When going into exile lessens the sting of another losing season

And here I was thinking it would be hard being away from hockey for the better part of a season.

Looks like I picked a good time to be as far away as possible from the Maple Leafs.

Anatomy of a Halloween costume

Certain typical celebrations have gone by the way-side while living here in Uganda.

For example, Thanksgiving came and went with little fanfare (though we tried our best). But would Halloween pass by unnoticed?

I think not.

A party was planned for Saturday night and so last week was full of discussion amongst everyone about costume ideas (and not to mention ideas on where to go for costume parts).

I was at a bit of a loss, until late Thursday night when someone suggested I go as a Mountie.

Hey, why not?

But where in heck do you find a Mountie costume in Uganda?

With that question in mind, here is how you find a Mountie costume in Uganda:

Friday, Noon: A reporter at the paper calls his tailor and explains I need a red jacket that buttons up right to the collar, and black dress pants. The tailor assures us he can find that, and tells us to meet him outside a Fish & Chips restaurant at 1 p.m. Saturday where, he promises, he will have what we need.

Saturday, 11 a.m.: Head down to Owino Market (you can see a few pictures of the market here). It is the busiest, craziest, most-chaotic market in Uganda and is a treasure trove of cheap clothing.

Saturday, 11:30 a.m.: Walk into the part of the market where shoes are sold. Here, hundreds of vendors are cramped into narrow corridors selling shoes of all kinds. I am immediately approach by some 20 vendors who demand to know what I am looking for. Knowing that I’ll have a hard time finding black cowboy boots in the market, I enlist their help. I explain what I need, they pull up a stool and demand that I sit, and then they fan out into the labyrinth-esque corridors of the market to find the boots.

Saturday, 11:40 a.m.: The first of the vendors returns, with a pair of low-cut dress shoes. Not remotely close to what I had described. I again describe what I need and show on my leg how high the boots have to come. He twists his face in thought, and then disappears again.

Saturday, 11:42 a.m.: Vendors around me begin cat-calling a woman who had  walked into the market.

Saturday, 11:43 a.m.: The vendors tap me on the shoulder and point at the woman in case I missed her entrance.

Saturday, 11:44 a.m.: Vendors huddle in conversation.

Saturday, 11:45 a.m.: One vendor leans back over to me and, smiling, says “They think you people do not like that kind of woman. You like your women portable.”

Chris: “Portable?”

Vendor: “Yes, you know, small.” *Vendors all explode in laughter*

Saturday, 11:50 a.m.: Several people return with increasingly higher dress shoes, but none are proper boots.

Saturday, 11:52 a.m.: Word begins to spread of a muzungu looking for cowboy boots. I am now surrounded by vendors pushing their boots at me.

Saturday, Noon: The first vendor I had spoken with when I came into the market finally returns with three pairs of proper cowboy boots. Just what I’d been looking for. He informs me he took so long because he could not find the boots in the market, and so had gone to area shops to find them and so will sell them to me for a “small” (read; “large”) commission.

Saturday, Noon-12:20 p.m.: Engage in spirited negotiation over the shockingly-high price, which involves several trips by the vendor back to the store to negotiate with the owner there over an acceptable price.

Saturday, 12:21 p.m.: I walk away with a pair of cowboy boots and far less money left in my pocket than I had anticipated.

Saturday, 12:23 p.m.: Approach a hat vendor. Having counted out how much money I need to get home, I know I do not have enough for most of the ideal hats. So instead I pull the vendor aside, explain my situation and tell him to show me what hats he would consider selling for the amount I have left. We try several on. I find one, and get on my way.

Saturday, 12:30 p.m.: Leave the market, but not before being offered cheap beef at a butcher shop. Looking at the majority of a full cow hanging on a metal hook, covered in flies, I politely decline.

Saturday, 1 p.m.: Arrive at the Fish & Chips restaurant to meet the tailor to get the suit.

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.: The tailor finally shows up.

Saturday, 2:31 p.m.: The tailor informs me he has been unable to find what I had asked for, but, not to worry, he tells me he does have a great grey-checkered suit that I would be interested in. I tell him that won’t do. So we  go walking in the nearby markets to find a ‘Plan B’ (a red suit jacket that I could wear with a red t-shirt)

Saturday, 3:15 p.m.: Finally find what I need.

Saturday, 3:30 p.m.: Buy two metres of yellow fabric for yellow lines on black pants and chevrons on red jacket.

Saturday, 3:35 p.m.: Find a woman with a sewing machine in the market who can sew on the fabric. A few minutes are taken to try, in vain, to explain why I needed her to do this.

Saturday, 3:45 p.m.: Find a red t-shirt in a nearby stall, and also buy a belt for costume.

Saturday, 4:30 p.m.:  Pick-up finished pants and jacket.

Saturday, 5 p.m.: Get home and try on costume. Look in mirror and confirm that, yes, it is in fact ridiculous.

Saturday, 7 p.m.: Head off to the party for a great time with friends.

Sunday, 1 a.m.: While chatting with a Texan friend I complain about how much I had to spend on the boots when I’ll likely never wear them again. Texan tries them on. Seeing that they fit perfect and, always in the market for a pair of cowboy boots, he buys them from me on the spot.

Here is the costume, in all its glory, and yes that is a Tin Man and Cowboy also in the picture (I happened to have my hands on a cigar when the picture was taken):

From the Bureau of Self-Promotion (B.S. for short)

UPDATED: Here is the direct link to the article: http://www.thestar.com/Travel/article/270055

In the Toronto area? Then why not pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Saturday Toronto Star and check out the travel section. I’ll have an article in there about Kidepo Valley National Park in Karamoja, bordering Sudan and Kenya.

Not in the Toronto area? Then swing on by to the paper’s Web site.

Really, there’s no excuse for not checking it out.

Ah-hem, sorry about the double-negative there… it’s been a long day. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Squirrel gets fat; Chris’s journalistic spirit decides to call it a day

If you need me, I’ll be hanging-out by the oak tree looking for plump squirrels.

 

Obviously that’s where the news is at, given that a story headlined “Fat squirrel trapped behind bars” is currently the most popular article on the BBC’s Web site.

 

Bruised journalistic spirit aside, this line is pretty classic:

“Inspector Graham Hammond said that the squirrel had “eyes bigger than its stomach” and had lost its figure while feasting in the wire-frame last week.”

Or maybe this is my favourite:
“He said he managed to widen the gaps between two of the bars with the aid of a crow-bar and a grasper – to release the squirrel, which was not hurt.

“As soon as the gap increased he shot off. I was slightly insulted,” he added.“

A sense of order arrives on Kampala’s roads

One of the most fascinating, and scariest, facets about life in Kampala is the traffic. Someone told me recently that Uganda has the third-highest rate of traffic fatalities in the world. I wouldn’t doubt it– though one report would refute this claim, and also make me wonder what the roads must be like in Swaziland.

Anyway, traffic here is fun. Recently, I was in a taxi car with a visiting friend and we got stuck in a traffic jam. You know, the usual kind of jam. A bus was stuck in the middle of an intersection, blocking traffic in all directions. A ray of sunlight would have a hard time reaching the street below, given the unbroken mass of cars hopelessly stuck in all directions. My friend’s jaw hit the floor as we watched drivers, including ours, do everything possible to escape the jam, including driving up on the sidewalk.

That’s par for the course here, where people regularly drive on the wrong side of the road to escape traffic and where not a single week has gone by when I haven’t witnessed a serious car accident.

But it’s not all chaos. In fact some of the traffic behaviour can be downright amusing.

For instance, watching traffic at one of the few intersections with traffic lights. There are only, by my count, four sets of traffic lights here, in a city approaching two million in population.

Other reasons aside, it’s actually quite practical to instead rely on roundabouts, which they do here, given the power supply problems. It is not uncommon to come up to one of the few traffic lights only to find them dark because the power is out. Roundabouts solve that problem.

But the roads have been undergoing one heck of a transformation in preparation for the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) taking place here in November, where presidents and prime ministers from 53 countries will come, along with the Queen, Prince Phillip and Prince Charles.

As such, Kampala has been getting a major face-lift. Roads repaved, sidewalks put in place, streetlights installed, etc.  It has meant a few months of major construction since I got here, but things are beginning to take shape with the meeting less than a month away and the results are startling.

Streets that were pitch-black at night are now lit; roads that were jammed with cars in every which way have now been made orderly with painted lines (though they often aren’t exactly straight…); stop signs have been installed; and police are deployed at every major intersection to monitor traffic behaviour.

And it is at those intersections that the difference is most striking. One intersection I cross twice a day was recently changed from a roundabout to traffic lights. At first, the change caused utter chaos. The signals were largely ignored and most time was spent trying to unsnarl traffic that crossed at the wrong time. I’d often cross this intersection on a boda-boda, weaving through the cars scattered about the intersection like a fistful of popsicle sticks tossed on the ground.

But then the police showed up. Now, they stand at the intersection and scold, and in one case I saw, even smack, boda-boda drivers that don’t obey the signals. They stand in the middle of the street stopping traffic in directions that have a red light.

Suddenly, chaos subsides. Pedestrians now cross the street on their signal, feeling much safer than before when they essentially played a game of real-life Frogger, dodging speeding cars as they scurried from lane to lane.

And so we can now see the effect CHOGM is having on day-to-day life here. The question, though, is whether we are witnessing a change in the culture of driving here, or whether CHOGM will be but an eye in the storm.

The consumate professional

Scene: Sitting in the newsroom, listening to music on my headphones while typing on deadline a front-page news feature about the mobile phone industry.

Disruption: The Fraggle Rock theme song inexplicably begins playing.

Response: At first befuddlement. How did this song get on my computer? And then, with a glance up at the clock revealing 20 minutes to deadline, a shrug of the shoulders and smile as the story gets finished to the tune of Fraggle Rock.

Dance your cares away/Worries for another day/Let the music play/Down on Fraggle Rock… 

When the end justifies the means…

For some reason, many parts in the world have adopted an hourly structure to income. A job is advertised based on how much an hour it will pay; someone takes or turns down a job based on how much it pays for each hour they will have to invest.

Here, I have time and again come across an entirely different way of thinking. It is instead based on an end point that asks “How much money do I need to survive?” If someone needs 5,000 shillings a day (nearly $3) to survive, they work until they have made that much money.

The boda-boda motorcycle driver I use most days has often provided me a lesson in economics. I pay him 3,000 shillings to drive me to work each morning. He pays 10,000 shillings a day to rent his motorcycle. Factor in the cost of fuel and any repairs he has to do on the bike, and he hopes to make 5,000 shillings, maybe 10,000 shillings on a very good day.

To get that he works long hours. And why not? When he is paying 10,000 shillings a day, why only work, say, eight hours a day when your overhead remains the same if you work 12 or more? And so, his day begins at 5 a.m. each morning and he finishes work sometime between 10 and 11 p.m. each evening. He works seven days a week, and so if I need a ride somewhere between those times, I can call him any day and he will come.

He used to own his own motorcycle, but it was stolen last December. So he tries to tuck away a few thousand shillings every now and then in the hopes of buying another one. A motorcycle costs between 1.5-2.1 million shillings.

“When you are poor, you cannot sit at home and wait for someone to help you,” he told me on the way to work the other day. “You must work very, very, hard and maybe then you will not be poor any more.”

His other reasoning for working such long hours?

“I am a bachelor,” he said while we were stopped at one of the few sets of traffic lights. “What else am I going to do? So I work.”

Last night I was at my barber getting my haircut. We got to talking about his lifestyle (I’m nosy like that—much of the reason why I became a journalist). He is 21, with a wife and two kids.

“What hours are you open?” I asked him.

He told me he starts work at 8 a.m. each morning and finishes work at 11 p.m. each evening.

“Are you here every day of the week?” I asked.

He smiled.

“Of course, I am here every day,” he answered. “I have a family to support.”

And so he cobbles together a living cutting hair for about 1,000 shillings (60 cents or so) per person, working 15 hours a day, seven days a week to support his family.

His barbershop is a model in enterprising. He has a barber chair, a photocopier, a computer with Internet and a phone, all of which can be used for a price.

Anything to make a living.

Chogm delegates unlikely to see Uganda’s poor

I haven’t posted an article up here for a while. This one came out on the weekend…

CHRISTOPHER MASON & UTHMAN KIYAGA

KAMPALA Shafic Kagimu is too busy hanging his laundry in the mid-day sun to notice the gleaming truck with police escorts that comes screaming into Kampala from the Entebbe Airport, carrying a cargo of luxury sedans to be used during Chogm. Despite living barely more than 100 metres from Entebbe Road Mr Kagimu, standing outside his mud-packed house that is squeezed between the railway tracks and a putrid drainage ditch, is a world away from that truck and what its cargo represents. When Chogm arrives in November, hundreds of foreign delegates will be driving on the newly re-paved (twice, in places) Entebbe Road, passing within sight of Katwe, home to one of Kampala’s largest and most disadvantaged slums. UNWANTED? Mr Kagimu and his wife Sharifa are residents of Katwe. Photo by Uthman Kiyaga A woman cooks in a railway reserve at Base Zone in Katwe. Children entering their shelter. Photos by Uthman Kiyaga And so, within sight of Chogm’s main thoroughfare, life will go on in the slums much as it did before, experiencing little of Chogm’s promised benefits beyond an increased police presence that has seen many of its youth rounded-up in recent months. It is here where claims by politicians, that Chogm will benefit all Ugandans, are put to the test, to see whether Kampala’s most impoverished will be affected by Chogm beyond the random arrests and the impact to be felt by an across the board 4.8 percent cut of government spending to fund Chogm’s budget. “The Queen is coming to see the condition of the Ugandan people, but I don’t know that she’ll see the conditions of the people here,” Mr Kagimu said in an interview outside his home. “We should ask her to use the train, because then she would see our lives.” With that he smiles and gestures up to the train tracks that are nearly within arms reach of his home. Mr Kagimu, who pays Shs10,000 a month for the small mud house he shares with his wife, lives in one of a half dozen or so mud structures packed tightly against the railway’s embankment. Residents say four or five trains pass by on a typical day. At times, many more come barreling through. The trains scatter dozens of pedestrians who use the tracks as a thoroughfare. Children, no more than 11 or 12 years old, struggle to run under the burden of heavy burlap sacks of scrap metals and plastics they plan to sell to local dealers. Nearby, an abandoned car is tarped-over to create another home. The smell of human feces permeates the surrounding grasses. Mr Kagimu said the number of people living in this cramped space, called Cambodia and known as being mostly former street people, ranges between 30 and 50. They are largely ignored by local authorities and even the rest of Katwe’s residents generally ignore them except to complain that Cambodia residents steal anything metal or plastic that can be re-sold as scrap. “The community fears them,” said Paddy Kiggundu, LCI chairman for Katwe Two. This isolation, along with crippling poverty, means the residents here have no access to outside help when one of them falls ill. “People are dying so much from strange diseases we don’t understand,” Mr Kagimu said. Over Mr Kagimu’s shoulder and across the drainage ditch, a man lies in the shade against a brick wall. His worried wife sits next to him, watching his arms, legs and lips spasm uncontrollably with an undiagnosed sickness that first appeared two weeks ago and has since gotten steadily worse. The family cannot afford to go to the doctor, and so they spend their days sitting in the shade, hoping that maybe tomorrow he will begin feeling better. They came from their village in eastern Uganda about a year ago, in the hopes of getting a good job in the city. Things have not gone well. “We just want to go back home, but we don’t have the money for transport,” the woman said. For months there have been reports of police arresting youth in the name of cleaning-up the streets ahead of Chogm. Ask a group of a dozen or so youth in Katwe whether any of them have been arrested during the sweeps and they all raise their hands. “We want Chogm, it is benefiting Uganda,” said Godfrey Ssozi, 21. “But we the youth, we do not benefit. We are arrested.” He and his fellow youth do odd jobs, like digging or carrying. On this day, they are gathered around a local water tap built by a private businessman. They are in charge of collecting Shs 50 from anyone who wants to fill their jerry can with water. Walking through Katwe Base Zone (Katwe is divided into six zones), women are busy cooking meat on open grills, or hanging laundry on lines strung between the homes. Children – a conspicuously high number of them given that it is a school day – run through the alleyways or sit in the shade. The community has a reputation for gang violence, theft and assaults. Undercover police keep a close eye on those coming and going from Katwe. On this day, they demand that visiting journalists identify themselves, asking whether they were aware of the dangers in Katwe and recommend hiding all valuables before entering Katwe. This close watch kept from the outside is symbolic of Katwe’s biggest problem – a problem that faces most of Kampala’s, and perhaps Uganda’s, most disadvantaged neighbourhoods – which is near complete isolation as a result of its reputation as a hive of chronic poverty and instability. That isolation will likely only be magnified during Chogm. A country eager to landscape its roundabouts and pave over its potholes is unlikely to put its social bumps and bruises on display for visiting dignitaries to see. But residents here are going to try to send a message to the hundreds of delegates traveling Entebbe Road to Kampala during Chogm. “We are going to stand by the side of the road and shout to let people know about our suffering,” Mr Kiggundu said. Judging by the police presence already in place along Entebbe Road, and in particular around the Clock Tower roundabout, any protestors are unlikely to get a warm greeting from authorities.

An Open Letter

To every laundry machine I’ve ever used,

Hi guys. I know, I know, it’s been a while. I’ve been busy, really I have.

But just because I haven’t been sending postcards does not mean I haven’t been thinking of you all.

In fact you all have often been on my mind. Like this morning when I was kneeling over the bathtub hand-washing my laundry. How were you guys so good at getting the cuffs of my pants so spotless? My hand-washing just can’t compare to your spin cycles.

After more than three months of hand-washing all my laundry, I have a new-found appreciation for the work you guys do.

To the washing machine I used during my brief time on Sunnyside Avenue in Ottawa: I’m sorry I got mad at you when you bumped and skipped your way across the basement floor. You bump and skip all you want, friend. So long as your bumping and skipping means I don’t have to hand-wash my clothes.

To the washing machine I used in Toronto: Look, I know I used to get really mad when you wouldn’t properly drain after a rinse cycle. Oh man, did I ever get angry when I had to take a dripping-wet load of clothes upstairs to hang-dry because you forgot to drain. Can we maybe move past that? Sure you can be a tad forgetful.  And yeah, I had to hang-dry my clothes a few times, and once or twice even used an iron to get the last bits of a shirt I had to wear dry before leaving the house. But dammit, I never once had to hand-wash my clothes because of you.

To all the other laundry machines I have used: You’re all special. Very, very special.

With great, great, great affection,

Chris

p.s. Say hi to the dryers for me. And tell them I think of them every time I hang my clothes out to dry, wondering if it will pour rain the moment I leave the house. Because it usually does.

The Boda Chronicles

Snippets of conversations from recent boda-boda rides (Updated at bottom following my boda-boda trip home after writing this post…);

Scene: Riding a boda-boda motorcycle through Kampala’s crazy, chaotic rush hour traffic jam

Boda driver, while weaving between stopped cars: Do you have jam in your country?

Me: Well… yeah.

Boda driver: Really? I would not think that you have jam in your country. You have boda-bodas in your country?

Me: No, we don’t have boda-bodas.

Boda driver: How would I find work in your country?

Me: Maybe you could be our first boda-boda driver!

We both smile– he at the prospect of being ahead of the curve, and me at the image of a single Soviet-era, belching motorcycle careening down the streets of Toronto with a driver who wears a winter parka in any weather below 25 degrees Celsius.

__________________________
Scene: Riding a boda-boda in the early evening to a friend’s house. The conversation quickly turns to the boda-boda driver’s fool-proof business proposal.

Boda driver: We go into business, you and I.

Me: Oh, really?

Boda driver: You come to our country, you invest in our country. You buy two cars, and I drive them for you. We run special hire business together, make lots of money.

Me: Are you asking me to invest in your country, or to invest in you?

Boda driver: pregnant pause … In your country it is easy to make a million dollars, yes?

_____________________________________

Scene: Having driven me home, the boda driver and I strike up a conversation while I dig through my backpack for change.

Boda driver, wearing a helmet of Marvin the Martian-esque proportions: Have you been to the west of Uganda?

Me, trying to distinguish between 100 and 200 shilling coins: No, I haven’t.

Boda driver: It is beautiful, you should come visit. My village is there.

Me: Ah, that’s great. I hope to see the west sometime soon.

Boda driver: You come with me to my village. We will boil bananas in the lake.

Me, looking up from my handful of coins utterly dumbfounded: Boil bananas in the lake?

Boda driver: In my village there are lakes that are very warm…..

Me: Like hot springs?

Boda driver: Yes, hot springs! We put bananas in the lake and they become matooke.

Me, not entirely convinced that I want to drive across the country for matooke when I already get an overload of it in Kampala: Ahhh, sounds like fun.

_____________________________________

Updated:

Scene: Going home on a boda-boda after originally putting up this post. In the middle of rush-hour, the motorcycle begins chugging, and soon coasts to a stop on the side of the road. 

Chris: Looks like we’re out of gas, friend.

Boda-boda driver: No problem, no problem.

Chris and the driver get off the motorcycle. Driver tips the bike down to the ground to pour the few remaining drops of fuel into the gas line. He then takes the gas cap off the tank, forms a seal around the hole using his lips, and blows into the tank to force the fuel into the line. Chris and the driver get back on the motorcycle. 

Boda driver, upon  starting the engine and driving off, shaking his fist in the air triumphantly: “Jesus wants us to get home today! Yes!”

*15 seconds pass*

Motorcycle again begins to chug and dies with a painful groan as we again coast to a stop.  A few more seconds pass with Chris and boda driver sitting on the stalled bike.

Chris: Sebo? (Luganda for ‘Sir’)

Boda driver: Yes?

Chris: I don’t think Jesus wants us to get home today.

A lesson in sharing

Journalists are generally territorial about four things: Notebooks, pens, source lists and bylines.

Fiddle around with any of those and you best watch out.

Today, we’re dealing with the last item.

Journalists generally guard their byline because it’s the one form of public recognition for the work they do. In that sense, territorial tendencies are understandable. But for all the hot air journalists expend on protecting their byline, studies show that bylines are one of the last things many newspaper readers actually notice.

Over the years, I’ve generally avoided problems with other reporters. It’s usually simple enough to sort out who should get a byline based on each person’s contribution.

But here it’s a different ballgame. Earlier this week I visited a slum in the city for a story running this weekend. I went along with a photographer who, after we got back, put together a small write-up and sent it to me for consideration as part of the story.

The story took a direction that didn’t include that, though, so I filed the story with my byline and moved on to other assignments.

Earlier today, the photographer came to me, and sat down with a very disappointed expression. “Chris, why didn’t you put my byline on the story?”

He had just been up with an editor and saw only my name at the top. I began explaining how the story ended up coming together differently, and how the original assignment was for me to write and him to take photos.

But then something clicked.

“Do you get paid extra if you get a byline in the paper?” I asked.

“Well yeah, that’s how I make a living, Chris.”

I sighed. Anywhere else I would have said no, because to get a byline you need to have written part of the article. Every word in that article was mine. But how do you say that to someone whose base salary is about $115 a month?

So we went for a walk, upstairs, to make sure the editor added his byline. Afterwards, I came back to my desk and gave it some more thought. I even considered pulling the photographer aside later on to explain that this time we’d go with a double-byline but that in the future he shouldn’t expect to get one unless he has made more of a contribution.

But doesn’t that all become redundant when someone can boost their very modest salary by as much as 10 per cent by getting a byline on a story he took photos for? Unsure of exactly how I felt, I let things be, figuring that his help in translating while we were on assignment would be enough to warrant the byline.

It’s a theme that has come up before. Sometimes I get sent articles by editors who ask me to add a different element, do a re-write, etc. At times this means doing enough work that, anywhere else, would warrant a byline. But here I keep it off, knowing that if two reporters’ names are on a story, each reporter only gets a half-share of the money.

Add this to the long list of issues here that, collectively, have put some pretty sizable cracks in my conventional thinking.

Confessions of a wayward book lover

For a guy whose book-filled boxes are weighing down basement floors across the land I left behind, it was probably unrealistic to expect I could go through seven months here without accumulating more heavy, suitcase-burdening books.

I tried to hold off, really I did. During the first month I read the two books I brought with me, borrowed a couple more and even swapped for one at the hostel I was staying at (which turned out to be an out-dated collection of columns written by a British politician. A real page-turner).

But then cracks began to show. I could only read newspapers and old magazines for so long. I was talking more and more with people who were recommending books– often books written by journalists who have worked in Africa, or books by African authors– that dealt with what, to me, were often new and fascinating topics.

So I bought a book. It was just a small fella. Paperback, even. Easy to find room for in a suitcase (because once purchased, I do not give up books easily).

Then I bought another. This one was a bit bigger, a bit heavier. But so good.

Then another.

And now another.

I now have a small, and growing, pile of books in my room that stare at me guiltily like a pack of cigarettes owned by someone who promised himself he’d quit smoking.

I’ve spent nights lying under my mosquito net reading about a Polish journalist’s life in Nigeria, days in the sun reading about a West African boy’s life, afternoons in cafes reading about Rwanda in the 1990s, evenings by the light of a kerosene lamp reading about Congo around the same time and now a book detailing the jaw-dropping history of how the Democratic Republic of Congo actually came to be.

There are worse things to be addicted to, right?

Steps away from CHOGM, but out of reach of its benefits, slum life marches on

Irony can come in all shapes and sizes. Today it came in the form of a transport truck carrying six brand new luxury cars, barreling down the road from the airport with police escorts.

We stood in an open expanse of dirt mounds, layered with garbage and feces of the human and animal variety, watching the convoy scream its way through the street. Its cargo of cars are to be used during next month’s meeting of Commonwealth heads of government (known as ‘CHOGM’) to be held here.

I had come to visit one of Kampala’s many, but arguably one of its most notorious, slums, with a photographer and two local aid workers, one of whom grew up in this particular slum, to learn more about life in this ramshackle neighbourhood that thousands of people drive past every day.

It sits on the western edge of Kampala, visible to anyone heading to or from the airport in Entebbe. In fact, besides being used as a route for the delivery of all the luxury goods arriving in this country as it prepares for CHOGM, the road itself has been completely re-done twice (because contractors used poor asphalt the first time) since I arrived here three months ago. All so that visiting dignitaries will have smooth sailing when they fly into town for three days in November.

Politicians here have said time-and-time again that CHOGM will benefit all Ugandans; that cutting every single government budget (health, education, etc.) by five per cent to help pay the costs of preparing for the conference would be worthwhile; that freezing a campaign to bring electricity to rural Ugandans (with a goal of achieving 10 per cent coverage by 2010) to help pay for a boost in power here in Kampala to lessen the chance of brown-outs during CHOGM will, in the long run, benefit all Ugandans.

The claims were difficult to believe, but rolling your eyes at the ludicrous nature of these statements is easy to do when you’re listening to them come from politicians during one-on-one interviews or from the comfortable seat in a press conference theatre.

So we set out to put these statements to the test. The Katwe slum is about the closest that CHOGM preparations come to the lives of Kampala’s most disadvantaged residents. The slum sits beside the road to the airport, and as if to drive the point home, the truck carrying the luxury cars blew past us just as we were about to cross the train tracks and descend into the slum.

We were reminded of the reputation this slum has within minutes of crossing the tracks. We first met some young kids, none older than 11, carrying large and heavy burlap sacks full of scrap metal and plastic.

This is how the kids, long dropped out of school, make a living. It is also a source of some of the insecurity people complain about, as they say these kids break into houses to steal anything—from pots and pans to plastic jugs— that could be sold as scrap material.

After leaving the kids and speaking briefly with a man who lived in a tiny mud building crammed between the railway tracks and a dark, pungent drainage ditch, we were approached by a group of men demanding to know who we were.

They spoke with my colleagues in Luganda, so I spent most of the conversation trying to pick up whatever words I recognized. From what I could discern, they claimed to be security officials of some sort and wanted to know what we were doing there.

Though strong and fit, their clothing was disheveled and dirty. One of the four wore mismatched plastic sandals. As the conversation continued, their demeanour softened and we all introduced ourselves.

It turns out they were undercover detectives who had been following us since we’d entered the slum. They stopped us to warn us and make sure we knew the safety threats that existed in the slums. We told them that yes, we knew about the problems. They shrugged, advised us to hide our valuables and warned that it was unlikely anyone in the slum would come to our assistance if we were accosted. Then they walked back to the shade where they sat, watching those who came and went.

We walked through the narrow, dirt paths that separated the collection of one-room homes. Some were made of concrete and mud brick. Others were made from mud that had been mixed with straw to fortify it. We crossed over drainage ditches, stepped around human feces and attracted a small collection of children who followed us through the slum.

Our first stop was the local councilor who is in charge of the slum. We spoke with him in his cramped, windowless office, also made from mud. He was interesting to speak with, but I was surprised when he told us he’d never actually been down to the worst part of the slum, called Cambodia, where we were interested in spending most of our time. The area was populated with street people who had taken to living in ramshackle shacks and one family even living in the tarped-over shell of a car.

Some had been living there as many as five years but they still aren’t welcome as far as the rest of the slum’s residents are concerned.

“They come in here and steal anything from our homes that they think they can sell as scrap metal,” the councilor told us.

This detachment was confirmed later on when we were speaking with a young man who had moved off the streets and into this tiny mud home (rent is 10,000 shillings a month, or about $6). We asked whether anyone from the community helps these people who live beside the train tracks.

“The only time they come to us is when they help us bury our dead,” the man told us.

After leaving the councilor’s office (we also asked whether he thinks the area residents will benefit at all from CHOGM. He answered in saying they plan to organize protests along the nearby road that most of the delegates will be using to reach Kampala from the airport in the hopes that someone will pay attention to their plight), we walked through the collection of shacks and stopped at a group of boys and young men who were sitting in the shade.

They were gathered around a community water tap. A businessman had installed the tap, and charged residents 50 shillings (about 8 cents) to fill a jerry can. These boys and young men were in charge of accepting payment from those who came for water.

We had been told that one of the slum’s problems (common in many places here) is idle youth who have no prospect for education or employment. Beyond the lack of hope, idle hands often find a way of getting into trouble.

But these guys were great. We spoke with them for 15 minutes or so (though one immediately elected himself as the group’s spokesperson to try to keep things orderly), about the challenges they face in the slum, and also about CHOGM.

They talked about being arrested merely for standing around in public areas. I asked (through a translator) everyone in the group to raise their hand if they had been arrested. Every single hand in the group, about 15, shot up. The main guy smiled as he raised his hand, as though it was a silly notion to think that any of them may have escaped arrest.

We discussed CHOGM and how the arrests were related to CHOGM for a few minutes before saying good-bye. As we turned to leave, a few of them stopped someone in our group to ask if we could explain what CHOGM is. Here they all were, being arrested by police trying to clear the streets for CHOGM and these guys don’t even know what it is. They just know that, whatever CHOGM is, it’s a giant pain for anyone here in the slum.

We continued on, weaving our way between buildings and shacks, and eventually out the back end of the neighbourhood, where we walked into an open, grassy area that was criss-crossed by a putrid and foul-smelling river that drained into a larger, and more putrid, river.

We crossed the weaving small river several times, each time by balancing across a narrow, rotting piece of wood that had been placed across. Eventually we came full-circle back to the train tracks where we had started. We wanted to return to the young man we’d spoken with first, and so made our way in that direction.

At the end of a mud-brick wall, the path turned left and we could see the young man across the drainage ditch, hanging his laundry. But first we were stopped by a family we met at the end of that mud-brick wall.

The wife sat in the grass. Her husband lay on a sheet, shaking and with his eyes closed. Their young son sat on the other side of the husband, all cramped into a small sliver of shade.

We knelt down and spoke with the wife. Every now and then the husband opened his eyes and muttered a few words in response to our questions, but otherwise he lay in silence, as his arms, legs and lips going into periodic spasms.

The husband had fallen ill two weeks ago and had gotten steadily worse. The family could not afford to go to the doctor, and so they spent their days sitting in the shade, hoping that maybe tomorrow he will begin feeling better.

We asked how they’d managed to scrape together money here in the city. This was one of the few times the husband opened his eyes and, in hardly a whisper, he said he was the only one in the family who could work. The wife cast her eyes down at the ground. I wondered whether she may have been thinking about life without her husband, who gave no reason to believe he’d regain his health.

They had, like many in this corner of the slum, come to Kampala from other parts of the country in the hopes of making more money than they could in their village in the eastern region of Uganda.

There they had land, but much of rural Uganda does not function on much of a cash economy, so many flock to the city or larger towns in the hopes of a paying job.

Few succeed, and this family’s experience was no different. They had been in Kampala about a year, and desperately wanted to go back to the village. Here they lived in a mud shack a few metres away from the train tracks, with no access to a toilet and few job prospects. The husband found the odd job carrying things for businessmen, but otherwise they found no prospects in the city.

We eventually said our good-byes and continued on our way for our final interview, with the young man named Godfrey who we had spoken with earlier.

Taking a break from hanging laundry, he crouched down and entered his home, coming out with a bench that he placed in the dirt. The small bench was as wide as the path, separating the train tracks from the drainage ditch, on which his home was built.

He took one of his shirts off the line, used it to wipe down the bench and gestured for us to sit. We were his guests, and he wished to make us as comfortable as possible.

We sat under the scorching sun and spoke with him for 20 or so minutes, about his life and about life here in the slum.

“Some people pass here and think we’re all mad. But when we walk up on the train tracks, do we not walk just like everybody else?” he said. “We are the same as all those people who live in the big houses. I mean, we’re all just human beings, right?”

He told us about leaving his village two years ago, to come to Kampala where he thought opportunity awaited. Unfortunately, it did not. And he spent a year living on the streets before he managed to scrape together some money to get this one-room mud house, perhaps the size of a small walk-in closet, where he lived with his wife.

We asked whether he knew what CHOGM is. He then went into a very detailed description of the meeting, explaining how the heads of state from all the Commonwealth countries would be visiting Uganda in November.

We then asked whether he thought the thousands of people living here in Katwe would benefit at all from the meeting, and all the money being spent to prepare for the meeting.

“I hear the Queen is coming to see the condition of the Ugandan people, but I don’t know that she’ll see the conditions of the people here,” he said. “Maybe we should ask her to use the train, because then she’d see our lives here.”

He said that last bit with a smile, and sheepish laugh, as he pointed up to the train tracks that were barely more than an arms-length away from his home.

How many times a day do trains pass by here, I asked.

“Four, five times a day but sometimes it’s too many to count,” he said.

We talked a bit more about health and education.

“In this area people are dying so much from strange diseases we don’t understand,” Godfrey said. Over his shoulder I could see the man we met earlier, still lying in the shade, shaking.

On education, he said he wants to go back to school. He dropped out in grade five, but still hopes to go back and finish.

And with that, we said our good-byes. As we shook hands, Godfrey spoke to me in Luganda. I picked up enough words to understand what he was saying and answered using a few simple words I’ve become comfortable with. He laughed. “You’re learning Luganda?”

I’m trying, I told him.

We climbed back up the steep embankment to the train tracks to begin our walk back to the main road. Standing on top of the elevated tracks, one could look to the left and see the slum in all its rusted, dilapidated glory. Looking to the right, in the direction we were walking, a panorama of downtown Kampala, with its gleaming office buildings and recently paved roads, stared back at us.

Our backs turned to Katwe, it was the perfect vantage point for a look at the only slice of Kampala that CHOGM delegates are likely to see in November.

Sorry, I don’t speak ‘Canadian’

Setting: Newsroom, this afternoon

Scene: Writing a story, listening to The Weakerthans on my headphones when I notice a reporter speaking to me. Taking out my earphones, I turn to her.

Reporter, pulling out her notebook: Chris, I want you to write down some typical greetings in Canada.

Chris: Huh?

Reporter: You know, like how you say hello in ‘Canadian’.

Chris: Huh?

Reporter: How do you greet people in your local language?

Chris, finally catching on, smiling: Um, well usually with things like “Hello” and “How are you?”

Reporter, looking confused: No, no, I mean your local language.

Chris: We don’t have local languages. The national languages are English and French.

Reporter, even more confused: You don’t have tribes?

Chris: *Insert lengthy explanation of the history of Native Canadians, their tribes, languages and how modern-day Canadian society formed following the arrival of Europeans*

Reporter: Oh. So what language do you speak at home?

Chris: English.

Reporter, scrunching her nose and looking disappointed: That’s no fun.

45 years in, many wait for a reason to celebrate

Yesterday was Independence Day here in Uganda, and a national holiday for its citizens.

But you wouldn’t have known it was a holiday judging by the street scene here yesterday. Most shops were open, traffic was as busy as ever and even the newsroom here was nearly as bustling as usual despite it being a day most people were supposed to be off work.

I had an appointment to meet someone yesterday morning to discuss a story I’m doing next week that I need her help with since it involves me spending some time in the slums and I need someone who knows the people there (not to mention the languages) to accompany me. As we waited for our tea to arrive at the cafe, I asked her if she would be doing anything for Independence Day.

“Me? No, I do not celebrate such things. What is there to celebrate?” she said, dismissing the notion with a wave of her hand.

The newspapers have mostly been full of take-stock articles and analysis pieces, using the occasion of a 45th anniversary to assess just what Uganda has accomplished and where it is going. The tone (other than that which appeared in the state-run newspaper, which is awash in coverage of the president’s statements)? The leading piece on independence in today’s paper said Ugandans have been living in “a sea of ignorance” for 45 years. “There has been great disappointment, all from never having known what was what, who was who, and most of the 45 years are a wasted period in politics,” the piece went on to say.

The Monitor didn’t even cover the Independence Day festivities that were held with great fanfare yesterday.

Why such a tone on what, for many countries, is a day to celebrate and reflect on progress? Especially considering that among African countries Uganda has performed reasonably well given its tumultuous past and ongoing battles with rebels in the north.

There is a sense that Ugandans expect more from a country with a growing population, many natural resources and, finally, political stability. Here is a country preparing to host an international conference of Commonwealth heads of state next month. Millions are being spent to boost Kampala’s infrastructure, and yet a few weeks ago when I was in the worst of the flood-affected regions, the work crews there could not fix the roads because the government hadn’t given them money to put gas in their trucks.

Yesterday I glanced over the shoulder of a reporter in the newsroom who was writing an opinion piece about independence. “Here we are, 45 years later, with nothing to show for independence but a flag, a passport and a national anthem,” the piece read.

Many times since moving here, I have found myself in casual conversations and debates with Ugandans about the notion of progress here. More often then not it was I who was pointing out signs of progress, with the Ugandan(s) arguing that, progress aside, this country’s citizens should be able to expect more.

On my way into work this morning I was talking with my boda-boda driver. I asked him whether he celebrated Independence Day yesterday.

“No, I was in the village,” he said, referring to the village he grew up in about 16 kms outside Kampala. “And why should we celebrate, anyway? The only people who have something to celebrate are the president, his family and his friends.”

As though to prove his point, my driver pointed to the mall we were passing at the time. “You see this mall, this beautiful mall? That is a sign of progress but what is there to celebrate? It was built by a friend of the president’s and Ugandans get only the lowest jobs there,” he said. “Why should we celebrate that?”

He was getting more agitated as we drove.

“You see that hotel?” he said, pointing to an imposing hotel, one of the city’s nicest, visible in the distance. “All these big hotels and businesses run by outsiders and nothing but the low jobs for Ugandans. And this? This is what we’re supposed to celebrate on Independence Day?”

Though it is disheartening to see that this sentiment is felt so strongly that a country’s citizens don’t even bother to acknowledge a national holiday by taking the day off, at the same time it shows promise. People here generally feel this country has every reason to prosper, which gives hope that eventually it will.

But until then, celebrations that reach the broader population will have to be put on hold.

Karamoja, Trip Two (at long last)

Nearly after a month after having gone there, here is an account of the most recent trip up to Karamoja.

Day One– September 11th

Moroto, Karamoja

Since the years when Britain governed Uganda, the Karamoja region in the region’s northeast has been looked on as a land of undeveloped, violent and backwards people.

This reputation was forged back when the rest of the country, and the continent for that matter, was hardly “developed”, at least in the western sense. But as the rest of Uganda, and Africa, adopts new technologies and otherwise continues to identify more with a western way of life, Karamoja, entrenched in a traditional lifestyle, becomes increasingly marginalized in Uganda.

This is a land of set-in-stone lifestyles. It is a land of people who, at face value anyway, live a way of life that transcends time. Their lifestyle could have been lived as it is today, two hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, six hundred years ago and so on.

They are cattle people. They live in mud huts, and herd their cattle all day, also eating, or selling in market, whatever little food they are able to grow in the soil that is often either bone dry or flooded.

But something is happening here. Though life here remains much the same, change is being forced upon the Karamojong.

Cattle are less prevalent, thanks to near constant cattle raids, and a government crackdown on guns (one of the few modern implements that has taken hold) that prevents reciprocal raids. As such, a way of life is slowly eroding.

And with that comes a search for new coping mechanisms. In Karamojong society, men are in charge of protecting the cattle, while women look after the house, the garden, the children and water supply.

Take away the cattle, and suddenly women are the breadwinners and caregivers. Suddenly they hold a lot more power in the home. This has left a sector of frustrated men who have turned to the bottle.

“Give a man in Karamoja a loan and he spends it on alcohol or gets himself a new wife with the money,” said a local government official over dinner tonight. “Give a woman a loan and she buys animals that feed her family.”

He pointed out how women are becoming more vocal at town meetings. They still don’t sit with the men, and instead sit off to the side. But they don’t sit quietly any more. They listen, and raise their voices when a decision they disagree with is about to be made.

This region, unsettled by gun-filled cattle raids and roadside ambushes (hence us wearing bulletproof vests and helmets while driving today), has seen a dip in violence of late. People attribute it mostly to a government-enforced disarmament process that has seen the army sweep through, confiscating guns and throwing people in prison for possession of illegal weapons.

The government has played it up as a success story, but several agencies have documented rights’ abuses by soldiers.

This came up during dinner tonight. The consensus was that, yes, there are fewer guns. But the problems that led people to arm themselves have not been addressed. People are still stealing cattle. Tribes still don’t get along. And families are still starving.

Food has become central to nearly every kind of development here. When kids go to school, they get food. When they go to the hospital, they get food. It goes on and on.

“When there’s smoke, there’s school,’ one official said at dinner tonight. He said families look across to the school each morning. If smoke is rising from it, that means food is being prepared so they go to school. No smoke, no school that day.

“We sometimes feel like we’re building sand castles here,” a UNICEF official said during the conversation. “We’re building and building, but as soon as the tide comes in, everything gets wiped out.”

They find providing food is essential to the success of any program they run. No food, no attendance. But with food comes a flood of people who can be there for the wrong reasons. So they get more people than they can handle, and they are people who disappear the moment the food is gone.

* * *
Our day began early in Kampala. Three of us reporters (me, a freelance photographer and Kenyan journalist from Nairobi who writes for the UN news service) met at the OCHA office in Kampala for a briefing there, before leaving for the Entebbe Airport. There were only four of us on the flight, so we had a tiny plane. I plunked myself down right behind the pilot to get a good view. After climbing into the plane, our pilot Jan twisted around in his seat like a Dad lecturing the kids in the backseat to tell us about our flight and what to do in case of an emergency.

In a few minutes we were in the air. I watched out the window for a while—I’ll never become bored with the landscape here— but eventually fell asleep to the music on my iPod.

I woke up 15 or so minutes before we were to land, so watched our slow descent into the valley.

It was a bit unsettling to watch our pilot reach down for a map several times and look at it quizzically while peering over the dashboard. “I know there’s supposed to be a landing strip here someplace…” was what I imagined going through his head.

Upon landing, we were mobbed by kids who came running from the fields to greet the plane. They didn’t say much, or do much for that matter. They just watched and scattered each time one of the local officials yelled at them, only to return a moment later.

Then we drove to the nearby Matany hospital (unlike last time, we landed at the landing strip right beside the Matany trading centre). It’s the same hospital we toured on the last trip, but it was still interesting nonetheless. We had a nice lunch and then the head doctor, James, took us on a tour. I was happy to hear that the man I interviewed on the last trip who had been shot in both legs was recovering well.

In the children’s nutrition ward I had one of the nurses show me how they judge whether a child is malnourished. It’s a small paper strip that is a sort of wristband. They wrap it around the child’s bicep, and the total circumference dictates to what extent they are malnourished. Under 13 cm, and they’re in trouble. The kid she demonstrated on had an arm that was 11 cm around. Go measure 11 cm and wrap it into a circle, and picture that as someone’s arm. It’s shockingly small.

With the help of a nurse who translated, I asked the child’s mother how old the child was. She didn’t know, but guessed the kid was about three. She had just brought the child in today, having walked two hours to do so.

Then we were off for the 45 minute drive to Moroto to have a chat with UN officials at their compound, and then have dinner with local officials at the hotel we’re staying at in the town.

We all had to don bulletproof vests and helmets for the drive. The UN suffered two road ambush attacks in August and they’re not messing around. We had armed soldiers at the front and back of our convoy of two Land Rovers. “We’ve lost a lot of people to that stretch of road,” Moses, the local CAO, said at dinner. He and a couple others at the table then listed off people they knew who had been attacked or killed on that stretch of road. Moses’ village where he grew up is on that stretch of road. “I never used to go home without an armed escort,” he said. “But it’s better now.”

It took me a second to process what it must be like to live 16 km from his home village, but to only be able to make that trip if he takes an armed escort with him.

We met with a few UN officials at their compound, which sits in a beautiful setting at the foot of Mount Moroto. We sat at a round table in a round hut, talking about various issues. We spent much of today doing that— speaking broadly about problems here. We have several more days to get into specifics, and I can feel already that there will be some good reporting to come out of this trip.

Now I’m sitting in my hotel room, typing this on what I think is the most comfortable bed I have laid in since coming to Uganda. We’ll be here two nights and I’m going to enjoy these two sleeps immensely.

It just passed 11 p.m. and, as I was warned, the power slowly faded away and the lights went out. They don’t have an electricity grid in the area— instead the whole town is hooked up to a large generator that provides a few hours of power each evening. Otherwise this whole region of one million lives in the dark.
Day Two– September 12th

Moroto, Karamoja

This morning I woke up feeling like I’d been up for three days. Maybe it was the buzzing mosquitos, sounding like Red Baron fliers dive-bombing my mosquito net. They were helped by the monstrous holes in the net, which had me flailing blindly, kind of like King Kong swatting at those pesky planes from the top of the Empire State Building. ( I couldn’t turn on a light to aid in the hunt since there is only power from 6 p.m. until 11 p.m. each night.

Anyway, we had a breakfast of a boiled egg, mandazi, banana and tea, before setting off for the day.

We began with a meeting at the district offices with the district chairman and the CAO, Moses, who was at dinner here at the hotel last night. We discussed some of the issues facing the district in surprisingly plush offices. The office floor was lined with red carpet. The chairman’s desk faced the door, and overstuffed chairs were lined, facing each other between his desk and the door, creating a gauntlet of sorts. Each chair had doilies on the back and arms.

After our interview, we went on a tour with the WFP of the Moroto Hospital. I picked up some info for a story on HIV rates here in Karamoja. The region was isolated from the rest of the country, and Africa, as HIV rates skyrocketed elsewhere in the ’80s. Because of this isolation, Karamoja’s rates were low while everyone else was dying. But then the rest of Uganda, and eventually much of East Africa, began tackling the problem and their numbers went down. As education has lowered rates elsewhere, Karamoja’s isolation has come back to hurt it, since that education has not reached here and so the rate is growing at an alarming rate. (One story, perhaps as much myth as truth, has it that condoms were distributed to Karamojong men as part of an effort to promote safe sex. The men were told that the condoms would protect them against HIV. Taking the advice at face value, the villages were soon full of men walking around wearing condoms at all times.)

Much of the HIV and TB treatments, and care for young mothers, is centered around food. Come in for treatment, and we’ll give you food. As we toured the facilities, a young boy stumbled around the compound, drunk. The medical superintendent there said he was babbling on about how he was denied food rations. We’ve been told several times that many of those who cannot get food turn instead to the local alcoholic brew, since it’s all they can afford and it dulls the pain of hunger. Here was that issue embodied by this young boy, stumbling around wrapped in a colourful blanket, drunk as anything. These are the sights that weigh heaviest.

Afterwards we toured a school, and teachers’ quarters being built there.

We went to one of the handful of restaurants in town for a mid-afternoon lunch. Still recovering from the stomach parasite that hit last week, I still don’t have a full appetite. But I was hungry going in, and sat down to… well… steamed rice, beans and a chiapatti. It’s all well and good, and I’m still full at 11 p.m. without having had dinner. But damn was it bland. I’m either going to gorge when I travel back home at the end of this contract, having missed out on familiar foods, or I’ll be so used to the utilitarian approach to food here that I’ll keep that approach when I get back. Who knows, but I had a heck of a time choking down lunch. I think it’s just a matter of hitting a wall every now and then.

Then we went to a business starting up here that is harvesting gum from trees that is then used in things like soap and other products. It’s part of a government-supported way to get people away from cattle, and to replace the livelihoods of those who have had their cattle stolen. Cattle are central to so many of the problems facing the region here, that it makes sense. But sitting in the sparse office of these people, I couldn’t help but feel that something like this cannot replace a culture that has thrived, and died, on cattle since the dawn of time.

Then we went to an Italian recreation centre that blew my mind. Inside the gates of this centre, we found hundreds of kids playing volleyball, football (soccer), basketball and all kinds of other games, like pingpong and foosball. It was incredible. We interviewed the Italian guy who runs the athletic programs and spoke with some of the kids. In an area that has so many problems, and so much violence between tribes, here were hundreds of kids laughing and smiling and having a great time. Refreshing, to say the least.

Then we were back to the UN compound for a security briefing with the security official there. Not much new from him, though a better understanding of overall issues. He feels strongly that the issue of road ambushes is overblown, since the UPDF reports as ambushes many instances that they themselves are suspected of instigating.

Then we were back to the hotel here to meet with a UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights worker who spoke with us over drinks about the issues here. She tours the region following-up on claims of human rights abuses and killings, so she sees the worst of the worst, and told us about this, but all with a smile. “It’s the only way to do it,” she said. “As soon as you get serious, you’re finished.”

She laughed at how bold the Karamojong warriors can be. There is a constant battle between the warriors, who head out on cattle raids, and the UPDF soldiers who try to stop, or catch, them.

Often, a village preparing to head out on a raid will have the local witchdoctor kill a goat, open up its chest and “read” its insides to predict the chances of success for the raid. If the witchdoctor says they will get attacked if they go now, then they go the next day instead.

Well recently, the community invited local officials, the UPDF, even a commander, to the village to witness one of these sessions. But instead, the witchdoctor reported seeing signs that their village was about to get attacked and their cattle raided. So the UPDF deployed in the area to protect it.

The village took advantage of this, heading out themselves and raiding cattle knowing that the UPDF was otherwise occupied. It was only when they heard reports of raids elsewhere that the military put two-and-two together, Priscilla said, laughing. I had to laugh too. You’ve got to give them credit…

With a bundle of information, I returned to my hotel room absolutely wiped. It was time to get some sleep before a busy day, and a long drive (so long as the roads are passable) to our next destinations in Kotido and Kaabong.

Day Three — September 13th

Kotido, Karamoja

Today started the same as before— a single boiled egg, a few pieces of mendazi and a banana, taken with some tea to start the day.

We got an early start—to find some of the local musical artists who are singing about peace, education and protection against HIV. The human rights official with the UN met me and one of the other reporters about 8 a.m. and we picked up a friend of hers, Francis, who knows Moroto well. We headed into Camp Swahili, one of the slums in Moroto, where several of the artists live.

Upon entering the camp, we pulled over, which sent a small group of kids scurrying out of the way, taking their yellow jerrycans with them. These water containers are everywhere. In the morning, the streets are lined with women, always women, walking to or from the nearest well with these containers perched on their heads.

I made a comment about water as this small group moved their containers. The human rights worker with us laughed. “That’s not water,” she said. It’s the homebrew I’ve heard so much about here. Someone with 200 shillings faces what has proven to be a difficult choice: it’s not enough to get food for his family. So what do you do? Buy a bit of food that won’t go far enough, or instead not buy any food at all and get a good dose of alcohol that will dull the pain of hunger and make the day a bit more bearable?

Everywhere we went, we ran into people drinking this homebrew. As we discussed the people in front of us, I could see further down the hill women cooking the grain that forms the basis for the alcohol. Across the way, lines of women waited their turn at the water pump. How much of that water would be used to make the alcohol? What can be done to stop the trend? More importantly, looking around at life here and what lays ahead, can you really blame them?

Francis disappeared into the huts and emerged with two young boys—Legless and Ugly Unit. Both 20, the men released their first record (as part of a group of a dozen called Rocky K’Jong Crew) when they were 12.

Legless is called Legless because he walks with a limp. “How’d you develop the limp?” he was asked.

“I don’t know. I got sick when I was young and now I walk with a limp.”

“Was it polio?”

Legless shrugs. He doesn’t know. And, to him, what does it matter? It’s all in the past, and he survived it.

We interviewed them for 20 or so minutes—it was all a bit rushed because we were trying to squeeze it in before our scheduled departure from Moroto shortly after 9 a.m. I gave them 30,000 shillings for copies of each of the three CDs the group has released (worth the equivalent of about $16 in total). They try to raise 500,000 shillings at a time, which is enough to put on a concert.

They sang for us— a song encouraging Karamojong to get an education. I asked them about their own educations– neither finished school (not surprising in a region where only 19% of children are in school and some 80% of kids between 7-16 have never set foot in a classroom, even once. “I want to go back to school,” Legless said. “I’m not so good with the books.”

Soon enough we left them and hit the road for the three-plus hour drive to Kotido, through muddy, flooded roads.

Our convoy consisted of two Land Rovers, with a truck of armed soldiers at the front and at the back.

We took nearly an hour at one stretch of road where the water was up to the chest of any man walking through it. Young men and boys from the nearby village had gathered at the flood to help push trucks through—for a price, of course. Of about 200 shillings per person (or about 8 cents each).

One by one, our trucks made it through. At the far side we stopped to wait for our final truck to make it through. Several trucks sat at the side of the road. Some waiting to get through, some having emerged on the other side. One sat at an angle, having gotten stuck in the mud. One of the boys who had gathered was wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey– further proving that Leafs Nation knows no boundaries.

On we went. The rest of the trip was relatively smooth.

In the back of the hardtop carrier, Jeremy and I bounced around chatting about this and that. I asked him about Karamoja and how its data on things like nutrition levels, mortality, etc. compare with other, higher profile, crisis areas in Africa.

He told me how international media like CNN and the BBC flooded into Darfur when the region’s acute malnutrition levels reached 15%. “Parts of Karamoja routinely pass 40% levels,” he said.

He added that Darfur’s mortality level peaked at five deaths per 10,000 people per day. Data indicates Karamoja could be at a constant level of about eight or nine deaths per 10,000 people per day.

The numbers are shocking, but what makes it difficult to accurately describe the region is that all this data is new, and sometimes not concrete. The region has been such a black hole, that no one can really say how bad things are, except to point out individual cases that paint a picture of life here.

We arrived in Kotido about 12:30, in time to order some lunch and then go to the local District Health Office to interview the man who heads-up the office there. Then back to the restaurant to get lunch—more rice and beans.

Then we went to the local health centre to see their work and tour the facility, which was much the same as other areas, but with one notable exception. In the maternity ward we met a young woman who had just given birth to twins— one girl, one boy— the night before. As we spoke with her, she sat on the edge of her bed with her mother there helping her. The newborns lay in a small bed beside her. We spoke with the mother with the help of the health centre’s midwife (the only person in the area trained to deliver babies—she figures she delivers about 2,000 a year). I asked the mother what the names of the babies were.

They hadn’t been named yet, she said.

“She wants to know what your name is,” the midwife said to me.

The midwife told the mother that my name is Chris and the two of them spoke briefly.

“She wishes to call the young boy ‘Chris’,” the midwife told me.

The mother smiled. I, taken aback, smiled as well, and asked the midwife to thank the mother. I couldn’t think of much else to say.

Next we went to a nearby village, where we saw some of the work they are doing to distribute mosquito nets and dig pit latrines (1.2% of the district’s population has access to latrines).

‘Do you find people use the latrines once they’re made?” I asked the district health officer.

“Well we get them into the latrines, I can’t say they all use them properly,” he said, laughing.

We spoke with people who lived there in the village, and took pictures of the children. We also got to see a minyata for the first time—these are the protected homesteads clans build to secure themselves against raids. They are fenced in—incredibly strongly, too— using dried sticks that are packed and woven so tightly that a bullet would have a hard time piercing the perimeter.

Outside the minyata, a man was weaving a grainary— a bulbous structure. This 43-year old man has nine wives, who have given him 61 children, 57 of whom survive today and only six of whom go to school. He was quite proud of himself, and told us how the entire minyata was populated with his wife and children.

Over the years, he had paid 810 million shillings in dowries for his wives—in the form of 2,700 cows. He has herds of several thousand cattle, goats and sheep. Hence, he is considered very wealthy, as illustrated by the bone bracelets he wore on his wrists.

Then we went back to the hotel here. It’s called La Maison, and is a house where we were the only five guests. There is no water, and the house is powered on solar power.

Our dinner came a little after 8:30 at night, and was quite good. Rice, cassava (kind of like mashed potatoes), kale and boiled chicken. My piece of chicken was the body of an entire chicken, minus the legs and wings. On that entire piece—nearly a whole chicken—I managed to pull off two small forkfuls of meat. The rest was skin and skeleton. It’s often the case in Kampala, but here it’s that much worse—that there is so little food for the animals that when you eat them, there is barely any meat to be found.

The solar power cut out towards the end of dinner, so we finished up in the glow of a kerosene lamp before retiring to the plastic patio chairs that sat on the perimeter of the main room.

That’s where I am now, typing this while the others talk and read. Periodically, you hear the hard smack of large beetles that drop from the ceiling. They sit on the ground, stunned for a moment, before flying back up to the ceiling to prepare for their next plummet.

Day Four– September 14th

Kidepo Valley National Park, Karamoja

“La Maison” guest house in Kotido turned out to be less than stellar. Besides limited power and no water, our breakfast consisted of a bowl of ground nuts and tea (in their defense it was because their access to supplies was cut off by flooding in the region). So we sat around the plastic patio chairs, had our breakfast and went down to the markets for a half hour before we were scheduled to begin our journey to Kaabong, and Kidepo after that.

We could have spent hours in the market, and it was not a very big one. The markets here are just so interesting—such a slice of life between the people you see there, and the things on sale. Our first stop was a stall that sold the Kenyan blankets everyone here wears. The fashion is so interesting. It’s all a mix of cultures that would look so bizarre on me, or anyone else, and yet looks amazing on the people here, in large part because they wear it with such pride. Typical fashion includes a brightly-coloured Kenyan blanket, sandals and a felt fedora with a feather sticking out of it.

This outfit can be combined with a variety of bracelets, necklaces and piercings. Women are also likely to have the scarring on their forehead that is seen as a sign of beauty.

Most men carry sticks, used for walking and also for directing cattle, as well as a small wooden stool that is incredibly multi-purposed. It can be used to lean their arm on if they care to lie in the shade, or to rest their head, or to sit on. They just carry it on the end of a small rope handle that dangles from their wrist.

So we wandered around and bought some things. I bought six Kenyan blankets, four for 10,000 shillings each (about $6 or $7) and two more for 9,000 shillings. I also bought a few brightly-coloured scarves and some beaded bracelets. The scarves were 4,000 shillings each (about $2) and the bracelets were each 300 shillings, so three came to about 60 cents.

We had a breakfast of rolexes from a nearby restaurant, since the nuts were unlikely to keep us going all day. And then we were off, for Kaabong, where we had a few hours of meetings planned before we hit the home stretch for the light that had been flickering at the end of the tunnel throughout the trip— Kidepo Valley National Park.

The road to Kaabong was rough, but no worse that what we’d been traversing the rest of the trip. We sat in the back of the Land Cruiser wearing our uncomfortable and heavy (and hot) bulletproof vests and helmets. The further north we went, the hotter it got. We took whatever breeze we could from the open windows, but otherwise sat, sweating and with dry throats as the landscape generally became more arid, though still surprisingly green.

Outside Kaabong, we visited a trading centre where the French arm of Doctors Without Borders has set up a mobile nutrition tent for children in the area. It’s too much for villagers to travel to the towns, so they have come in to tour the trading centres so parents can bring their young kids in to be assessed for malnutrition.

Kaabong District has long been one of the most remote, and desperate, districts in all of Uganda. And yet there are only two international aid organizations working there right now, including MSF, which only arrived two months ago and will only be there another six months or so providing emergency nutritional relief.

The region has been ignored for a variety of reasons, but mostly because no one has previously known just how bad things have been there. It is so remote, and so inaccessible because of violence, that no one really knew the true desperation of the population.

But the one international aid organization, MedicAid, there doing water and sanitation work contacted the World Food Program (WFP) because they were so alarmed by the conditions in the district. Because of that, WFP, and soon after MSF, did an assessment of the area. MSF was not yet finished their assessment when the WFP came out with figures showing over 2o% of the children there were suffering from global acute malnutrition.

United Nations’ organizations have a rule that they intervene in an area when its GAM levels surpass 10%. International media flooded into Darfur in Sudan when that region’s GAM surpassed 15%, and here was an area where over 20% of the population was silently suffering from chronic malnutrition.

“We were in the middle of doing our assessment when the WFP figures came out,” the MSF project coordinator in Kaabong told me. “As soon as those came out, our directors called us up and said not to wait for our own assessment to be finished. Just to get in here as fast as we could.”

They’re trying to set up infrastructure for long-term nutrition programs, but they are a group that specializes in emergency relief, so they will leave soon enough and hope that another organization will step in to set up long-term support.

Afterwards, we drove into Kaabong to see the work they’re doing at the hospital there, and then a lunch (more rice, but this time also chiapatti, chicken and cassava). I’m getting used to eating with my hands now. Especially in the rural areas, utensils are rare. You think eating rice with chopsticks is hard? Try eating rice covered in sauce from the chicken with your hands, while trying not to get covered in the stuff.

After lunch, we bid goodbye to those who were heading back to Kampala and the remaining four of us went on to Kidepo. The drive took about an hour and a half, and went relatively smoothly, as the rivers were manageable. Along the way we passed the river where a Daily Monitor reporter had died a few years ago when the vehicle he was driving in got swept away by the river’s current (there is no bridge, so you just drive down the bank, across the river and up the other side, so fingers crossed that it’s not running deep).

The amount of death-related landmarks we’ve passed on this trip has been a bit disconcerting. Besides the river, we have passed several crosses on the side of the road marking spots where various people have died in road ambushes, and our driver kindly pointed out the spots where a WFP driver had been killed earlier this year in an ambush, and also the two spots where attempted ambushes on UN convoys have taken place in the last few weeks.

But we got through no problem, and arrived at Kidepo by about 4 p.m. Within minutes of crossing into the park, we came across a herd of zebra. This, after not seeing any wildlife, except birds, in four days of traveling. It just goes to show how much the wildlife population has been hunted. Can you blame the local villagers? How do you convince a local population to buy in to conservation efforts when they’re starving?

Here in the park, though, they are protected. And so it was that these zebras were just inside the park boundary. It was my first-ever zebra sighting, so obviously I, and all of us for that matter, was quite excited.

A few kilometers later, we arrived at the lodge here. My god, this place is amazing. We were greeted by the friendly South African couple, Barbara and Joe, who run the place. As she told us about the lodge facilities, we were presented with fresh iced tea, complete with sugar-rimmed glasses and slices of orange. It felt surreal to be sipping from sugar-rimmed glasses, having just spent several days collecting information on crushing malnutrition levels. We were then shown to our cabins to get settled before gathering in the dining hall for tea and snacks.

The lodge has 10 individual grass-thatched, canvas-walled huts. Inside, they have a massive wooden bed, with a mosquito net canopy, two overstuffed chairs with a solid wooden coffee table, a desk and an open wooden closet. In the bathroom, there is a beautiful rock shower that overlooks the grasslands where zebra, buffalo, water bucks, jackals and antelope graze lazily. Beyond that, through a screen door, each cabin has a private rock outdoor bathtub. It wasn’t long before I was soaking in that, enjoying the view of the animals.

Out front of the cabin is a covered porch with a comfortable couch. I did much of my writing from that comfortable perch.

Over by the dining area is an outdoor pool carved into the rock.

Above and beside that, is an observation tower with a couple couches where the whole region can be viewed, and also where the night watchman stays for the night to escort anyone who wishes to go to or from their cabin in the dark (with lions and buffalo hanging out nearby people are not allowed to walk alone at night).

The lodge overlooks much of the park, with the mountains marking the Sudanese border, and to the right the Kenyan border, in the distance.

After a relaxing evening, we joined the french group here for dinner at the long lodge table, where we had beef tenderloin, mashed potatoes, pumpkin soup, and crème caramel. Before dinner, I sat in one of the many couches and chairs in the hall, with a view overlooking the grasslands, reading a book and enjoying some complimentary drinks. (Everything is included in the accommodation price, which is nice). I have been taking medication to flush out a parasite that gave me hell a week or so back. I couldn’t drink any alcohol while taking the medication so I was sure to take my last pill on Thursday to have it cleared out of my system in time for this weekend (priorities, right?). Nothing was going to stop me from having a happy hour in this setting.

During dinner I spoke with Barbara and Joe, who join us at every meal, about what it’s like to run a lodge in Karamoja—a region with so many negative connotations. “When we came here I was wondering what we’d gotten ourselves into because I’d heard so much about the violence in Karamoja,” Barbara said. “But then we got here and wondered what the fuss was all about.”

Joe agreed. “This park has some of the wildest views I’ve seen,” he said. “The fact that so few people have traditionally come here makes it that much better for those who do come.”

We finally left the dinner table about 11 at night, exhausted from a long journey. I climbed into bed—with Egyptian cotton sheets, it is by far the most comfortable bed I’ve found in Uganda— and fell asleep soon enough.

Only I was woken about 4:30 a.m. by heavy breathing and loud chewing sounds. Directly behind me. It was either a buffalo, or a water buck (like an oversized deer) that was grazing directly behind my cabin. Funny when whether or not an animal chews with his mouth open determines whether you sleep through the night.
Day Five — September 15th

Kidepo Valley National Park, Karamoja

Lions are shy towards humans, and avoid confrontations at all costs. If you tell yourself that often enough, you eventually begin to believe it.

That was something to keep in mind this night, when two female lions walked past our dinner table, only a few metres from where we were eating.

After a day of game drives, and relaxing by the pool, the 11 of us sat down to a fantastic outdoor dinner of bbq’d chicken, pork chops and lamb with a wide array of side dishes. The four in our group, along with the five French group and the two, Barbara and Joe, who run the lodge, were talking over desert when Joe, facing the rock that rises above where we were eating suddenly pointed and, with his eyes on fire, said “Nobody move” in a hushed, but urgent, tone. We all turned just in time to see the shapes of two fully-grown lions walking above us.

Joe grabbed a flashlight and ran up the stairs that led up to where they were walking. “Follow me, but stay behind.” We all got up and rushed quietly behind him. We followed the lions about 15 or 20 feet behind, as they made their way through the lodge grounds. As we stalked the lions, we heard a loud grunt off to our side, where a few of us turned to see two fully-grown buffalo sitting in the grass a few feet beside us.

The lions didn’t pay us much attention. But up close it is easy to see just how impressive these creatures are. They’re all muscle, and move with a confidence expected of anything possessed with such a keen ability to kill.

Eventually, the lions crossed over a hill and disappeared. We walked back to the table, exhilarated. “That’s never happened before!” Joe kept saying. Pretty damn cool. As we sat back down to finish our meal and chat, we heard a chorus of lion calls in all directions around us. The pride of 11 lions was in the area, along with a few others, and so everyone was calling out their territory. Several other lions were spotted that night, and we eventually went to bed, excited by the encounter.

About 2:30 in the morning, I was awoken by a very loud noise. It was an animal of some kind. The night before, there had been a buffalo directly behind my head on the other side of the canvas wall. Its noises kept me up for a while. But already, by my second night at the lodge, I had become more accustomed to the noises, and so just rolled over and went back to sleep.

At breakfast Sunday morning, two others in our group came to the table fully charged, but tired. “Did you hear that last night??” they asked excitedly.

Yeah, I heard something about 2:30. What was it?

“There were lions right outside our cabin!”

Apparently there were several lions surrounding their cabin, all making territorial calls. The noise only lasted 20 minutes or so, but the thought of several lions surrounding them kept them awake for a couple hours. I probably would have been up for a while too if I’d realized just what it was at the time.

But there was more to Saturday than just the lions. We got up at 6 a.m. for an early breakfast of toast, wrapped bacon and granola, yogourt and fresh fruit.

By 7 a.m. we were ready for our game drive. We had to wait a while because of rain but by 8 or so we were on the trail. This would be my first chance to see so many of these animals, and I was excited for what we were about to see.

We climbed into the large safari Toyota Land Cruiser with our guide, Augustus, and began the adventure. Our first stop was a nearby rock outcropping where two male lions were basking in the early morning sunlight. I hadn’t yet had the excitement that came later in the day, so this was my first ever sighting of lions in the wild, and it was quite something. We stayed for a while, taking photos of the two cats lounging in the sun, and then went off to see what else we could find.

Over the course of the next four-plus hours, we saw giraffes (13 of the 18-20 that live in the park), more lions, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of buffalo (I was able to imagine what it must have been like to see the giant herds of buffalo that once roamed the Canadian west), water buck (like large deer), wildebeest and all kinds of other smaller animals and dozens of bird species.

It was great fun, and allowed us to see nearly every animal we had come to see, except an elephant.

We got back to the lodge about 1 p.m. and sat down for a large meal of hamburgers, fries, onion rings and several tasty salads. We decided not to do another game drive later that day and to instead relax at the lodge. It allowed for some time to swim in the pool, read, have some drinks and otherwise just enjoy the setting (something I wish we had more time for).

As I lay on the bed in my room, reading a book I’d picked out from the lodge library (Empire Falls by Robert Russo), I heard Hussein, the fourth member of our group, call my name. I came out to see what was up and found him excited and saying we all had to come. He had asked around with some of the staff about a “rogue” elephant in the area named Bul-Bul, who was known to spend a lot of time down the hill from the lodge at the staff quarters and hostel.

Low and behold, Bul-Bul was around, and when I came out to Hussein he pointed out the outline of the large elephant in amidst the huts in the distance. We called Joe over and asked if he could take us down there, and so the four of us climbed back into the safari vehicle with Joe to go see Bul-Bul.

We drove into the collection of huts, very humble homes for the staff while they’re working on-site, to find Bul-Bul on the far side. He was massive, and dark, almost black, as he foraged in the nearby grass.

Besides being incredibly tame, he has taken a liking to the substance that is leftover from the making of a grain-based alcoholic brew that many of the locals make. So as we sat and watched Bul-Bul, the staff collected a couple tubs of the substance and dumped it in the nearby grass. Bul-Bul immediately came over and began munching on the food, while we watched and snapped pictures about 20 feet away.

It’s funny that this elephant has become so friendly with those who live in the huts, but it’s probably a sign of bad things to come. Already, he has ripped off some of the roofs of the huts when they haven’t been giving him enough food. A step further, and someone might get hurt, at which point he would be shot. “This is so wrong…” Joe said as we watched.

He had a point, but it was to be our only chance to see an elephant, and it allowed us to say we were able to see every species of animal we wanted to spot in the park.

Before dinner, I sat in the lodge dinning hall on one of the comfy chairs, reading my book. Joe came over and as we each had a drink, we chatted about the park’s history and the developments leading up to the building of this lodge, which opened in January 2006.

“It used to be the Wild West around this place,” Joe said. The park was largely devoid of visitors for more than 20 years, because the lodge closed when civil war broke out in the years after Idi Amin was ousted in 1979. The same company that ran the lodge had also built a hotel, in the hopes of boosting business. But the war broke out before the hotel could host even its first guest and it never opened. Today it sits in ruins within sight of the lodge.

It’s such an interesting place, with a history that adds a different level of depth to the experience of seeing it for the first time. There’s also something special about being part of such a small group that has made it up to the park and seen what it has to offer.
Day Six– September 16th

Kidepo Valley National Park, Karamoja

This day began early again– 6 a.m.– so that we could head off on a walk through the savannah with Joe and a park ranger to get a closer look at the animals. We saw many of the same animals as the day before– giraffes, buffalo, wart hogs, gazelle, jackals, lions (much of the pride was perched on the rocks nearby where we were to begin the walk. “We’ll just drive a bit further before we start the walk to put some space between us and the lions,” Joe said. Yeah, thanks, a head-start would be nice.)

It was a nice way to cap off a stay at the lodge, because we had lunch when we got back and then went to the nearby airstrip to meet our plane for a flight south to Soroti to witness the effects of the severe flooding that has crippled the region.

I enjoyed our last bit at the lodge– for two people to come to this place from North America would cost about $10,000 for airfare and accomodation from Friday-Monday– knowing that we had a couple of rough days ahead of us in the flooded areas.

The flight south to Soroti went well enough, though traveling in a four-seater plane was interesting. Anyone who makes the argument that the best way to scare a kid away from smoking cigarettes is to force them to smoke three packs would also make the argument that the best way for a person to get over a fear of flying would be to take a flight in the plane we had. It was a tiny, single-prop contraption that blew off course at even the slightest gust of wind. At times I pictured a snotty-nosed kid on the ground somewhere, piloting our plane with a remote control. The fact that our pilot spent most of the flight reading a magazine didn’t help matters. Here’s the plane:

Days Six and Seven– September 17th and 18th

Soroti and Katakwi, Teso Region

We spent two days in the worst of the flood-affected regions, talking to local officials and visiting an IDP camp to get a sense of how people are coping. The consensus? They’re not coping well.

During one meeting with local officials, we asked about road repairs. During our entire time driving in the region the only road works we saw being carried-out were being done by local villagers who, having done this work at their own initiative and thusly unpaid, stopped passing cars for donations so they could buy lunch that day.

“Does the district not have road maintenance crews and machines?” we asked.

Yep, they do, we were told. But they’re sitting idly by, because the central government has not released any money to put fuel in the vehicles. It was incredible to hear this, given that one of the biggest challenges during the floods was simply reaching those who were worst-affected. Make the roads passable, and suddenly supplies and medicines can reach these communities. So aid organizations, focused on relief efforts, suddenly had to also make provisions for fuel and vehicle maintenance costs since the government wasn’t providing it.

During our visit to the IDP camp we toured the collection of crumbling mud huts. Their mud floors were, as one would expect, wet and muddy. Those who remained in their huts were sleeping in the mud. The lucky ones had white plastic tarps to sleep on. The even luckier ones had moved into the nearby school, as it was the only concrete structure in the community. Classes were supposed to have started during the week we were there, but schools remained closed because most in the area were full of people who had nowhere else to go.

After two days, we piled back into one last plane for the flight back to Kampala after a long, fascinating and, at times, frustrating trip that left me with memories that will long out-live anything I have seen or heard in Kampala.

You know it’s going to be a long night when…

1. You’re invited to the bachelor party of a co-worker at a downtown club.

2. You meet with Ugandan friends at a nearby bar for a few pre-bachelor party drinks. The group then decides it is time to “start” the festivities about midnight.

3. Upon walking into a packed dance club, you turn to your friends and ask where in the club is the bachelor party group. You are then informed that the entire club has been rented out for the bachelor party and everyone in the club is in fact there for the bachelor party.

4. You witness a debate between your friends– one of whom is your ride home– over whether to head home before, or after, dawn. On a week night.

Heading into work today was a lot of fun. Yep, really happy to be here.

“Turkey”, as a loosely defined term

It was a typical Thanksgiving weekend in this part of the world—gathering with friends over a large dinner complete with Turkey.

Wait, was that a capital “T” on “Turkey”?

Yep.

We did the best we could. Really, we did.

Turkeys don’t exactly grow on trees around here. And the oven in my house doesn’t so much “work”, so a traditional Thanksgiving dinner just wasn’t in the cards.

So we improvised. Four of us Canadians headed off to the closest thing we could think of—a Turkish restaurant here in Kampala. Hey, if we can’t have turkey, we’ll sure as heck have Turkey.

So instead of turkey, we had chicken. Instead of squash, we had hummus. Instead of mashed potatoes, we had rice. Instead of sharing a large pumpkin pie, we all shared a hookah pipe while lounging in the cool evening.

All in all, it was a fun evening and not a bad way to cap off a great weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

More than just a hair cut

A couple months ago, I wrote about the trials and tribulations of finding a good place to get my hair cut.

Just when I had found the perfect barbershop near my hostel, it was razed as part of a city campaign to get rid of illegal markets. Soon afterwards, I moved across the city to the house I live in now and the search for a barber began anew.

That search did not take long. Down the hill from where I live is a barber named Tom who works out of a tiny shop that doubles as a photocopy shop (a perfectly logical combination, no?)

Anyway, Tom is a good guy. The first time I went in there he was so concerned about doing a good job, he took about 45 minutes cutting my hair and was working with such precision that I began to wonder whether he was trying to trim each hair individually.

The fact that I pay well has not discouraged this trend. A man’s haircut typically costs 1,500 shillings or less–about 80 cents. Feeling sheepish at paying someone so little, I usually pay 5,000 shillings. And so each time I come to get my hair cut, Tom tries to direct me right to the chair, ahead of the others who are waiting in line. Each time I refuse, and quietly take my seat to read weeks-old newspapers while the cramped shop buzzes with Luganda chatter.

After trimming my hair and beard, Tom always pulls out an assortment of liquids and gels to rub into my head, face and neck. The first time he did this I was curious just what each one was.
“What is this?” I asked him as he massaged an unknown substance into my cheeks.

“This will help you smell nice for the girls,” Tom said. “You want to smell nice for the girls, don’t you?”

Tom is good at asking questions you can’t really refute.

On my most recent visit, Tom was again going through the motions of applying this liquid and that, when he and his business partner (the one who runs the photocopier) got into an argument.

Normally no problem, but Tom seemed to forget that he was massaging a liquid that will help me smell nice for the girls into my cheeks when he began arguing.

In fact, it soon became apparent that he had completely forgotten. So there he was, arguing with his business partner while he continued to massage my cheeks. I sat there patiently, at one point making eye contact with the guy who was waiting his turn. He was having a difficult time suppressing laughter.

Eventually, the argument ended, and Tom turned his attention back to me.

“So sorry,” he said as he loaded up with another substance (“To soften your scalp, sir,” he told me), and began rubbing it into my head.

No problem, Tom, see ya next week.

Matooke and Me: A love-hate relationship

Since returning from the most recent trip to Karamoja a little over two weeks ago I’ve been on a quasi-hiatus from local foods. Partly because I was on local foods overload up there, where beans and rice are often all that’s available, or trustworthy. But also in part because I still haven’t fully kicked the after-effects of this parasite.

And so, I’ve been seeking out familiar foods. Yesterday I had a Hawaiian pizza for lunch. The day before, a tuna sandwhich. It’s an expensive way to eat (say 10,000 shillings compared to the 1,000 shillings it would cost to have a lunch of local foods), but it’s helped keep my stomach in line.

Today, I thought it was time to return to local foods. I couldn’t go on heading into town for lunch every day, and it’s been long enough that I was sure my stomach could handle local foods again.

Guess again.

I should have turned back when I walked into the lunch room and saw a pile of fish heads staring back at me from the metal serving dish. But instead, I slapped my 1,000 shilling note on the table, grabbed a plate and loaded up.

Matooke (steamed bananas), g-nut sauce, rice, boiled fish and a boiled vegetable of unknown origin.

I got through about half of it before I threw in the towel and left, my stomach grumbling away its unhappiness.

Sorry, local food, our friendship is back on hold. Hope to see you again soon.