Dispatch 8
Hi everyone,
I'm overjoyed to say that I am back in the States, sitting on my yellow couch in my house in downtown Santa Barbara, peering over stacks of receipts, documents, notebooks, and souvenirs from my trip to Uganda, which officially ended last night when my plane landed at LAX. I actually left Uganda in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, after our flight was delayed more than four hours, sparking quite a scare in Connie and I that we'd be stuck in Ugandan for another night. Never had I been so excited to leave a foreign land--usually it's quite the opposite, not wanting to come home--so we were relieved when the announcement came over the speakers at close to 3 am, saying that we were boarding and flying to Amsterdam. I made it to London by the following afternoon, and stayed with my friend Danny for a night there, watching Arsenal--the home team for his London neighborhood--tie Real Madrid to advance in the Champion's Cup.
There's not much more to say, then, and I send this message just as a means of saying thanks for wondering and hopefully sometimes reading about my travels in East Africa. Writing these messages gave me something to look forward to--both to download my thoughts and, more importantly, to somehow participate in a community of family and friends from afar--while also serving as a great means of organizing my experience and keeping these memories vivid for future writings.
As you may have been able to tell toward the end of my dispatches, the picture I have of Uganda is not an entirely pretty one. Its many problems seem to overwhelm the small glitters of hope. In the coming weeks, I'll be trying to sort out why that is, and why my experience in the country was often more sour than sweet. That being said, Connie and I got along perfectly--we were both able to keep our cool and think clearly (her sometimes more than me) in enormously stressful situations. Who knew that running over some sort of antelope would probably be the highlight of our entire experience?
In any case, work-wise, it was a success, having worked from dawn till dusk and often later for our entire time. Now let's just hope we can get the articles out there, spread the word about the state of Ugandan life, and help get this region out of the doldrums it is currently facing.
Thanks for listening and I'll see you all soon,
Bye,
matt, in santa barbara
Dispatch Number Seven: The Day the Impala (or Johnson’s Hardebeest?) Died…and then some
Saturday was supposed to be our day of escape from the poverty, abuse, and general despair we’d been reporting on for more than two weeks. It started off good enough, my mild head cold gone, not a trace of a hangover even after drinking banana liquor with a group of random men on the side of the road in Gulu (and Bells with an AIDS worker who I tried to inform of the slogans used to promote safe sex in America), and our spirits high as we slid into the downslope of our adventure. We even managed to ditch that psycho chick Teddy—well, Connie really cut her loose, I just ran away and hid.
We began the day with some final interviews at World Vision—specifically of a man and a young girl who had shrapnel wounds and need special medical attention. We were excited to drive south toward Murchison Falls, Uganda’s biggest national park where we’d booked a room for that night, and we asked at World Vision for a map, which in turn led to them showing us a beach ball-type blow-up globe, with Uganda the size of a quarter. Needless to say, that didn’t really answer my questions, but we took off on the road anyway, knowing generally where to go.
South from Gulu, I was driving at a good clip—between 80 to 120 km/hour--with Connie sitting in the passenger seat as the only other person in the car (Ricky had gone back to Kampala the day before and left us with his Toyota Corolla). At one highway junction—think lots of dirt and barely hanging signs—Connie noticed baboons running around , so we stopped and I took some photos, as gun-toting soldiers watched us. Then we hopped in the car and began gaining speed, other baboons playing in the bushes nearby.
As I looked slightly to the left and remarked something about “these guys are everywhere,” I saw Connie’s head buckle the other way as she let out a little yelp. I turned my head fast enough to just see an impala-like mass of brown fur, white specks, and antlers become annihilated by the front of our car. I didn’t even have a chanced to slow down as we plowed through the beast, its momentum—it was also at full-speed, running we think from a predator—carrying it across the grill and flopping it confused, battered, and twisted into a ditch on the side of the road.
I’m not exactly sure what we said next, something to the effect of “what the fuck was that?”, but I kept driving, having been instructed that one should never stop for hitting anything here, especially humans. As I kept driving, I heard a hissing noise emanating from the engine and realized that our hood was seriously crumpled. Suddenly we turned one bend, entirely confused and frightened ourselves but not twisted or battered at all, to find the massive Nile River careening over an impressive cascade, its sound and sight adding the rushing sensory overload that so matched our mindset.
After the bridge, I stopped, got out of the car, and examined the front. It was destroyed, but the engine was running.
“What should we do?” we asked each other. Connie suggested going back to Gulu, about 80 kilometers in the opposite direction of Kampala. (Murchison Falls, meanwhile, had both dropped from our minds, as we figured we’d be spending the night somewhere else and perhaps returning to Kampala without a car.) At first I thought we should just drive up the hill to the next town, but then I agreed with Connie, as did two good Ugandans who stopped their car to check on us and agreed to lead us back to town and to a mechanic. So I started driving the beaten car back toward Gulu, thinking to myself that one day I’d laugh about this, but figuring that day would not be for weeks.
I didn’t stop for anything on the way back, not the man trying to sell me an edible rat on the side of the road—held up like some recently killed trophy with front limbs extended in a huggish pose—and not, perhaps mistakenly, for the beret-wearing police officer who waved me down right outside Gulu. We were following our new friends to a mechanic, and I figured that the cop would understand and not come after us. I was wrong.
As we pulled into the mechanic in Gulu and popped the trunk, the cop was in hot pursuit, and walked up yelling about “where’s the driver?” Our friends assured me it would be okay and said proudly, “Let him come,” with a noticeable sense of defiance. I raised my hand and walked over to the irate officer, him saying something rather piggish about he being the symbol of authority, me being disobedient and undisciplined, and so on. I said we were journalists, that we had hit a wild animal, that we were scared and just didn’t want to stop because we thought the car might die. Slowly, as the crowd grew around us, them all in favor of my position in the argument, the cop slowly backed off, and explained that he was concerned we had hit a human and not stopped. He then asked about the cow’s owner, to which I reiterated that it was a wild animal. He left us alone then.
Back at the open engine, the mechanic said it would cost only about 20,000 to fix, which is less than $15. We only needed it to be able to drive us to Kampala, and we didn’t need to get the body worked on at all. The brights worked, which was also good. Forty minutes later, it was fixed for 20K—I gave him an extra five for good measure—and I was already laughing about the incident and realizing that we’d probably be staying in Murchison Falls after all. And that’s what we did, being stopped multiple times along the way by the police and the military, who both wanted to know what happened to the car, what happened to the cow (“It wasn’t a cow, it was a wild animal” became our refrain), and where was our accident report. We began joking amongst ourselves that the impala or whatever it was didn’t decide to press charges; indeed, when we drove past where we hit it on the way back, it had run away, so we were able to say with confidence that we didn’t think we killed it, immediately at least.
By taking the long road to Murchison, we were pressing our luck and testing the gods.
It was very rocky, very rutted, and very long, meaning that night descended with 20 kilometers to go on a road where I could only go about 30 km/h. Our headlights only worked when I pulled back on the brights, so I had to hold them the whole time in the dark. But that didn’t help that much, as the lights shined mostly straight up, sometimes to the side, sometimes straight down. It was funny, but stressful and tense, as I knew that in the past this area had been rebel country and that this was clearly lion country.
We made it eventually, only to eat, drink some beers, and unknowingly tell the dramatically exaggerated version of our story to a Ugandan Wildlife Authority ranger, who threatened to fine us, but instead just bored us with stories of hardcore Mormons he knew from Utah. The next morning, we rose, ate, and then drove back stopping by the raging Murchison Falls on the way out and being stopped by every checkpoint on the road (What happened to the cow?, was the typical question). Yesterday, we made it to Kampala, stayed in the Blue Mango, and drank Ketel One vodka with a Peace Corps kid from Nevada and Bostonian who plans to start a business of exporting Ugandan bricks.
About one hour ago, I learned that the entire damage would cost $1,000, which I will have to borrow—perhaps permanently, mom and dad?—from my parents. But we leave tomorrow, and not too soon at all. Uganda is wearing me thin, ragged, and restless.
See you soon,
matt
UPDATE ON THE UPDATE, AKA: Dispatch Number Six: Gulu’s Hopeless Romantic
It’s Friday morning now, and our driver Ricky just left us with his car as he needed to get back to Kampala. We had an interesting day yesterday, Thursday, after I had written the previous dispatch. We met up with the World Vision Rehabilitation Center director, who is in charge of the program that takes rescued child soldiers and counsels them back to relative sanity. He gave a great overview of their program and we are about to head over there for some interviews and experiences with the children and their counselors. But that was the normal part of the afternoon.
The abnormal part began when we started to walk away from World Vision and asked some men on bikes where the “night commuters” went each night. The night commuters are the children who walk from their homes up to seven kilometers every night to sleep in a safe place. It began in the late ‘90s, as thousands of children fled their village huts to sleep under verandas, in churches, and around bus depots and abandoned train stations. In the early 2000s, Noah’s Ark began a mission to provide a safe and clean space for these children, and by 2004, when the rebels were as close as a line of trees just half a kilometer away, they had upwards of 7,000 children coming to their tents nightly. These days, as peace has been more prevalent, the numbers have dwindled—happily of course—to about 400, and of those, only about 40 percent still flee their villages because of war. The others come to escape abuse, total poverty, and general homelessness. So we were asking where these people were, as the sun set behind us.
Suddenly, a cute, friendly young girl came up and asked, in decent English, if she could help us. So we asked her where it was and she said she’d take us there, and began a long, honest sob story about her past, which included a dead father, a mother dead from AIDS, some suicide attempts, and many nights sleeping in the center herself. It seemed a bit too lucky to run into her, so I kept checking behind us for robbers. None were there, and she was genuine, even introducing us to the director of the Noah’s Ark facility and easing our access. After interviewing the director, we went to a local bar for some ginger ale and water to wait until the girls and boys started showing up.
Things got weird when we returned. The girl, whose name is Teddy, asked me if Connie was my girlfriend. I said no, and explained the situation, but added that I had a serious girlfriend at home. A bit later, she told me that I should go out with someone much younger than myself (I can’t recall how the age issue came out, but somehow it did). Since Teddy is seventeen, I began to see where this was going.
After watching the children dance, sing, pray, and get hygiene lessons, we moved to where they sleep. As Connie went in to shoot the insides, I was left with Teddy. I have some a minor cold at the moment, so my energy was low and my mind wasn’t working too quickly, so I was blindsided when Teddy’s next question was blurted out, “Is she slender?”
“What?” I said, “my girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Uhh, yes, she’s very slender,” I replied, realizing that I was about to fall into the man-comforting-insecure-woman role.
“So am I fatter than her?”
Shit, I thought, here we go. “No, you are very slender too.” I had realized early on by this girl’s sob story that she was a hopeless romantic, but this was getting too heavy, though it was clearly hilarious the whole time.
She then said something about “lovely ladies in Uganda,” and I said that yes, there are very beautiful ladies in Uganda, which is kinda true in some places.
“What do you think about me?” she asked.
“Well,” my mind working more slowly than ever, “you are very pretty. You could be uh, uh, uh a model.” See, my mind wasn’t functioning well. A model? What kind of advice is that? I couldn't find an out.
Soon enough, Connie, who did not know of the budding ridiculousness of the situation, appeared. We went to sit on a bench to wait for the children to calm down a bit. After Connie got up from there, Teddy began again, telling me stories about how she can’t find a man in Uganda, that they all equate sex with love, tat she had to dump a boyfriend who tested positive for HIV, etc., etc. I told her to prepare for that, because that seems to be a human universal for teenagers, which might not have been the most encouraging thing to say.
Then she apologized if she was offending me, and I said I was hard to offend. Then she said, “I want to tell you something, but I have to think about if I want to tell you or not.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering what outlandish thing might come next. My head was aching, my nose was stuffed, I was feeling generally tired, and now I had to deal with this increasingly psycho chick. Meanwhile, various children and counselors were walking by, and they kept shooting looks our way, as if they knew what Teddy was up to. It was awkward to say the least.
“You have to promise to not tell Connie,” she said.
“Okay, I promise.”
“No, she clarified, “you have to promise.”
“I promise,” I said looking in the general direction of her eyes, dropping a big fat lie.
“I am falling in love with you,” she said, with no hint of sarcasm or humor.
“No, no, no,” I said, the silly severity of the situation finally descending on me. “I already told you, I have a girlfriend.”
“Why can’t you have a wife in America and a wife in Uganda?”
“Because, I we don’t do that in America, and I don’t cheat on my girlfriend, and honestly, I don’t think I’ll be back in Uganda anytime soon..”
She wasn’t’ buying it and kept pushing, even going for the “can I stay with you just tonight?” line. This was bad, but funny, and I managed to quash it most effectively by saying that even if I didn’t have a girlfriend and if Teddy was older (I didn’t also mention that this was AIDS-ridden Northern Uganda—one out of every three people have HIV, I think), I am still sharing a two-bed room with Connie so it would be impossible to find privacy. At least that was a physically practical excuse.
She wasn’t having it, and since I had already given her my card with contact info and work address, I started having images of boiling edible rats on my stove at home, a la the rabbit boiling in Fatal Attraction. Connie eventually came back--to my relief--and then Teddy walked us to our hotel, standing outside like she wanted to come in. We turned her away, then over two Nile Special lagers, I told Connie the news, breaking my promise. We had a good laugh, thinking that the saga was over. It was not.
Just about one hour ago, as we finished breakfast and parted ways with Ricky, Teddy showed up at the breakfast table. I shot a look at Connie like, oh no, here we go. She followed us into this Internet café but has since left due to my ignoring her, allowing me to finish this tome. Connie just told me that Teddy thinks that she will be accompanying us to Murchison Falls tomorrow, which happens to be her 18th birthday. I’m still not sure how we will break the news to her that she’s not coming, and I fear what might happen when we do. Perhaps we are not out of the danger zone after all.
I’ll let you know what happens.
Bye,
matt
Dispatch Number Five: To Hell and Back
Hi all,
It seems that the worst of this trip is over. We have returned from the danger zone, which is a stretch of road from Lira to the Pader District where cars get ambushed occasionally by the Lord’s Resistance Army. I left the day after I last wrote, driving from Mbale to Lira, a town where bicycles outnumber cars, trucks, and motorcycles combined. Other than that, it’s like most other cities that I’ve seen in Uganda: hectic, dirty, not the kind of place to spend too much time unless you have to.
That day, which was Tuesday—today being Thursday I think—we got to Lira and checked into a pretty nice hotel, with our own bathroom, a true luxury. I put in a call to World Vision, the charity that helped sponsor the northern leg of our trip with an official “letter of introduction,” and they were supposed to be leaving for Pader the next morning with provision-carrying trucks from the World Food Program. However, when I reached Mike, who was happily an American, he informed me that things change fast, and that because district elections were happening later in the week (today, in fact), the convoy of trucks would not be leaving until Friday. That was too late for us, so we started debating what to do, with our driver advocating that we set up our own military escort and go that afternoon. Knowing that we’d save about $50 or so by not staying at The White House Hotel that night, we agreed, and began putting the odd wheels of army convoys into motion.
The clock was approaching 2 p.m., the skies were ominous with darkness, rain, and occasional booms of thunder and flashes of lightning. This seemed a bad omen, for this two-hour stretch of dirt road is not one that you want to get stuck on. But we went for it anyway. The first step was renting a truck, which was about $80, then we had to get six soldiers from the army barracks, which were arranged by our driver during a meeting in a dilapidated hut. The commander, who could have told us no, obliged, which meant a tip of about $3. When the truck arrived, the soldiers hopped in with fairly large weapons, one a massive machine gun with a can of ammo attached. I felt safer already. Connie, meanwhile, hopped in the truck with the soldiers for some of the ride, and I rode in the sedan we have.
“You guys ride in front of us, because they might ambush you from behind if we go first,” is what the head soldier told our driver. “I haven’t heard of that before,” the driver informed me, with a hearty chuckle. Wearing a bright red Imperial shirt from Costa Rica, I slid down a little in the seat. “Oh,” said the driver, “and we don’t wear seat belts in this part of the country in case you have to get out and run.” Great.
Despite all the preparations—which in retrospect seem more like a military-aided (we paid each soldier about $1.25 each, supposedly for lunch), moneymaking scam than anything—the road was pretty uneventful, filled with women carrying hoes, men riding bikes with sticks on the back, and soldiers posted in the bushes every so often. Our driver let us know when we hit the hotter areas, but he was more or less occupied chatting politics with an old friend of his we had picked up after seeing him on the back of an overloaded truck.
By the time we reached Pader, it was nearing 5pm, when they close to road to traffic. The rebels work mainly at night and hide out all day long. There were a couple burnt out cars along the way, but otherwise no signs of violence. The poverty, however, was thick, as literally 300,000-plus people are confined to Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps in the Pader District alone. The camps, which we toured extensively yesterday, consist of thousands of self-made mud and thatch huts, the sporadic market, and multitudes of children, all with dirt, flies, and snot on their faces.
In the Pader Town Council, a village erected in 2001to be a central hub for the newly created district, there was a camp of about 21,000 people, all huddled around one long street. It was exactly like the Wild West, complete with all the dusty frontier luxuries you might imagine: warm beer, no running water, no electricity (save for that from smoke-spewing generators and one ingenious solar paneled building run by an Italian NGO), menus with edible rat (unfortunately I didn’t try it) and greenish chicken (unfortunately I did), fly-filled holes to piss/shit in, big spider-lined rooms to sleep in, men with guns all over the place, and even a notorious bad guy (a former LRA leader who got amnesty even though he was integral in cutting women’s lips off) walking the streets with his posse. In short, it was a hellhole of the highest regard, and we stayed there two nights. Last night, an Italian NGO worker saved us from the streets and made us pesto pasta and gave me cold beer, which was great. Meanwhile, we did a lot of good work checking out the camps, scaring all the little kids who’d never seen more than one or two other white people (Connie, though Japanese/Korean-American, is seen by them as white like me). We also stumbled upon some serious beauty amidst the open sewage and rotting animals, such as a troupe of Acholi dancers practicing their rain dance and a seriously badass group of musicians playing their traditional instruments and singing together to make a assuredly marketable calypso sort of sound. (I taped it on my digital recorder, so you all can hear.)
After traveling all day yesterday without an escort—from Pader TC to Patongo, the second biggest camp in Northern Uganda with about 40,000 people and a semi-bustling with lots of people selling things and no one buying—we realized that there was no real need for an escort back to Lira. The NGO people basically confirmed as much, though admitted that they always take escorts as a matter of policy. (One even went so far to predict that the guy who rents out the trucks that carry the soldiers would probably start killing travelers if they lifted the official need for escorts.) So this morning, around 10am after helping some orphans reply to their pen pals in San Diego (most of them asked for money, which was kinda sad but not surprising as that seems to be their connotations of Westerners), we left on the road back to Lira, with no escort. We made it without any problems, as you can tell since I am writing this now.
I am currently in Gulu, the largest city in the north where we are going to visit some rescued child soldiers and maybe see a hospital or two. We hope to get out of here by tomorrow or the next day and do something fun, like seeing Murchison Falls, just so we don’t leave Uganda with the taste of utter poverty and sour dirt in our mouths. We’ll be back in Kampala by Sunday night, and then flying back to Western civilization on Tuesday.
Dispatch Number Four, from Mbale, Uganda, in the foothills of Mt. Elgon
Hi all,
Well, elections are over and violence never erupted, which is of course a good thing. We are now in Mbale, the largest city in the far east of Uganda, where the border collides with Kenya near the base of the dormant volcano known as Mt. Elgon. The city itself is rather dirty and has a noticeably seedy element, no doubt due to the amount of khat (a leafy green stimulant) that people chew and the smuggling connections to the Kenyan border.
We got her yesterday around noon, after taking the bus from Kampala. It took about four hours, and we got to sleep on the bus just fine, a fact due to the Christian-based morality of Ugandans, who generally don't seem to steal outright. (Surely, they cheat you in other ways, as is the case in all developing countries with tourists, but here, the dollar goes so far, the cheating never amounts to more than $5.) Our driver had fallen ill while in Mburo, so he stayed home for "treatment" and then met up with us this afternoon.
When we got to town, we checked into a decent place that sits above a very good Indian restaurant on a corner run by Indians. Our room is big, with a couch, two beds, a sink that doesn't work, a balcony that does, and a white plastic table, all for less than $10 a night. (Okay, so there's some mice too, but they came free.) The restaurant, as I mentioned, is excellent; I ate lunch there yesterday, lunch today, and will be returning for dinner tonight. It's called Naruli's, or something like that.
Our reason for being in Mbale is to do a story on the Ugandans Jews, a group that proclaimed themselves Jewish in the early 20th century. After much asking around--most people didn;t seem to know anything about them, but then again, most people here don't speak English that convincingly--we finally ended up at the police station, where a colorful constable found us an overpriced driver and escorted us to Nabugoye, where the Jews reside. We met with the chairman for half an hour and then returned this morning at around 6:30 a.m. after a particularly cool pre-sunrise boda boda ride through the foothilled countryside. We watched them do their prayers and then I interviewed the rabbi, who spoke great English and was very warm, compared especially to the chairman, who tried to get us to give them money after we chatted with him. (Incidentally, everyone seems to panhandle here one way or another.)
After that, we returned to the hotel, took naps, and then waited for Ricky to show up. Once he did, we took off in his car with me driving all the way up the mountain to a place called Sipi Falls. The villages on the mountainside were rather beautiful, with unobstructed--save for the smoggy sky--views of the Ugandan flatlands. On a clear day, you can probably see Kampala and Kenya. As well, there were no piles of rubbish in these villages, which was a refreshing change from the dump-like atmosphere of most village centers. We then hit the falls, which was also nice.
On the way back, we saw two accidents: one a flipped over truck with some broken bones and the other a police car that rammed another vehicle; the latter caused quite a crowd to gather in Mbale, which I had to deftly drive through. We, thankfully, did not hit anybody, though if you do, I have been instructed to keep driving, because the locals will stone to death indefinitely.
My time is running out here, so I'll finish up by telling you that tomorrow we head north, to Lira, and then on Wednesday, we get a military convoy to Pader, which I have heard described as the worst place on earth. I'll let you know if that's the case. Safety-wise, I was hanging out with an Acholi woman and her Australian friend last night and they had gone to Pader and back without escorts, so all seems calm.
You'll hear from me again in a couple days.
Bye,
matt
Dispatch Number Three: End of Elections, Beginning of the Rest
The elections are over, the winner has been decided, and nothing looks likely to change in Uganda for at least the next five years. Yoweri Museveni, the former revolutionary who changed the constitution so he could run for a third term (after ruling without elections for 10 years previous) and who is the announced target of the 20 years of rebel attacks in the north, has been reelected with an overwhelming majority, garnering somewhere around 60 percent of the vote.
It’s a depressing outcome for many here, if not most in Kampala, an educated if dirty city that took offense to the president’s constitution tweaking (which included well-known bribes to parliament to make sure it happened). They wanted change badly—said one man I met at a polling station on Thursday, “I don’t want to have the same president from the age of five until I die.” Unfortunately for that man, who like most men here has a biblical name, his being Moses, the challenger Kizza Besigye could not muster enough votes to even push a run-off. Certainly, if election rigging did not occur—and no one is yet claiming it did—the reason for Besigye’s paltry showing could be that he wasn’t allowed to start campaigning until December, when the multi-party elections were first approved. (Meanwhile, Museveni was able to use state coffers to fund his multi-year campaign and, for that matter, also locked up Besigye on what appear to be bogus charges of treason and rape late last year.)
Most of the people I have met along the way here--from impoverished Acholi women who break rocks for a living to government insiders--are Besigye supporters. Not because he’s a great man, but rather because Besigye equaled change, change away from rampant corruption, change away from an army that’s ruled by the president’s cronies, change away from a war in the north that has not been responsibly handled for 20 years. But I guess that there are quite a few Museveni supporters as well, though the ones I have interviewed cannot give thorough reasons for why they support him. They say life is good and that there’s little crime, but they are all quite poor too. It reminds me of a country I know well, where elitist regimes use the poor and undereducated to do the dirty work of democracy by riling them up with symbolic issues.
Speaking of symbols, the two candidates each had hand signals used by their supporters that were exactly the ones that I tend to use as universal messages when I travel: the thumbs up and the peace sign The thumbs up is Museveni’s sign, which I nearly did two or three times in the presence of Besigye supporters, which then made me paranoid that I was about to cause a riot. The first was to approve of this guy’s cool shiny shoes while I was in a pro-Besigye slum, and the other was to a young boy in a similar situation. No riots ensued. As for Besigye, his fans use the peace sign—I flashed that one by accident when leaving the office of the president when I waved by hand goodbye, which sometimes causes me by reflex to wave two fingers. They had guns so I didn’t look for a reaction and just kep moving. If anything had happened, I could have played it off as th stupid act of a silly muzungu.
Only the thumbs up sign is being flashed tonight, as Museveni was declared the official winner around 5 p.m. today, which is Saturday. We were at the stadium where the votes were being counted, and then watched as a swarm of supporters gathered around us near the entrance. They were singing and yelling and riding their motorcycles like madmen, waving branches, chanting “No Change!” and then moving down the street on a procession into town. At that point, Connie and I had had enough of the whole scene, the whole dirty, busy city of Kampala for that reason, so we ended up getting some Chinese food at a restaurant called Fang Fang. It was good and reminded me oddly of home. Ahh, the familiar beauty of Americanized international cuisine.
But thankfully, not all is Kampala and ballots. Yesterday, we fled the city to head south to Lake Mburo National Park, a nearly four hour route through banana plantations and coffee fields that allowed me to straddle the equator. Within 100 yards or so of turning off the road, we nearly ran over a herd of zebra. A kudu followed, then were warthogs and other deer-like creatures of various names. I figured that, like many other wildlife experiences I’ve had, we’d go looking for these animals with a ranger for hours and maybe see three. By the time we reached the ranger station, though, warthogs were old hat and zebras no longer impressed. We rented a little family cabin with Connie, myself, and our driver/friend Ricky, who was disturbed by the peaceful nature of the place, and also by a case of likely food poisoning from the fish fingers we both ate for lunch. (I, by the way, am fine, thanks to all the Bell beer keeping my stomach unfriendly for parasitic visitors.)
We then drove down to the water, where a restaurant sat overlooking a lake full of hippos, crocodiles, and crazy colored birds. On the ground ran vervet monkeys, whose testicles are a bright shade of pale blue and who, on the whole, are rather humanoid. On a boat ride, we saw more hippos then I could count, eagles and kingfishers and herons, but no crocs. That was okay, because by the time we made it to shore, the warthogs had come to roost right next door to the restaurant. So I ate my goat stew while checking out warthogs, which isn’t so bad. At night, when we made it back to our “banda”—which means, I guess, four walls and a few beds in a room—there was a fire waiting for us outside and a ridiculous amount of stars above. I took a headlamp and went to go find another chair, when all of the sudden I realized that I was seeing more than 15 sets of eyes staring at me. Luckily, they were just waterbuck, a big sort of deer, and they surrounded us all night. I think we even saw a couple of them trying to get busy with each other.
And that about brings y’all up to date on my current situation. In terms of miscellany, we also hung out with Allen Cantakerous again on election night at the Rock Catalina, where he gave a joke and bombed because a political hater was in the front row. And then there’s the whole electricity situation, which is that there is not enough, so lights go on and off at entirely random hours of each day. It makes little sense, totally stymies business—unless you’ve got a generator—and causes one to really appreciate the reliability of such a relied-upon resource. For instance, last time, when I hit the ‘send’ button on the last dispatch, the power here failed. Luckily, they have some back-up, because they message sent just fine. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen now.
Tomorrow, we leave for a full week of traveling to the east and the north. Hopefully, our driver has gotten better, or we’re gonna have to get creative tomorrow morning and cram into a minibus for the five hour-plus ride to Mbale.
Hope that was interesting enough to keep you reading for 1,300 words.
Bye,
matt
Ugandan Dispatch Number Two: The Election Run-Up
Considering the situation—a heated political battle in tumultuous East Africa, the first multi-party election in Uganda in 26 years, rabid fans raging through the streets, and a 20-year corrupt incumbent being decently challenged by his onetime personal doctor and husband of his former girlfriend—all is relatively calm in Kampala at the moment. The election is tomorrow, Thursday, February 23, and after that, this peace might be shattered. Of course, ‘peace’ is probably not the first word one would use to describe Kampala, a hurried, dusty, and smoggy city of more than two million where the easiest form of transportation through ridiculous traffic is on the back of scooters called ‘boda bodas,’ where every other storefront is guarded by a man with a snub-nosed shotgun or bolt-action rifle, and where non-black people—whether you look Asian, Indian, or Irish—are yelled out as ‘muzungus’ at every turn.
Since the last email, which was Sunday night, I’ve been more or less focusing on covering the elections here. That means a lot of silly hump-jooping—the Media Council, for instance, is located at the Office of the President, but to get your press pass, you have to take a letter from them to the Media Centre, which is located in the Health Ministry and was just opened one month ago by the president. The Centre (which incidentally only gives us calls about where the president will be and hangs up when we ask about other candidates) then gave us a letter to take to the Media Council, which then gave me a press pass. When I asked the Centre guy what his role was, he kind of smiled, and said, ‘We verify your information.’ Needless to say, the Media Council rep—a darkly humored guy named Paul who is going to visit St. Louis after the elections—is rather irked by the presence of this new Centre, as for that matter were the guards who watched us come in and out of there three times. It’s clearly corrupt and everyone knows it.
As well, we visited the US Embassy (with nicely manicured grounds and a Frank Gehry-looking architecture, it felt much like our comparably opulent homeland) to register and give them our schedule. We visited the Elections Commission office, where we met a man named Moses who does PR for the commission chairman, who spilled the beans about the personal vendetta nature of the election, and who this morning gave us a ride to the stadium where there was another press conference (kinda fun to show up at a media event with the dude who has all the materials). We also went to a political rally for the president yesterday, which was kinda sketchy because of the thousands of people but was entirely safe.
Perhaps the most memorable evening so far, at least in this political landscape (because, of course, there was the maroa drinking on Monday in the slums of Namugongo, which is a drink made from roasted, fermented millet served in a hot pot through long reed straws amidst four or five drunk old men) was Monday night, when we were having some beers at the Rock Catalina again to wind down the day. Ricky, our driver, pointed out a man a the other table, and said he was a former radio DJ, the most famous is all of Uganda. After a few twists of luck and fate—including billiards, a surrendipitously gay bartender (homosexuality is illegal here), a mention that pro wrestling which was on TV is actually fake, and a young politico named John Paul who did not know he was in the company of a celebrity—this man came to sit at our table. His name was Allen Cantankerous (his dj name at least) and he has been fired from his station eight times for drinking too much. The local tabloid actually attacked the death of his first and only child one year ago by saying that he was born drunk and with smoke coming from his lungs. (He died of meningitis, and now, Allen and his wife are separated.) But Allen is still as sharp as ever, and regaled us in stories of his former radio show, which was political satire. His last show was called Museveni’s Bedroom (Museveni is the current prez), and featured made-up political pillow talk between the prez and his wife. The guy was funny, is the ‘pioneer of FM radio in Uganda,’ and we happened to chat with him for like three hours. All the Bell Lager made the press conference the next morning a bit lazy.
Today, after the morning conference at the stadium, we checked out some tourist sites, including a shrine to Christian martyrs that were killed by a king in the 1800s, a tomb of the Buganda kings, and a resort on the shores of Lake Victoria, which was a total contrast to the hectic nature of Kampala.
Otherwise, the place we are staying is nice, the people we have met are generally friendly, and we’ve had few problems. Money wise, things are cheap for the most part—beers are less than a dollar for a half-liter, meals are less than $4 usually, and boda boda rides rage from 30 cents to a buck or so.
We’ve also figured out our schedule, which is as follows, just in case things go haywire here: Friday morning, go to Lake Mburo to see wildlife at a national park, come back to Kampala Saturday night for election results, Sunday morning go east to Mbale to see the Ugandan Jews, Monday or Tuesday go north to Lira, which on Wednesday morning we will take a military convoy with World Vision to Pader, where we will stay for two nights, then a military convoy back to Lira, then on to Gulu in the north, and then back to Kampala by March 5, for we have meetings on March 6 and 7 in town. Our friend Ricky is taking us there all for free, save for his beer, food, lodging, and incidentals. All he wants in return is some help with press stuff, and don’t worry, he’s a very nice, trustworthy guy—we checked.
So that’s about it. Expect another email tomorrow night perhaps, or if not, then maybe Saturday. If all hell breaks lose in the meantime, you can watch it on TV. But everyone seems to think that everything is going to be fine.
Bye,
matt
Hi everyone.
I have about ten minutes left on in this Internet cafe, so I gotta make this one short.
Landed in Entebbe, Uganda last night around 8:30 pm, and about 20minutes later Connie was there with her friend and driver Rikcy to pick me up. That was goo,d because I didn;t write down here phone number and didn;t have the address where we were staying (well, there aren't addresses). Instead of going straight home, as I thought would be the case, I started to talk to Ricky--who runs an organization that rehabs child soldiers and was himself a child soldier for many years--about Ugandan beer. He said he likes Bell Lager, and that we could go somewhere to have one on the way home. He also said something about dancing. Soon enough, we pulled up to this barfront called the Catalina Rock, walked through two or three other small bars--no white people, or muzungus as they say, in sight--and found our way to the back. There outside beneath the clouded, dark sky was a stage, two other bars, thre pool tables under a cabana, and more than 300 Ugandans--we were the only whites--watching six or seven Ugandan women shake their things on stage to pop music. They were wearing clothes, for those who were thinking otherwise, and it was part of the "karoake show." Following them was a leather and chain-clad guy--complete with black leather cowboy hat and fake wooden electric, stringless guitar--lip syncing country songs. Apparently, country music is huge in Uganda, especially Kenny Rogers, because "it makes us feel good," according to Ricky. They are aware of the occasionally redneck nature--and racist undertones--to country music culture in our countyr, but look past it because they simply love the music. You assume you'll see some odd juxtapositions when traveling, but this one tops them all. It was hilarious, made even more so because men would walk up onto the stage and tip him by handing him money or putting money in his pockets. The only thing that made it better was that he was followed by two midgets--one with dreads, a la Bushwick Bill from the Geto Boys--lyp syncing a local dancehall tune. One mdiget even took his shirt off at the end of his act. More lyp syncers--and one singer--followed, but the highlight had to be the cowboy crooner followed by midget duo.
Today, things were a bit sadder. We checked out a rock quarry where displaced female members of the Acholi tribe--who are the people that the war in the north affects--break rocks seven days a week for a living. One kid brought out his pet owl for us to look at, and it was funny, if a bit languid and sickly. We then went to the Namuwongo slum--Ricky, by the way, is taking us all around for gas and food and beer money--where this one woman cooked us some Acholi food: sesame seed sauce with posho, which was like a bready cake made of some meal.. The sesame sauce also had dried beef in it, which was pretty tasty. Around the corner from her house was a group of men drinking maroa, which is a warm, strong beer made from millet that they sipped through long wooden or bamboo straws. I tried some from the pot that sits in the middle of the group, and it wasn't so bad, even though it looks horrible as a grainy, smelly brown watered mush. Tasted like a Guiness Stout gone wrong. .
We walked around the lowest parts of the slum next, where the displaced tribesmen have set up camp--houses made literally of sticks and mud--in the midst of a wetland, complete with banana trees and sugar cane stalkes growing all around. As we walked around, past the drying millet, past the charcoal sellers, past men getting smashed on their Sundays, the children followed us and shook our hands constantly. They called us muzungu at every turn, and stared at us like they;d never seen a white person, which may have been the case for some of them.
That's about all for now. See, I told you it would be short. This Internet cafe I am in in downtown Kampala closes as 8, and I'm already pushing it.
I'll keep in touch.
Bye,
mk
