Day 3

So, today I switched hostels. The first hostel was, all told, pretty horrible. It wasn't any one big thing, but a bunch of small things that cumulatively made it un-liveable, and made the prospect of staying there for a week dim. I looked up Kampala on hostelworld.com and found a place called Etana Motel which looked like it was near where the flat is that I'll ultimately move into. I called last night, booked it for 12 nights, and crossed my fingers. When I got up this morning, I ate breakfast and then had the hostel-that-shall-not-be-named call me a special hire (what we think of as a taxi), and we set off on an adventure. The driver knew the general area where we were going, but I made a grave miscalculation. There's a minibus taxi stage right near the hostel, with a name. I assumed that, since it shows up on Google maps, it must be well-known to locals, right? Wrong. It turns out, I have learned, there are taxi stages every few blocks all over the city, and it was completely unreasonable for me to expect it to serve as a useful landmark. However, by stopping and asking boda-boda drivers for directions about five times and driving back and forth along Kira Road a few times, we finally found it.


I knew this place was an improvement based on the simple fact that someone was there to welcome me, and that there is a reception desk. Three friendly staff people came and insisted on each taking one of my bags, telling me, "You are most welcome," and showing me to my room. Which, by the way, is beautiful. The bed is clean, the floor is clean, there's a desk with a mirror, there's a closet, and the shower works and has hot water. I must literally be in heaven.

The young man at the front desk actually introduced himself to me (his name is Brian): another improvement over the last place. We chatted for a bit and he explained the taxi system in Kampala and how the major roads work. It turns out the main arteries in the city are named for the place they lead you -- e.g. Jinja Road will take you to the town of Jinja, Kira Road will take you to the sub-county of Kira, etc. After I picked his brain for a while, he made me lunch. He said it would take 30-40 minutes, but it took almost 2 hours. I am learning quickly that Ugandans do things very s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y. That said, lunch -- which was a delicious beef and vegetable stew with white rice -- was exactly the right size and very good. The beef wasn't exactly of kobe quality, but that's not exactly a shocker. I ate most of it in all its chewy glory, because the sauce was so damn good. Even the white rice tasted better than normal.

After lunch, Brian and I chatted a bit more about the political situation in Uganda right now. He is the second Ugandan I've talked politics with, and he's the second one to hate Mouseveni. He actually got caught up in the violence on Thursday; he said he hadn't gone to protest, but drove a taxi right into the middle of the confrontation, and when he got out to find out what was going on, he ended up getting beaten by a police officer. His elbow definitely looked freshly-wounded, although I can't say whether it was really an accident that he was there. He told me all about the tribal politics of Uganda, and how Mouseveni is from the western part of the country and favors those tribes over the Buganda, who form a majority, especially in Kampala. According to Brian, Mouseveni gives jobs to underqualified members of his own tribe, while passing over qualified Buganda and other central Ugandan tribe members. He also said that the political government of Uganda is supposed to pay money to the Buganda king, but Mouseveni stopped paying almost 10 years ago (I think?) and owes billions of shillings now.

Interestingly, Brian was very excited to find out that I'm American, and the first thing he said was, "President Obama!" He's read one of Obama's books (he couldn't remember the title, but I think it was probably The Audacity of Hope) and views the NATO mission in Libya as Obama following through on his promise to free Africa from its dictators. I've heard now from two sources that Mouseveni is good friends with Gaddafi -- there's even a road named "Col. Muammar Gaddafi Road" in the Somali neighborhood of Kampala, that Gaddafi funded and built with Mouseveni's permission/approval. The general consensus -- if there can be such a thing after four days in a new country -- is that Ugandans believe that anyone who rules for 20 or 30 years is bound to go bad. Like Gaddafi, like Mouseveni, and I imagine like Mugabe, although he hasn't come up. Brian and my taxi driver from Entebbe both agreed that Mouseveni was very good for the first 10 years, and then everything went to hell.

While Brian and I were talking, his boss and her three children showed up. Now, anyone who knows me know that I love nothing more than sassy African children, especially when they're dressed in patent leather shoes, jeans, white dress shirts, vests, and bow ties. So I went to introduce myself. The woman, whose name I embarrassingly didn't get or can't remember, and her husband own this motel, and she is lovely. We spent the next 4 hours talking about all sorts of things, from Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters to the difficulty of earning a good living in Uganda to the difficulties she's had with her sisters-in-law because she's from a different part of the country and had to convert to Catholicism to be allowed to marry her husband. The kids hung out, all of them calling me "auntie" to my great delight. The middle one, who is 4 years old, kept giving me and his mom flowers that he had picked from the decorative plants. So the afternoon flew by that way. She offered to take me to work tomorrow morning, and to show me where the taxis will stop so I can start to figure out how to get to/from the office on my own. This saves me about 25,000 UGX (around $10) in taxi fare and will hopefully enable me to get to the office completely on my own on Tuesday.

I finally had to leave her and the delicious South African wine we were drinking so that I could take a shower (allow me to say it again: hot water is a godsend) and put in my order for dinner. I am currently waiting for dinner, and am not hopeful that it will be ready anytime soon, given how long lunch took. But that's okay, I'm starting to adjust to things taking this long. It's not like I have anywhere to be at the moment.

Phew. Sorry for such a long entry. I guess I'm feeling verbose tonight. Tomorrow is my first day of work, and I'm very excited. But for now, I will leave you with a picture I took while I was waiting for lunch today, enjoying the smell of the coming rain. This woman looked so perfect standing in her doorway, watching her daughter do chores in the yard, that I couldn't help getting a little voyeuristic.