Instant coffee

I never knew one could find instant friendship and instant love much like one finds instant coffee in Mbale. Take a matatu ride into town, for example. I am sitting by the window and my cell phone rings. I answer it, and the woman sitting next to me reaches behind my head to shut the window. When I hang up, she explains in broken English that people can snatch my phone from the window if I am not careful. I thank her, she introduces herself as Sheila, asks for my phone number, and steps out of the matatu exclaiming "I hope you call me soon!" Instand friendship. Just like that. On a ten minute taxi ride into town.

I walk into a fabric store in the charming little main street of Mbale, and the shop owner attempts to grasp my attention. They all do when you walk by: "Hey sista! Mzungu! Madame, I want to talk with you!" And they sincerely believe that if I'm not answering, it must be because I have not heard them yet. I can usually get away with the instincts I learned from three years of NYC catcalls and walk on by, but this time I am stuck in a dark shoebox of a shop with Jamie and Nathan. The shopowner asks me my name. I introduce myself, he introduces himself, and without missing a step, jumps straight to the point of his interpellation: "I want to marry you." Instant love. Just like that. In a five-minute shopping stop in a fabric store.

Nate, Jamie and I have arrived in Mbale, the three of us staying at the Apule Safari Lodge where the cold shower water drains straight into the toilet pit, a hole in the middle of the bathroom. The town is charming and the Indian food exquisite so you make do with the accomodations you find.

Akim offered to take us to Sippi Falls for the Ush30,000 we demanded, so we hopped into the box he claimed as vehicle. It was unclear why all the locals surrounding us as we negotiated with a myriad taxi drivers burst out in laughter, but when they gathered behind Akim's box to push it awake, and when the engine finally farted and roared in the trunk, it became clear why the three bazungu had become the laughing stock of Mbale. Ten minutes in the back seat with the windows closed and no lever to open them, with the engine grunting in the trunk, my eyes began to sting and the print of the Daily Monitor I was perusing began to blurr. The air inside Akim's car was more petrol fumes than oxygen. But somehow the box rides so you maneuver, you open the windows, and you make do with the vehicle you have.

The wounded car almost made its way to Sippi Falls, crawling up to the trailhead against all odds. Budget accomodations make for sketchier experiences and certainly for better stories after the fact. After the fact, though, is a key element to the story when you pass two checkpoints and dole out a few bills without being certain whether you just passed the Ugandan police or some private profitable informal business.

Akim's box ran out of gas about 1km from the dirt road leading up to the trailhead and about seven kilometers from the trailhead. We paid Akim in full for his efforts and made our way toward Kapkwai trailhead in Mount Elgon National Park.

The walk up was exquisitely beautiful, with colors more vivid than I have ever seen. The vegetation abounds and bursts with the darkest, richest green. The village children are not much different in their fascination with us than Kampala's children, except that they walk behind you for a kilometer or two and know a few more basic phrases such as "Give me money." We arrived at the trailhead with a fan club of three 5-7 year old boys, and they stared at us persistently as we waited for our guide. Finally, with the guards' short-wave radio blasting some of the latest American hip hop, I started dancing in the middle of rural Eastern Uganda, providing entertainment rather than money to an audience of three kids who found the scene entirely amusing and shrieked with excitement. Our guide Jimmy arrived, we wrapped up our dance party, ate some last minute sesame balls, and made our way into the park.

Trekking up to Chebonet Falls through a tropical forest was one of the most wondrous, exciting and uncomfortable hikes I've ever known. Never have I walked through more vegetation and life forms. I felt more like an intruder trekking up to the Falls than walking around in my mzungu gear through the streets of Kampala.

We arrived at the Falls, exhaustion momentarily eclipsed by excitement at what we considered to be a great feat and what Jimmy considered to be a weekend stroll in the woods. It would have been a perfect moment of satisfaction and respite had I not felt an uncomfortable, sharp sting on my stomach and my hip. I tried to brush it off but the sting persisted. Finally, I lifted my shirt to the frightening sight of an ant the size of a beetle clawing at my skin. It was a stubborn thing, and I remember feeling like that kid covered in leaches in "Stand By Me" as I freaked out and ran in circles around my guide.

We sang the "Rainbow Connectoin" all the way back down to distract ourselves from the ant ordeal, and Jimmy thoroughly enjoyed it. We hurried back to the main road, jumped on the first matatu that was willing to rip us off for a ride back to Mbale, and enjoyed a first class view of the sunset on our ride home.

That's the kind of compensation you get for the discomforts that come with budget travelling in Africa. The unsollicited and raw beauty of impromptu landscapes and sunsets.

Shifting Landscapes

Gazing out the window of our taxi van on the way to Mbale, it struck me how much the dirt roads and mud houses outside Kampala looked like those of Mulago and Kyebando - the two Kampalan divisions our project is based on. And it hit me in a very concrete way how much a slum is just an imported village, the migration of rural life into the capital. Except it doesn't work when space is so restricted and migrants are so numerous. There's too many people, too much garbage, too many cars, too many skinny cows.

Our taxi van was crowded and I got to sit between a fat woman with a suitcase and a man with his newspaper. The back bumper of the van had also been stuffed in the trunk, hovering over us eerily. We drove through the different landscapes of this country, leaving Kampala's crowded streets behind and welcoming the green rolling hills of the Windows XP default background (yes, I heard that's where they shot that photo). This is radically different from the Savannah of Southern Africa, but in spite of the contrast, I've noticed one distinct characteristic of the African landscape common to both regions on this vast continent: the occasional lone tree that stands erect, almost defiantly in the landscape. Whether it emerges out of a bed of sand and rocks like it does in northern Botswana or western Namibia, or out of ondulating matoke leaves as in Eastern Uganda, it protrudes awkwardly with twisted, barren branches. It looks like it's dancing.

A four-hour matatu ride and landscapes unfolding before my eyes:

The source of the Nile, where blue meets green the way it does so crisply in the foothills of Northern California's peninsula.

The snack stop where vendors in blue vests - they look like stock exchange brokers - run after our taxi van in hords, swarming around the car, brandishing their Fanta bottles and BBQ chickens on sticks, shoving their goods through the window and in my face. I look up as the car slows down, and see two or three vendors chasing the vehicle, speaking to me and pleading with me in a language I don't understand; in an instant, the car is surrounded by a mob of desperate kids and the corn, chicken, and soda they are begging me to buy.

The light of the sun; I can't get over the light of the setting sun, the way every color bursts at you and a thin veil of haze covers the horizon.

I am cramped up and sweating in a matatu that is as overcrowded as the slums of Uganda's deceiving capital city, and the state of the road only worsens as we head toward Mbale, but none of that seems to matter when I look out the window and realize over and over again, with each passing pothole, each glaring villager, and each cloud of dust rushing through our windows, how many beautiful landscapes this country has to uncover.

There are mountains here too

We rode home in silence yesterday evening after a full day at the office, partly because the insanity of the project has started to take its toll on the energy level in the house, and partly because the city's evening sunlight and breeze begged us to quiet down and enjoy its colors and scents. Children ran around in the dark red dirt, women sold us broiled maize off the side of the road as if the entire city were its own little drive-through, and boda boda drivers zigzagged their way and their fate through the streets.

Cows, goats, boda bodas, matatus, screaming children, and people people people everywhere. We all share this chaotic whirlwind of a city. Density hangs in the air throughout the day and it's only when the sun begins to set that it lets up a little bit. I've been here almost a month. It's hard to believe. But there is more to Uganda than Kampala; there are mountains and falls and villages. I'm off to Mbale and Mount Elgon for the weekend, off to see what kinds of colors and perfumes the Eastern part of this country has to offer.

The Old Taxi Park

The old taxi park in Kampala is perhaps one of the most unbelievable and amazing phenomena I’ve ever witnessed. It is an ocean of taxi vans swimming and swarming around a crater of concrete, surrounded by walls of shops selling anything from popcorn to q-tips. There is no apparent order to it but it works. There are no formal rules of operation but it functions. Taxis depart from there to any direction in Uganda. You zigzag through the catwalk at lightning speed to avoid the insecurity of a crowd, you bounce from driver to driver in search of your taxi, you get directed and misdirected. Finally, the locals get a little more adamant and excited when you approach your target, you get shoved into a van, you wait for it to fill up, it somehow fills up, and you’re off. It is entirely unclear how the van finds its way around the taxis and out of the park, but it does. Informal rules and invisible hands of coordination abound in a place that appears to be only chaos and anarchy to the mzungu eye. The old taxi park is a microcosm of Kampala as far as I know it. You don’t know how things work, but they work.

Yesterday morning, as we were sorting our envelope data for the day, Nathan – the Stanford undergraduate who joined the team a week ago to become our dataset and network go-to guy – came across news in the paper that Uganda was playing Cape Verde for a qualifying game for the 2006 World Cup. This game was going on the very same day, Saturday afternoon in Kampala, across town. Alex, Nate and I got extremely excited about this prospect, proceeded to finish up our sorting exercise at lightning speed, and grabbed a couple taxi vans to the Mandela stadium. A half hour and Ush5,000 - about US$2 - later, I was in the stadium watching my first professional soccer game. The crowd was thin but the fans still just as passionate and loud as you imagine soccer fans to be. The Uganda Cranes scored one goal and won against Cape Verde, which made the entire experience my best and cheapest live sporting event yet.

Sunday in Kampala is church-going day. The streets are almost unnaturally quiet. The whirlwind of taxi vans and street vendors feels distant. There is only the occasional sound of live a-cappella gospel chants emanating from every other street corner church in the city. And if I sit back on the porch, take a sip of my coffee, and close my eyes to the hundreds of envelopes waiting to be sorted today, it almost feels like summer vacation again.

Ever been inside a dataset?

Our little project is coming to a close as we sit down with our exit interviews to enter the data, and switch from data collection to data analysis mode. So what's my take so far on experimental field work? Well, it's a lot of work for very uncertain payoffs. Subject recruitment in the slums of Kampala entails hours of walking under a hostile sun, losing your way and finding it again a few dozen times, going through the entire spectrum of human emotions within a two-hour timespan - the heat, the dust, the smells and the smog only exacerbate the unpleasant interactions with suspicious locals and inflate the heart-warming ones with starry-eyed children. The response from the subjects so far has been encouraging, especially considering the fact that I literally went to their door to ask them to participate in a "game" in a language they do not speak. I kept marvelling at their willingness to indulge me and not simply turn their backs on me. I couldn't help but think that I wouldn't get a fraction of that kind of attention and respect if I were to do this in the U.S. Grant it, I got the occasional local who splurged all her money on alcohol and then came back to the exit interview claiming I had promised to help her out with her business; I also got the young teen-age moms who wanted my phone number in order to become friends; but then I also got the really enthusiastic part of the sample who simply wanted to play the game.

I've spent a lot of time with Deo, Geoffrey, Brenda and Susan - a different interpreter each day, somewhat of a testament to how the management part of this project is going - hanging around at the local shacks, waiting for the subjects to show up for their exit interviews. We’ve chatted about a heap of various issues, from born-again Christian music to Toni Braxton (whose music is making a killing here), from Museveni’s dubious political ambitions to AIDS and Malaria, from the locals’ fascination with bazungu to the bazungu’s inability to digest matoke, from the Indians to Idi Amin. I started to become a staple at these various interview locations, the shop-owners offering me a bench to sit on and some shade to sit under, the boda-boda drivers stationing next to me to show off their Ludo skills, a gambling game that will keep them busy for the better part of the afternoon. I am a real creature of habit, and even more so in unfamiliar places where improvised traditions can bring some center to the chaos of traveling: the 11a.m. Fanta that I buy my interpreter, the 12 o’clock text message to Jeremy to check in on their side of field work madness, the 2p.m. "cake" that I buy my interpreter friends to make sure they actually eat something at some point during the day.

My first boda-boda ride took place on Sunday with Alex on our way to the Speke Resort swimming pool. It was hot, it was Sunday, we were tired of walking. I was well aware of some of the warnings I had gotten from a variety of people, and Brenda’s advice, a Lugandan saying that a lake can kill a fisherman too, reminded me that just because those guys know the Kampalan road doesn’t mean they’re immune to it. But I also learned another important thing from traveling in Latin America a couple summers ago, which is that hard-and-fast rules don’t work too well when traveling. There are simply too many unforeseen contingencies to be able to claim never to ride a boda-boda, or never to enter into a green taxi in Mexico City. When the options are few and far between, it sometimes boils down to a judgment call. In any event, we had our boda-boda ride on an empty Sunday road, we made it to the resort safe and sound, and even enjoyed one of the most pleasant views of the Lake on our way there. After being so adamant against boda-boda use, Alex and I looked at each other a little sheepishly as we payed our boda boda driver with a strange giddiness from the beautiful ride, and then laughed at ourselves and each other.

There is no way to blend in here. There is absolutely no way to dodge the stares; they never tire of calling me mzungu as soon as I step out of the house; and the children just keep on chanting. It's become a buzzing sound that I hear as I run by the shopowners in the morning or walk by the taxi drivers during the day. It’s really an amazing – and truthfully quite frustrating – experience for someone who’s always lived in, let’s face it, predominantly white countries. I found it funny for the first couple days, then incredibly irritating; Deo and I have had some really interesting exchanges about it. I suppose we really do look quite strange and out of place here; Deo pointed to the veins on my wrists and scoffed that our blood turns blue in the sun. He claims it’s all innocuous, he claims they’re all simply wondering how did God make this one? Laughing about it with him helps, yet all these conflicting emotions have led me to realize that as open-minded as I’d like to think I am, I have very little patience for the scrutiny and the questioning I receive on my race and my religion. Does open-mindedness include tolerating close-mindedness?

But when I’m not busy being frustrated with and weighed down by these issues, I marvel over and over again at the way that things operate here. In a place where the most basic infrastructure, the everyday stuff we take for granted, is missing, it is truly wondrous that anything gets done at all. Seen in this light, this is also a place where small miracles abound: like how we manage to get to work safely and on time every morning when the roads are sand and rock and the drivers are insanity personified; or how we manage to get this dataset built with 6 computers, 5 stabilizers, and power that goes out for about 3 hours in the afternoon and 4 to 5 hours in the late evening. Last night, sitting in the office with the et al's, giving them a rundown of our findings from our pilot experiment, the power went out. It was 8pm and pitch black; we still had a few subjects running the experiments in the other room. We all immediately pulled out our phones and turned on our little flashlight setting, which enabled the experimental games to go on while we sat in the darkness of the bazungu managers' office.

“The return to normal is relatively easy in Africa, and can even be accomplished quite rapidly. Because so much here is makeshift, impermanent, light, and shabby, it is possible instantly to destroy a village, a field, or a road – and just as quickly to rebuild them” (Kapuscinsky)

When I first arrived here, I wondered at what point this life and place would start to feel and look familiar to me. Two weeks into my East African adventure, things are starting to become a little more comfortable: I pay the taxi fare a little more adamantly so as not to get ripped off; I know where to go for the best English coffee; I have figured out my running route in the mornings; I can guess when moody Mother Nature is merely threatening me with morning thunder and when a real downpour is about to greet my day... Sure, it's all little things; but little things tend to go a long way around here.

We are the world

The et al’s have done a really good job at giving Alex and myself ownership of part of the project, but that comes with its responsibility costs as well. Alex and I were in charge of running a pilot version of one of the experimental games the et al’s would like to run in a couple weeks. It came as an exciting and daunting task, since both Alex and I are mere 2nd years, real field work acolytes and complete mzungu strangers to Kampala. But I can think of no better way to introduce us to both field work and this city than to dump us in the middle of both. No such thing as getting your feet wet here, it’s all about belly flopping into it.

The week has been incredibly stressful, incredibly busy, incredibly exhausting – physically, intellectually and emotionally – and incredibly exciting. After a couple days of reconnaissance work in a couple different slum areas and an entirely new epidermal shade, we discovered what random sampling in the field and with human beings really looks like. There’s something quite exciting about choosing a landmark, walking 2 minutes in one randomly selected direction relative to the sun, and picking the first house to your left, that gives meat to the statistics lingo we love to recycle at Stanford. No dead end, gated house, or large matoke field will stop us in our random sampling tracks, and every bone and muscle in our body can certainly feel it by the end of the day. I try not to step back too much to speculate on what I must look like because I’m not sure whether I would be amused or horrified: a strange mzungu walking around the slums, unintentionally crossing people’s backyards, pen and notebook in hand, occasionally stopping to keep track of a pile of bricks here, a large gated house there, the Arafat high school on my left, the construction truck parking lot to my right. Street signs don’t work and every road seems to be “the road to the police station”, or “the road to city centre”.

I did cross people’s backyards a few times; they sit outside, unwrapping and cooking matoke, observing our backs and forths, mumbling in Luganda. Field work so far has felt like an incredibly schizophrenic friend, a balance between smooth sailing and conflagrations of disasters that truly keep you in check. Alex and I had spent quite a bit of time on the logistics of the pilot experiment, and after a successful and exciting first day of subject recruitment on Tuesday, we began to feel like we were settling into our field researcher roles quite well. We had meetings set up for Wednesday, a clear budget, a clear schedule, and a couple of interpreters of Luganda to keep us company. I went to bed on Tuesday night feeling exhausted but ready to get my experimental subjects started on their game. I set my alarm clock for six in the morning to start my day fresh with a run; Simon our driver was picking us up at 7.30 so we could get to the office by 8.30, pick up our interpreters and reach our meeting spots by 9. My alarm clock did go off at 6, but I woke up to the most disorienting sound of a torrid rain crashing on our roof. We must have hit the last big rain storm of the rainy season, and the unpaved roads became mud baths, paralyzing the entire city. It all ended by 7.30, but the damage was done and life all of a sudden got pushed back by an hour and a half. It occurred to me on the drive to the office how easily an entire day’s worth of work and productivity can be shot due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control and I almost became a Jeffrey Sachs convert right then and there. I began to understand the logic of Africa time, and was grateful for it when our subjects also showed up an hour and a half late and we were able to proceed with our plans in spite of the storm.

Another spurt of realization hit after I was told that my interpreter friend, Deo – whom I had been dragging along throughout the slums and who had done an incredible job of connecting with the locals and recruiting with me – couldn’t make it in on Thursday because he was sick with malaria. Alex and I were completely stunned. Deo had not said a word to us all day about it; he had quietly followed us along, walking for four hours under a hot high-noon sun, making conversation with us about California beaches versus New York skyscrapers. I read a passage later that night in Kapuscinski’s book that struck me:

“Time and again you encounter here drowsy, apathetic, benumbed people. They sit or lie for hours on end on the streets, by the roadsides, doing nothing. You speak to them and they do not hear you; you look at them and have the impression that they do not see you. It is unclear if they are ignoring you, if these are just idle lazybones and do-nothings, or if they are being ravaged by a malaria that is slowly and inexorably killing them.”

I just assumed it was cultures clashing, that the locals I met had different maneurisms, intonations, facial expressions. Now, with every new local I talk to who doesn’t quite react to me, I can’t help but wonder where communication breakdown ends and disease, simply, begins.

And I also wonder what the locals crammed next to me in the taxi vans think when “We are the World” comes on the local radio as we drive through a gorge of shacks and mud houses.

Welcome to Field Work

Welcome to field work is a phrase that Jeremy has enjoyed repeating to me over and over again over the past three days, and it resonated in my mind today as I walked around a few different localities in Kampala to truly soak and poke.

A few immediate observations from the past three days.

First, I am amazed at how tirelessly the children recite their mzungu chant when we walk by. They run up to us, wave, cry out either "Bye muzungu" or "How are you", and explode in laughter when we wave or smile or greet back at them. We chatted with one of our local enumerators today about the fascination with that word, mzungu - or rather, with that concept. I originally thought it meant white person, but Alex our enumerator told us it actually originally meant British person. It is now used for any white person who happens to walk by, but it was originally directed at the British colonizers. Kinda like the Mexicans' "gringo" appellation. But the children never tire and are so easily amused. At the very least, I'm glad I was able to provide that kind of distraction. Let's face it, we probably do look weird and out of place with our North Face gear, our pale or red skin, and our sweat:

"Among these palm trees and vine, in this bush and jungle, the white man is a sort of
outlandish and unseemly intruder" (Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun).

Yes. Outlandish and unseemly: that pretty much captures how I felt today. Alex and I were dropped in the middle of a Kampalan locality to get a feel for some of the socio-economic variation among the different local council areas within the city of Kampala; a lot of this soaking and poking stuff entails getting lost and finding your way again, and that was no problem seeing that we got all sorts of contradicting directions from various locals and we had no real road signs or maps to rely on. I guess we're going to learn to rely on landmarks more than anything; the gas station; the green roof church; the hospital. I hear they do that in some parts of the U.S. too. The variation is pretty striking between local council areas but also within. Gated stucco houses with red rooftops sit next door to mudwall shacks.

Second,I found where all the other mzungus hang out! They all hide away behind the gates of the Speke Resort, where local Ugandans serve beer and diet coke (can't find diet coke anywhere else) to all sorts of white Europeans tanning in lounging chairs by the side of an Olympic size pool. I was looking for a pool, and ended up having to face my feelings of discomfort with this picture.The resort, by the way, is owned and operated by none other than one of Uganda's very own economically successful ethnic minorities. I'll let you guess what I'm referring to.

Third, African nightlife is another interesting field work adventure. One strip of bars curiously reminds me of Adams Morgan in D.C.; East African beer isn't too bad, though it doesn't compare to South African beer; there are many many black Ugandan prostitutes with old white European men; and we manage to discuss academia and the job market in the midst of it all. Academics are curious, curious little beings.

Fourth, our cook tried to convert me this morning; he asked me to come to Church with him after I told him I was Jewish (he kept pestering me about why I wouldn't eat the pork he prepared), and he was truly shocked to find out I did not believe in good ol' J.C.

The work is going well; I have already learned so much in three days, namely what soaking and poking feels like in a concrete sense, the debates and discussions that are carried on endlessly on research design and data collection/analysis, the logistics of data gathering, the sensitivities of field research in another country and another culture. I am so very lucky to have this opportunity. The professors, or as I've started to call them, the et al's, are also milking Alex and me as much as possible; but the process overall is one hell of a learning experience for a second year grad student.

There is, of course, the more unsettling point of reflection at the end of the day when I get home, dirty, dusty and sweaty, and jump in the shower to wash it all off. Welcome to field work indeed. I think it comes with somewhat of a guilty conscience.

Realization hits me in spurts

The couple of months before my departure somehow managed to become some of the busiest months of my life, and I found I had neither the time nor space of mind to reflect upon what this summer in Eastern and Southern Africa would be like. People would ask me about my project and plans and I would recount as much as I could and as much as I knew – which wasn’t all that much – as if this were some other reality and I were a third party observer to the distant upcoming events.

But spurts started to hit. Like the afternoon beer I had with my father the day before my departure. Maybe it was his questions on the logistics of my trip; or the taste of an afternoon beer; or the subtle yet persistent concern in his eyes and his voice.

Or like the last email I sent off to Jeremy on Monday night to inform him of my arrival time into Entebbe two days later; and the last time I checked email early Tuesday morning to make sure he would indeed be there to pick me up.

Or the customs forms handed to me on the last leg of my trip, that little light-blue square of paper that somehow opened the door to a whole new country.

It was night when I arrived into Entebbe, Uganda on Wednesday, and I lost all remnants of formality between graduate student and assistant professor when I saw Jeremy’s familiar face at the airport. I gave him a big hug, happy and relieved to end two days of plane life with an escort service to Kampala. There wasn’t much for me to discover on the hour-long ride from Entebbe to Kampala, but Jeremy’s promise of daily breakfasts overlooking Lake Victoria infused me with just enough fresh energy to absorb his update of the project and to realize that I was going to have to switch gears relatively soon.

I realized when I turned down Jeremy’s suggestion that I sleep in and take the half day off before fully getting on board the project that I very well might be turning down the only occasion Jeremy would ever give me to take it easy. But the realization that I had landed in a new country was slowly cementing and any common sense I may have had was quickly eclipsed by the excitement of a new place, new faces, new sunrises and sunsets, new smells and tastes, new accents and handshakes.

Between the mosquitoes, the guard dogs and my nervous anticipation, sleep found its way only sporadically into my first night in Kampala. I was up by 6 a.m. and went on my morning run, intent on shaking off two days of airplane inertia and impatient to take in the scenery: I had a sunrise to see on Lake Victoria. It turns out I wasn’t alone outside at 6 in the morning. School kids abounded and stared at the sole white girl running without a direction or much of a sense of orientation, yelled out muzungu to exclaim the strange pallor of my skin, and laughed at me innocuously. I would have laughed too had I been in their shoes. Instead, I was a little awkward in mine, spotting landmarks and dodging taxis, wondering at what point all this strangeness would become familiar to my eyes and mind.

I did go to work on this first day in Kampala; I met some of the locals on our project team; went over some of the drafts for the scripts of the experiments we were going to start running in a couple of weeks; headed off to the city with my Columbia equivalent, Alex, to change some money and buy a cell phone – apparently the first priority to get anything done in an African capital; and more or less made it through an intense day with fatigue and jetlag hovering over me.

We have a cook in our house; as well as a cleaning lady who does our laundry. We also have a driver who manages to get us to work and back in one piece – perhaps one of the greatest feat of living and operating in Kampala. We have a gate keeper, Daniel, who laughs at me when I go running at six in the morning but is always there to welcome me upon my return. We do have breakfast on the front porch overlooking Lake Victoria. And we have four guard dogs, whose hostile barks are supposed to make me feel safer at night.

I work with a truly inspiring team, each scholar with a unique work ethic and communication style that make for some interesting late night debates on experimental methodology and project management. I’ve been here only one day and I feel myself absorbing and learning so much information. It’s revitalizing, yet I’m certain I will be exhausted by the end of the summer. Soaking and poking, it seems, is a full time job and they don’t pay you overtime.