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.