The Real World - Kampala

My Sheer Good Fortune

2005-08-11T16:13:00.000+03:00

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

2005-08-09T18:11:00.000+03:00

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

2005-08-08T23:31:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-24T14:42:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-23T14:23:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-21T12:30:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-15T11:37:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-15T11:14:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-09T16:17:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-09T15:57:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-09T10:06:00.000+03:00

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

2005-07-04T18:00:00.000+03:00

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.

Instant coffee

2005-06-26T16:34:00.000+03:00

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

2005-06-26T16:12:00.000+03:00

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

2005-06-24T14:27:00.000+03:00

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

2005-06-19T11:09:00.000+03:00

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?

2005-06-11T18:03:00.000+03:00

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

2005-06-10T18:08:00.000+03:00

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

2005-06-05T17:32:00.000+03:00

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

2005-06-03T19:45:00.000+03:00

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.

It's all happening

2005-05-31T10:36:00.000+03:00

I'm off to Kampala in a few hours and it hasn't yet quite hit me that in four plane rides and at least as many time zones, I'll have started my summer of preliminary field work in Africa. I heard there's no reliable door-to-door mail in Uganda so save your care packages and get to your computers, because email and - apparently - this blog will have to do for now. I traveled to Latin America a few years ago and sent regular Claire Logs by email; in an effort to be more efficient and perhaps less intrusive with my updates, I have now officially become a blogger. I hope to turn this little virtual space into an effective field note journal as well as a networking tool for staying in touch and connected.

In the meantime, I ask you this: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? wtf?