1800 Kilometers.

I have just finished a twelve-day work week, and let me tell you, I've been everywhere maaaaan.

1800 km in nine days. Three different compass directions.

My trip to Soroti, Eastern Uganda was a bit of surprise. I knew about Arua and Masaka, but on the Monday, I was informed that I would be heading to the East on the Wednesday.

This was an interesting journey because it took me in a direction that I’ve never been in before, and let me pass through Jinja, the source of the Nile, where I could see the large dam project, as well as the start of the raging river.

The trip to Soroti was relatively uneventful, outside of a 15-minute period or so of blinding rain, where I swear our driver, Emma, was driving entirely by memory.

No, this isn't the salesman I was intimidated by. But it's so cute. 

I also discovered the first thing about Uganda that really challenges my comfort levels: the road-side food salesmen. We briefly passed some on the way back from Pader, but I didn’t really get the full experience. As soon as your car comes to a stop, all the windows were rolled down and about 15 hands holding food and drink items – mostly speared meat, roasted corn and Fanta – were jammed into your face. I occasionally have anxiety with too many humans in my personal space and this definitely triggered it. I almost got whacked repeatedly in the nose by meat-on-a-stick, and my anxiety made any hunger I had promptly disappear. The salesmen are quite persistent, and don’t really take a “no” for an answer, unless your window is closed, or you’re driving off with their arm still in your vehicle (and even then …) Over the next few days, we’ve made a few more of these stops, but each time, I would just request my window stayed down. I will occasionally overcome this anxiety, I’m sure, but not yet.

Soroti reminded me of a town from an old Western, with wide dirt streets, and square buildings that you’d expect Clint Eastwood to stride out of on his way to duel with the leader of some gang. On the second evening in town, we decided to check out the town with two of my co-workers, Abel and Bob. Our first stop was a “Pork Place” – which is exactly what it sounds like. Abel did the ordering for us and ordered “two and a half” and I thought to myself “oh good, I can’t really eat more than half a bit of pork”. Turns out the measurement was in kilograms … TWO AND A HALF KILOS of pork was placed in front of us. My jaw dropped. It was all on a tray, and we tackled it like it was a feed-trough as I certainly beat my personal record for amount of meat consumed in a single sitting.

We walked around the town for a bit, trying to find a place which served cold beer, had a crowd and played some good music. We found one club (which you had to enter from a dark alleyway) which would be more at home in Kampala, but the only people inside were the DJ and the bartenders. We found a place which had the appropriately dingy feel to it – think Thunder Bay’s “Apollo,” or any place in Toronto that is open after 2 am – where the drinks were cheap, cold, and frequently served. We listened to a nice selection of classic Ugandan reggae, slow jams and reggae with a little bit of Lauryn Hill and Ludakris mixed in for home comfort. I won’t detail how many Ugandan Club beers were drank, but let me say: it was a good evening.

We went home via Bodas, one per boda and it we almost had a misadventure, when we came across a dubious road-block. Luckily our bodas decided to blaze through them without stopping, because to quote Abel: “If we had stopped, we’d be in a hospital right now”.

Some of the panhandling baboons that I've mentioned in
previous entries. 

We took a scenic route back to Kampala, dropping off Bob in Lira, and my supervisor just on the outskirtsKampala when our vehicle started to sputter … and it was already dark. Getting stuck at night with vehicular issues is one of those things you dream about when you are taking anti-malarials. It was definitely not a situation I wanted to be in. Alas, our brief stop in Luwero had caused the tank to settle and our Fuel arrow had dropped significantly (or someone syphone off our gas). We came to a complete stop on a stretch of highway undergoing construction and managed to get into the construction lane. Our driver jumped out of the car and hitched a ride in the direction traffic was going. We quickly realized that he had gone to a further gas-station after speaking with a boda driver. There was a gas station about five-to-ten minutes back from where we had come, rather than the thirty minutes that he had headed. We must have been there for an hour and a half on the side of the road, as people slowed down to look at us, and people walked by on their way home on the side of the road. Luckily, we were not that isolated which made the situation a little safer. Eventually, we were overjoyed to see the lights of a boda heading towards us with Emma on the back. On we went; I got home just before midnight.

of Gulu. The real adventure came about an hour outside of

The trip to Arua was breath-taking. Once you start heading West, it stops being meadowland, and become rolling green hills with shrubbery and wild-life to be seen as far as the eye can see, while the Nile traces it’s course through the distance with a the occasional grass-hut village peppering the country side. It was beautiful. We were going this direction as the sun was starting to set, and a storm was coming in from the Congo. We were in a hurry, so I couldn’t stop for photos … but it was like a National Geographic photo. We however did stop for the elephants. Seeing the elephants was probably the 

the single most out-of-my-world experience that I have experienced since here. You see them on tv, you see them in the zoo, but to see a dozen of them just roaming in their natural habitat is something else altogether. They were quietly eating, covered in dirt, with birds picking them clean, while we spent about five minutes staring at them and taking some photos. If there was ever any doubt in my mind that I was on a different continent, it had been single-handedly been shattered. I definitely plan on going back to Arua and checking out Murchison Falls and the nearby park, so I can take in more of this scenery.

The rest of the journey was work-oriented, and you can read more about it in my forthcoming professional blog, but after Arua, we returned to Kampala, before doing a day trip to nearby Masaka, passing over the exact spot of the equator.

Including the two Kampala hospitals we visited, I did 1800 km in 9 days and went in three different directions. 

Getting Directions & Police Reports in Kampala

If they haven’t already, they really need to run an episode or two of the Amazing Race in Kampala. 

As mentioned prior, most people aren’t really aware of street names (outside of the major arteries), but rather landmarks. And often, the landmarks have multiple names, appear in different locations than boda-drivers remember, or are something that a Canadian wouldn’t normally perceive as a landmark, i.e. gas-stations.

Yesterday, I went for a walk with a few American friends to find some art galleries and if someone had drawn out our paths, they would have thought we were a caged zoo tiger. For example, we were told to go to the end of one road and ask for directions. Sure! We get there and get directed to the left looking for a street called “Princess St”. We walked and walked until we found some bored Boda-drivers, who instructed us to back-track. Ok, sure … we started to exchange uncertain looks. We walked for about ten minutes before we asked for directions again … and were once again told with all certainty that we needed to back-track yet again towards the drivers … Sigh. But wait! After a few steps, we asked another security guard for directions who said we never should have headed this way whatsoever, and had to back-track and turn right at the first street we had come to. Eventually we found the gallery, but not before adding an additionial two kilometers to our trek.

On a very amusing and positive note: on the way to our next gallery, we were helped out part of the way by the Ugandan Ashton Kutcher. Yup – we met the three hosts of Ugandan Punk’d ("Pranks" as it is called here), a show where three tricksters pull pranks – generally fake arrests – on big Ugandan celebrities and politicians. Not going to lie, I suspected that we might be on camera, being led into some serious hazing … but luckily we got fairly close to where we needed to be. However, once in the vicinity, the procedure from the previous paragraph happened again, although this time we decided to ask many people where to go and get an aggregate of responses. The amazing thing is that at one point we heard advice to go in three entirely separate directions….

The conclusion: Ugandans will never, ever say “I don’t know” when asked for directions.

Where the next step in the process comes in, I am not sure: guesses, mental coin flip, a basic reflection? Luckily I know my part of town fairly well and can guide wandering boda-drivers home, but it worries me when I get a confident “YES! I know where that is – sit down!” and then we start meandering, before asking other Boda-drivers for directions. That is why my rule of thumb is to 100% know where I am going before setting out, so I don’t end up in Nairobi by pure accident. Considering, there is that 1% of Boda-drivers who also con people into late evening rides and drop them off in the middle of nowhere and demand money … it’s at times worryingly hard to decipher if they are legitimately taking a short-cut alternative route, are lost, or are on the way to stick you in the worst part of town and leave you.

I’ve long learned to expect to wear down my shoes a lot when accomplishing any of my missions, because a) the already established lack of clear or accurate directions; and b) things often being much more complex than they should be.

Case in point: for my work permit, I needed to navigate a police check. Here are all the steps that took place:

1) Get staff to call police station and request information on what is needed. The presence of a letter of introduction is apparently not needed (doubt on my end …)

2) Show up at police station. Letter is very sternly required by a man with K-57 assault rifle.

3) Go back for letter.

4) Stand in a tent that is trapping heat and sitting around 40 degrees C.

5) Fill out paperwork in duplicate.

6) Go to “Room 2”

7) Get cross examined. Sent to Room 5.

8) Wander aimlessly, till Room 5 is found.

9) Get receipts that need to be paid at a national bank.

10) Go to bank.

11) Return to sweaty tent. Fill out a deceleration of my good intentions. In pen. In my own handwriting.

12) Return to tent. Get bounced around three separate lines. At one point my security officer and I stand in separate lines just in case.

13) Get finger prints taken. Angrily. Wrist almost broken.

14) Asked to stand on line on other side of finger-print dude.

15) After 20 minutes of sweating and being glared at by police officers, the officer hands the paper with prints on it. Take note: Rather than handing it back right away, you literally need to stand and sweat in a different line before being handed the paper.

16) Drop off papers with prints at tent number 2.

17) Get told wait time is 2 weeks. Security officer informs them, that 4 days is "quite good, please and thank you".

18) Return five days later. Go to sweaty tent. Get sent to Room 2.

19) A pile of dossiers is angrily pointed out to me. I need to go through them by myself till I find my report.

20) Get sent to a dizzying amount of rooms with my paper.

21) Get photo taken. Angrily (Yes, yes, this is a trend).

22) Get told that it will take 12 hours to print off my final report. Security officer says he prefers 20 minutes. Since my security officer isn’t Canadian, this now seems reasonable (the lady ahead of me, British, was not so lucky).

23) After 20 minutes, get handed paper with police report.

And this was the easiest part of THAT process ………. One of the Amazing Race challenges should be to get ANY official paper completed in a single day. 

As a final anecdote on complex processes and directions: when I finally received word that I can pick up my passport with work-permit, we got told angrily(yes, even at the Ministry … actually, especially) that we needed to go to Room Number Five to pick it up and told to go across the yard. We promptly go there, speak with some number cruncher with an oversize calculator, and get sent all the way across the compound to the parking lot … and then bounced around the compound four different times over a period of over twenty minutes, before eventually finding out that the number cruncher (read: tool) who had sent us all the way to the parking lot was actually sitting directly beside Room Number Five. At this point, I remain pretty certain that they were playing a trick on the Mzungu and seeing just how hard they can make we work to get the precious document.

The moral of these stories: Ugandans always want to help with directions (unless they work for the bureaucracy), they just don’t always actually know where to point you…. And if you work in the bureaucracy, you are always angry no matter how big of a calculator, or gun you are holding.

Animal Refuge; Conrad Travels North

On Saturday morning, I put my foot down and said that one-way-or-another I will leave Kampala and see some animals. I had been in Kampala and outside of rats the size of Master Splinter and storks so ugly their own mothers have disowned them (picture a vulture with a throat sack that looks like a foot-long condom dangling from its throat) I have not seen anything that makes me want to hum the Lion King soundtrack. My supervisor from Canada was in town and had a rare day off, so we decided that we would go to Entebbe and check out the Animal Refuge.

The journey there was an adventure from start-to-finish (as it often is in Uganda; you arrive somewhere and your adrenaline is flowing so much you wonder how the rest of the day can top it). We started by getting a friend, Ashraf, to help us locate a boda to take us to the Taxi Park. He has a secret whistle with one of the boda drivers which he did off of the balcony of the restaurant – it was oddly reminiscent of a scene from Zorro. I sincerely hoped I wasn’t expected to next jump off the balcony onto the back of the boda. However, this leap might have been safer than the impending ride. It was rush-hour on a Saturday morning and we were heading to the belly of the congestion – the downtown transport centres. And oh yes, the national football team was playing that day and the downtown area was filled with cheering fans dressed in the tri-colors, blaring into Vuvuzelas, cheering and hawking all sorts of Uganda goodies. The path we took can only be described as chaotic and I smashed my knee into the side of a car on one particularly gravity-defying turn. The taxi park is like an ant-hill, with vehicles everywhere and people running around. The services are competitive so the second you enter, several drivers compete to get you into their vehicle.

I should interject and clarify that “taxis” actually mean “mini-bus” in Uganda, or “Mutatu” in the local vernacular. They are taxi vans as we would recognize them, colorfully decorated with biblical passages and either Manchester United or Arsenal decals. Each one is usually operated by a pair, the driver and the hawker. Their goal is to fill to the capacity of 14 (!!) as quickly as possible before heading out on a pre-designated route. These Mutatus head to all corners of the city and all corners of Uganda.

We quickly discovered the Mutatu heading to Entebbe and packed in with 14 people. The trick to being a passenger in Kampala traffic is to distract yourself so you don’t notice the chaotic merges and turns. The trip to-and-from Entebbe have blended together in my mind, but many topics of conversation were discussed, and at various times I found myself singing choruses from a Backstreet Boys, Ace of Base song, and the full version of the Prince of Bel-Air theme (I’m special that way). The trip to Entebbe was relatively uneventful outside of an argument between the hawker and one passenger which resulted in a tug-of-war over a jacket. We weren’t entirely sure where we were going, so we kept our eyes peeled for likely signs that would indicate that one of the Entebbe stops was close to the animals. Luckily we saw two statues of rhinos and that gave us the necessary hint.

The refuge was interesting, although as we traversed the site, we noticed that there were a lot of the predators that we couldn’t see. Considering the large amounts of emergency phone numbers, emergency gathering points we saw, you could not help but have Jurassic Park flashbacks. I spent a lot of time glancing into the trees to make sure I wasn’t about to be pounced on by an oversized Tabby.

The twin highlights of the visit were the rhinos and the chimpanzees.

The rhinos were truly docile and majestic and seeing them, I simply can’t believe that people would poach them for simply their single horn. As wonderful as this horn is, it doesn’t come anywhere near the beauty of the animal. There was a pair grazing and I spent several minutes watching them. They like most of the animals in the refuge, were there because they had been rescued from either poachers or private collection (in this case, I wasn’t clear which one exactly). The chimps were too human to believe. You could clearly see them thinking, and their motions were so life-like. They hammed it up for a group of children who were chanting “monkey! Monkey!” at them, and when they were tossed sugar-cane, they carried it in their mouths like cigars, making them look like a private eye from some silent feature flick.

The final noteworthy story is the "mugging" Kate received. Early in the day she had observed the gang of monkeys which was loitering around the property, and she had narrowed her eyes and said that she was sure one of them would try to steal something at some point. We managed to go a visit with limited attempts at purloining by the simian sabateurs. Finally, during lunch, we noticed one monkey edging closer and closer to the restaurant. Disappearing out of our field of vision, it suddenly appeared in the restaurant with a loud Kung-Fu scream, grabbed the remainder of Kate's scone, screamed at her a stream of monkey profanity, used it's tail to spill soda all over the table (no doubt it's version of a smokescreen) and took off to the other side of the mesh. It there sat, glaring challenging at us, while it ate the whole meal, jamming it's little monkey cheeks greedily like a pudgy kid from the "the Biggest Loser" who had just raided a Dunkin' Donuts.

On Monday morning we headed up north. Snacks in hand, I strapped myself into the back of a mighty Landcruiser and we started the journey from Kampala (the very south of Uganda) to Pader district (one district shy of the Sudanese border; the region which had suffered the greatest under the civil war with Kony and the LRA). Our driver, Vincent, calm as a Jedi master, sporting trendy aviators, navigated the roads with the expertise and charm revealing his 18 years of traversing most of Uganda and Rwanda (during the conflict). Ugandan roads have stretches that remind me of the trans-Canada … but few and far between. A lot of roads are equal parts road and pot-hole (and often, more the latter). On three occasions, upon reaching Pader district (and on the return journey) we had to drive through a newly-formed creek.  The venture through these improvised paths was caught by me on film and will eventually feature on this blog (and my official one). It led to me developing the catch-phrase, “AMREF: no roads, no problem!” During one of these harrowing passages I turned to Kate and we hypothesized about the result of attempting to drive an American-made vehicle through one of these roads. All I can say, it might improve the roads, because it would probably just disintegrate into the potholes and provide traction for Landcruisers to drive over.

Some other observations / tid-bits during my drive:

•         The occupants of the cars and the children (many, many) alongside the road seemed to play a mutual game. For them it was spot the AMREF vehicle / muzungu … for us, it was making sure we returned as many waves as we could. If we had turned this into a game of “punch buggy” the occupants of the car would have shoulders as bruised as their tail-bones. The smiles of the children – as cliché as this sounds – definitely made the bone-jarring ride all that much quicker.
•         We got to see the River Nile during a stretch of the Gulu highway and I won’t bother describing it, but will say that photos and video don’t do this mighty river justice. The Nile’s mystique was enhanced by the baboons which would panhandle for bananas on the side of the road. I have been told by another driving friend of mine, Ben, that at times during hungry times the baboons have actually stopped traffic and outright demanded food from the passing vehicles.
•         No matter which part of Uganda you go, you will find football jerseys, especially Manchester United and Arsenal. The best part is spotting some truly rare players’ names on the back, such as Chamakh (!!), Anderson and Fletcher. It is truly amazing, and it really makes me appreciate all that much more the love of football to see people ploughing traditionally in a field, grass / brick huts in the backdrop, sporting matching Paul Scholes jerseys.
•         Construction closures are harrowing experiences. On the night return, there was about 20 vehicles / taxis / trucks trying to pass through the gap simultaneously, while a construction worker tried to navigate them like Tetris blocks. My friend Moses described driving in Uganda as “survival of the fittest” and this is definitely one example. As soon as an available gap emerges – or there is no one standing behind the barrier – you either gas it through the gap, or drive over the barrier. During our night return, the lane which should only allow a single stream of traffic through had traffic going in both directions, with smaller vehicles (read: not petrol or teetering produce trucks) had to go on the construction lane, which had been strewn with small boulders to prevent heroes like us from driving on it. I am not exaggerating when I say, I have a blister on my butt from the bumps which ensued.
•     While Uganda doesn’t have drive-thrus, it has the next best thing: road side hawkers. Halfway between Gulu and Kampala there is a stop where about thirty-to-forty hawkers try to sell you numerous food, drink and non-edible products, should you slow down.

Once in Pader, we had a brief meeting, ate, checked the hotel rooms for spiders (well, this was me … I had seen a doozy in a roadside washroom earlier) and went to bed early for our field visit to a school.

I won’t delve too deeply into our visit to the school, since it will feature in my professional blog, but it was an amazing experience to see so many children wearing their uniforms running, playing and singing in a school that had been started at an IDP camp a few years ago. The children definitely provide a symbol of optimism in a region that has seen such a traumatic couple decades (thousands of children in this district had been abducted by the war to be turned into soldiers, slaves and bush-wives). It was here that I took another of my favorite photos of the trip thus far: children being children, chasing a football around a field. I particularly like the one child standing there with his pack-sack, eager to get to join the game. Towards the end of the visit, some of the children sang as a round of harmonies (they were quite good), which they will feature in an upcoming song competition.

I didn’t get home till 9:45 pm in the evening, tired, hungry, but very, very satisfied with my journey. I was greeted warmly by my friends at the restaurant (who acted like I had been gone a week; the manager of my apartment even called to see if I was alright!) and after eating a plate of fries, calling home, went to bed and had an amazing sleep.