Settling into a routine.

I have almost nothing of interest to report today. Why then, you wonder, is she writing a blog post entry? I will tell you.

I have two things of marginal interest to report today -- a day in which I literally sat at my desk from 10am to 5pm and did not move. First of all: I took a taxi in both directions (to/from work) today, and I successfully navigated both times. I had to confirm that we were actually in Wandegeya in the morning, but I was 100% on my own coming back from work. I did it all by myself!

Secondly, a burn update. Against the recommendations and advice of Brian, who has been burned by a boda exhaust pipe before, I bandaged my leg up last night pretty well. He told me to leave it open to "let the heat out," and I (rather pompously, I must admit) thought he was using some sort of indigenous concept of medicine and cold/hot balance -- so I ignored him. Well, when I unbandaged it about half an hour ago, the joke was on me: it doesn't look good. I took a picture and tried to upload it to show you all, but luckily for you, the internet is so slow right now that the image won't upload. You will have to use your imaginations.

A battle wound.

So, I decided today that I really don't like boda bodas very much. And it's only a little bit because I just badly (okay, moderately) burned my leg on a boda's exhaust pipe.

I took a taxi to work this morning, finally. There was on about to leave as I walked up to Kiira Road, so I jumped in. It was pretty uneventful. I have yet to figure out exactly how long it should take, so I get nervous about halfway through the ride and start to wonder if I've missed my stop. I asked for help from the woman next to me, who told me where we were, and then when to get off. The walk to the office only took about 10 minutes, which is what I expected. The walk from Wandegeya to the office takes me right past the National Resistance Movement's headquarters -- that's Mouseveni's party. Even though the election was in February (I think?), there are posters of all the candidates all over the city and on every available surface. The entrance to headquarters has these big yellow balloon-type things with Mouseveni's face on them. The guards were sitting outside in their blue fatigues this morning, engrossed in their newspapers.

I started researching the East Africa Community this morning, but was interrupted when I got a call to come to Makerere University to conduct another interview with a Darfurian refugee. I reluctantly went, although really -- one was enough. This guy talked a lot more than the one yesterday, but it made it harder to ask all the questions. I don't think I'm doing a very good job getting at what the organization really wants to know, in part because I'm not really an expert interviewer, and in part because of a still-existing language barrier that prevents the refugees from articulating more abstract concepts about citizenship and belonging. I also have to take my own notes while I ask the questions, which makes it hard to think about good, incisive follow-up questions. They want me to do another one tomorrow, and I don't know if I can refuse, but I'd like to. I find that, although it was definitely really cool to do be able to do it, one was enough... I'd rather do research. (Maybe my dad is right, and I really am an academic at heart.)


I got back to the office in time for lunch, and for the battle of the American versus the Giant Black Ants to begin. I had noticed them before -- these ants are probably an inch long, and they're resilient buggers. They apparently like sugar, and so they climb all over the desk (and, in one truly gross moment, on me) in search of sugar. I would flick them off the desk, and another one would show up ten seconds later. It was unpleasant.

I stayed at the office until around 6:45 tonight, waiting for Emily (the girl I'll live with starting next week) to come get me so we could go to dinner. I found out there's a Nando's here, which is a South African fast food chain that is delicious, and we decided to go. She also invited her two roommates. We were going to meet the roommates at a craft market, but Emily was running late, so we just went straight to the restaurant. It was good, although the quality of the chicken was markedly worse than in South Africa, England, or the United States (all the countries I've eaten Nando's in). The four of us sat around and talked for about two hours. Then we got onto two bodas (two people on each) and headed back to the suburbs where we live. The two roommates went back to their apartment, but Emily came with me to my motel -- it was dark and she didn't want me to be on a boda alone (especially as a boda driver tried to rob her last night... oops), and she wanted to get something called a Rolex for dinner, since she didn't like her veggie burger from Nando's. A rolex appears to be a thin crepe-like pancake with egg on the inside. I was too full to try one, but it's good to know they exist. Then Emily went back home, and I went back to the motel.

The title of this entry ("a battle wound") refers to the pretty significant burn I now have on my leg that I got while dismounting the boda boda. Instead of foot rests on the sides, I realized (too late) that my foot had been resting on a very hot exhaust pipe. I hit it with the inside of my right calf when I got off the motorcycle. It's not the end of the world, but it blistered and the skin peeled off right away, and it hurts like hell. I've got it all bandaged up now, but it's still stinging and throbbing, even an hour later. The experience just compounded my observations from today, which is that I just... really don't like boda bodas. I imagine horrible accidents every time I'm on them, and when they tilt a bit to the side when taking a sharp turn, I always panic that the bike is going to fall over or that I'm going to fall off. Add to this the fact that they're expensive, and it makes for not a very attractive transportation option. Unfortunately, they're the only way to get to certain places, so I think I'll have to continue taking them -- but hopefully only for short distances. Emily and I took one the entire length of the city tonight, and I was pretty unhappy the whole time.

Oh, no big deal.

No big deal, I just interviewed a Darfurian refugee today.

But first things first: I was going to take a taxi to work today, since Fauzia showed me how to walk yesterday. At the last minute, the owner of the motel offered to drive me into town, since she had a doctor's appointment, and I figured -- free is better than 1,000 UGX, so I accepted. I appear to be getting to the office before everyone except the man I share an office with upstairs, and today was no exception. At least Debbie, the woman who makes us lunch every day, has figured out that I need to drink a lot of coffee in the morning, bless her heart. My mornings look something like this:

Anyway, I read yet another report (this time on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo) for most of the morning, although I had to read it in the dark. I haven't mentioned it yet, but the power fails in Kampala pretty regularly -- both at the motel and at the office. The motel has a generator that it runs whenever the power shuts off, but in the office, we just sat around in the relative dark until it came back on. I think it was out for about 2.5 hours... most of the morning.

While I was reading the Congo report, the lead interviewer in Kampala for the Darfur project (Joseph) came in to tell me he wanted me to visit the refugees with him at noon. I headed out at around 11:45am, despite the fact that the boda driver didn't know the place I told him I needed to go. I had Joseph talk to the boda driver, and he said he knew where to go.... and then charged me 4,000 UGX to drop me off in the wrong place. I flagged down another boda boda, who talked to the interviewer on the phone again and agreed to take me the rest of the way for 2,000 UGX. It was a really short distance though, and when Joseph heard how much I was being charged, he insisted that I only pay 1,000. So I guess I got less ripped off than I would have otherwise.

We walked a bit to the home of a Darfurian refugee. It was a bit removed from the main road, and there were definitely goats tied up outside the house. In the capital city. That's the kind of stuff that I mean when I say you see things in Kampala that you would only see in rural South Africa. I'm not even kidding, I saw two giant cows walking along one of the main roads yesterday... who knows where they were going. Anyways, we went inside and sat on one of the beds in the front room, and Darfurians sort of... trickled in, until there were about 30 of them sitting on the floor. Joseph explained our project to them through a translator, a really cool Darfurian refugee named Quoscondy, who was an interviewer (rather than an interviewee). I was not just the only white person in the room; I was also the only female. There's a whole separate group of women refugees that we'll interview later, so it will be different then. Once we had introduced ourselves, we figured out who would talk to us when, and then the 5 or 6 of us doing interviews went to get lunch and discuss logistics among ourselves. We went to an Ethiopian place nearby, and I thought the entire time about how much my parents would have hated what we had to eat.

After lunch, the first group of refugees came for the interviews, which we did at the restaurant because of lack of space in the house. There was one refugee who spoke enough English that he was comfortable talking to me without a translator, so I sat with him for around two hours. I'm not allowed to say exactly what we talked about (it was confidential, after all), but generally speaking, we talked about the conflict in Darfur, life as a refugee in Kampala, the referendum for independence in South Sudan, and how he identifies (as a Sudanese, as a Darfurian, etc.). His English was really good, although he hesitated to really tell me a story -- he instead waited for me to ask questions, which we were hoping wouldn't happen. Still, I think it was a fairly successful interview. I finished first, because I didn't have to do any translating, and I sort of sat around until Quoscondy finished his interview. At that point, he got us some beer from the guy who owned the restaurant (I think?), who he knew, and he and I sat and chatted for a while. He studied philosophy in university in Khartoum, so we talked about our favorite philosophers and theories about government and power. It was a surreal moment: drinking beer in the late afternoon in Kampala with a refugee from Darfur, talking about John Locke's humanist theory of tabula rasa

When the final interview wrapped up, we all reconvened and talked about general impressions, themes from the interviews, and challenges we encountered. It didn't take very long, and then it was time to get home -- the true challenge of the day. I was so far away from the motel that a boda boda would have cost an arm and a leg, but there was no direct taxi route back to Bukoto. We ended up taking a taxi to one of the taxi parks, which was complete and utter chaos. I didn't really get a chance to look around much, because I was so busy trying to follow Joseph and not get run over by a taxi, bicycle, boda boda, or truck. Quoscondy eventually left us to go home, and Joseph found a taxi going in the right direction and shoved me into it, then promptly disappeared. I took the taxi to Wandegeya, where it stopped and we waited to re-load... then off in the direction of Ntinda, which is the suburb east of where I'm staying. It would have been fine, except that it was about 7pm by then, and the sun set very quickly and all of a sudden, it was dark. Most of Kampala looks the same to me, so I was keeping my eyes desperately peeled for landmarks I would recognize so I would know when to get off the taxi. Unfortunately, the taxi cut through a petrol station and drove for a while on a road I had never been on, and it was pitch black outside. I started to panic a bit, and asked the fare collector if we were even going to Frobel stage (my "stop"), and he told me we weren't there yet. So I relaxed a bit, and when we did approach it, he remembered me and made sure the driver stopped.

Crisis averted.

In other news, Ugandan mosquitoes find me delicious. I have at least a dozen bug bites, mostly on my feet and legs, and I am itchyitchyitchy. I went to the pharmacy the other day to get something to make them stop itching, and I wanted to buy bug spray, but they only had a repellant cream (?), which I haven't used yet. I would be perfectly content if all mosquitoes spontaneously died and/or stopped biting me, though. That would be just peachy.

Genocide and civil war and refugees, oh my?

Second day of work! I got up a little bit early, had breakfast (I tried matoke -- steamed green bananas, and a very popular dish in Uganda. It was yummy!), and took a boda boda to work. My boss had given me a bunch of different reports to read yesterday, so the first thing I did was finish the one I had started yesterday on Rwandan refugees living in Uganda. Apparently, the Rwandan government really wants all the refugees to come back, so it can say that everything is back to normal -- but a lot of the refugees are Hutus (the ethnic group who did most of the killing in the genocide), and they are scared to go back because the Hutus are collectively blamed for the genocide, even if a particular Hutu individual wasn't involved at all. The report was really interesting, and is apparently really controversial with the Rwandan government.

The Darfurians all met again in the office today, but I didn't join them like I did yesterday. However, after they finished, the two researchers who will be in Kampala came to talk to me, and apparently I am going with them tomorrow to interview Darfurians in Kampala. The goal is to interview as many people as possible, so if any of the refugees (likely the younger ones) speak English, I get to actually conduct the interview. Otherwise, I'll be taking notes based on the translation from Arabic. However, my boss didn't want to send me out to do interviews without me knowing details about what's going on in Darfur. And it's sort of embarrassing to admit, but until today I really didn't know all the details. I was sort of like "genocide is bad, janjaweed are bad guys." And okay, janjaweed are bad guys, but it's much more complicated and confusing than that. I'm sure I still only understand a small part of what happened there, but I spent many hours today reading histories and surveys about the conflict. The former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, led an African inquiry into the situation which has a nice summary of the history of the region, and there's an NGO that did a huge survey-based study of Darfurian refugees living in Chad that focused on the refugees' beliefs justice in Darfur and South Sudan.

Reading the reports, I was struck once again (as I often am when I'm in Africa) by how smart these people are. There's this assumption in the developed world that uneducated means unintelligent -- but the refugees who answered this NGO's survey questions had sophisticated ideas about freedom, democracy, justice, and blame. I think 99% of them were farmers before they were displaced, and most of them probably couldn't write their name in any language... but they know what's happening to them, they understand the politics, they know who is to blame (overwhelmingly, they blame Bashir and the Government of Sudan), and they know what punishment those people should get. I was amazed by the large proportion of refugees who firmly believe that Bashir and other war criminals should be tried by the International Criminal Court, and the faith they have in the impartiality and ability of the international community. Really remarkable stuff, and it's good to be reminded every once in a while that all the education in the world at the greatest schools doesn't mean I know or understand this stuff better than the people who have lived through it.

Anyway, I met with my boss in the afternoon about the Darfurian interviews and about a paper that we're going to write together on the emerging East African Community, which is kind of like the EU in its early phases. It's a confederation of east African states moving towards the free flow of goods, services, and (most relevant to my organization's mission) people. My organization is hosting a conference in the first week of July, and my boss is presenting a paper on the ramifications of the EAC on refugees and refugee law, and she wants me to do most of the research and write a first draft. So that will be my big project for the next month, along with working with the senior researcher in Cape Town on writing up a report based on the Darfurian interviews. Since I type so fast, all the interviews in Arabic will be orally translated for me to transcribe, so I'll really be the only one who has heard all the interviews. That puts me in a good position to pick up on repeated themes and topics that pop out in the different conversations.

After work, one of the Ugandan lawyers walked me to Wandegeya, which is a neighborhood in Kampala, and also a major hub for the minibus taxis. I decided it was time to learn how to take a taxi to and from the office. The walk took about 15 (maybe 20?) minutes, but we were walking slowly -- I think it would probably only take me about 10 minutes on my own. She put me into a taxi heading to Ntinda, which was the right direction for me, and off we went. The taxi was so low on gas that the motor kept dying every time we slowed down or stopped... I thought it was a more serious problem, but we stopped to get gas, and then it was fine after that. It was nice to be surrounded by metal, instead of flying down the street on the back of a motorcycle. The taxis are significantly cheaper (1,000 UGX vs. 4,000 UGX for a one-way ride between the motel and my office), but they are also significantly slower. None of the vehicles, which are all Toyota Hiaces from the 1980s, are in very good condition, and the one today was no different. I could feel the heat of the overburdened engine through my sandals on the floor, and when I pitched forward at one point as the driver stopped sharply, my knee hit the engine cover and I thought it was going to leave a burn mark, it was so hot. With all the stops and sitting in traffic, it took me about an hour to get home -- instead of the 15 minutes it would have taken on a boda boda -- and when I got home, I was sweaty and tired. But I think it's still probably a better idea to take them as much as possible instead of the bodas, if only for the cost difference. If I take a taxi both ways, that's 2,000 UGX per day instead of 8,000 UGX per day -- $0.80 cents versus $3.35 every day. It doesn't sound like much, but I think it will make a difference in the long-run. And this way, I don't need to buy a helmet or fear for my life twice a day.

Work!

So, today was my first day of work. And I, of course, slept through my alarm. Thankfully, Brian called me to let me know it was time for breakfast, and I got up with plenty of time to spare. Ate a quick breakfast, then waited around for Diana (the motel owner/owner's wife) to be ready to take me to work. She drove me into town, but asked me to pay 10,000 UGX for gas -- which I guess means she didn't give me a free ride after all. Anyway, she dropped me off at the office a bit after 9:00am. When I went inside, there was no one there except Debbie, who sort of serves tea and coffee and makes lunch, I guess? She appears to leave after lunchtime, and according to my office mate, she makes lunch every day. In any case, people came in a bit after I got there, and my boss emailed me some things to read while she was on her way in. It was a summary of the organization's activities in 2009-2010 -- and they did a LOT. After I read it, I went and met with her about what I found interesting and the things she thinks I should work on.

Apparently some of the work is pretty politically sensitive -- some of the members of this organization have received death threats based on certain reports (sorry, Mom), so I can't really go into details (that sounds so mysterious), but generally speaking, there are three areas she thinks I could work on: 1) Rwandan refugees in northern Uganda; 2) the emerging East African Community; and 3) citizenship and belonging among Darfurians in the newly-independent Southern Sudan (which becomes independent on July 9 -- happy birthday, Mom! I got you a new African country.) She gave me some reports to read about Rwanda and Darfurians in South Sudan. A group is actually heading to Juba in South Sudan on Wednesday to do research interviews about citizenship for a new report, and there are going to be interviews among Darfurians in Kampala, too. In the afternoon, the researchers came in and we had a big (read: 4 hours long) meeting about research methodology. It seems that I'm going to type up oral/dictated translations of the interviews, which will probably all be in Arabic. Even though the conversation sort of went in circles, and there were some language barriers, it was actually a lot of fun and very informative. One of the Darfurian refugees who's heading to South Sudan walked me out to the road and got a boda boda driver down to a reasonable price to take me home. Unfortunately, I thought I recognized the spot where the motel is and had the boda driver drop me off... but I was wrong. At least I was only about 500m away (according to the estimate of a man working at the nearby supermarket). When I realized my mistake, I decided to go into the supermarket and see what I could buy. Now that I'm friendly with Brian, it feels strange to ask him to cook meals for me -- even though I know he loves to cook. It's still weird, so I bought some cereal and non-refrigerated milk (the kind that comes in packets, like in Europe), and walked back to the motel.

When I got home, I had a bowl of cereal and then hung out at reception and talked to the owner, Bruno, and Brian. I somehow ended up on the topic of the American Constitution and went on and on about the details and everything I know now after a semester of Constitutional Law, AKA I proved that I am a giant nerd. I stayed down there for the whole evening chatting with Brian (who tends to monologue, and ended up telling me his whole life story and -- once again -- about how corrupt Mouseveni's government is) without even realizing it. Brian works pretty much 24 hours a day, every day, but he promised that the next time he goes home to his village, he'll take me with him. It's only 45 minutes from Kampala, and I think it will be fun. He had better not just be agreeing to pacify me.

So that's pretty much it. I have to make my own way to work tomorrow morning, and I still don't know how to walk from the Wandegeya taxi stage to my office. I'll probably end up just getting a boda... I really need to find a place to buy a helmet so I don't feel like I'm going to die every time I ride one. The taxis are less expensive than bodas, so hopefully I'll figure out how to use them soon. I was going to wander around the area a bit at lunchtime to see if I could orient myself (hah), but since Debbie brought food to my desk, I didn't really get the chance. But tomorrow is another day.

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.

 

Day 1

Have arrived in Kampala. Getting into the country was uneventful, except for the fact that I couldn’t get a multiple entry visa at the airport, or a visa for longer than 90 days. I’ll have to figure out how to change both of those things once I’m a bit more settled. The hostel last night in Entebbe was fine. The power went out a few times this morning, but it’s not so hot that fans are necessary — at least not early in the morning. I got a taxi from the hostel into Kampala, with a nice driver named Daniel. The opposition leader Kizza Besigye returned to Kampala yesterday, and apparently the road into Kampala from Entebbe was full of roadblocks and the military fighting, as the presidential convoy met FDC supporters. The road was clear today, but there were TONS of men in military uniform and big guns standing along the side of the highway. It was definitely a noticeable presence, and more than a little bit intimidating.

The drive from Entebbe to Kampala confirmed what I already knew — Uganda is significantly less developed than South Africa. The sights in urban Uganda are things you would only see in rural South Afirca — bicycles carrying loads and loads of plantains, goats and cows tied up on the side of the highway, women walking with jugs of water on their heads, etc. It was hard to tell when we actually entered Kampala; we didn’t go into the “downtown” area, and the area I’m in (Old Kampala) doesn’t seem much more developed. The roads are TERRIBLE — huge potholes all over, the likes of which I’ve only seen in rural Eastern Cape South Africa. And this is the capital city.

The room at the hostel is fine — nothing except a bed, really, but it will do for a few weeks. There doesn’t appear to be anyone else checked in, but hopefully other people will come soon. There’s another hostel that’s more popular with backpackers a little farther away from downtown Kampala, which I might move to after the week at Tuhende Lodge. We’ll see how things go. Maybe the other hostel has a bed fan -- it's not as sweltering as I was promised, but it is warm.

When I emailed my boss and Emily, the girl whose puppy I am going to live, Emily emailed back right away and asked if I wanted to meet her at a big mall called Nakumatt Oasis to buy a phone and get lunch. I thought that sounded  like a good idea, so I had one of the staff at the hostel flag me down a boda boda to take me there. Boda bodas are sometimes referred to as "flying death traps" -- they're moped taxis where no one follows the rules of the road or wears a helmet. However, they're much easier than the minibus taxis: you just tell them where you want to go, and they take you there. With the taxis, you have to make sure you're getting on the right route, and you have to know where you're going, so you can tell the driver to pull over. They are apparently less expensive than boda bodas, though. Here's a picture of a boda boda from Wikipedia (in other words, I didn't take this photo):

So I got to Nakumatt Oasis and met Emily, who took me to get a phone. It's just a cheap Nokia, but it's nice to have one anyway. I feel more connected to the universe. Then we got lunch at an Indian place on the top floor of Garden City, which is a giant mall next-door to the other giant mall (go figure?), with nice views of the city. According to Emily, Indian food in Kampala is really good for some reason. I don't know about all Indian food here, but the place we ate was delicious. After lunch, we went to buy an Orange "dongle"... it's a USB stick that provides internet access wherever the Orange network has coverage, which is basically everywhere. I'm currently using it from the hostel, which doesn't have its own internet.

After I finished buying all my technology, Emily and I jumped on another boda boda together to go to the office of the organization where I'm working. I met some of the people in the office, including the lovely woman who interviewed me and with whom I've been in touch over email. They were all really nice, and seem to be looking forward to me starting on Monday. After a brief visit, I parted ways with Emily, got on my own boda boda, and headed back to the hostel. I played around on the internet for a while to make sure the dongle works, and then I ventured out to get dinner. I didn't venture very far, to be honest... just downstairs to the restaurant in the hostel. They served me a three-course meal for less than $10, which was good and very filling. I'm now back up in my room, killing time before I get tired and go to bed! I hope I won't have trouble sleeping without a fan. It's cool at night, but for some reason it's fairly warm in my room.

Anyway, that’s all I have to report — other than the fact that I heard a minibux taxi blasting the Macarena on the way into Kampala, in a truly multlcultural moment. Welcome to Africa, Katie.