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.