What a day..

22 September 2009

I realize that I have been promising a lot of you blog entries. Well, as you might have guessed, adjusting to life in East Africa has been difficult, time consuming, and exhausting. Most of all, however, it has been rewarding. There is much to tell. Too much to encompass in one entry spanning the last three weeks of my life (the first two of which were spent gallivanting around Europe with Clark, having no clue what we were doing, except having the time of our lives). So, I will start with a story.

Abstract: My 4th day in Africa and Joel’s 2nd, we decided to hit the ground running with our non-profit work out here. This entailed traveling to a rural village about 90 minutes south of Mbale to meet with two existing organizations. This is the account.

8:00AM: Jet-lagged, we wake up in a daze and start preparing for the day.

8:30AM: We leave on foot to meet Juliet, our rural village guide, who works as a micro-financial officer here in Mbale. We had met here once before, and our wits and guile left us a half an hour late to the meeting where we had been greeted with, “So I see we are already operating on African time!!” It was rather embarrassing, so we made a point to be on time. We were two minutes early. Great success.

8:58AM: We arrive. Juliet is excited and happy, and we discuss plans for the day as we anxiously await for our driver.

9:58AM: No driver. Juliet is rather upset. She does not appreciate African time, so she calls a second driver.

10:15AM: Second driver arrives. We embark.

10:30AM: Here is where things get interesting. There are police check-points along the roads between the villages. They serve many purposes, and the one that becomes most obvious to us is to pull over random vehicles and check for proper documentation, drugs, and whatever else could be going on. We are “randomly” pulled over. Our driver is nervous, and we don’t know why. Upon looking at his documents, the officer pulls him and Juliet out of the car to talk. Although us white people in the back seat are left alone, we are not too sure what’s happening, but we are relieved when the officers and the Ugandans stand outside the car laughing and joking with each other. However, after a brief informal interaction, it becomes clear to us that the driver’s license had expired the day before, and the officers are not going to let him drive white people around without proper documentation. A reasonable request.

10:35AM: The officers no longer think the situation is comical. They demand the rest of us get out of the car, take the keys, and refuse to talk to anybody but Juliet. They treat our driver like a criminal, demand he leave the scene, and proceed to make bizarre accusations to Juliet about who really owns the car and that it must be impounded. We learn that the car is actually Juliet’s, and that she does not like to drive, which is why she hired the driver in the first place. I can understand why she doesn’t like driving here, but more on that later.

10:35 - 11:30AM: We stand in the sun and ROAST. Officers refuse to speak to us, so we wait.

11:30AM: Two of the officers get into the front of the car, pile the rest of us in the back, and drive the caravan back into town where they impound the car and take us to traffic court.

Traffic Court

The door is guarded by two officers, one holding an AK-47 and one holding a shotgun. Although almost every officer in this country carriers and automatic firearm, having someone stare at me holding a gun the size of my torso is something I’m afraid I will never get used to. The building is more of a courtyard with several buildings around the perimeter, and casually hanging out in the courtyard are 2 or 3 different groups of armed soldiers, each group with its own uniform (probably army and local police), and each soldier in possession of his weapon of choice (AK-47 or shotgun). I would like to take this opportunity to express that NOT ONCE did I feel threatened by any of these people. They stared because we were white, but other than that they had nothing to do with us. In fact, we were treated with the utmost respect by everybody involved in this process, except for the original officer, who did not disrespect us, he simply ignored us.

We walked into a building where a big, jolly Ugandan is sitting behind a desk waiting for us. Our driver, Mario, is also here. The big man greats us with a smile and says, “tell me who was driving the car!” While the officer, the driver, and Juliet are sorting out the details of the event, I take this opportunity to not the pictures on the wall. The photographs are of fatal accidents in Mbale. I have never seen a picture of a dead body, let alone 30 or 40, and I’m not too sure how to describe the feelings that came over me, probably because I had never experienced those emotions. Moving along.

They officer gives Juliet her car back, and the driver is not fined because he had submitted an application for a license renewal months prior, and it was not his fault he had not received it. Apparently traffic court operates on African time too.

We eat lunch, and Mario is so shaken up from the experience that he decides he no longer wants to drive us out to Tororo. Juliet is disappointed because she had been planning those meetings for a while, and we are disappointed because we had left at 8:30AM, it was then 1:00PM, and we had accomplished absolutely nothing. Juliet then asks if I want to drive. I say no. I think. I say yes.

Tororo

Driving in Uganda demands more concentration than taking the SATs. First of all, they drive on the left side of the road, and the steering wheel is on the right side of the car. Enough said. Second, they drive like maniacs, bats out of hell, chickens with their heads cut off, or however you wish to describe it. Third, there are so many potholes in the road (more like ditches than potholes) that I can only look about 50 feet in front of me. The combination of these elements makes driving as difficult as holding an efficient meeting on the floor at the House of Representatives. I am told that as recently as the 70s, fist-fights used to break out between Democrats and Republicans during such meetings. You can use your own imagination.

By the time we make it to Tororo for our first meeting, I am so worn out that I cannot think of anything to say, and I can barely stay awake, let alone concentrate, as Juliet conducts business and Joel takes notes. Business goes down in Uganda like nothing I have ever experienced in my life. It astounded me and made me feel ashamed that I grew up in a world where the phrase “I give you my word” is synonymous with, “I’ll shake hands with the same hand I wipe my ass with, just so we’re clear about our feelings of mutual respect.” A world where contracts MUST be drawn up by lawyers paid six figures annually, and those contracts are broken without consequence as surely as the sun rises. A world where I personally have not made a promise since I was 16 because the last promise I made I broke, and broke my best friend’s heart along with it.

First came introductions, then came small talk, then came business. After five minutes of small talk, this other organization, Community Vision, physically laid the most intricate details of every aspect of their business on the table. Everything from their cost structure, to the management structure, to their marketing strategy, all the way down to what their employees eat for breakfast within 10 minutes. I mean EVERYTHING. After they were done, Juliet reciprocated, and the sequential 3 hours were spent discussing best practices and what wasn’t working. The meeting concluded with the exchange of financial ledgers and the agreement to meet again and partner up so as to reach the most amount of people in the most effective ways. Absolutely incredible. Imagine if Coca-Cola and Pepsi sat down and said, “Hey, here’s our recipe. It is my understanding that people in the south don’t like Coke, but they like Pepsi. Why don’t you take the south, we’ll take the north, and we can both use the same marketing strategy to save money and time.” (To pronounce the unusual nature of this situation, it is interesting to note that there are only 3 people in the world that know the recipe of Coca-Cola.)

Homeward Bound

I drove home. I took an hour nap, and since it was Friday and also Patrick’s last night in Mbale, we decided to go out. We went to dinner and had beers, then we went to Sports Club and had beers, and then we went out to the club. And yes, there are night clubs in Mbale, Uganda, East Africa. We arrived around 1:00AM, which was early. We danced the night away, and at 4:00AM we decided it was time to call it a night, which was 2 hours before the club closed. What a day…

I realize that I have not provided much insight into my daily life in Uganda, or what I’m doing here professionally, or the friends I have made, or the cultural dont’s and do’s. However, this story was too good to not share with everybody, and I believe that story-telling is the best way to gain insight into those situations anyway. So expect that when these types of stories come along, I will share them with you instead of telling you what I ate for lunch (which today was beans and potatoes).

Thanks for reading, and sorry I don’t have any pictures to go along with this particular story. I’m not 100% positive, but I’m not sure how the officers feel about having pictures taken of them, and I was not about to find out. I have included some pictures, some of them are just random, so use your imagination!

Good night and good luck!