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.

And then some

The Matoke Bunch, take 2.

Is it just me, or is there something strangely beautiful about this shot of our sample slum?

The Matoke Bunch + one fiance; that's right, Alex and Bernd got engaged in Rwanda! If nothing else, this project will have redistributed incomes and invigorated relationships.


Et Als/2: James and Jeremy back in the good old Bunga mansion days.

The office. Where it's all happening.

Visual Aid

Do not be fooled. There was no such thing as a Mulago/Kyebando "community" before we invaded. And yes, Jeremy always looks this serious.


There's no glory to datasets in the making.

One of very few moments of respite at Cafe Pap, where you feel like you're back in a San Francisco coffeeshop again.


Yours truly, Alex and Nate... the Matoke Bunch, take 1.

Everybody´s switching to Mango

The last few weeks at Stanford before my departure for Uganda saw me struggling between a political theory paper I had to finish, a comprehensive exam I had to pass and a field paper I had to submit and re-submit. The demands and expectations of early graduate school took their toll on me and the existential crisis that seems to have become a rite of passage in academia broke out as I submitted the fifth version of my field paper and hopped on a plane to Kampala. Why the hell am I in grad school? Why in the world am I putting myself through a career in a field where it is so painstakingly difficult to produce good work and so ridiculously easy to deconstruct others´? I entered grad school without expectations, knowing only that I could write and that I enjoyed reading. By the time I completed my second year, I wasn´t even sure I knew how to think for myself anymore. So I welcomed this summer of mini-field work with an MTV Real World flavor as an opportunity to find some inspiration and some answers to the big questions; not those "how do I save the world" type questions – although it would be nice to figure that one out while I´m at it as well – but the "why am I in grad school again" type questions. If the 20s are indeed the new teens, I was certainly going through a puberty crisis again.

I turned in my field paper. I left Stanford. I arrived in Kampala, my spirits a tad down but my mind and heart wide open. If I was looking for inspiration and answers, I was certainly taking the perfect trip for it – into the heart of a developing country and four young scholars´ ever-burgeoning minds.

Inspiration – it has come in fits and spurts. It´s the ritual morning Ugandan handshakes and smile I get from the local staff, who know nothing of pre-coffee moodiness. It was Daniel´s smile and nod at 6 in the morning as he opened the gate. It´s a stranger walking out of her way for half a kilometer to direct me to her local council leader´s office and send me off with a hug and four kisses. It´s the astonishment on the matatu conductor´s face when I yelp out the bit of Lugandan I have learned, like "masao" (stop) or "webale sebo" (thank you sir). It´s the delight in a child´s eyes when the mzungu that I am turns around and waves back. It´s stories of how participants in our project´s experiments will use their games´ earnings to pay their school fees or to care for their orphan grandchildren. As Jeremy says, if nothing else, this project will have provided some income redistribution. It´s the excitement in the et als´ eyes when the first regressions turn up statistically significant. There are a myriad subtle reasons to be inspired; maybe we just look too hard to see them sometimes.

Answers – those are few and far between. Ironically enough, though, it was the most laborious and intensive week yet that offered one up to me. Data sorting reached record levels and my mind had grown numb by the end of the day, my only relief being a boda boda ride to the gym with the sun setting behind me. And yes, it´s in the middle of that data sorting misery that I caught a glimpse of one answer – or at least a story I could tell myself whenever the existential crisis would start to creep in again. It was Monday night. I had worked all afternoon on data sorting, going slightly mad by dinner time. After dinner, Jeremy, Macartan and James came back to the dataset scene with me, sat down, and started ripping envelopes open and counting coins with me. The five of us sat on the floor, ripping open envelope after envelope, organizing and cleaning up the information as Tracy Chapman sang to us from Nathan´s i-tunes and we all hummed along to "Fast Car"... assistant professor, graduate student, undergrad. It was beautiful.

So why am I putting myself through the trials and tribulations of academia? Because it seems to me there is no other career path ever so humbling. Sure, you´re a hot shot 30-year old assistant professor at Stanford or Columbia who kicked some butt at Harvard graduate school; yet you are still sitting on your butt at 11 p.m. on a Monday night in Kampala, opening little manila envelopes and counting money to the rhythm of Tracy´s sorrowful tunes.

Maybe I´m wrong. Maybe this holds true only pre-tenure. Maybe academia is a place where a few become incredibly lucky and arrogant while the rest struggle resentfully. But I´d like to think – and part of me really believes – that this kind of journey, the one where you count data, run regressions and discuss grand ideas all in one day, will keep me humble.

I was promoted to middle management by Wednesday when the et als hired three local staff to help out with the data sorting madness. It was fun to manage tasks and processes rather than envelopes and coins. And it was incredibly revitalizing to chat and joke around with Susan, Alex K. and Ben about Congolese cuisine (monkey), the upcoming political referendum on multipartyism, tacky places where Bazungu congregate in this town, and how everyone is switching to Mango cell phone service in East Africa.

So field work is ups and downs. It´s highs and lows. It´s the high of a great insightful interview in the morning and the low of data hell in the afternoon. It´s the high of new, higher level tasks one minute and the low of the stench and the color of Ugandan Shilling coins on my fingers. It´s feeling like a grand idealistic theorizing intellectual in one conversation and a data sorting monkey the next. And by extrapolation I suppose it´s the high of a new research idea in September and the low of its complete deconstruction from March to June. It´s all of it. Exactly the kind of reality checks that motivate me to sort a little faster and think a little deeper.

Kuhandel

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to us becoming real “scientists” as we’d like to think we are, is that our object of study often gets in the way of our study. Maybe that’s why political science can never really be a science. If you want to study corruption, it – in and of itself – is bound to get in the way of your analysis. If you want to study poverty and development, you’re heading off to places where potholes and power outages are bound to get in the way of your “scientific” process. So when your entire dataset happens to reside in one big room in a mansion outside Kampala, and when the landlord’s wife stops by one morning to announce that we have to move out of the house immediately for “political reasons”, you are quickly reminded how fragile of a scientific process your project really is.

We are all still trying to parse out truth from storytelling in an effort to understand what actually happened to our mansion overlooking Lake Victoria. Between political reasons and blatant dishonesty – an alternative which became much more salient the morning a Belgian businessman stopped by our house with a truck full of furniture to move into the place he had rented out from our landlord a couple months ago – it remains unclear where sincere misunderstandings end and bullshit begins; nor does it really matter anymore when we are given two days to evacuate the premises. In the meantime, small but increasingly apparent and inconvenient changes began to take place this week. Daniel our gate-keeper disappeared and young armed patrol guards took over the compound; furniture began to vanish sporadically and we ended up eating our very last meal on newspaper table mats; a random collection of young men entered the house several times in an effort to grab the living room carpet on which our data-sorting activities took place. They even tried to take our cable TV – we adamantly resisted, holding on fast to our best data-sorting companion.

We celebrated our last night in the mansion with a game of Kuhandel. Macartan played some of his Cape Verde music – the melancholy of fado tunes quite becoming of our departure. I went off to my room to pack and smiled at how inconvenient this entire situation seemed to be, yet how perfect it all really was. I have been in Kampala one month. The project is going well and moving from one phase of experimental games to another. We have now found a couple apartments closer to the center of town. It seems like a whole new experience is ready to unfold.

Kuhandel - a german game that involves auctioning off and trading farm animals in an attempt to gather both as many farm animal families as possible, and the most valuable farm animal families possible. Take “Go Fish”, add cash, barter and bluffing, and you soon find yourself talking smack to your dissertation advisor. I looked around the room, each of us with our glass of whiskey or brandy, strategizing about the value of a pig or a horse, sweating with excitement and anxiety, and I thought to myself… so this is what academics do for fun. In the end it was Macartan who beat us all when he successfully bought off my horse, and the entire experience made for quite the perfect way to seal off our stay in the mansion.

We moved into two new apartments this weekend and left the mansion to the Belgian businessman and our sketchy landlords. My natural anxiety soon gave way to silly giddiness when I realized that we were moving 10 minutes away from the office, 15 minutes away from bars and restaurants, and 7 minutes away from complementary access to the biggest, most ridiculously equipped health club I have ever been to. They even have vibration chairs for post-workout relief. The gap between extreme poverty and extreme luxury, a developing country trait that Uganda seemingly has not escaped, could not be more conspicuous now: our new apartment is equidistant from the slums of our Mulago/Kyebando study and the ostentation of the Kabira Health Club.

We’ve got not more barking dogs, no more view of Lake Victoria, no more Daniel to open up the gate with a smile, no more ping-pong table, and I spent my Sunday moving hundreds of envelopes from one end of Kampala to another. But somehow, and this may just be one of those small miracles you can’t help but marvel at – like getting to work on time amidst traffic jams and potholes, holding onto my boda-boda driver for dear life as we zigzag through trucks and matatus and cows on Kampala’s ridiculous roundabouts, or finding my way to my various interviews when directions go something like “find the red container building by the catholic church at the junction… make a left at the tallest tree… ask for my place when you get to the primary school” – yes, somehow, the project continues.