Travels with Myself...

I am sitting at the Acacia Guest House, in Mbarara, Uganda, listening to the competing sounds of very loud soft rock (Phil Collins and the like) and a "football" game on a small flat screened tv that is sitting high up on the whitewashed wall of the lobby. I arrived in Entebbe yesterday at around noon, after a 4.5h flight from Dubai. (My parting with Dave was not without its requisite tears- as much for not being able to experience this new part of Africa without him as for not really knowing why I was going and where this new research endeavor would lead.) The entry through immigration was quick, even with my need to purchase a visa on site.

I was greeted by Lucas, the driver sent by a travel agency that was recommended to me by the folks at Harvard and UCSF. After quickly getting my new SIM card, we proceeded to travel another 5 hours by car through jungle ("the banana republic"), rolling green pastures, and small shabby towns with their brightly painted stores and rusted iron awnings. Lucas and I chatted about each others families, Ugandan politics and the essentials. He has worked for Moses's Travel Agency for about 4 years now, and prior to that he worked as the driver for children with disabilities at Mission Hospital. He had 3 children; 2 are twins and one of the twins had some delay and left arm and leg paralysis due to anoxic brain injury during birth. All lived in Kampala with their mother, whom he met working with the UN and the Red Cross in Rwanda (as a driver)- though she is Ugandan, she is from a different tribe (in Mbarara). Lucas himself is from Jinja (at the mouth of the Nile), located in the central-western part of Uganda that he feels is a bit less developed and more neglected as many of the chief ministers hail from the southwestern part of Uganda (where we were traveling and from where the current President of nearly 25 years, Musaveni, hails). Though I couldn't catch everything Lucas had to say (a combination of my relative deafness and his accent), my general sense from our conversation was the Musaveni is appreciated for a lot of things. He reigned in a lot of the corrupt local police who would create roadblocks and make folks fork over sums of money that invariably would go straight to their pockets. But Lucas lamented the failure of the education system in Uganda, which is why he spends money sending his kids to better schools in Kampala- teachers in the public school system are not paid well enough. Hmm. I also tactfully asked about how he and his fellow Ugandans perceived the Indian immigrants in the country. While they were thrown out during Amin's "reign of terror" in the late seventies (resulting in near economic collapse), they were repatriated in the mid 80s and now again own many businesses. Lucas, whose first question to me was, "are you Indian?," tactfully replied that in general Indians were well-liked because they often sold items at cheaper rates than Ugandan merchants...putting a lot of Ugandan merchants out of work.

 Lucas stopped at the equator for a picture:

We also passed through a national park and saw zebras and impalas- a mini-safari of sorts. My i-phone would not let me zoom close enough to take great pictures. We arrived in Mbarara by 5:30pm. We first drove to the MGH guest house (as in Mass Gen Hosp), which had a high brick fence, an armed security guard and a lovely garden of fruit trees including avocado, papaya, and mango. We met Pauline, the innkeeper, who took me to a different guest house (as there was no room for the week I am here), which offered reasonably secure premises and simple but clean and spacious rooms. I settled in and went down for a dinner of chappatis, stew, and a coke which I was unable to finish:

I wrote a few emails and retired to my room, falling asleep in front of "Benson" and some Filipino soap dubbed in English. Dave woke me up at around 6am this morning and I was excited to hear his voice and glad he made it safely back to the states and was reunited with Emily. I re-organized and went down to grab some coffee and a banana and then headed out toe explore town. Most of the shops were closed, but there were plenty of people out. I caught glimpses of church goers and heard bits of church music. (There is a sizable Muslim community here as well- Lucas says about 25%- but the country is overwhelmingly Christian, and any little religious tension is largely between the Catholics and Protestants, unlike changing India. I did see a number of women sporting burkas, a conversation for another day.) I only heard one "Mzungu" from a small child- though there is some other word for someone of Asian descent, Lucas said that children cannot distinguish me from any other Mzungu...which had largely been my experience in Kenya.

I spent the remainder of the day planning my trip to Kenya (the flights were harder to come by than I had imagined) and thinking about whether I would want to spend the one "free" day I had in Uganda tracking gorillas in Bwindi or chimpanzees in Kibale...and am leaning towards the latter.  I also did a bit of real work (for the first time in 2 weeks) and caught up on old New Yorkers, notably an article on matchmaking websites in China.

I am just about to eat the chapattis and stew I ordered yesterday for the second time today- I had a portion for lunch earlier today, but was again, strangely, quickly filled. I previously had handwritten about 11 pages on 5x8 college ruled paper of our trip to India, so I may allude to it periodically in this journal. But writing by hand frequently causes the muscle below my thumb (the thenar eminence) to cramp, so I am restarting this blog, as typing is far more comfortable. Will try to include pictures as I go along.