election time is fast approaching. However, there are two bills which have attracted the ire of Westerners and their policymakers and have also, accordingly, managed to stay pretty dust free.

The first is the infamous "Anti-Homo Bill" tabled by MP David Bahati. Aside from the usual shame-on- you's telephoned in by diplomats worldwide, several European nations have threatened to pull the plug on foreign aid, on which Uganda is heavily reliant. That is where I left you in December, but not much has changed since save one development, Mouseveni has told legislators to slow down and consider the foreign policy implications of the bill, which could be disastrous. Keep in mind: the President has a lot of sway with the NRM-packed Parliament, and he will want to make more friends than enemies in the year leading up to the 2011 elections, especially with Hilary Clinton monitoring the poll booths. . (Actually, I have personally met someone who works very closely with Mouseveni, who asserted with a sly grin after a few whiskeys, "The Bill will not pass."

The next piece of legislation is one that I haven't discussed yet, and touches on HIV/AIDS. Uganda has improved leaps and bounds in the last decade in this area, drastically reducing its prevalence rate to 5.4%. Some brilliant practitioner of the legislative arts has put forth a bill, coined the HIV Prevention and Control Bill 2009, which, among other things, criminalizes transmission of the virus. People aren't too keen on this one either. The UK doesn't like it one bit, and neither does the Human Rights Watch.

Once again, I'll keep you (blog) posted

But, then again, everybody looks like a keeper after Idi Amin!

2010-02-08T10:22:00.003+03:00

The National Resistance Movement is the current ruling party in Uganda. It and its leader, President Yoweri Mouseveni, have been in power since 1986 Elections will take place next year. This is an excerpt from an issue of The Daily Monitor newspaper, Uganda's "opposition" daily, with my own comments attached in parenthesis. Enjoy, I could be jailed for writing this:

NRM balance sheet

Achievements

Per capita income has risen from $264 in 1986 to almost $394 in 2009 (does it really matter if the figures have been adjusted for inflation or not?)
Country now collects Shs 4trillion ($2.1 billion) in revenue compared to Shs 5billion ($2.63 million) in 1986
Total exports of goods are now approximately $1.3billion (neighboring Kenya has a fraction of the rainfall but, aggregate, exports are valued at $4.7 billion per year) of which $1 billion are non coffee exports (credit not diversification--the coffee trade has tanked big time in recent years)
Number of Ugandans living below the poverty line has reduced to 31% down from 56% in 1988
HIV prevalence rates slashed from 32% in 1992 to 6.2% thanks to ABC strategy (this is a legitimate, impressive statistic)
As of 2007, 7.5million pupils attending Primary school compared to 2.2million in 1997 (makes little difference when per capita income is $394 but school fees at "government subsidized" public schools, the cheapest option, hover around $60 per semester per child. Oh, and every Ugandan woman has 6.77 children)
Economy growing at an average 6% of GDP (2009 data shows the economy was extremely susceptible to global market fluctuations)
Inflation has been stable at about 5 per cent per annum until most recently when it shot to 14 percent (last clause makes a lot of the information that preceded it unreliable)
Relative peace and security around the country with the exception of northern Uganda (and Kampala, and the Rwenzori region on border between Uganda and the DRC, and Eastern Uganda's border with Kenya)

Failures

Corruption continues to blight his (Mouseveni's) administration
Over stay in power, failure to groom successors
Weak infrastructure, hospitals, roads (and Uganda's population growth rate is 3.6% annually, one of the world's highest--median age is 15 years, making "weak" an scary understatement)
Real power is centred in the presidency, failure to build independent institutions
Two decades of conflict in northern Uganda
Intolerance for democratic opposition (the NRM was the only legal political party until 2005)
(Average life expectancy 39.5 years)
(Adult literacy 65%, secondary school enrollment 13%, primary school completion 38%)
(Development: Uganda is ranked 154 of 177 on the UN Human Development Index)
(Tribalism still overrides nationalist sentiments)

What should have been included:

Uganda's art renaissance "embodies a vibrant and vital country redefining its past yet also reaching for a hopeful future"
Uganda is very safe when compared to other African countries, particularly its East African neighbors
Over 90% of Ugandans are subsistence farmers or work in agriculture related fields. Deforestation is rampant
The country is heavily reliant on foreign aid, and is a member of the HIPC and Paris clubs
The introduced massive (100 kg) Nile perch has decimated local species in Lake Victoria, and efforts to control its impact have only exacerbated the problem. The Nalubaale Dam built last decade was nixed by Makarere's environmental team during th eplanning stages, and the soon-to-be-constructed Bujagali Dam seems it will continue the trend
Freedom of speech is is guaranteed at most levels, though the conspiracy theorists will quickly remind you of the men who wait and listen in bars or the people that are taken away silently in the night
Ugandan people are extremely kind and outgoing, despite a troubled past that would normally suggest wariness and reservedness
There are substantial natural resources here, including fertile soils, gold, copper, cobalt, and, the newly discovered oil reserves in the western part of the state
A disastrous, horrific decade under Idi Amin, not much better in the ensuing or preceding decades, has bred a resilient culture that doesn't complain, ever. Even with this not-so-rosy picture I have painted here, the future is bright for Ugandans, who continue to put their head down and work hard

In 2001, Mouseveni "reiterated his commitment" to stepping down after the 2006 elections, adhering the term limits specified in the Uganda Constitution. Lo and behold, NRM's "big man" on the ticket in the upcoming 2011 elections? None other than our friend, Yoweri Mouseveni.

I feel like Teddy Roosevelt at times...

2010-02-06T08:51:00.009+03:00

...even though I don't shoot at wild animals from a couch fixed to the front of a moving train.

I'm not sure what this interesting little bird is called, but would love it if someone could tell me!

Despite how it may look, that is NOT my little sister drinking a beer in front of the Nile River after a full day of world class white water rafting

Terrace farming just visible in the early hours of the morning, Lake Bunyonyi, Southwest Uganda

The lake has hundreds of islands, some inhabited, some filled with muzungu travelers like my sister and me, but others have more interesting histories, including Punishment Island, a single-tree mound in one of the most remote parts of the lake where villagers used to bring women who had been impregnated out of wedlock to fend for themselves in the cold waters. The girls we were traveling with somehow found their way back to the boat.

Some canoeists paddle across the lake at dusk towards home after a full day of fishing for tilapia and, the specialty of the area, the Bunyonyi crayfish.

The second animal Hayley and I saw at Kidepo Wildlife Preserve was Bull Bull, an aging African bull elephant that has acquired an affinity for marwa, the local beer made from millet that is popular with the locals. (WAS popular, I should say. Apparently Bull Bull, if he picks up the scent, will stop at nothing to get his trunk on some marwa, even if it means breaking down the doors in the staff quarters.)

Hayley and I went exploring around the campsite we stayed at, first walking to this beautiful sunken area which centered around the dregs of a rapidly-shrinking water hole, and then onto the dry wadi of the Narus River, where we strolled, toes in the soft sand, until we stumbled across some fresh looking lion prints moving in the same direction and decided it was time to head home for lunch.

I could try and use some fancy words like "juxtaposition" and "reclamation" to describe this photo, but I'd only embarrass myself. How's this: Rift Valley peaks line the perimeter of Kidepo, extending through Kenya into Sudan, then back down to complete the enclosure in Uganda.

The third animal we saw was, like the second, a medium-sized, ageing bull elephant. This one was not friendly however, and began to charge the pickup truck which we were standing on. Luckily for you, the reader, that my first inclination when I hear the guide frantically yelling directions to the driver because a full grown African behemoth has just started to charge, is to take a picture.

Abyssinian Roller, one of my favorite birds ever.

I forgot what this animal was called. The mountains in the background lie in Kenya.

A duo of lions in heat, too exhausted from all of the action to do anything more than lazily watch our vehicle creep by

What do you call a female elephant? Bullina? One of those things I should probably know after living in Africa for five months

Our final day in Kidepo, Hayley and I shelled out more shillings that we ought to have, and went swimming in the greatest pool ever. All one had to do is float over to the pool's edge, peak over the retaining wall, and catch a glimpse of waterbucks, zebras, wildebeest, or even a family of warthogs playing in the mud.

Savannah lines the valley around the township of Karenga, Karamoja.

Interesting Restaurant English

2010-01-27T23:43:00.001+03:00

Ladies, your prayers have been answered.

My good friend Steven was kind enough to inform me freshman year of college that I had been confusing "homely" and "homey" for the first 19 years of my life.

"I would like to order a drink, please. No, wait, let's make that a beverage." (Also, check out item number 14. This explains EVERYTHING.)

There is plenty more where this came from...

Breastfeeding and Cockroaches? Musings from an Amateur

2010-01-26T16:06:00.006+03:00

Some of you may be thinking to yourself, "Is there any method to Joel's blog posting madness?"

The answer is, in short, no.

My kindly dad once told me that I had the musings of an Erato, or Thalia. (I must admit most of my topics are more Dionysian.) But permit me to continue that trend.

Prior to leaving for Uganda I asked anybody who would talk to me about what to expect in Sub-Saharan Africa. I also tried to read up on the region as much as possible, hitting fiction and non-fiction with like gusto: Joseph Conrad, David Lamb, Paul Theroux, Alan Moorehead, Barbara Kingsolver, even one of my idols, Bill Bryson.

One thing I heard from several different sources that African children do not cry. This is false. The neighbor boy Emma, age two, cries twelve times each day. African children do cry, perhaps just not as frequently as Western children. Because Matooke Six-Pack has so many kids, there are millions and millions of children in Africa, and they are EVERYWHERE: riding every bus and taxi, singing carols at Christmas concerts, dining at very fancy restaurants, playing in the local dumpster, peeking through your fence, climbing your water tower and breaking the pipes that lead to your showerhead. There are so many kids all over the place that I hear, on a daily basis, way more kids crying than I ever did living stateside. One thing people should have warned me about was the popularity of breastfeeding your baby in public. If one were to espy an African mother at her home she would be cooking or cleaning or some other domestic chore, but as soon as she boards the bus she lets it all hang out. Imagine an already awkward young man going to Africa for the first time and driving to a remote village to meet with a rural group of thirty or so women. Now, imagine that young man, sweat pouring down his face because he is so nervous, getting up to make an introduction speech before fifteen breastfeeding women.

I asked my friend Nasser if he could share for me the general opinion held by Uganda’s Muslim population about public breastfeeding. In other words, I wanted to know how Muslims about felt strongly encouraging their feminine members to wear a headscarf while their Christian counterparts so liberally display their mammary glands. I don’t think I ever got an answer.

I was at East Burn public house with fellow traveler Brad sampling a local quaff in the week leading up to my departure when we met a man who had previously traveled to Uganda to do some missionary work. After the customary bullshitting, I asked him if he had anything spectacular to tell me about Uganda. Insects, he said. Beware, of the insects. Spiders so big they can palm a basketball, mosquitoes terrorizing the aspiring sleeper and carrying more disease than a 14th century European rat, murderous caterpillars, etc. Actually, I’ve found the insect situation to be quite tolerable. Sure the occasional cockroach may be found hiding in your shoe or dancing on your toothbrush, but aside from that I’ve found no big and scary difference between the insects here and everywhere else I have been, and, like I said, they are all easy to live with. We have very few spiders in our house. The termite tunnels that try and creep up the wall can be knocked down or sprayed in a flash. Bright blue wood bees the size of a human thumb are absolutely harmless, they just sound like Harriers taking off. In fact, man’s efforts to control the African insect are, sometimes, self-contradictory. I can’t tell you how many times I have had the grin wiped off of my face after pulling down my mosquito net only to find I have trapped myself with ten of the little bloodsuckers. And little they are. African mosquitoes are surprisingly tiny, I guess I was expecting the worlds greatest murderer of all time to be more substantial. Perhaps the larger, scarier insects were all killed by the enormous rats.

The Village (Idiot)

2010-01-21T22:35:00.009+03:00

Ugandans have many signs of wealth which you might find interesting. For instance, anyone who can afford one buys a wristwatch. This is just an African twist on what I like to call the “California Complex,” that is, a propensity to acquire luxury items a person cannot realistically afford for the sole purpose of boosting one’s image. In California, you’ll be amazed at how many Mercedeses and BMWs you’ll find in the parking lot of a discount strip mall, miles away from any financial center, and being driven by men and women who are far too young to have finished their doctorate. Ugandans behave similarly. Cell phones are another good example. People buy expensive phones with internet surfing capability, even though there is rarely a reliable internet connection to be surfed. Men and women get more haircuts in one year than I have had in my entire life (perhaps I should have chosen a less unkempt example that doesn't say so much about me, but this will work for now). It is not unusual for a woman to spend over ten hours in a hair salon, perming this, defrizzing that, dying these, dreading those. Men, on the other hand, have next to nothing hair-wise, but still sit in the chair for hours each month, which comes in the form of twice-monthly visits to trim the stray hairs which poke up above the suede. A wrinkled shirt won’t garner you any respect, despite how many degrees you have, because it suggests you can’t afford to keep yourself looking sharp and therefore haven’t made it. Finally, everyone goes home to the village for the holiday season (“the village” is the place where your family hails from, and where your extended family is likely to reside), and if you do not have a village to go home to, you are a very, very poor man. Ugandans, even if they have spent the last thirty years going to school and living in an urban center, never lose that close connection with their village.

--------------------------------------------

Yesterday, Caitlin, Eddie, and I went to Eddie’s village just an hour outside of Mbale to kick start a new business education program there. Around ten in the morning we crushed into a matatu (minibus) and took off. Fortunately for me, I was able to get a window seat, which means I could extend as much of my torso outside of the vehicle as possible and away from the stagnant, malodorous air inside. Unfortunately for me, the conductor did not see me hanging out behind him, and slammed open the sliding door with such great force at one station that he pinned my arm between the door and the outside of the window (on second thought, he had to have known I was there...), to the result of men screaming, children crying and women fainting and all sorts of hullabaloo. After that, I rejoined my fellow passengers inside the vehicle, forced to ride the layman way.

After a twenty minute boda ride we arrived at Kamu Trading Center, the local market. For anyone who has not seen the African open air marketplace, a few words to describe it. It is utter chaos. Men and women carrying baby elephants on their backs and on their heads weave in and out of dense human traffic to which there is absolutely no order. Old and young walk to and fro, people sitting on anything with a remotely flat surface, and tables popping up in every imaginable place. Goats and chicken are slaughtered in the middle of the thoroughfare and, in the case of the former, left hanging to drain just feet away from a women selling grilled corn. Colors abound here. Tomatoes, onions, passion fruits, mangoes of all shapes and sizes, enormous avocados, massive jack fruits, the smallest garlic cloves you’ll ever lay your eyes upon, soiled heads of cabbage, papayas, carrots, over one million different kinds of bean, ginger, lentils, ground nuts, red and green peppers, yellow bananas, and, easily the most abundant, matooke, the green plantains used to create Uganda’s national dish, found here still on the vine. Bicycles add a different speed element to the mix, but still follow the rules of the market. People move out of the way of the cyclist, who creeps along just faster than the pedestrian. Motorcycles part the crowds easier still, but not as easily as the car, which has fortunate capability of moving along at a continuous slow, pace, with the driver acknowledging he might have to run over a few toes or potatoes to reach his destination. The king of the market is the matooke truck, which rumbles along with no less than two dozen sweaty Africans hanging from its siding. To manage, I usually try and find a heavyset, normal-walking local and fall in behind them, using their mass to wedge my way through the throng. Dust is everywhere. Vehicles kick up dirt, spew exhaust over every child, adult and vegetable. Everything is filthy, the African market is not the place to sport your new white shirt. Crushed mangoes and torn black plastic bags coat the ground an inch thick, and, perhaps my favorite part, the smell of fish spoiling under the terrible African sun can be found in the background of every sniff. The sun is always overhead at the African market.

At the market, Eddie uttered the most disconcerting words one can hear in Africa, “You just follow me.” Eddie led us to one shop, set back from the main road a few yards, where a his uncle and four other Ugandan men sat under the shade of an awning while scores of chickens with their legs tied together fought for direction and anything edible. Eddie’s uncle spoke little English, so conversation petered out after a couple rounds of “How are you? I’m fine.” It was now, finally time to get down to business. But first, we had to meet another uncle, and, after him, we absolutely had to stop at his Aunt’s new husband’s house to say hello. Actually, the first good half hour after our arrival was spent cruising around and greeting people, until Eddie had checked off every cousin, brother, uncle, aunt, half sister, cousin-brother, and brother-brother off of the list. After introductions, it was time to introduce ourselves to the villagers who would comprise the group. This is also a process that demands explanation, for it is a very different one than we are accustomed to. The men shake hands. First the hand is extendedb, even before the owner has finished approaching his target. The hand, large and extremely calloused from years spent clutching a hoe or machete or saw, has cracked fingernails, many scars and other signs of hard weathering, but still grips with astonishing delicacy and vigor. Then comes the best part, trying to read and see if that hand is going to perform the ol’ Ugandan Thumb Shake-- that is, the two hands unite just as any other handshake begins, but then, then, the plot twist comes. Out of the blue, with no wink, grunt, or any other signal, the hand releases only to rapidly regrip itself, around the other’s thumb. Thus, for a split second the two actors are locked around the thumbs, the oldest and most sacred of all the shaking appendages. The bond has been made, but its strength is too powerful to maintain for long, and the hands part momentarily before resuming the starting position. If the connection is a good one, with good flow, accurate speed, cosmic energy and all around perfect deliverance, the hands will go for another thumb-lock and reversion. This may continue until both parties are satisfied. My personal record is seven thumb-locks in one greeting, actually with the hand whose owner had ripped me off with a muzungu-priced good during a previous visit to his shop. The women learned to shake hands from a different school. Though it is often far more worn and rugged than those of their husbands, the feminine hand strikes with a limpness that I don’t think warrants analogy. But the body language is what is the most interesting part. For, you see, a woman, when shaking a man’s hand, must first get on her knees, even if she happens to be wearing an evening gown. I have had five village women battling for knee space in front of me at one time simultaneously. Instead of making me feel powerful or masculine, I just feel awkward and embarrassed. The elder, more traditional women even talk to men from the same position. Later that day in the village, Eddie’s archaic neighbor came out of her house to send us off. We had already started down the path, so physical contact was impossible, but she came running out anyway. Seeing that we had noticed her and her cries for attention, she immediately dropped to ancient knobby knees and with clean dress into the dirt and, throwing her arms in the air, wished us a safe journey.

I absolutely love going to the village; it is one of my favorite things to do. The people are welcoming, genuinely enthusiastic, and always optimistic. And they love greeting foreigners. One man in Eddie’s village (some uncle) spent I’m not kidding ten minutes trying to untie a knot on his gate to let us into his compound, just for us to shake his hand and then leave a minute later. But we parted with him smiling and waving.

The meeting with Eddie’s village went well. Our plans were well received, and next week we head back to discuss our educational curriculum and agree on a schedule. (Oh, and to also make a few introductions.) I am kind of wishing I had a village to go to during the holidays.

Caitlin cooking while the cute neighbor boys get away with murder and grate cheese on the floor. Those are guilty smiles, people

Caitlin and Eddie with Eddie's father, Tom posing on a bluff above the market

The first group we met with

I just had to show you. The rat Eddie and I killed in our kitchen the other night. Sleep peacefully (I know I won't)

Pictures from Entebbe (wow, Joel, what a creative title)

2010-01-07T15:07:00.003+03:00

The Entebbe Country Club. Despite Tiger's popularity, golf is still slow to catch on here in Uganda

Entebbe Botanical Gardens

I believe this white flower is called a tiger lily, but don't ask me for any more details on Ugandan flora, I just like the picture

Towering yucca plant growing tall in front of a backdrop of suffocating curtain vines

Someone, I believe it was my usually reliable Field Director Luke, once told me that Lake Victoria fishermen have one of the highest AIDS prevalence rates, hovering around an astonishing 80 percent

Man swimming in Lake Victoria. Apparently there is an otter species living in the waters here that penalizes men from swimming naked at night by biting off their members

Hey Bush, where is your African plane with your picture on it?

Acting like a responsible, mature adult in front of my sister

That flag says "Next Adventure" on it after the sporting goods store in Portland. Think the'll send me a free kayak?

Wonderful old colonial administrative building in residential Entebbe, now called home by who knows how many squatters. At least the colonists did something positive for the Africans

Colonialism, nationalism, and...gardening

2010-01-07T10:41:00.003+03:00

“A visit to the botanical gardens?” you might have proposed.

There was a good chance I would have replied with something along the lines of, “Blah, no way! Gardens are for Babylonians and old people.”

This was the Old Joel. The New Joel is a huge fan of botanical gardens actually, which means I have grown more mature and open-minded since coming to Uganda (I don‘t think it is because I have grown more Babylonian).

My sister, on holiday from her freshman year as a collegiate academic at the University of Puget Sound, decided she needed to fly all the way over to Uganda to remind me that her first semester grades were much better than mine. There wasn’t much I could do in argument (she showed me her transcript), so I am left with the thoroughly enjoyable task of showing her as many different cultural and geographical aspects of Africa as possible in a limited amount of time and money.

Wednesday, and my sister’s first morning here in Uganda, began with a walk to Entebbe Airport. This just so happened to be one of those incidents that begun with me saying “Follow me, everybody, I think I have a good idea where [insert location] is!” Even though I have little or no clue where I am actually going. My sister and I and Brad and Asha (his girlfriend) set off that morning trying to find our way to Aero Beach, but ended up wandering to the airport. This wandering phase, because it was kind of my fault as I was the guide we shall call the “sightseeing tour” of Entebbe, ended just in time to observe the lunch hour lull at a cafeteria in the taxi park. A lesson I learned from Peter Mayle proven time and time again its relevance: Truck stops and taxi parks, no matter the country, often have very good food, usually at a very reasonable price, and always delivered in very massive proportions.

After a filling lunch of public transportion chaos and local Ugandan cuisine, our quartet segued to Aero Beach, a curious oddity. Rusting away on a beach only a kilometer away from Entebbe International were two old passenger airplane skeletons. The larger of the two bore the faded black, red, and yellow of the Ugandan flag, an oxidized remnant of some past foray into the national carrier gig, though it did not appear like it had ever been flight-worthy. A dark black mold had grown over much of the dirty yellow paint, visibly contrasting a dull metallic gleam revealed by peeling undercoat. The only two remaining doors hung awkwardly on broken hinges and the engine turbines had been stripped bare and now provided a number of small lizards with an excellent basking place. Heaped disorderly under the left wing was a pile of junk: broken chairs, tables, bed frames, paint cans. Inside, there was nothing, not a single chair or flotation device in the entire cabin, merely a few thousand corners all worthy of requiring a tetanus injection merely by looking at them. Prior to our visit, I had heard rumors that one of the planes on Aero Beach was the Air France liner hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. En route from Ben Gurion to Paris, a group of frustrated Palestinian men took control of Flight 139 and rerouted to it to a country found universally reliable and friendly to bad people the world over, Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda. Israeli paratroopers landed, despite Amin’s bumbling efforts at mediation, and all hostages were released save just one casualty. I am not certain what has happened to that plane, whether it is rotting on an Entebbe Beach having been repainted in Ugandan colors or with a picture of a smiling Barack Obama on its tailfin, or if it is sitting on proud display in some Masada museum, I cannot tell. I am certain, however, that airplane skeletons wearing national colors is eerily symbolic of Africa’s past tradition of engaging in luxurious endeavors which it could not sustain, and letting them fall into decay(see David Lamb's The Africans, specifically the national air carriers chapter), at times even marring pristine, untouched country.

These days the main attraction of Entebbe is not rotting airplane carcasses, believe it or not, but an expansive 40 hectare garden started in 1897. Begun partly as an experiment, the Botanical Gardens were created in part to give botanists an idea of which plants could survive in tropical, equatorial Uganda. A number of species were introduced, and, perhaps not to anyone’s surprise, it appears as they have all performed marvelously. Foreign varietals of cinnamon, fig, pine, apple, clove, mahogany, and even hazelnut trees towered spectacularly, shrugging off the pesky strangling fig and curtain vines with almost local impunity. The only failure, we were told, was a species of oak tree that couldn’t quite handle cohabitating with African termites.

The oxygen breathing contingency was less breathtaking. Aside from an impressive array of birds to see--a listing which includes hornbill, two varieties of turaco, red-chested sunbird, palmnut vulture, fish eagle, eagle owl, among others--there was not much to see that moved. The occasional vervet or colobus monkey chattered in the sprawling canopies above, and I believe I saw the tail end of the bright green tree snake before it fled into the high grass, the latter being exciting news at the time due to my sister’s great phobia of anything serpentine.

A pleasant afternoon cap was spent walking around Entebbe on our way back from the botanical gardens. The quiet town was replaced by Kampala in the 1960s as the administrative capital in Uganda, thereby locking Entebbe in a different time and era. Massive colonial government buildings lined the streets, windows broken and whitewash dirtied and overgrown with vines and squatters, but still exuding an air of languor that suggests “a deck chair, a shady veranda, the chink of ice on glass, and the curling smoke of a cigar.” Winston Churchill, I venture, would have absolutely loved Entebbe. We did.

Maybe I'll read Conrad one more time...

2009-12-29T08:10:00.002+03:00

Satellite photo of the African continent at night. The Arabian Peninsula is all desert and is still lit up noticeably more.

Makes for good stargazin'

In case you hadn't heard

2009-12-23T10:37:00.003+03:00

Another funny anecdote about me in an awkward situation prefaces my next blog post, which is much more serious.

During the Summer of 2007 I went to Amman, Jordan to take an intensive Arabic course at the University of Jordan. Accompanying me was my good friend and fellow Claremont McKenna College student Alex, who, I hope he does not mind me saying this, is of the Reagan ilk and thoroughly enjoys his conservative placement. He is from Ski-Town Colorado and is incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to domestic and international politics--last I heard he was teaching Sex Education at a high school in New Orleans for Teach For America.

My first step upon entering any foreign environment is to find a place to take beer. I usually prefer a cold, cheap quaff of the local variety in a relaxed, erudite setting, though I often happily settle for less than perfect conditions. Thus, Alex and I, soon after arriving in the Jordanian capital, set off to find a suitable watering hole, somewhat of a challenge considering the whole Muslims don’t drink thing. However, rather rapidly we stumbled across flowering oasis in the midst of dry Arabia: an outdoor two story bar with relatively cheap beer sitting above a substantial English language book store. Plants surrounding the terrace provided shade as well as insulation from the noisy Ammani traffic. Because the bar (the name escapes me right now) was so apt, Alex and I used it as a spring board for our assimilation process; frequenting the bar sometimes twice a week. During our visits, we began to notice a heightened level of friendliness about the place: young men struck up conversations easily and were quick to recognize our faces, and even the girls weren’t repulsed by the week old growth sprouting from my face and soiled travel attire. Eventually we disclosed our findings with some local Jordanians, I believe it was our landlord or his early-twenties son, when we received startling information. Our favorite bar was in fact Amman’s most renowned gay and lesbian bar. This news couldn’t have had less of an affect on us. After all, I grew up in Portland, Oregon and Alex, well, Alex really likes cold beer and has a lot of homosexual friends to boot (though I admit I was a little saddened to learn that all of those young women weren’t friendly to us because we are so handsome).

Before coming to Uganda I thought the Middle East was the most intolerant place in the world towards homosexuality. I now must admit Sub-Saharan Africa takes the cake. Offenders in Kenya may receive up to 14 years in prison for engaging in homosexual behavior, but may find no sanctuary in Tanzania, where the act is illegal as well. Burundi has banned homosexuality, and South Africa, in most matters the most Western African country, legal same-sex marriage has not prevented gangs from roaming the country and committing their own policy of “corrective” rape on female homosexuals. Uganda is not far behind them, and is in many ways is more radical; at the moment a piece of legislation called the Bahati Bill (after the MP who drafted it) has been presented to parliament that, if passed, would make Uganda the second country in Africa (after Nigeria) to implement capital punishment for homosexuals who commit serial offenses, or offenders who carry the AIDS virus. Indeed, if the bill passes, Uganda’s estimated 500,000 gay people may be found guilty of committing a homosexual act and given a sentence of life in prison. Even landlords can get jail time (up to seven years), or any other person who “helps, counsels, or encourages another person to engage in a homosexual act.”

The Bill will be discussed in Parliament early 2010.

Understandably, the proposal has elicited considerable international backlash, and Uganda’s outraged gay community has garnered much support in addition to its own voice. Sweden, which contributes $50 million annually in foreign aid to Uganda’s budget, says it would withdraw all foreign aid if the bill passes. Similar outcry has emanated from Washington. John Kerry admits the bill will seriously hurt US-Uganda relations. Russ Feingold, who is currently working on a measure to provide military aid to Museveni’s regime in order to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, declared passage would hinder the two countries working-relationship, especially in combating HIV/AIDS. (Uganda currently receives $285 million per year from the US for the AIDS fight.) The European Union has issued its version of a formal protest, known as a demarche, over the proposed legislation. The Bahati Bill, if passed, would essentially shoot Uganda in its own foot--drastically reducing foreign aid and political support from Western governments.

Proponents of the bill blame the West for Uganda’s homosexuality “problem,” arguing the phenomenon is foreign to Africa but that it has crept and encroached into their sphere of living, promoted by sinners and fueled by a strengthening trend of a-religious behavior.

President Yoweri Museveni and his party the National Resistance Movement have been strangely silent over the issue. International Human Rights Day was celebrated earlier this month by Ugandan’s without a single mention of the homosexuality issue in the government-run newspaper The New Vision. Moreover, the Uganda Human Rights Commission ignored the sensitive issue completely, delineating the social ills resulting from discriminatory behavior in a press conference, probably to avoid having to religious card dealt.

I find it ironic that the same countries which bore the missionaries that Christianized Africa hundreds of years ago are now lambasting such anti-homosexuality legislation as intolerant and homophobic. Nevertheless, we are in the 21st century. Sometimes a strong hand, and I think the removal of foreign aid will be very effective, is necessary to bring a country on the brink of barbarianism back to modernity. Nevertheless, I also think other measures should be explored by foreign policymakers, measures that neither encourage or discourage the practice: sensitization workshops, counseling services, Western backed anonymous HIV/AIDS treatment centers, etc.

I will keep you posted on the development of the Bahati Bill.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8412962.stm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/uganda-considering-death_n_384650.html

Holiday wishes from MAPLE Uganda!

2009-12-21T14:18:00.002+03:00

Season’s greetings from the equator and the warmest holiday wishes (the bureaucrats behind this operation won‘t let me say “Merry Christmas,” but you know what I mean) from the entire MAPLE Uganda family!!!!

I sincerely hope that this letter finds you all well and winding down your 2009 in great élan! I must admit the MAPLE Uganda team (Caitlin, Rachel, Luke, Nasser, Dennis, Brad, and Joel) is missing the champagne, but, in consolation, has found an excellent alternative in millet beer. Not quite as smooth or carbonated as the stuff you will be enjoying, but it can certainly do the trick if one just remembers to strain out the bigger chunks!

The past several months have been filled with taxing but absorbing NGO work, and I have much to talk about! Nobody has gotten married yet, though I think you’ll recall hearing about how we had to restrain Luke from eloping to Mombasa with that Kenyan, and the only growing this family has done is closer! Luke, or, “Lucky Luke” as we sometimes like to call him after the type of diaper rash, has done quite well. Our field director, when he is not coordinating training sessions, planning tree farms, writing business plans or visiting rural villages, has donned the apron and hairnet and enjoys fine tuning his domestic skills. (Sometimes I think the Kenyan girl was terribly unlucky, as Luke is a wizard in the kitchen, but there are occasions, chilli nights to be specific, when I think that she, and her olfactory gland, escaped in the nick of time!)

Caitlin and Rachel have done equally well, and this family is gosh darn proud of ’em! Aside from their daily MAPLE duties, the girls have found time to start up a women’s empowerment group with local high school girls. For some reason they don’t let this handsome bachelor attend any of the meetings, but I hear they are a blast! These two lovely young ladies are really taking Mbale by storm; indeed, the men of this house have already had to reject several offers from local men asking for their hands in marriage. I guess we are waiting for the right offer (as of now we’re thinking four cows for each girl, or the two-set for the excellent deal of only six cows and a goat). Having these two great leaders on the team makes MAPLE’s goal of educating Uganda’s burgeoning female class fun and promising.

We love you Caitlin and Rachel!!!!!

Let me not forget Dennis and Nasser, our two strapping young Makarere University Business School graduates who have opted to forgo their customary party-collegiate-style-while-living-in-your-parents’-basement year and actually gain some good employment experience. And that is why we couldn’t be happier to have them! Quick to give us great ideas about how to work together as a team and produce results, they have been most helpful in making this one, big, cohesive family! So industrious are they, in fact, that the two have even managed to find a way to get work done while surfing the Facebook website!

Brad, ironically the only male here with a significant other back home, seems to be getting most of the attention from the Ugandan females. (I think that I, too, will try growing a handlebar mustache!) But he has not time for girls anyway. Whether he is directing a city-wide trash cleanup, or just elbows deep in household waste making fuel briquettes, our Brad always comes to the dinner table on time with only a light amount of expletives! We are so very proud of what he has accomplished, now if he’d only share some of those phone numbers with your’s truly!!!!

The MAPLE family here in Uganda is doing quite well, and, pending Luke’s arraignment, will continue to try its best to do so. Furthermore, it is so very thankful for all of the support it has received from friends, family, colleagues and hangers-on over the past year. It therefore offers you again, the heartiest of holiday greetings!

Best wishes,

Joel and the rest of the MAPLE Uganda family!

Now don’t go quoting me on any of this…

2009-12-12T23:12:00.004+03:00

Deforestation is a huge issue in Africa, yet continues to receive less attention than it deserves. Political issues dominate. Corruption, Pan-African unity and regime discord, Muslim extremism, intertribal warfare, electoral fraud, the list goes on. However, the continent is making an effort to supplement its traditional preoccupations, and is now, more and more so every year, fueled by a greener, more climate- conscious zeitgeist. The reasons for this transformation--international pressure, carbon emission reports, or beaded hippies preaching the gospel of Mother Earth from their VW Bus pulpit--are not terribly important; what must be watched closely is how a young, developing continent with prehistoric heuristics copes with being force-fed a completely novel, life-altering policy. And the problem couldn’t be more pertinent. BBC’s Focus on Africa covered Africa’s fuel predicament in a recent issue. “Four million hectares of forest are felled each year in Africa, twice the world average (one hectare of trees can offset 200 tons of atmospheric carbon annually).” (vol.20, no. 4)

But the challenges associated with slowing deforestation are intimidating: Only 7.5 percent of the population in rural sub-Saharan Africa has access to electricity. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, efforts by the state to control charcoal smuggling has led to military involvement and bloodshed. Earlier this year in January Chad enacted strict but unpopular legislation to stop completely the charcoal trade that is rapidly erasing its already miniscule forestland and abetting the irreversible phenomenon of desertification. Great for international opinion polls but devastating for the 99 percent of Chadians reliant on charcoal for household fuel, the ban on charcoal has come without a cheap or government-subsidized alternative. In Tanzania, 20,000 bags of charcoal enter the capital Dar es Salaam every day. (Focus on Africa, 20:4)

Uganda is perhaps one of the worst off. Small in size but characteristically congruent with Africa’s burgeoning population, deforestation has already transformed much of the country’s canopied landscape to grass, bush, and farmlan. Indeed, outnumbering the trees along the roadsides are gigantic brick kilns used by villagers to turn hewn timber into charcoal for sale. Recently discovered oil reserves in the central region will likely fail to provide the answer. Even if the natural gas accompanying the reservoir were to be exploited rather than sequestered, flamed, or used to repressurize the drill, only a handful of Ugandans would have the equipment to use it. And, like the rest of Africa, the deforestation problem in Uganda will likely escalate until harsh legislation becomes necessary.

Northern Uganda won't be turned to when timber becomes scarce

Joel and Brad to the rescue.

This past week we went to Kampala for business. Believe it or not the capital city is not just a place where one can eat brie cheese sandwiches at whim and drink cold beer until the wee hours, but also has a number of people passionate about the deforestation issue. Brad and I have opted for the two tack approach: working with academics and politicians to raise awareness, and work on a charcoal alternative. The latter was what brought us to Kampala, to attend a training session on making biomass fuel briquettes. Actually we have been making briquettes since our first week here in Uganda, but, I can now admit only because I have just learned how to really make them, we were having difficulties. The briquettes were beautiful and looked like they would burn nicely. If they didn’t crumble in your hand, there was a decent chance that they would burn too slowly in the stove, or, worse yet, crumble while in the stove and smother the other coals. Starting a mere two and a half hours late, the training session turned out to be incredibly lucrative. Isaac the instructor, though relatively new to the process himself having only started in April, was a wizard at making briquettes. In just one hour we had made dozens of the donut-like briquettes out of charcoal, sawdust, and paper. (Interestingly enough, Brad and I have worked with these materials previously, but only managed to produce some really foul-smelling decomposed goop.) On top of the training we received, Isaac hooked us up with a briquette press each to bring back to Mbale, and promised to bring us a couple of stoves designed specifically for burning the cakes when we return to Kampala next week. We left brimming with confidence.

Isaac searches for a few ripe fuel briquettes to cook with

Brand name marketing and fuel briquette making

Fortunately for Ugandans we will not be satisfied with just making briquettes in our front lawn and entertaining a bunch of our chuckling neighbors, we have visions of grandeur. Excited from our excellent training session, we began to brainstorm ways in which we can reach rural Ugandans. Our organization will soon begin working with village savings and loan groups to increase entrepreneurial abilities. These groups, about thirty people each, provide the perfect class forum for teaching locals how to make briquettes and educate them on deforestation. On top of the education, we can provide them with a briquette press at subsidized cost, which they can pay back at the end of their savings cycle with their group funds. If the group becomes proficient enough, the cakes can be sold in the market and transform briquette making into an income generating activity for the group.

The new face of Uganda's anti-deforestation campaign

Into the Lion's Den...

2009-12-02T08:21:00.003+03:00

Although Uganda is small, the country is called home by a surprising diversity of people. The Buganda from the central part of the state dominate the political sphere and hold fast to a tribal identity that often puts them, in their eyes, above their country mates. In the southwest we have the Buchigu, the equivalent of Ugandan Ticos, an incredibly industrious and boisterous people that inhabit the high altitude tropical region. Where we live, the easy-going Bugizu celebrate with huge circumcision ceremonies every year in which young men, aged 15 to 16, get their foreskin lopped off and run up a hill while being slapped you-know-where by the village women. Across the gender divide, the inhabitants of Kapchorwa district still occasionally practice female circumcision. In the extreme North, the towering Dinka provide one end of the extreme, while the Pygmies of the far West provide the other. Finally, the adventurous may find the reclusive Karamajong in the northeastern part of the country close to the border with Kenya. There are countless other tribes here in Uganda that I haven’t mentioned, but I must stop here because it is this last group, the Karamajong, that I am going to talk about in this posting.

Mbale-Moroto road

A brief overview of the Karamajong. One of the most distinct tribes in Uganda, these nomadic pastoralists share only a few similarities with any other tribe in Uganda, the Teso of the east. Hundreds (but probably thousands) of years ago a great tribe moved down from the Sudan and came to what is now Karamoja. Something made the tribe split, and a faction migrated away from the dry, flatlands of the North to the rain soaked central highlands. That splinter group, the Teso, shook off many of their cultural traditions and assimilated with other tribes within Uganda, and kept faithful only to their linguistic heritage, though just vaguely. (One fun fact: Karamajong means “uncles“ in Ateso language, while Teso means “dead bodies“ in the Karamajong languages.) Though they have remained very much isolated in the harsh lands of the north, the Karamajong have also shed many of their traditions. Formerly a semi-nudist collection of cattle herders, many people of Karamoja have opted for a more agrarian lifestyle and clothing handouts from international aid organizations, although many of the elders still walk around town holding the long switch used to guide cattle to grazing lands. Life has been tough for the Karamajong. It is true many of them may be seen sporting Union High School Football tee-shirts, but inter-tribal fighting is still a very real problem just as it was a thousand years ago. The Turkana from Kenya often cross illegally into Karamoja and raid villages, stealing sacred cattle and food. In a saddening tit for tat, the Karamoja villagers respond by raiding the village that had attacked them; if they do not they will surely starve. Indeed, food has increased in value enormously in recent decades, as climate change has shortened the rainy season and exacerbated the dry season, making food a precious commodity and churning out a rapidly growing number of people dependant on handouts from the World Food Program. Finally, guns smuggled into Uganda via Sudan have found their way to Karamoja, increasing the frequency of road ambushes and making one place, Kotido, a “wild east town where AK-47s are common as walking sticks and blankets.” Just last week, ten people were killed on the road from Mbale to Moroto, the regional capital. As if I hadn’t given my parents enough grey hair already, I decided I just had to go to Karamoja.

Check out the bow and arrow

There are two routes from Mbale to Moroto: the safe road and the dangerous road. The latter is shorter and loads more scenic, while the former is, well, safer. Brad, Luke, our German friend Justus and I of course wanted to take the sketchy road. Cruising into the bus park at 8 in the morning, we found out that someone was looking out for us; the dangerous bus was broken and would not be running that day, so we would be forced to take the long, dusty trip to Soroti and, from there, onward to Moroto. To our surprise, a family of heavily-perspiring Muzungus board the bus and plop down in the seats directly behind us. Gauging by the way they talked it was obvious that they were very religious Australians, therefore we wasted no time in jumping into a very loud and very personal conversation about circumcision. They turned out to be quite friendly (or forgetful) and we later spent some time talking to them and the attractive daughter. In an interesting development, we had just crossed into Karamoja district, still a couple of hours from our destination, when the bus broke down. There I sat in the Ambush Capital of the World, heart racing and with sweat pouring down my face, trying to look cool in front of the cute Australian. A few bottles of water poured on the radiator was all it took, and the bus rumbled off after only a twenty minute delay, long before any bad men could have gotten wind of us and come running. A mere three hours tardy, our bus rolled into Moroto at around five pm. After bidding the Aussies adieu we jumped off the dusty bus and began looking for a safe, reliable place to get a cold beer. Unable to find a cold beer, we ignored the voices telling us to return to Mbale where cold beer is plentiful and settled for cold sodas. Meeting us at the soda parlor was Wilbert, a young Kampalan from the International Rescue Committee who had agreed to show us around that weekend. Wilbert helped us find some accommodation, promised he would show us where to obtain cold beers later, and then led us on a walking tour of Moroto.

Moroto is an NGO town. Instead of bodas and minibuses, the streets are lined with glistening SUVs, all with some sort of giant logo plastered on the doors and bonnet. In an almost sickening display of wealth they cruise almost pointlessly around town with the air-conditioner a-blowin’ while the people they are there to help hobble barefooted on the sidewalk next to them. There is no industry, no regionally-specific produce, no substantial marketplace--only a handful of restaurants and bars which cater toward the relatively wealthy NGO staffers. The “downtown” area consists of just one quarter mile stretch of divided road, saddled on either side by new NGO offices and decaying Karamajong general stores. Up the road to the east are the two residential areas lying at the foot of the 3000 meter Mt. Moroto: the Karamajong slums and the NGO workers community. Leading us through both areas, Wilbert did not need to point out their differences. Strewn with trash, tin shacks and idlers, the slums were, for me, incredibly saddening and uncomfortable to walk through; I couldn’t help but look down at my feet, despite the shouts of from children, and walk faster. In a stark contrast to the Karamojong living conditions, the fenced-off foreigners dwelt in brand new concrete mansions, with satellite antennas and blue metal roofs. Passing through the slums area, the sun began to drop and dusk was inching closer, and Wilbert quickened his pace to almost a jog. It was not good, he said, to get caught outside after dark. I am usually skeptical of such advice when a foreigner tells me that about a place, but from a Ugandan the information, I admit, was a little unnerving but certainly heeded. Luckily for us, we had no problems, and soon found ourselves at one of the posh NGO hotels with ice cold beers sitting in front of us and watching a football match on television under generator power while the rest of Moroto lay in darkness.

The next day Wilbert took us out to a school his organization was working with, which was rather impressive. Piping led the precious rainfall from rooftop gutters to a giant cistern in the center of the compound, and two new outhouse buildings, one for each sex, stood in the back. Most of the 600 students had free schooling, brand new classrooms, and a football stadium in the planning stages--all of it subsidized by the Northern Ugandan Rehabilitation Program. Administrators were even having trouble finding enough qualified teachers to keep up with demand. Actually, their biggest problem was not lack of funding, but the large three hundred yard gap in the fencing around the compound. Just recently, they informed us, some warriors had come onto their property looking for items to loot, but were confronted by the Ugandan Military. One of the warriors was killed in the ensuing shootout. Nevertheless, this was the other side of the NGO picture, which is the side my organization, MAPLE, is on. I have always been, and always will be, a huge advocate for education, and I truly believe that it can heal very deep wounds. Here was a fully-functioning school in the middle of a war-torn nowhere, providing free education to a large number of very poor children; if there ever was a way to escape the vicious cycle the Karamajong were experiencing, this was it.

Now I am certainly no English major, but...

For one to truly understand the Karamoja he or she must grasp the importance of the role security plays in their lives. Their lives revolve around it, almost to the point of being paranoiac. Enemies abound in Karamoja, though they have traded in their bow and quiver for automatic weapons and tribal dress for army fatigues and Ray Bans, and friends and family are held close while foreigners are kept at a distance. Interestingly, the Karamajong’s Nilotic cousin lived under similar conditions three thousand years ago in the Levant. Chaim Potok writes:

“When your world is a wilderness of sand and stone, a wasteland of scorpions, jackals, serpents, and enemy tribes, you need a close social organization based on ties of blood in order to stay alive and protected.”

Potok’s description of the Jew struggling to find a foothold in a hostile world accurately portrays the Karamajong’s struggle in the harsh brush of Northern Uganda. Neighboring tribes are your enemies, and the land is your enemy. Wild Turkana tribesman cross over illegally from Kenya, raid your village of food and steal your cattle. The dry season, growing in length each year as a result of climate change, makes food so scarce you have no choice but get aid from the humanitarian organizations. Should you choose to react to your situation with violence, the Ugandan military is there to quickly return fire. It is understandable, then, why it was a big deal for Wilbert to bring us to a traditional Karamajong village and ask for their permission to let us inside of their compound. Luckily for us, they said yes, and we stepped inside.

Additional security wall inside of a Karamajong village

Rather, we stooped inside. Surrounding the compound was a six foot high fence made from arm-thick poles stuck deep into the ground with brambles filling in the gaps, and only one entrance: a three foot by two foot hole in the wall. Trouble enough for me, it was pretty entertaining watching our 6’5’’ German friend duck down low enough to pass through the doorway. But we weren’t in yet. There was another defense wall just inside the first, this doorway even smaller, which was nice because it gave me an opportunity to get my camera out and take pictures of everybody crawling through. The residential block, consisting of about ten round straw huts, was found in the center of the multi-walled compound encircling an open gathering area. The villagers were extremely cautious to approach us at first, warmed up slowly when I began showing them that our cameras weren’t dangerous and that they could see pictures of themselves in seconds. It was still quite awkward; they had very few possessions, no chickens or goats running around, no bags of flour or grain, just the occasional blackened pot sitting on a couple of rocks over a charcoal pit. Brad, Luke, and I had visited a number of villages before, but this experience was very different. In the place of our usual enthusiastic and inquisitive reception, the elders almost receded, looking at us with solemn, scarred faces. Wilbert suggested we leave the compound and talk to their leader outside to ease their (and our) nerves. Back out side the compound, everybody relaxed and we finally explained who we were and where we came from, and also got to ask them some questions. We knew life for the Karamajong had been hard, Wilbert and the guide books had prepared us for that, but I don’t think anyone could have fully prepared themselves for what we heard. A drought had reduced the years crop yield, and they were starving. Indeed, many of their young men, instead of off tending to the cattle like they had done in the past, were out in the bush catching rats and rabbits for the village to eat that night. Commerce had grinded for a halt, too. The women had no produce to bring to the market, nor the supplies required to make a batch of their local brew. The drought and famine was encroaching into their heritage as well, without money coming in, men could not afford a dowry and some neighboring villages hadn’t hosted a marriage in years. One ancient women, sitting on the dirt ground, told us through the translator that, “Climate change was killing our culture.” To add insult to injury, our villagers told us that only three days prior they were raided by another tribe, much of their food and cattle stolen. Without embarrassment they told us that, given the terrible position the raid and the drought had left them in, they had no choice but to plan a raid on the same tribe. The raid was to take place in three days.

Justus at the front gate

It was not my agenda here to sensationalize. But the experience we had in that village was emotional and unforgettable, and I hope the reader gets at least some idea of how we felt, despite my brevity in telling the story. Karamoja is a sensational place, we realized, and we rode back to Moroto in silence, trying to digest this fact. For the second time in as many days, I needed a cold beer and a football match, though these served mainly to divert my thoughts.

The sun sets over Karamoja

One of my finer moments…

2009-11-25T00:53:00.000+03:00

NGO workers acquire business cards like a teenage Joel Hedges acquires zits; their pockets become stuffed with them seemingly overnight. Microfinance institutions, development organizations, HIV/AIDS health centers, womens advocacy groups, all employees, no matter how yeoman, pass out their cards like candy. As a result, my colleagues here at MAPLE and I have amassed a considerable number of business cards during our tenures here in Uganda. Now, being the organizational nut that I am, I felt it prudent to find us a holder for these cards.

I might just be the only NGO worker in the entire world without his personal business card. Thus, when I went door to door at Mbale’s two hundred stationary/secretarial shops looking for a holder, I of course had nothing to show them. Hah! A lack of example is no match for the power of clever observation. Early on in my search I realized that the term “business card holder” was not in the everyday Ugandan’s vocabulary (either that or they couldn‘t understand English when it is mumbled, which is just as likely). I did, however, observe multiple signs declaring “success cards” were now on sale. “Success cards must be what they call business cards here in Uganda,” I thought, then patted myself on the back for keen observation and logical deduction. The workers at the next twenty seven stationary shops all failed to understand business card holder, but their eyes lit up when I mentioned success cards:

"Do you sell business card holders?"

"Umm, sorry sir."

"You know, like a Rolodex?

(Confused blank stare.)

"Success cards, are they there?"

"Ahh, yes we have!"

"Do you have something to put them in, like a book?"

"No, it is not there."

Finally I came to an Indian man’s shop, just as I was about to admit defeat, who pulled out, lo and behold, a small book for holding business cards. That’s it, I said. Give that to me now, sahib, just name your price! He told me that, unfortunately, he could not sell it to me, as it was his only one. He did tell me, to my elation, that his brother was in Kampala that very moment, possibly even already searching for business card holders, and he could have one brought to me here in Mbale as early as the next business day. Success! I told him I would come by on Monday to pick up my order.

Monday rolled around and I went to the Indian man’s shop. At Sam's Stationary, I was informed that the business card holder was not there. I then proceeded to stop in on his shop every single day for the next two weeks just to be told that it had not arrived until we finally exchanged contact information. Another week elapsed until I received a phone call from a man with a heavy Indian accent. Despite the more or less unintelligible conversation that ensued, I gathered that an Indian man was calling me, and, using that keen power of deduction of mine, he must be the only Indian man I have met thus far here in Uganda, which so happened to be the one with my business card holder. Sure enough, Jaime, who was already at the market (and by circumstance in the general vicinity of Indian Business Card-man), was more than happy to pickup the holder for me. Just later that day I held the elusive book in my hand. Astounding success!

While bragging later to my friend Eddie, who is Ugandan, about my exploits, I learned an interesting little factoid.Our conversation went a little something like this:

“Hey Eddie, check this out man. Look what I got today. I finally got my success card holder! Bask in my glory!”

“This? Noo, man, this is not a success card holder.”

“Then what for Pete's sake do you call this?”

“You know, man, I think something like this is called a business card holder.”

“Drat! Then what in the name of all that is holy is a success card holder.”

“Something that holds success cards.”

“Hah! Exactly like this, right?”

“No, I don’t think you are getting what I am saying. This holds business cards, not success cards, man. Success cards are the cards high school graduates receive from friends and family for finishing their exams.”

“Oh, bollocks.”

For future reference, I can now say, with certainty, that there are no success card holders in all of Mbale, Uganda. How many business card holders there actually are, I have no idea.

PS: MTN mobile service provider Joke-O‘-the Day, “I just bought 500 Sadam t-shirts, they’re a bit tight around the neck, but they hang well!”

PPS: K2 part deuce and Krazy Karamoja coming up shortly!

More Visual Evidence

2009-11-19T10:18:00.000+03:00

Our teammate Nasser watching the sunset with Tororo Rock in the background
Sunset in color of the same valley
Scene of Tororo valley and the biggest cement factory in Uganda. I hope you enjoy this picture because I might have had to trespass on the municipal water supply to get it
Tororo Rock, a steep volcanic mound that overlooks the border town of the same name

Augusta’s sister course Tororo, but marked by a different set of challenges: cows wander the course in very messy twenty-somes, greens often don’t have a flagpole and sometimes don’t even have a cup, and head pro can always be found in big rubber galoshes and napping under the shade of a big mango tree
Before and after
Children sprinting after the car on the way back from Sisiyi Falls. After a hundred yards of high-pitched “muzungus!” we had to talk the driver out of slamming on the brakes
I really like pictures of lone figures walking down dirt roads, and it is for people like this gentleman walking towards Sisiyi Falls near Sironko that lead me to always have my finger on the shutter
Baby goat in a tree
MAPLE team touring through the bush near Sironko
Mary, Veronica’s sister, demonstrates why chiropractic clinics are not necessary here in Uganda
A flock of egrets flies low across the bush. The wall of trees in the background is a tree farm owned by the husband of Veronica (chairwoman of the Mbale SACCO we are currently working with). Though this one was primarily Eucalyptus, some tree farms contain pine, cypress, musizi, even smatterings of teak and mahogany

Child walking home from school alone, near Bududa, Eastern Region

Mbale Hill, Part 1 of 2

2009-11-19T10:13:00.000+03:00

Apparently the repaired hole above my bed was not actually repaired when I took the caulking gun to it several weeks ago, but in fact was made larger. Which, my dad would point out, is really a good thing because I shouldn’t waste the best part of the afternoon napping. A wet bed also tells me if it rained or not in case I didn’t notice the downpour when it happened. Above all, however, it provides me some decent blog starting material.

One of the greatest things about living in Mbale is the setting. Nearly all of the town’s 80 thousand inhabitants have at least a partial view of the giant mesa sitting just several kilometers to their east. Perpetually crowned with a daunting array of cumulonimbus clouds, the protrusion creates its own microclimate; keeping Mbale town cooled off despite the often overpowering equatorial sun and ensures that the thousands of people in the vicinity relying on agriculture to subsist and earn a living do not go disappointed. Glinting on the western face in the afternoon are several large waterfalls, volume-wise not that impressive but tall enough to give Multnomah Falls, the tallest waterfall in North America, a run for its money. Approaching the mesa, called Nkokonjeru, gently sloping feet give rise to sheer cliff faces that extend some 1,148 vertical meters above the town below before ending at an almost flat summit. Littered throughout the cliffs and covering any plot of land flat enough to allow soil to accumulate are some truly impressive examples of terrace cropping--maize, cassava, beans, and plantain. Though MAPLE has been here in Mbale town for several months now, it was not until today that its field officers rallied themselves to hike up the thing.

Nkokonjeru (a Lugisu name, I believe, that translates to “nightmare maker” in the local language) is actually a spur of the much larger Mount Elgon, which one semi-reliable source once told me was the fourth highest peak in Africa. And there it sat for three months, silently mocking me and my sedentary lifestyle. Brad, Luke and I finally decided one Sunday night that we couldn’t take it anymore; every day the hill sat there un-summited the less masculine we could claim to be, a reoccurring hit that I, for obvious reasons, could not afford to take.

I should have turned my alarm off, rolled over this morning and gone right back to bed. Actually, I should have probably abstained from drinking those most recent three hundred beers. I might have also studied more closely the surprised grins that crept across the faces of the locals to whom we announced our plan. If ignorance is bliss, you could safely say we were all on cloud nine that morning. We set out from the car shortly after eight, (unfortunately for us) before the sun had a chance to make us reconsider, when Nkokonjeru’s shadow extended far from its base and lapped at Mbale’s doorstep. This made the first leg of the ascent quite nice: with lots of breaks, ten minute vista look-arounds, and enthusiastic conversation while we followed the snaking road up the hillside towards the sole cranny in the cliff face. So enveloped in the hike were we that when a truck passed us by going in the same direction we simply motioned it on, even joking to ourselves afterward about jumping in the back already. Hah, we had no need or desire for such luxuries. The waterfalls, emboldened by the rainy season’s daily downpours, glistened at their crests but gradually fell dark as they descended into the hill’s shadow, and sprayed a light mist that obscured their bases further. Women gathered at the waters before the edge with their daily load of laundry paused to stare at the passing white boys while their barefoot children sprinted up and down the road wielding bicycle tires, sticks, bags of salt, and machetes. Upon reaching break in the cliff, the steep switchbacks abruptly transformed into loping undulations that gradually climbed to the mesa’s highest point. This was the second leg, and, because the change in terrain also marks the spot when you come out of the morning shadow and into the sapping heat, was intimidating enough for Luke to nickname it the “Widowmaker.” At the other end of this stretch, though mostly outside of our vision except for just a tiny spire extending above the horizon, was our ultimate destination: a giant cable TV tower where Brad promised we would have unsurpassed views of Eastern Uganda and a chance to watch Portland Trailblazer games at whim. Our pace quickened.

To be continued...

The 9 to 5

2009-11-10T08:47:00.001+03:00

There have been rumors circulating that MAPLE is essentially running a “summer camp” here in Uganda. That its field officers, myself included, have been doing more play than work. And, I admit, one look at my blog thus far would seem to reinforce this idea. However, I am now going to dispel these rumors. Actually, we have been doing loads of work, and, more importantly, accomplishing quite a bit. Brad touched on these in his most recent blog posting, but I think those accomplishments deserve attention in The White Nile.

My official charge here in Uganda as a MAPLE field Officer is to find a village SACCO (Savings and Credit Co-operative) to work with. Right now our organization is working closely with a local women’s group, the Mbale United Women’s Association (MUWA), here within the city. Our young organization’s experience thus far has been quite positive working with an urban lending and savings group, despite training session attendance that mysteriously fluctuates with the rain and sun, but longevity and performance’s sake we feel it would be helpful to be able to work will all kinds of groups, rural or urban or somewhere in between. So, instead of kayaking and campfire songs, Brad and I have been travelling all over the eastern part of Uganda, enduring vomit filled bus trips and three hour taxi rides with strangers sitting on our laps, punishing equatorial heat, bed bugs, and traveler’s diarrhea, in search of the perfect village SACCO to work with. It has been absolutely fantastic. Every group we have met with in rural Uganda, and there have been dozens thus far, has welcomed us warmly, often with song and dance. And they are all different. In Lira, we went to refugee camps, remnants from the turmoil in the north that have yet to be dealt with properly by the government, and visited groups there. A gentleman from one of the groups we met who happened to run an orphanage for children whose parents were killed in the insurgency in the north, misunderstanding the nature of our organization, asked Brad, Jordan and me if we could help pay for his kids’ school fees. One of the hardest things I have ever done in my life was to look this man in the eyes and tell him that, though we would do our best with the resources we have, we cannot help him financially. In Bukedea, visiting with an organization that deals strictly with village women, we met a group of women that had a 25 percent HIV positive rate among its members. For the most part, however, the mood has been encouraging rather than sad. The women, usually waiting for us under the shade of a large banyon tree when we arrive, immediately begin to clap and a sing and dance and make a shrill, pulsating whistle that I believe only African women can make. As we approach, they physically get on their knees in front of us and fight to one another to shake our hands. Then, after introductions, we get to ask them how their group is doing--are they saving money and or borrowing, what kind of businesses they run, what have been their biggest challenges, and other questions we have planned or think of there on the spot. Though most of the groups are too incompatible for our organization to help, be they not literate enough, too far away from our office in Mbale, or too large and fragmented, we can always offer word of encouragement and share our enthusiasm for the steps they have shown in the right direction. I usually part with a declaration that I will come back if, and only if, they teach me how to make the whistling noise. It is the only joke of mine that I have had much success with here in Uganda. In fact I could write a whole blog post just about my poor joke attempts that have left me in some very awkward situations, but that is neither here or there.

Downtime is a fact of life here in Africa. Whether it be during a rolling blackout or when you are competing with the African Minute, there are periods of your day when it is almost impossible to get done what you had planned. That is why the MAPLE team has adopted a number of side projects, which have also been successful.

Fuel Briquettes: Deforestation is a huge issue in Africa, but it often, understandably, gets thrown on the back burner to things like rebel fighting and corruption. It seems like the issue only comes to the forefront, like it is in Congo, when the smuggling of wood and charcoal overlaps with rebel infighting and death. Uganda’s once arboreal horizon is now mostly tree-less thanks to deforestation, and the efforts of tree farming, a relatively new phenomenon, simply cannot keep pace with the hewing. The only places in Uganda untouched by widespread deforestation are the national parks and protected areas, a relatively small drop in the proverbial bucket of total land area. To combat this and other effects of burning charcoal (charcoal burning produces a lot of carbon emissions per BTU), Brad and I have imported a fuel briquette press and are working on training locals how to make a charcoal substitute out of household waste products. The machine we use is called the Peterson Press III and uses a two ton hydraulic press to compress waste materials like coffee and corn husks, grass clippings, sawdust from a mill, and even charcoal dust swept from the floor of a vendor’s stall, into small, donut-sized cakes that can be burned in any stove. Admittedly, our first attempts were pretty bad, requiring just about a liter of kerosene to light just one. However, we have made some big improvements. We found a local kid named Chris, who, now finishing up his final year of high school, is enthusiastic about the project and even motivates us to work on making fuel briquettes when we wereat the time leaning towards drinking Club beers instead. Because the materials used to make the briquettes can be acquired for little or no charge, really driven individuals like Chris, if they work hard and long enough at it, can turn a profit selling the cakes to people who have traditionally burned charcoal or wood. Right now I am in close contact with a professor of Environment at Makarere University in Kampala, and we are working together to raise awareness about the availability of charcoal substitutes and, hopefully, lobby local governments to pay more attention to deforestation and charcoal smuggling. Though we are swimming up stream--charcoal is dirt cheap, widely available, and people are already very dependant on it--we are trying hard and get to work on briquette making every day. Eventually we would like to hand over the press to Chris and teach him to train others in the art of cake making, and focus our time on raising awareness.

Trash Cleanup: Brad and I have been working with the local government here in Mbale to implement a community wide trash cleanup. We held one last month just in our own neighborhood, Indian Quarters, and it was a huge success, drawing close to two hundred participants, though most of them were high school students more intent on being seen and looking cool than picking up litter on the streets. Despite the paramount popularity scene among Ugandan adolescents, we managed to clean about a two mile stretch in a two hour period. We are now working with the local government to make this event a monthly one, recurring on the last Saturday of every month. Brad, already a big shot here in Mbale with his knowledge of motorcycles, went on the radio last night for over an hour to plug the next cleanup, which has been set for November 28. Mbale, where we live, was once known as the “cleanest city in East Africa,” and one of our tactics for rallying public support for this project is to foment community pride and a desire to restore the people’s hometown to the status it once held. Though we are swimming upstream on this one two (the streets are absolutely filthy), Brad and I now have a lot of support from the other MAPLE field officers, and things are getting easier. Similarly, we found “the guy to work with” within the local government who actually keeps his promises and shows up to meetings almost on time.

I owe you some pictures to liven this post up a bit, coming soon!

Some Work Related Photos and Random Blog Post

2009-10-30T08:25:00.000+03:00

Brad finally found a friend that is willing to change a little bit for him.
Meeting the kids at an elementary school in Aromo, a village north of Lira.
Jordan and Akullu Betty posing at a bakery in Lira.

While We Are On The Subject Of Transportation

Public transportation in developing countries was designed for bald people, because they have no hair to rip out during bouts of frustration. Cairene streets are stuffed with some 300,000 Peugot 504s, all of them manned by chain-smoking, toothless Egyptians. The taxis in Amman require notary proof that you have put your house up for a second mortgage even before you get in. And if I recall correctly, government policy in Costa Rica dictated all taxis had to play 50 Cent “In Da Club” loudly on a set of broken speakers. I have one fond memory of taking an overcrowded minibus from Cairo to Alexandria with a bunch of Egyptians who had all agreed that if nobody wore deodorant, then nobody would be guilty of committing a social faux pas.

Here in Uganda, people get around on two wheels instead of four. Bicycles that have never seen “better days” and have a cushion fixed above the back wheel are called boda-bodas, and they are everywhere. Their motorized cousin, almost always a Chinese “Boxer” with a top speed of 40 km/h, is side-splittingly (yet ‘re logically) called the moda-boda.

I am afraid I cannot talk much about bicycle bodas. I have taken them on a number of occasions, but I feel so terrible making the driver lug my 190 pound butt up and down the hills of Mbale I try to take the alternative. My colleague Caitlin had an interesting experience her first time taking a boda-boda. Ill-prepared for the jerky ride (women have to sit side-saddle, due to dresses, a precarious position that does not come naturally to Westerners), Caitlin was caught off balance and her foot swung into the back spokes. Unaware of Caitlin’s bleeding ankle, we continued on to our destination, the center of town. When we arrived at our destination, the dude tries to get more money out of Caitlin, even though she had already overpaid by 200 shillings, more than enough than it would take to merely pop the spokes back into place. So, we began to argue about it. And, of course being in Africa, twenty seven passers-by immediately swooped in to see what the argument was about and to throw in their two cents each. Finally one guy turns to us and says, “Wait a minute, let me get this straight, you overpaid by that much and they’re still asking form more? Just walk away.” We took his advice and walked off to a mixture of angry shouts and laughing.

Moda-Bodas, when stationed under the shade of a tree, provide an excellent perch from which to croon sweet nothings at passing white girls. They are absolutely everywhere in the streets, except of course when you are in a hurry to get home and it is beginning to rain, in which case they have all hidden themselves under a far away tree to laugh inconspicuously at the sopping muzungu. My mother might not enjoy hearing about this, especially when she finds out that I take them nearly every day, given that she still calls motorcycles “donor cycles.” I really do enjoy traveling this way, in the end, unless of course you happen to have one of the abnormally large African insects fly into your eye. My roommates don’t enjoy bodas nearly as much, because, being shorter than 6’1, their noses are located directly downwind of the boda driver’s armpits.

Ugandan Joke of the Day

2009-10-22T21:46:00.001+03:00

A real zinger:

"Money can't buy happiness but it keeps the kids in touch!"

Not for the Weak Constitution

2009-10-22T10:38:00.000+03:00

I will try my best to describe the African bus experience, but I am afraid I can only fall short; African buses, you see, involve so many sights, sounds, and, most importantly, smells, that putting them into words in the form of a story is like “painting a desert sunset in black and white.” I have taken buses before in developing countries, but Africa, well, Africa takes the cake.

Let me preface my story by recounting another enjoyable bus trip, this one in hyper-Saharan Egypt. Our group was returning to Cairo back from relaxing in the sun of Sharm el Sheikh. I would also like to mention that it is nearly impossible for me to fall asleep in public transportation. Airplanes provide the best chance to get some rest, mostly because you can always order more booze. Buses, however, especially the ones in Muslim Egypt, usually do not offer such a service. This particular carrier was called Nile Delta and it is famous within inner circle Egypt for being the most ill-conducive to Western tastes and comforts. It may not surprise you to learn that, despite full knowledge of this little tidbit, I was a strong advocate for taking this particular bus line only because our group could save a combined two dollars on fare. Our side won support and so I found myself sitting at the back of my bus and next to my good friend Jeremy, who suffers from a similar inability to sleep. This particular bus was a red-eye, which, upon reflection, makes quite a bit of sense, because I don’t think that it would be able to pass a police checkpoint in daylight. Fortunately the speaker directly above us was broken and it synced nicely with all of the other broken speakers on the bus. Entertainment was provided, free of cost, and Jeremy and I settled down and tuned in to the featured film: Dennis Rodman’s Oscar-worthy crowning off-court achievement, Double Team, costarring Jean Claude Van Damme. As soon as the horror show ended I began what is the hilarious display that is Joel Hedges falling asleep. For anyone who has ever witnessed this, you will know what I am talking about. First, the eyes close and the mouth opens, as if they are connected by some cruel biological beam. Thus, I am unable to see the faces of the other people staring at the glistening pool of drool forming in the corners of my mouth. Then, still awake mind you, my head begins to search for the nearest comfortable hold, which often involves contortions that invoke jealousy even among the best Chinese gymnasts. After resting semi-comfortably for 9.7 seconds my body spasms into another semi-uncomfortable position (possibly knocking into the person next to me or the cup of tomato juice in front of me), only to repeat the process once over again. I was fortunate in that I did not have to provide the entertainment for the remaining eight hours of the seven hour bus ride. Our driver, obviously a pious man, had come into possession of a tape of Quranic chanting. No music, just chanting, which he played on loop until we arrived in the Cairo bus park. Even despite the broken speakers, I now consider myself in league with the best Muslim muezzins.

This brings me to African bus story number two. This route was from Mbale in the eastern part of Uganda, to Lira, in the north, a 200 kilometer journey that should have taken a little under four hours. Hah! Welcome to Africa! I consulted with our field director before leaving on appropriate bus preparations, and asked him how long the trip would take. “The first time I made the trip it took me 8 hours, the second time it took 6 hours, and the third time, a scant 4 hours.” I was optimistic, picturing myself in Lira 4 hours later, early afternoon, perhaps relaxing by a swimming pool to escape the oppressive North Ugandan heat.

We opted for the Gateway bus service. Africans generally fall on the leaner side of the size spectrum, and I believe their seats are designed the way they are because of this. Two seats lie on one side of the bus, and three ultra narrow ones lie on the other. Being three white dudes traveling together, Brad, Jordan and I decided we would cram into a row on the three-seat side. Now, our shoulders, especially the Atlas-ian ones belonging to yours truly, are a bit bigger, and we must have looked like a big white tree, with Brad’s torso sprouting out into the aisle and Jordan’s sprouting out of the window. The first leg of the trip, from Mbale to the midpoint city of Soroti (100km away) took about 2 hours, but was tolerable aside from the lack of space. The stopover in Soroti, however, was where things began to fall apart. Our bus driver, apparently a regular Ugandan don juan, thought he would break up the drive by visiting his girlfriend. For two hours we sat on the steaming bus in a dustbowl in the middle of nowhere among an astonishing collection of bodily odors. Finally the driver makes it back to the bus, and we depart once again for the second leg: the rough 100km stretch of road from Soroti to Lira. Ugandan buses have a unique characteristic not found on buses in other parts of the world. Their back suspension system actually magnifies road inconsistencies, instead of dampening them. And African roads are anything but flat. Hot, sweaty, and with a head bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box I spent the next two hours trying hard not to think about swimming pools. The bus trip became even more fun during the home stretch, when something happened that has never happened to me before. Jordan and I were sitting in a row in the back of the bus, discussing the different kinds of neck surgery one can undergo, when I heard the splash of water coming from the row of seats behind us. It couldn’t be. Then came another loud splash, this one accompanied by a soft gagging sound. There is no way. Then the sound came a third time, and I looked over to my right to Jordan, about to ask him if my theory about the source of the splashing noise was correct. I didn’t need to; Jordan was on the verge of tears from holding in his laughter. Sure enough, the girl behind us was throwing up on floor right behind us. Jordan, once sufficient composure was regained, was finally able to say, “I can see why you wore long pants, Joel, I have vomit sprinkles all over the back of my legs.” Luckily for my stomach and Jordan’s legs we were already nearing our destination, because the girls purges set off a chain reaction. The woman in front of us, displaying the manners of a true public transport traveler, leaned over and began vomiting out of her window. So, for the remaining two or three kilometers, Jordan was getting vomit splash from two directions, in the face and in the back of the legs. Long pants would not have helped him with the former.

We took a taxi home.

Racial Observations and the Real Meaning Behind The White Nile

2009-10-08T22:02:00.000+03:00

One of the reasons I am writing this entry is to explain the name of my blog, The White Nile. The title, I must admit, was borrowed from book of the same name written by English historian Alan Moorehead, a fascinating read if you should ever get the chance. Divided into three sections, the book traces the history of the West in East Africa, from exploration and the efforts if the Royal Geographical Society to locate the headwaters of the Nile, to the militarization and governance at the hands of the British , and finally to the Evangelization of its inhabitants by adventurous missionaries. Thus, the headwaters of the Nile beginning at Lake Victoria began, with each additional white footstep into East Africa, to interestingly (and sadly) take on a new meaning to the name that was given them, the White Nile. The White Nile was in fact becoming whiter, so to speak. I chose to call my blog this not only because within the region I am living springs the White Nile, but, whether I like it or not, I am continuing a trend that began with Richard Speke and John Burton and the first exploration into East Africa in the mid-nineteenth century.

Paul Theroux, probably the greatest travel writer since Mark Twain, is an outspoken critic of the West’s involvement in Africa. Not unfounded (Theroux spent a number of years teaching at Makarere University in Kampala during the 1960s while it was still the “Oxford of the East“), his argument is shared with a number of people, including many Africans, that Africa should be left to the Africans. Western involvement, in the form of NGOs and non-profits, is doing more harm than good, and essentially constitutes what might have been Moorehead’s fourth wave of white intervention in East Africa had he not finished his work in the 1960s. Nevertheless, here I am, teaching Ugandans basic business skills as a member of the MAPLE Microdevelopment organization. Based on my own experience so far and the warm welcome our teaching efforts have received, I am inclined to disagree with Mr. Theroux. In the end, however, I do acknowledge that a fair amount of the aid work designed to lift Africa out of “darkness” falls short of its goal, more specifically creating a dependence rather than personal foundation. This is understandably a sensitive subject among NGO and non-profit circles, and it will be interesting to find out what I think after my tenure here in Africa has ended. I will keep you posted.

The lighter side

Brad, our Ugandan friend Eddie, and I were watching a Premier League game the other day at a neighborhood establishment, the Loving Tone Hotel, when it suddenly struck me: Here we are, two white men, sitting amid a sea of black football fans watching white guys play a sport on TV, the exact reverse of what goes on back in the United States. I can picture two Ugandans coming to the United States and going to a Boston Celtics game and sitting among an arena of white people all the while cheering on a quintet of all black men. Very interesting indeed.

While patronizing one of our favorite Sino-Indian-Ugandan restaurants, Ribat, last week our group had an interesting experience. Service was slow, and we were well into our second hour of waiting for our food when conversation slowed and minds began to wander. Luckily for us, a football match was playing on the TV and would provide an excellent distraction. The game, tied 2-2 heading into the last ten minutes, was becoming increasingly intense, and Jordan was about to fall off of his seat and into his cocktail when in strolled a group of Indians, a large minority group here in Uganda. Luke, our resident pro having spent the greater part of a year here in Uganda already, groaned “Watch this, they will probably go turn on cricket.” Sure enough, one man went immediately over to the TV, scanned a few channels, and eventually found a replay of the Most-Boring-Sport-On-Earth. We were too shocked and amused with Luke’s prescience to get angry. It may have turned out for the better anyway. The cooks in the kitchen, having their football game turned off, could now focus on preparing our food, which came out shortly after the cricket game came on.

Despite a long and usurious legacy of colonialism, I don’t think today’s Ugandans harbor any animosity towards white people. On the contrary, I think good will towards Westerners is very common and is especially evident when you look at the best way of gauging public opinion, the children. Children everywhere are often vocal and blatant projections of their more reserved parents and their opinions; in order to get an idea of what someone thinks about a particularly sensitive subject, just ask his or her child. The muzungu (“white man“ in Swahili) may get a fair amount of stares on the street, just in case they decide to do something goofy or culturally abnormal, but he gets nothing but cheers and greetings from the youngest children. Sometimes kids will see you wave back at them and run up and hold your hand, perhaps even walk with you all the way to your destination.

A Couple of Random Conversations and Accoutrement

2009-10-06T07:51:00.000+03:00

One of the perks of subscribing to a particular Ugandan cell phone service is the MTN Joke of the Day. Yesterdays zinger, which cost me about ten cents, was, and I quote:

“The Russians are very jealous of the American’s stealth bombers, so they’ve decided to build their own.”

While Brad and I are eating lunch the other day at a little hole-in-the-wall joint near our house. A younger guy, taller than Brad or me, sits down next to us at our picnic table and orders the same thing we are having: rice, beans, irish (potatoes), and chapati. Brad and I, that is to say, enjoyed our meal together. Conversation took a respite while we focused on the task before us, pausing only occasionally to sip from our Coca Cola. Unbeknownst to us, the man on my immediate left exercised his ability to turn into a human vacuum cleaner and inhaled his equally-portioned plate in record time. Now, I am no speed demon at the dining table, nor have I been traditionally (unless my parents suddenly brought up the topic of schoolwork or girlfriends), but this guy sitting next to me had finished his plate of food just as I had reached the halfway point. I raised my jaw from its wadir to ask him to explain his superhuman ability, per usual my eloquence elicits profound conversation.

“Dude, you eat really fast.”
He looked at me with the faintest trace of a grin. “That is what I do.”
Silence. Not the response Brad or I was expecting. Nevertheless, the conversation was the perfect segue to my next statement:
“You’re tall, dude. How tall are you?”
He gets up, leaves his money on the table, and makes toward the door. Before he exits, he turns to me and offers the obvious reply, “Taller than you.” Then he heads out, leaving me slack-jawed and Brad on the verge of rupturing some vital organ from laughing so hard.

The next incident involved Brad and I in a shopping venture over by the Mbale market. Brad had his eyes set on a snazzy pair of $12 alligator skin dress shoes and decided to see if they carried his size, so we plopped down on a bench next to a weathered Ugandan shoe shiner. Usually in this situation we decide to initiate some conversation, exchange the curious stare for a bit of cultural insight, so Brad began with an inquiry into the weather, of which all Ugandans are experts.

Brad: “Do you think it will it rain today?”
Shoe shiner: “Yes. But it will rain later, at seven o‘clock…or four.”

Brad decided Uganda was not ready for a white man with alligator shoes and we opted to move on, lest we get caught in the 4 pm rainstorm.

Actually, I have found the Ugandan sense of humor to be one of the best I have encountered. It is perhaps a product of his or her perpetually-optimistic attitude that the average Ugandan feels the need to joke and laugh, and it is contagious. Yes, life is hard, but from every tier of society, be it Muslim or Evangelical, wealthy or poor, crippled or athletic, humor is important and remains a fixture in any daily interaction. I’m not joking!

African Time

2009-10-01T18:51:00.000+03:00

First off, I would like to apologize for my obvious propensity to ramble. Concision, I must admit, is not the mark of a History and Political Science major, just ask my poor thesis advisor who had to crawl through my 96-page senior yawn-inducer. A leisurely attitude towards time, perhaps resulting from our country’s Quaker beginnings or something like that (this is what I guess, but I‘m no historian), is often at odds with the fast paced and punctual lifestyle of the typical American. We enjoy fast food and fast cars, trains that leave when they are supposed to, meetings that start and end on time, and our children have made the founders of CliffsNotes very happy, wealthy men.

The Churchillian orators of the world need look no further for solace, Africa is the place for you. Time moves differently here, much more slowly and without the strict management as it does in the West. Ask any twenty something their age and he or she might surprise you by thinking about it for a moment. People are not late for an appointment, they are, vaguely, “delayed.” Try to fit in a quick bite to eat at a restaurant before the rain sets in and you’ll find yourself eating at a snails pace in order to coordinate your last bite with the last raindrop. Those of you who know me know also that I am no stranger to leisure, nevertheless, adjusting even to African time has been both interesting and challenging.

Last week we were warned that our MAPLE representative from the northern Ugandan city of Lira and a university student from Kampala would be stopping off in Mbale for the night in order to break up their long trip from the capital to Lira. Our executive director and arranger-extraordinaire told us they would be arriving here in town between 10 and 11 in the morning, but that they would call to alert us with an ETA. Upon hearing nothing at 10:30, we phoned Akullu Betty, who told us that they would be getting into the bus station around 11:30. Aha, we thought, we have a time of arrival , we can now safely make plans. Maybe a little stroll around the city (we had a few minor errands to run), perhaps a little lunch (we knew of a perfect café to wet our appetites), tons of time to do things before the afternoon thundershowers set in. The midday sun had already turned my scalp the color of Ugandan tomato by the time we had walked to the bus station from the house, precisely on time (11:30) and in good form: slacks, dress shoes and a tucked-in polo shirt. How smart and professional I looked. Upon getting to the bus station we phoned Betty, to be told that our timing was impeccable, that she, Betty from Lira, was in fact just outside of Mbale and would be there in a matter of minutes. To wait the short time until their arrival, Jaime, Brad and I plopped down on a curb and began to…sweat. After twenty or so minutes and still no sign of Akullu Betty and her compatriot, we decided to call and see if there had been an unforeseen snag, we conjectured a tsunami had swept across Kenya and washed out the only road into town, and that they had to fix it before Bill Gates arrived this afternoon. Call number three was placed shortly after noon:

“Hello.”
“Hello, Betty? This is Jaime and the boys, we were just wondering how close you were.”
“Ah, we are just getting to Soroti.” (Dejected look from Jaime--Soroti is about an hour and a half from Mbale by bus).
“Okay. You’ll call us when you get here?”
“Yes.”

Betty from Lira did eventually arrive in Mbale, though it was nearing 2 o’clock when she did. Two hours had elapsed since we first arrived at the bus station. My head was spinning from a constant diet of diesel exhaust and I would have probably sworn off beer for the remainder of my life just for a tube of sunscreen. Our afternoon plans put on hold, we found ourselves again guilty of trying to apply an American regimen in Africa.

Incident number two is less windy, but I think funny as well. After visiting some of the women vendors in Buguere market, Brad and I began heading back to the house. I was hungry. My inability to differentiate between a soup spoon and a ladle extends to breakfast, which I had skipped because the only thing I can really make is cold cereal. Lunch was still a couple of hours away, and I was starving. Lo and behold, there on the side of the road were some chapatti makers. Chappati is a Ugandan tortilla made from wheat and eggs and derives its flavor from a generous coating of cooking oil, it is delicious. Ignoring my hearts screaming protests, I pulled up to the first vendor and bought a couple of the round treats. As we were walking away and unable to restrain myself, I unpeeled their wrapping of soggy old newspaper and began to do what I now know is on par with emitting flatulence in the King of Buganda’s presence: eating while walking. Completely involved in tearing up the warm gooey bread I did not notice that everyone and their mother was staring at me with their jaws dropped in utter disbelief. Luckily for me, a few boda drivers decided they could not let me continue embarrassing myself and sprinted over on their bicycles to educate me on the nuances of Ugandan cultural norms:

“Hey Muzungu! What are you doing? Is it supper time? Dinner time?”
Not knowing what they were talking about, I did what I often do in such a situation: grinned like an idiot and shrugged my shoulders with a mouthful of food.
“Tea time? It is always tea time, eh Muzungu?”
Then they erupted in a spat of laughter that could be heard well over the din of the marketplace.

When I later told my Ugandan friend Eddie about what had happened, he laughed just as hard. Ugandans, he informed me, never ate and walked at the same time. One should always take their time, sit down and eat, and relax. Killing two birds with one stone to save time is almost unheard of here, yet we in the states make a point to do it. Time just moves differently here. For some odd reason, I don’t think too many people here are overstressed.

But why does the African maintain such an attitude towards time? There are competing theories, I’m sure. To find out, I asked my African friend Eddie Kasaumbeim, who told me straight up “Time is not Important..” Africans, he said, just don’t put it high on their list of priorities. There are no punishments for showing up late (or not at all), even for school. Similarly, time is not a major constraint that goes into production; take your time, get the job done, of course, but take your time. Eddie’s explanation brings to mind an idea propounded by LA Times Africa correspondent David Lamb. His book, The Africans, is somewhat dated and I read it some time ago, but if my memory serves me correctly Lamb conjectures Africans are leisurely towards time because they have been conditioned that way over thousands of years. Draughts and other major phenomena, events that are found more infrequently in the Western world, can unhinge even the best laid plans. Disease, too, is another culprit, and something Africa has no shortage of. So that’s my spiel, don’t quote me on any of it, of course, but I do hope you enjoyed reading it. It was a long posting, and I truly hope I didn’t make you late for something.

Pictures, oh my

2009-09-28T07:24:00.001+03:00

Brad filling in during a lesson with the local SACCO (Savings and Credit CO-OP). Wind blown hair girl is Jaime, our wonderful Eugenite housemate.

Relaxing by the pool on my birthday. The two people in the foreground are Simon, a British friend with a smile that apparently doesn't break cameras and Melissa, the daughter of Simon's fiancee. Also, Rachel, Jaime, and the sun-deficient Brad.

Brad lapping, Jaime slapping and Rachel napping.

Luke: Our field director and 2008 UO grad. Mothers, guard your noisy children.

Eddie, our Ugandan friend, and Brad enjoying the hammock I brought as much as they can before 72 ogling Ugandan children come to watch and, every once and a while just at the moment when you have closed your eyes to take a much needed nap, sneak up and push you so hard our support pole comes into play.

The House

2009-09-27T18:58:00.000+03:00

Preface:
In Fall 2006 I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt for about 6 months with my good buddy from school Mike Diaz. Either a desire to make things difficult for ourselves or the more conventional poor planning (or a combination thereof) placed me and mike in one of the biggest cities in the world without a clue of where we were going to live. We knew we wanted an apartment, but that was as much as we knew. Luckily for us, we were in contact with a girl from Nevada named Brenna who, as an incoming freshman at the American University, was also searching for a flat to rent. She just so happened to know an Egyptian guy about our age whom she had talked into taking her around to look at apartments, and the two of them agreed to let us tag along. Now, before I continue, I should mention that the study abroad department from our college practically demanded that we try an assimilate with the locals, eat what they eat, talk like they talk, and dress like they dress. This last idea posed a problem for us. Mike and I arrived in Cairo in the middle of an August heat wave wearing local attire: pants and a long sleeve shirt. On the day we set out to scope out flats, temperatures soared to well over 100 degrees, with humidity to boot. Sweating profusely before I even had my shoes tied, I thought about maybe just slipping on some shorts, just for the day, but then I remembered non-assimilation was in fact not an option. Suffer, because they suffer. Swearing under my breath, I stepped out into the noon heat. Within half a block’s walk I was planning to burn my shirt and pants and after a full block I had made a mental note to transfer to a school in Reykjavik. For the next month and a half, the pants and long sleeve shirts stayed in my closet. Screw assimilation, toujours comfort. Fortunately, with the thought of another day of apartment hunting on foot looming ahead of us, we all settled on an apartment rather quickly. One with ac, of course.

The situation when I arrived here in Uganda was quite different. MAPLE already had a house for us new arrivals; I merely had to unpack my gear straight into my room. The house is in many ways much better than I had expected. There is a full kitchen equipped with everything from brand new gas oven/range set shipped direct from Kampala to the older-but-still-functional cockroach population. We have a nice living room with two big chairs and a sofa that is in a constant state of occupation due to the fact that it is the only place where one can access the internet; queues occasionally wrap around the corner. Also in the living room is a dinner table that sees a surprisingly high amount of use, though I am afraid I cannot take much credit for this; my ability to cook only mushroom lasagna, French onion soup , and quesadillas has designated me a resident eater, but I remember to dish out some compliments about the food, which always warrants them. The lone bathroom was a wonderful surprise. An anomaly among the developing world, In Uganda one is actually permitted to flush used paper products, instead of having to throw them in a non-airtight waste bin. (Nor , even, does the person have to cross their fingers every time they flush something they shouldn‘t have in have or suffer rejection, as one person I know did on a daily basis while studying Arabic in Jordan.) The shower works just fine, and the lack of a hot water heater ensures that no one in the house has to wander into a steamy bathroom or try to shave while looking into a foggy mirror. The bedrooms are nice, with big windows to let in the healthy equatorial sun and large, flowing mosquito nets to provide each person with a sense of isolation, even though they are sleeping just across the room from someone else. Brad and I, either because we are so manly and tough or because we smell bad, were given the converted garage to sleep in. It is actually not as bad as you might think. Troglodyte Brad is able to sleep in all hours of the day should he feel compelled because there are no windows. I like it very much because the sounds from the rest of the house are muffled. There are some downsides, however. The metallic garage door and tin roof above us act as perfect conduits for that punishing “equatorial sun,” there are a few strategically placed holes in the ceiling located above our beds that could use some caulking, and cockroaches seem fond of creeping around our room at night until they find a strange place to die. The termite colony that slowly crept up a wall in our room has been knocked down by our housecleaner Eve.

The house is already starting to feel like home. Sure it is a little rough around the edges, but I lived out of a car for almost 5 months. Moreover, it is not so much the quality of the craftsmanship or the number of subwoofers that make a house great to live in, but a number of fun and interesting people to live there with. I know it sounds corny, but its all about the people. My housemates truly are amazing people and the young Ugandans who drop by from time to time provide a local spice to the medley. I shall have no problem living here for five months.

Cuisine

2009-09-24T00:02:00.000+03:00

“Do you guys want to slaughter a chicken tonight?”
“Sure, I guess. Do we need anything?
“Maybe some vegetables.”

Yes we did slaughter a chicken the other night (my second night here), and yes we did eat it, and yes I did take pictures. Luckily, Patrick, my housemate, is a resident pro at chicken preparation, decapitating, boiling, plucking, bone cracking and gutting with the manual dexterity of a concert pianist and the stomach of a menagerie janitor. Pictures will do this evening more justice than words.

My uncle who works in the wine industry has told me on multiple occasions that old white men are the worst people in the world to take food and drink advice from. Old white men, you see, have a palate that deteriorates faster than any other grouping of human in terms of ability to taste the subtleties and delicacies of what is ingested. I have always believed that, rather than claiming myself exempt from this interesting trend, I was born with an ancient man’s mouth in that all food to me remains void of the interesting nuances food critics and resterateurs like to stretch their vocabulary about. Zucchini is the lone exception, which has so many different tiers and dimensions of badness and boringness I could write a book.

Thus, while I try my hand at explaining Ugandan cuisine, take it with the knowledge that I am as inept at describing food as I am at resolving integrals. But, I am going to give it a throw.

Ugandan food is notoriously bland. So bland, in fact, that I rest easy at night knowing my premature case of White-Man’s-Palate has not prevented me from enjoying anything terribly spectacular. Rice, beans, smashed up plantains and the occasional large grain of sand make up the average Ugandan meal. Starches are called “food” and a bowl of liquid protein on the side is called “sauce,” and little variation in these combinations suggests not so much lack of imagination in the kitchen as a desire by Ugandans to stick with what they know and like. Every meal is “comfortable.” Spicy things might be the Ugandan’s worst nightmare. Fortunately for me a shortage of pizzazz means a lack of agitators, quite unlike Mexican food which requires me to find restaurants strategically located near by a water closet.

Uganda’s Indian population, however, has created a wonderful alternative. Illegally-soft cheese dumplings drenched in a spinach bath, an array of spicy lentil dishes from Chicken Afghani to the sponge like -yet-delicious Mutter Paneer and always reliable Tikka Masala. Moist, flaky garlic naan and butter naan may be employed by the eater for purposes of soaking, pinching, and shoveling, but not with the left hand, of course, which is the traditional wiping hand. Vegetarian Manchurian, be it “dry” or “wet,” is most likely tofu coated with a tender layer of more spices than I knew existed and swimming in or sitting alongside a heavy brown sauce The Stoney Tangarizi ginger beer washes down things nicely and wipes clean the slate for another, but entirely exciting, bite. Absolutely delicious.

Alas, prices reflect this contrast. Local food, palatable but not anything novel, does come with a very write-homeable price, usually about a dollar a meal (though my lunch yesterday, of chippiati and meat sauce, was only about 25 cents). Indian food is considerably more expensive, about five bucks.

A smile is creeping across my face. I do not think I shall starve, here in Uganda.

Transit

2009-09-22T06:53:00.000+03:00

The saner people in my organization spent about 18 hours total flying over here to Uganda: 10 hours from Seattle to London, and then another 8 from London to Entebbe, Uganda’s airport. However, those who know me also know that I sometimes like to make things difficult for myself. Here is a rundown of my travel experience getting to Uganda.

Portland to San Francisco, 2 hours
--Person in front of me immediately reclines their seat. They should make it protocol that you cannot recline your seat if the person behind you is over 6 feet tall, unless of course the recliner is more muscular than the reclinee.
--It ended up being OK because one does not need much space to eat their United Airlines peanuts.

San Francisco to Dubai, 15:35 hours
--Emirates from here on out. Rumors heard that the Emirates stewardesses are very pretty are affirmed.
--After a quick viewing of Angels and Demons, my personal monitor in front of me breaks, yet I decide not to move over to the empty seat next to me on the 10% capacity airplane for fear of repercussions.
--Though I had reclined my own seat (I checked to see if the guy behind me was bigger than me, he wasn‘t) , I found that laying forward at an angle and resting my head on fold down tray belonging to the seat next to me was the most comfortable way to get about 20 minutes of sleep.
--Emirates, despite their monitor problem, tops my list for their “no questions asked” policy regarding the consumption of their free alcohol.

Layover in Dubai, 11 hours
--Emirates puts its passengers up in a hotel for free if their layover is over 8 hours. Millennium Airport hotel was nice, and would have taken a picture of it if it were not for the intense humidity that kept steaming up my camera lens.
--Discovery made: Emirates can afford to give out free beer on flights only because they charge $8 per Budweiser at their hotel.
--Met an Ethiopian girl on my way back to the airport in the morning. She is beautiful, runs the only two yoga studios in all of Ethiopia, reads Niall Ferguson, laughs at my jokes and is not interested in marriage.

Dubai to Ethiopia, 4:30 hours
--Entertainment monitor number two breaks, but this time before I get to even watch a movie. I am starting to think that it is just me.
--I detect a faint odor emanating from somewhere behind me. Ah, the person directly behind me has taken his shoes off. I sure hope he is deplaning at our stopover in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia to Dubai, 3 hours
--Just as they are serving our lunch, the odor grows exponentially. I turn my air valve on maximum in hopes of trying to blow the odor away for I am beginning to lose my appetite, but it still gets stronger. As I am cutting my Kofta sausage my right elbow nudges up against something damp. It appears as though the gentleman behind me with the fungus issue has wedged his foot in between my seat and the side of the plane so far that it is intruding on the back third of my armrest.

I arrive in Entebbe, extremely hungry and entirely happy to be off the plane and in Uganda, my home for the next five plus months. Coming up: Chicken-slaughtering, stove-making, and insider accounts of Ugandan police compounds.

Welcome!

2009-09-13T19:31:00.000+03:00

"Uganda truly is the pearl of Africa"

--Sir Winston Churchill, 1907

Welcome everybody to my latest blog effort. Tomorrow I leave for Uganda where I will be working for a microdevelopment organization. The organization, named MAPLE, is posting me up in a house in the town of Mbale for about six months. While I am there, I will do my best keep everybody up to date with the pen(though I am certainly no Theroux) and photograph (you will see proof that I am no Ansel Adams).

Please enjoy, I promise to make this blog better than the last one!