UGANDA JOURNAL - MONTH ONE

While I had no jet lag of any kind it has been a slow and steamy transition from -32 Calgary to feeling comfortable in equatorial Africa. This place, Uganda, reminds me a great deal of Indonesia. They're both on the equator, have similar climate and foods as well as feeling quite a bit alike in terms of their social and economic situations. Uganda has about forty million people but covers about a quarter the area of B.C. – so, just like Indonesia, with three hundred million but stretching across a vast archipelago, there's always people everywhere. This similarity has meant that, while being plenty for the senses, nothing has been too much of a shock. The main differences are that Uganda is landlocked and dominantly Christian, not Muslim, though still very religious. My friend Emily's place is a small single-storey house in a kind of suburb about two miles from downtown Kampala, on the side of a hill. Like almost any house in the country built of brick and over 500sq/ft it's surrounded by a eight foot wall topped by shards of broken glass and razor wire. She has a nice little yard full of trees and plants, a pair of hens and four chicks that run around, and a rescued street dog named Neville (who looks like a tan whippet, but with bigger, pointier ears.) The power goes out here almost daily, usually for a few hours, or for the whole day about once a week. (This, I'm told is a tremendous improvement over ten years ago.) The house has a small fridge and a gas stove, not unlike one you might have for camping. The tap water in Kampala is chlorinated though I've also been discouraged from ever drinking it; instead, for drinking, tap water is filtered through a special clay pot into a plastic bucket – a process that takes several hours per litre. While there is a flushing toiled it doesn't work very well. And though there is a nozzle for a shower it's hard to get any water to come out of it so instead I squat under the spigot, which is about three feet off the ground and above a shallow depression in the floor of the fully tiled sixteen sq/ft room. When power is available there is hot water, which is a real luxury that I never had in Indonesia, but you have to plan ahead and flip a switch and wait about an hour. As the heat doesn't last long I usually don't bother. (And, after all, nobody comes to Africa for the quality showers...) As is typical, Emily has two guards, John and Charles, who are “guards” really in name only. John is about seventy and weighs maybe seventy pounds and Charles is a young guy (who's going to school to become a nurse and works for Emily to pay tuition) and roughly the same size as John. They spend much of their time doing odd jobs around the yard, for their own amusement, or listening to the radio, and love to be sent on random errands to lessen the tedium. I'm told that crime is mostly not a thing, except for opportunistic kinds of stuff when and where no one is around and it's easy to disappear. This, they say, is due to the use of neighbourhood mob justice, meaning that if something goes down ten men from the neighbourhood are summoned and beat the person to near-death. (That being said there is the aforementioned glass and razor wire around anything of value; airport level security to get into any major building or place where people congregate, including multiple levels of metal detectors, bag searches, and pat downs; and there are young men in uniforms with rifles and/or semi-automatic weapons within sight, on every street, in every part of town...) It does seem that Emily has guards largely to demonstrate that she's part of the community and is supporting some folks and their families with respectable employment. (She pays them something close to twice the typical wage for a regular job.) Emily also has a kind of maid, Justine, that comes by once a week to do odd cleaning jobs around the house and yard – which may have been useful when there were many more people living in the house (it's typically a kind of communal house for expats doing NGO stints) but seems very unnecessary at this point while I'm the only other person around, except for the desire to help Justine out and, again, to communicate Emily's goodwill and usefulness as an employer to her neighbours. It seems Emily pays Justine whatever she asks for the tasks she volunteers to busy herself with for the day. Outside of downtown, many of the roads don't have names and plenty are not on any map (electronic or otherwise.) Almost every street has little stalls selling fresh produce, small stores (maybe one hundred sq/ft) selling household stuff, and various repair shops. The most typical shops are actually folks selling charcoal which is the standard cooking fuel; plastic dealers selling brightly coloured chairs, bowls and tubs, and place mats; and general stores selling anything and everything else, including airtime for your phone (which come in $0.15 and $0.30 increments sold on little scratch cards like scratch-and-win tickets), bags of milk (which magically don't need refrigeration here in the tropics and last not less than six months, while stating on the label that it “contains no additives or preservatives”), and, of course, requisite candles. Common street stalls are those making and selling breakfast over a crude charcoal stove (typically “Rolex”: fried eggs on a chapati, rolled up), or the ubiquitous "pork joint", which usually has pig parts, or unknown “meat”, hanging in the air. Most streets, even busy ones in this part of town, are dirt – which means that, because of the regular and immense rains (it rains almost daily and they get about three times as much rain annually as Vancouver), they are often very muddy and cut full of deep channels often making transportation a messy business. Though the streets are bad in the rain, I'd argue that they're actually worse when dry. The sky in Kampala is darkened by road dust (as much as it is by coal and diesel exhaust.) This dust coats everything – buildings, trees, clothes, skin, and lungs – in a very fine orange powder that's almost instantly replaced should you ever muster the energy or gall to wash it away. Like Indonesia, the volume of trash everywhere is considerable, due both to folks just chucking stuff and the lack of collection. Instead of official collection here, like much of the planet, garbage just gets piled at the end of every street and burned (but never before the birds, chickens, goats, and stray dogs get to it and spread it around.) The open sewer running along most streets (full of rocks, discarded plastic, dead street dogs, and, well, sewage) doubles as a kind of informal neighbourhood infrastructure maintenance material and is shoveled out and used to, ineffectively, fill the large and regular pot holes that constantly reemerge in the street. Though most Ugandans are Christian, there are three mosques within close vicinity to where I'm staying and they can be heard clearly during their regular calls to prayer. Each seems to be on their own schedule and competing with the other, or something. Almost next door is a school full of kids heard chanting the alphabet or a passage from a book back to their teacher. In the mornings and evenings someone drives or cycles by with a loud speaker calling out the news or some sort of paid advertisement. (Here you can actually pay a person to go around anyplace at 8am yelling anything you'd like them to through a loudspeaker. Not sure how this evolved or is maintained but every time it happens I love to imagine someone trying this in Kitsilano or the West End.) Oh, and there's a kind of Popsicle vendor who rides by blasting electronic Celine Dion remixes. That's always amusing. (Doubly so when I recall how, seventeen years ago, all I heard while traveling through Malaysia was Celine Dion.) Cars are common in Kampala, though SUVs and motorcycles are more so. Though you do see bikes they are rare due to the hilly terrain, the sad state of the roads and the general chaos out there, and the lack of any kind of sidewalk or otherwise passable terrain in most places. In most places there's often a naked kid chasing a wheel of some kind, and poking it with a stick to keep it upright. (Yes, all the African stereotypes are accurate and present, though there are mega malls and KFC and Belgian beers to be found too.) Goats and storks graze in any open field, patch of grass, or ditch and occasionally someone takes their herd of cattle for a stroll down the road or through the neighbourhood, causing some amount of chaos. A twenty minute walk up the hill from Emily's is a busy area where a bunch of roads converge. This spot is the center of a network of markets and shops, and slums as well, and as such it's also a kind of red-light district (though there are some nicer shops to be found and someone is attempting to fix up the area.) Down the hill from Emily's place, down in a shallow but wide valley or a sort, is a neighbourhood with no name on any maps. This is another slum, mostly occupied by recent refugees from Congo and South Sudan escaping the chaos there. There are some really swanky places around, mostly downtown, some of which may be nicer than anything in Canada, but they aren't the best places to hang out (being places where Westerners frequent and this being the 21st century...) Once engaged in conversation, when that is possible, which it tends to be, everyone is super friendly; though it seems almost impossible to get a smile out of anyone before such a conversation (with the exception of little kids, who are often smiling, waving, yelling “hello” or “good morning”, and even running up to you.) It seems you simply don't smile at or greet people you don't already know well. In recent days, just for sport, I painted a bedroom and a bathroom, and tilled a field (a very small one) for planting some vegetables. I've also used much of my downtime to finish another book. (Bah!) Other than that I've been on two little adventures. The first was only an hour out of town – once you get out of town, which takes about an hour or two due to the perpetual traffic congestion known locally as “the jam.” Travel was mostly via “matatu”, little white and blue mini busses, also known as “taxi” (but which resemble a taxi in no real sense.) To get a “taxi” out of town requires navigating the sufficiently chaotic and intimidating jungle of dense busyness that is the older part of Kampala and its bus parks. I've learned that if you puff up your chest and march like you know where you're going, and are on a mission and perhaps late and in a hurry, that there is still no diminishment in the number of men that follow and accost you. And any attempt at inconspicuousness is futile as, aside from likely smelling me on the wind, my being a whole head taller than most people (accept those from Sudan, who are usually a head or more taller than me) in combination with my radiant whiteness means that spotting me coming at three hundred yards, at night, during a rain storm, is a simple task... however. Travel anywhere within about five hours of the city costs between $0.30 and $1.75; but here, like many other places, there are never any schedules and busses don't move until they're full. And, of course, “full” is not the legal maximum of fourteen, as stated on the sticker inside every bus, but is instead however many people may be packed in. On this trip we were twenty-four steamy sardines. I'm told packing a bus in this town takes between fifteen minutes and three hours, so the forty minutes it took felt like a gift. Once we got going and beyond the jam our bus raced up the highway and let everyone off in the village of Mpigi, a collection of shacks completely covered in newly painted ads for the local milk business and a national mobile phone company. The trek from there to the final destination was made via the most common mode of transport: motorbike. These “boda-boda” guys are everywhere, and if they don't appear to be around at first they simply materialize out of thin air. Of course there are no helmets and you and your driver weave through traffic and up the shoulder as if in a video game – one that will just reload from the beginning of the level when you end up under a truck or shooting off a cliff. But this is how tens of millions of folks get around every day. Just like the images you've surely seen of Vietnam or Guatemala, it's not uncommon to see a family of four, or a seven foot couch, or thirty-six tires on the back of a motorbike. While it's technically illegal to carry more than one passenger, drivers are always happy for the money, it's far cheaper and faster than any other method, and, unless you want to walk two hours up the side of the highway, there is seldom another option. So, 'when in Rome...' From Mpigi we shot up the highway and then off onto a weathered and winding dirt road (essentially off-roading), passed small, single-room mud-brick homes, each on their own acre of land and each with it's own cluster of taro, plantain, and cassava crops. Where the road ended and the jungle began was where I'd be spending the night. The “Mpanga Forest Eco-village” was a small concrete duplex with no electricity or running water but a gas lamp and a bed with a mosquito net. I spent the rest of the day and the following morning walking a network of trails teeming with butterflies, praying mantises, white and black hornbills (which are locally common but found few other places), and red-tailed monkeys (found only in Central Africa). While probably louder than the city, with a pulsating static of insect noises and the endless chatter of birds and monkeys, it was a great, if brief, escape from the diesel and dust of the city. The following weekend was an excursion to an island in the Nile river, not far from its source at Lake Victoria. Getting there was wild and took three buses (“taxis”), a motorbike with more off-roading, and an old twenty-foot wooden row boat (actually a dug-out tree trunk). As with many destinations that are difficult to get to, the island and its surrounds were nearly magical. The island (an area of about ten acres) and the waterway and its many marshes form a kind of natural sanctuary where absent are the otherwise common hippos, crocodiles, and large snakes but in great numbers are the kingfishers, storks, egrets, fish, frogs, and monitor lizards. The island also acts as a campground for kayakers from all over the world, who come for this stretch of river that is unusually warm and deep while still having world-class rapids. There are some modest facilities on the island, the center of which is an adobe structure housing a communal kitchen and some sheltered picnic tables as well as reading nooks – that would fit in really well on Saltspring or Galiano, with its Tibetan prayer flags and shelf of abandoned self-help and New Age books. Camping there was made memorable by an amazing evening chorus of frogs and a tremendous thunderstorm that lasted from before dawn until late in the afternoon. Given the torrential rains, and the state of the terrain I had to cross on motorbike before the soak, return to Kampala would not have been possible that day were it not for Sam. Sam is an English kayaking coach who'd been staying on the island working with the world's number three and four, and who had a four-wheel-drive near-by. He was very talkative and kind and refused any money for the ride out to the highway, while also driving us much farther up the highway than he needed to. The crazy bit, and the whole reason I ended up out there, is that the island and surrounding area is slated to be under fifty feet of water shortly, with the completion of a new dam – one that most people seem to agree is doubly ridiculous given the current abundance of electricity but dire lack of infrastructure to deliver it. So, needless to say, I was glad for the great weekend and the chance to see it all before it's wiped off the map. Africa!

#ridiculousness #travel #culture #life