My Sheer Good Fortune

I spent some time in city council offices this week, wrapping up my role on this project and my survey of field work with an attempt at collecting primary data from government agencies. It's been an inefficient process of course, but to be fair a surprisingly productive one given the little time I had to collect this data and the little notice I gave with my requests. I feel a little silly telling these civil servants that I need data on garbage collection, drainage channels, health facilities, educational institutions and security services and that I am leaving in two days. But the mzungu factor and the PhD candidate business card go a long way in Uganda. And everyone has been incredibly accomodating.

Sitting on a small wooden bench today in front of the Kawempe Division City Council office in a slum neighboring our sample area, I was reminded of the very first phase of the project, the pilot of the network game. I had barely set foot in Kampala that the et als were already sending me around dirt roads, garbage dumps, flooding drains, and matoke fields to ask random slum dwellers if they would be willing to participate in a game where we pay them to find someone they do not know. I did a lot of waiting on wooden benches back then. I got a lot of inquisitive looks, suspicious reactions, and curious children with tentative approaches toward the mzungu.

Today, over two months later, I still inspire those same reactions. The looks haven't changed yet they feel different. Less aggressive or intrusive, perhaps, more innocuous. Maybe I've grown accustomed to them, just as I've come to know bits and pieces of this town. The Kubiri Roundabout, between our office and the Mulago Hospital. Kalerwe market down Gayazza Road. The Nakasero Hill shortcut to town. The famous Mawanda Road, the one Alex and I could not find on our very first walk together through the field, the one that ended up being the main road which connects the slumiest of slums in our sample - Butaka Bukirwa, Kifumbira - to the wealthiest zones - Upper Mawanda, Tuffnel. The streets off of Kampala Road where photocopy centers and airline offices congregate. The strip of samosa take-away restaurants in Wandegeya.

I passed our characteristic office building with the non-existent fourth floor today in the taxi on my way back from the Kawempe Division City Council office, and I joked around with my taxi driver about the notorious traffic jams and potholes we successfully evaded.

Except there is no one in the office anymore. And only three of us in the apartment. And only one of us at the gym. Nothing's changed except for us; we're either back to our homes and our other deadlines or wrapping up our stay with a more removed glance. In a couple days i'll be on a plane to a more mzungu place. I'll be working on my own research. I'll be near a university. I'll be closer to the life I know at home in a way. And these smelly markets, flooded mud streets, crazy boda drivers, and inquisitive looks will feel far away.

I'll take home with me what I learned in the past 2 months. I learned to bargain better. I learned a few key words of Luganda. I learned what random sampling in the field looks like. I learned a bit about how to conduct a meaningful interview. I learned how to use a memory stick. I learned how not to use a memory stick. I learned about power generators and how to sleep through a chorus of frog-mating calls. I learned to interpret a few local speech and expression maneurisms, from "Eh!" to "Ah!" to "Okkkkkkk". I learned how to order Indian food. I learned to appreciate unsweetened coffee. I learned how to reconcile and understand inconsistencies between various sources of data. I learned how to SMS even more quickly. I learned to live with very little privacy in a crazed house full of quirky academics.

But perhaps most importantly, I learned about waiting. I learned to wait two hours for an interview appointment. I learned to wait under a Church or a metal sheet roof for the mid-day rain storm to pass by. I learned to wait until the taxi van is full before it departs. I learned to wait 45 minutes when the et als tell me they'll pick me up in 15. I learned to wait through a painfully slow modem connection to get back in touch with the outside world. I learned to wait for mango and eat papaya instead when really, why do we even bother with papaya at all when Mother Nature gave us mango? I learned to observe and read facial expressions as I wait for a translation.

Countless things I have missed in my time here. The people of my life, of course. And salads and tap water. Paved roads and sidewalks. My music and laptop. A good night's sleep. An effective shower. Some quiet space. A good movie. Normal digestion. My cell phone rings. My guitar. My running shoes. Baby carrots. Pickles. Olives. Tortilla chips. My mother's endive pie. Running outside. Traffic rules.

Countless things I will miss when I leave. Kamwokya market on the boda ride to the gym. The Kitante Close hill that I climb every morning as the sun rises over matoke leaves and orange flowers. The Cafe Pap institution. My post-workout cappucino. The calls of the matatu conductors. That speedbump on Kira Road I never know whether my boda will notice. Pepine's "You are welcome" when dinner is ready. Simon's laugh. Pepine's laugh. The boda drivers' art of stating the obvious, from "Madame, you are fearing" to "This road is very very bad." Mangos. And g-nuts. Plantains. And conchas. And the city's hectic round-abouts.

Toni Morrison writes that "It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you." I wonder if the same can be said about a city, for I miss Kampala already.

The Border Walk

On our way back from our Kabale-Lake Bunyoni hike, we ran into Felix, the owner of a tourist agency, who asked us if we were interested in going to the Congo to see some mountain gorillas. Desha's eyes lit up. We entertained the possibility long enough to meet disappointment when we realized neither Desha nor Nate had brought a passport along. Next time, we promised Felix, as we took his publicity leaflet; the number of entrepreneurs in this country, young and charismatic people who make a career out of the most ingenuous and original services, is astounding. Economic potential abounds. We did end up calling Felix again for a ride to Kisoro on Sunday morning, after countless failed attempts at hitching a ride and a self-loathing moment upon meeting hostility and stupidity from the mzungu overland truck passengers who had no idea where they were nor where they were going and were entirely uninterested in giving us a lift.

They say the road from Kabale to Kisoro is in terrible condition yet the most beautiful and scenic drive in the country, and again - those travel guides are correct. Hills become patchworks of bean, sorghum, and potatoe plantations and a quick stop in the middle of this canvass felt truly magical. Our driver dropped us off at the Uganda Wildlife Authority Office at 1pm, and when the ranger mentioned a 5-hour border walk as one of our hiking options, Desha's eyes immediately sparkled. The border walk, you mean the border with the Congo? The ranger nodded. Nate had no more say in any of this. We inquired about this border walk, and insisted we could do it that very day; we really didn't have much of a choice, since we all had to be back in Kampala by Monday night. The ranger seemed quite skeptical, but he radio'ed a few people and came back with good news. It seemed this was our lucky day. One guide, Sunday Charles was his name, would wait for us until 2p.m. at the mouth of Mgahinga National Park. This was 13 km away on a very bad dirt road. A 40 minute car ride. A 30 minute boda ride. In the following 20 minutes, utter chaos ensued; I'm not sure how we did it, but we snapped at each other and we snapped at the hotel managers who promised good rates and then refused to budge and we snapped at the vendor who only had crackers called "Glucose" for lunch and we snapped at the boda drivers who wanted to charge us USh 10,000 for a USh 6,000 ride. We were certainly victims of the mzungu price. Yet by 1.30pm, we had our hard-ass negotiated USh 7,000 boda rides, our hard-ass negotiated USh 18,000 hostel room for three, our stock of glucose and water, and our mission to get to Sunday Charles by 2pm.

We got to Sunday Charles by 2.30pm after a boda ride across a wall of dust, and the campground manager laughed at me when I arrived, and unabashedly exclaimed that I was so dusty I "looked oriental". Cultural norms are very different in Uganda.

Sunday Charles rocked. We strolled into the park for 20 minutes, waited in a hut for reinforcement, and then headed out - three bazungus and three armed rangers - to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The weapons, they were to scare off the animals. And the border with the DRC, it was in the middle of the Verunga Forest and the Verunga mountain range. Panicking at this point in the blog post would be entirely unjustified.

The hike to the border was single-handedly the best hike of my life. It was physically intense but beautiful and ever-surprising with new fauna and terrain. From the eucalyptus trees to the bamboo shoots, from the dark density of a tall forest to the refreshing light of a clearing, from steep climbs to pleasant strolls. The dormant Verunga volcanoes towered over us in the background, looming and majestic. To our right was the DRC. To our left was Rwanda.

We reached the border and did the silly thing of jumping from one side to another, DRC, Uganda, DRC, Uganda, failed state, recovered state, failed state, recovered state. Heck, one picture of us and our armed rangers on the Congo side and you could even say we smuggled weapons into the DRC. You see, when you do political science, it's possible to be a big dork even in the field. No need for libraries and pristine university settings.

It was an amazing experience. We toyed with the idea of doing an early morning walk to the Rwanda/Congo/Uganda summit, but the logistics of having to get back to Kampala by Monday night got in the way. It had, after all, taken us three long and bumpy drives to get to where we were and we had to condense it all in one day to get back to the capital in time to meet our responsibilities and our schedules. The only consolation for me, the same justification I've used for not going to Kigali and for not going to Zanzibar, is this firm and steadfast belief that I will be back shortly.

We spent Monday on the road, hitching a beautiful ride on the back of a pickup truck with locals and empty jerrycans for the Kisoro-Kabale leg, catching an overcrowded matatu for the Kabale-Mbarara leg, and jumping on an overpriced bus for the Mbarara-Kampala leg. The rides got less and less comfortable and less and less beautiful and more and more expensive as we approached the capital. It was dark and cold by the time we reached Kampala, and we returned home after an endless day of travel.

We were cold. We were exhausted. We were starving. We had four days of dust under our nails and behind our ears. We had sore muscles in places we didn't even know muscles existed. And I fell asleep with a giddy heart, still pounding to the rythm of the Western landscapes and ready for my last week in the Pearl of Africa.

Stuck in a New Jersey

Desha, Nathan and I met up at the Old Taxi Park at 9a.m. on Friday morning, Desha having completed her ambitious to-do list and eight interviews for the week, Nate having barely fought off the typical nausea-fever Ugandan flu that seems to have hit everyone on the project but me, and myself having sent out enough deliverables for the et als to chew on for a few days. It turns out when you use a myriad methods of measurement in a fuzzy science like ours, you run into blatant inconsistencies; I had to spend the entire week returning to various villages in our sample to find some reconciliation in our data. By Friday morning, needless to say, the three of us were more than ready for our impromptu and well anticipated vacation. We exchanged good mornings and words of utter excitement and proceeded through the old taxi park, already swarming with matatu vans, matoke vendors and mobile candy shops,
in search of a taxi to Mbarara - the country's sixth largest city and gateway to Kampala from the West. There was really no set plan for this trip, just this vague notion that we wanted to hit Mbarara, Kabale and Kisoro to see some beautiful mountain and lake-filled landscapes. It was the basic mountain gorilla itinerary without the mountain gorillas for lack of time and money.

We were promptly guided toward the new taxi park, which was basically more of the old taxi park but a few blocks away, and we climbed into the only matatu we found heading Southwest with a hint of skepticism when we found it less than full. So much for meeting and leaving early. This matatu wasn't going anywhere for a while. Nate, Desha and I had plenty of excitement and catching up to keep us busy and entertained as hawkers of various kinds attempted to sell us newspapers, necklaces, candy, plates full of matoke and other starches, men's underwear, straw hats, and matching pink, orange and red striped tank tops which we almost bought.

You know there's a real communication breakdown when - after a couple hours of waiting in an increasingly hot and crowded matatu, you turn to the conductor to ask him at what time the taxi is leaving and he nods back at you with an emphatic yes. In any case, we departed Kampala around mid-day, after the first of many waiting-for-godot experiences on this trip that seem to have characterized so much of my summer here.

The ride to Mbarara was probably one of the more pleasant and uneventful legs of our weekend travel in retrospect, and after much debating and pros-and-cons-cost-and-benefit-academic-style weighing of whether or not to go straight to Mbarara or attempt to hit a hike at Lake Mburo National Park on the way, we decided that time
and weather were not on our side and that an Mbarara visit was probably the optimal choice.

We arrived in Mbarara by late afternoon and our welcome at the taxi park should have tipped us off. Hardly had we crawled out of the matatu that aggressive men ordered us around the taxi park to head out to Kasese, Fort Portal or Kabale. When we asserted instead that we had every intention of staying in Mbarara for the night, we received the typical Ugandan high-pitched "Eh!" of surprise. After a quick
and dusty walk through the main strip, the heat, the weight of our bags, and the heightened mzungu harassment in a town where white people are even more scarce than in the capital, we decided to settle for the first reasonably clean and affordable accomodations we found. Though we tried our best to stroll around town, we
quickly realized that Mbarara had the hustle and bustle of a burgeoning economic hub without the charm of a small town. And there were definitely too many boda bodas per capita.

We had all worked up an appetite, and began our search for food, which ended up being much more of a quest for accurate menus and for meals other than matoke than originally anticipated. We tried a couple different places where only about 1/5 of the menu items were available - and they were all under the starches section, and I
remembered our friend Jamies's insightful observation on our trip to Mbale that the menus here have no bearing on reality. Don't even think of ordering the fruit salad, the avocado milkshake, or even at times the English coffee. What they have here is matoke, beans, chicken, beef, goat and potatoes.

We finally settled for a restaurant near our hotel with an outdoor balcony, and we all grew excited at the idea of being on a balcony - with a view of the town yet removed just enough to avoid the mzungu harassment. And when we realized there was a liquor store with Spanish red wine downstairs and the fish on the menu was not a
lie, it seemed like the evening could turn out to be quite pleasant after all. We sat down on the balcony with our own little booth and a view of the Mbarara sunset.

The fish, of course, ended up being Tilapia head. And the cork of my sweet little Spanish wine made of elastic plastic, some kind of material that resisted defiantly and victoriously our hasty attempts at opening the bottle and broke our newly purchased corkscrew. We received an apologetic Ugandan doughnut for our
troubles, the stale version of my grandmother's sweet and soft North African pastry.

Fish head, broken corkscrew, and matoke galore aside, what salvaged Mbarara was the company I had. Storytelling and laughter ensued, and if it had not been for Nate and Desha, I most certainly would have been stuck in a New Jersey - an expression Nate picked up from a play he once read about those kinds of days when nothing seems to be going quite your way.

We left this industrial town without looking back early the next morning, only to find out that the days of comfortable matatu rides were now behind us. For some reason, once you hit West of Mbarara, taxi conductors accept no less than four passengers per 3-passenger row. And so it was that our taxi ride from Mbarara to Kabale was one of the most physically draining parts of our trip. And with one sick woman one passenger away from me, I decided it was a good time to shut my eyes and drift off into daydreams. The changing landscape helped and I could not keep my eyes shut too long to the beauty of Western Uganda, where waves of matoke trees gently cover the country's characteristic, soft, rolling hills.

We arrived in Kabale around mid-day and rediscovered charm in this small town. Our hostel was manned by Francis, one of the kindest and most helpful locals yet. He set us up with our rooms and all the information we needed to know to enjoy Lake Bunyoni, a beautiful lava damp lake encircling countless island hills, each with its own name and story. We hired three bodas to the Lake - bodas had actually become motorcycles now, a necessity for the Western dirt roads - and Nate and Desha laughed at the "Jesus is the way" bumper sticker boda that took me and sped ahead.

I don't know if it was Jesus or my boda driver who led the way, but after a few failed coordination attempts, the three of us found each other at the foot of the lake, hired a guide and a dugout canoe, and paddled our way through the islands. Jonan our guide was a bright young twenty-year old student with an orange lifevest and hopes of becoming a travel journalist. He seemed to think all Bazungus knew how to swim and was hard pressed to believe me when I assured him it was not the case. It reminded me of a vendor at the taxi park in Mbarara, who exclaimed "Hey Mzungu, when I see you I see the face of G-d" with either anger or humor - I could not quite detect the tone.

We reached Bushaga Island, stopped at a trinkets shop in which we indulged after we found out that the trinkets were made by local cooperatives and the proceeds went back to the local people, and we set off with our trinkets around our wrists and our heads for our exquisite hike back to the village. We passed countless huts, smiling farmers, warm grandmothers carrying their livelihoods in a clay pot on their heads, shrieking children. Desha and I were asked if we were Nathan's wives, told we were worth at least 12 or 13 cows' bride price, and advised that it was a lot of cows. We passed matoke and beehives and all sorts of colors and scents and sights to awaken our senses. We returned to town exhausted and hungry, and two coffees and three showers later, found ourselves debating road culture and the rule of law over wine, curry and ciappati. It was a stimulating conversation, fueled in part by the wine and in part by the sheer excitement of the trip. Uganda's landscapes have certainly spoiled me. And New Jersey seems worlds away.

Bayesian Breakdown

Another week in Kampala winds down and I walk out of my last moment of the summer with Jeremy - as he makes his way toward South Africa for his own little peace of mind - with a few thoughts in my head and a flurry of emotions on my mind.

Every moment of pause and reflection on my summer experience so far concludes itself with a headshake and a smirk, with realizations of how wonderfully quirky and fun this Real World Kampala team has been.

The et als: James “This-data-is-slightly-dodgy” Habyarimana, Macartan “I-think-we-should-increase-the-sample-size” Humphreys, Dan “This-would-make-for-a-great-side-project” Posner, and Jeremy “We’re-toast” Weinstein. These guys are an unbelievable bunch. When they’re not debating a critically minute detail of the project over a three-hour long dinner, they’re arguing about whether the Indigo Girls can sing or merely harmonize, coming up with publication pseudonyms like Habyahumpostein, busting a move until 2.30 a.m. on the dance floors of Kampala’s club scene, or putting together a collection of primary data for their 14th research project - while they’re at it and just because they can. Jeremy left today and there are three weeks left to wrap up this field work. He asked me two months ago what I wanted and expected out of this summer experience and I challenged him and this project to inspire me into academia again.

There were too many Sunday mornings in the office and too many late nights in our dataset. There were too many card games of mafia and kuhandel and too many last minute decisions. There were too many plantains and too many monkey jokes. There were too many traffic jams and too many latte coffees. There were too many potholes and too many people per taxi van. There were too many Fantas and too many hours on Africa time.

There were not enough computers and not enough internet connections. There were not enough envelopes and not enough local enumerators. There were not enough rooms in the apartment and not enough power stabilizers. There were not enough showers and not enough functioning memory sticks. There were not enough hours in the day and certainly not enough hours of sleep.

The matoke bunch: We already each have our little idiosyncracies but we’re definitely quirky et als in the making. Nate has proceeded to pick up every local speech and facial maneurism we’ve come across and now sounds entirely Ugandan. Alex has mastered the art of mixing Lugandan and English in the same sentence while making Café Pap and its latte coffees her second home. As for me, I suppose others find it quirky that I’ll wake up before 7 on the few days we have off to escape to the Kabira Health Club, or that I’ll spend our precious little free time writing up elaborate blog entries of our experiences on the project, or that I’d rather walk to work and get lost through Mulago Hospital than take the pothole road to the office. Little do they know these structured methods of escape from the chaos of the project have kept me sane and productive – and my blog readers, whoever they may be, well-informed.

Of course we’re all academic types and we’ve all chosen to spend a summer on a project that exports economic lab experiments to the slums of Kampala, so there’s a slight selection bias there.

And of course we’ve all over-used our poli sci lingo in everyday parlance.

And then some: And if it wasn’t for the local staff, who have brought all the charm and the warmth to this project, this entire undertaking would have certainly been a lot more dull.


It was, altogether, just what I needed in a summer research project.

Everyone on this project found or built for himself his own contribution. I can’t imagine how it would have worked without one of the et als here, but I also can’t imagine how it would have worked without one of our local translators, or without Pepine our cook or Simon our driver, or without one of the grad students – even when we really felt like data-sorting monkeys.

Jeremy left and we said good-bye and it was heartfelt and cheesy. But I reminded him of that very first weekend a couple months ago at Al’s Bar in Kabalagala, of his question and of my hopes and expectations.

And I thanked him.

Not your ordinary premiere

Not many things justify spending $80 in one night when you’re on a graduate student travel budget; yet when you have the opportunity to attend a special screening of "Hotel Rwanda", in the presence of Don Cheadle and John Prendergast and the U.S. Ambassador to Uganda and a heap of other important people in the pearl of Africa, you get the sense this is going to be one hell of a different movie-going experience than watching the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in an air-conditioned movie theater in the Bay Area.

And it was.

Though I had already seen the movie when it originally came out in the U.S., this screening evoked chills and emotions I had not felt the first time around. The familiarity of the landscapes, in particular, struck a very shrill cord. This was right next door and the hills, the green, the houses, the dirt roads, the boda bodas… this looked like Kampala. It was eerie. I cried, I laughed, I was angry and disgusted and ashamed and deeply deeply sad.

The reception afterward was absolutely anticlimactic. There was beer. There was wine. There was Don. He was shorter than I thought. There was Celtel, the main event sponsor, overtly advertising itself. There was an auction hosted by an uncharismatic young woman who gave me a headache as she repeated incessantly, in her valleygirl voice, that the proceeds were for “the children of the north” and that we really needed to help “the children of the north” and that our money will go to “the children of the north” and thank you for saving the “children of the north”. There was the Ambassador, who spoke in such a soft voice that I could not understand a single thing he said and I’m sure Jeremy didn’t either even though he kept nodding and retorting with a “We have to keep pushing for that in Washington.” On more than a few occasions, I took a step back and looked around at the absurdity of it all and thought myself possibly in the middle of a Seinfeld episode.

Except there was really nothing funny about any of it. Just a lot of absurdity. Like waking up the next day and going to the health club and hearing about the explosion in a tourist-haven hotel in Sharm El-Sheik and the growing tensions in London and thinking I might very well be safer here in the slums of Kampala than back home in France or the United States. Or spending three months in Kampala and reading and hearing and talking with locals about that very war in the North as if it were taking place in a different country or on a different continent or in a different universe, really. Or attending a rally for the National Resistance Movement and hearing Museveni and his supporters go wild in support for the upcoming referendum that will “open up the political space to multipartyism” while he buys off the MPs – one by one – to amend the Constitution and abolish presidential term limits. Yes, that’s what it feels like. One big fat Seinfeld episode.

Makeshift

Two weeks ago I went to Home Affairs to pick up my passport and visa extension only to find out that the application had been rejected for reasons unbeknownst to me and to the immigration officer who broke the news. Two things crossed my mind as I glared back at Christopher with a fading smile:
1. Well this is an interesting turn of events, and
2. … wtf?

Those weren’t very constructive thoughts and I sat there for a while, not really sure how to proceed. I asked him what my “options” were, and he told me I could either come back with a letter of appeal or with a plane ticket out of Uganda. I thought… well, appeal. But what exactly was I appealing? When I asked him why my application had been rejected, he just flipped slowly through my passport and shook his head, claiming he had not been given the reason and that the committee had simply decided to reject the application: “I can’t tell you, sometimes this happens. You have been here a month, that’s enough.”

The temperature rose a little bit when I demanded my passport back and he refused to give it to me without an outgoing plane ticket. I gave in, and walked out, without a passport, without a visa, without a clue, and with a flurry of emotions.

I’ve never been very lucky with visas.

I spent a sleepless weekend, mainly because my passport was sleeping without me in the Ministry of the Interior somewhere and partly because the power generator next to our first floor apartment decided to go off tirelessly for approximately 20 hours starting Sunday night at 11p.m. Take a dull anxious headache, add to that the cyclical sound of the gargantuan engine of a power generator intended to feed power to a dozen three bedroom apartments, and you’ve got yourself a slight state of exhaustion-and-stress-induced insanity. It’s a good thing I am well surrounded and well connected on this project; when James told me to bring my return ticket for August 15 to the Legal Affairs Office at 11 a.m. on Monday, the only last little glitch was having to scour the entire apartment for that return ticket, hidden so securely in Nathan’s locked room that I couldn’t find it anymore. Anxiety, exhaustion, power generator. You get the idea. This was not a revitalizing way to start my week.

But as Kapuscinski seemed to have put it so eloquently and accurately before, things get resolved just as quickly as they come undone in this part of the world. Go to Legal Affairs Office. Meet James’s friend. Sit on bench. Explain situation (though beyond “I applied for a visa extension and provided all the documents they asked for and it got denied and I don’t know why”, there wasn’t much more to explicate). Wait on bench. Share bad U.S. visa stories with James. Go to other bench. Wait. Talk to James about Kenya. Go to next bench. Sit. Wait. Get passport + visa + apology back.

Just like that. A weekend of unraveling. Behind me.

Neither James nor I really knows what happened and I could not tell you why I originally got denied. Beyond my sheer bad luck with customs issues, James’s friend explained this as an “oversight”. Apparently they thought I was trying to over-extend my stay. Which seems strange to me since I initially showed up for my visa extension two weeks before it expired, was told to come back on July 1st, the day of expiration, and came back on July 1st with all the required papers.

“Just think about how great this will be for your blog” were Jeremy’s words of consolation. And in a way, now that I have my passport and my visa and my smile back, I suppose he’s right.

Just like reading tea leaves

You know you´ve created an institution when Dan, the fourth et al of this project, comes back to you with "Do you know what people are calling us now? The et als!" I smiled. Yes, in fact, I do know. I believe the phrase was created at the beginning of the summer for the purpose of this very blog. I also know that Jeremy retorted by coining us, the student staff on the project, the Matoke Bunch. It´s truly surprising what catches on and what does not. But this expression apparently does not belong to me anymore, which is a sign of a strong institution, something this country´s president could stand to learn a little bit about. But I digress.

This week has seen the flooding of Kampala by a host of et als, as the Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes Conference took place, bringing together truly impressive scholars from NYU, Princeton, Wisconsin, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, etc... If inspiration has come in spurts over the past month and a half, I enjoyed a great big spike of it this week. I said goodbye to my dirt-infused boots and clothes and the slums of Kampala for a few days, and hello to a pristine academic room in the Grand Imperial Hotel – the name could not be any more sadistically ironic. I was treated to actual morning croissants, mid-morning coffee, and a buffet of choices beyond matoke and potatoes and then more starch for lunch. But most importantly, I was offered a taste of some really exciting interactions, discussions among young assistant professors on their research projects in their very infancy or in progress. It was a wonderful intellectual treat, and my little blue inspiration notebook – the first thing I bought this summer off the streets of Kampala’s City Square – was soon covered with ink.

The excitement that I am trying to convey didn´t just stem from the research ideas that suddenly captured my mind or from the overdose of caffeine I´ve had today. It also came from an increasing level of comfort and confidence that I have surprised myself with around these scholars. We all went out to dinner last night, and after a flustering boda ride that got me lost in the depths of expat hill, I grabbed a bottle of Nile Club beer, plopped myself down next to a 33-year old superstar who just got offered tenure at NYU, and proceeded to spend the entire evening making casual and intellectual conversation. Perhaps it was the end of another busy day and I was too tired to guard my insecurities; perhaps it was the boda ride that disarmed me a little bit; perhaps it was temporary larium-induced insanity; or perhaps it was simply a growing level of comfort with the kinds of questions, ideas, thoughts, impressions that I have and a deepening confidence in the contribution I can pretend to make. No doubt hanging out with the et als on a daily basis for a month and a half has helped demystify these young rockstar professors we often place on pedestals. I mean, playing pool in teams of student against advisor, talking smack as I auction off my horse in Kuhandel, "throwing" frisbee at the Kololo airstrip under a bright orange sunset, this summer has also had its fill of beautifully disarming and equal opportunity embarrassing moments that have helped equalize the status a little bit between the et als and the matoke bunch.

So when these scholars start talking about using fMRI to figure out whether social identity is emotionally fixed or instrumentally constructed, I have no problem agreeing with Jim Fearon that the project seems like little more than "reading tea leaves."

We are now the Matoke Bunch and the Et Als in their most complete state. A real system, a new ethnic group all to ourselves. We believe in micro-foundations of political processes and we're not afraid to pretend like we're doing real science. We are four professors, six students. Two apartments. Six rooms. One operational kitchen. Four bathrooms. Five bottles of Coke. Two bottles of Diet Pepsi. One exhausted collection of Cape Verdean, Senegalese, Brazilian and American music. Two news channels. Five Bollywood channels. Eight cell phones. No mailbox. Four sets of keys. Eight computers. One modem connection. Four memory sticks. One stabilizer. 300 subjects. Ten thousand envelopes. 20 local staff members. One coffee maker.

And one rejected application for a visa extension. But that, my friends, is for another post.

A thousand words

This image attests to the intense preparation that is required as we head off to our field work interviews. This is serious business folks.


The famous office building where it's all happening. Notice the non-existant fourth floor. It's certainly served as a landmark from which to orient ourselves around town.

Not sure which looks more ridiculous... Macartan's thinking cap or Pepine's cook cap?

Simon - this is the man responsible for getting us to work on time, rain or shine, amongst bodas or cows. He's a badass on Kampala's messed up roads, and when he's not shuttling us around and translating our interviews for us, he's making clay art in his workshop and running a sustainable employment-creating NGO.

Whatever pearls of insight this project holds and whatever fancy publications come out of it, it all started out right here, in little manilla envelopes on the floor of a house overlooking Lake Victoria.