It took over four days of traveling and meetings, but I finally made it to Arua in the far northwest part of Uganda, just a few kilometers from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and economic hub of the region. After settling into the apartment for a bit, Gerard and I went over to Rojey Creamery, a nearby restaurant that I frequented during my stay in Uganda (and ended up not eating the same thing twice, even with all of the visits to the restaurant.) I got to meet the owners of the restaurant and try their version of a hamburger and fries. Lots of ketchup on this one, which was easily fixed using the giant pile of fries that came with the burger.
I called it an early night on Friday because we had a number of things to do on Saturday. I still needed some sort of Internet connection so that I could attempt to stay in touch with the other side of the world along with keeping in contact with people in Arua while I was there. I also had more money that needed to be exchanged from U.S. dollars to Ugandan shillings. I wanted to visit a grocery store in order to get some bottles of water and pop and get some snacks for the apartment, since I had to walk at least half a kilometer to the nearest restaurant. Most of all, I needed to go over and see the venue where our class was to take place and pay in advance for the space and the food and drink that they were to provide during the sessions.
I picked the larger of the two bedrooms as mine for the month, since its bathroom was off the bedroom. The other bathroom was next to the other bedroom, but you had to go out into the hall to go between rooms. The bedroom and bathroom I picked were both the larger of the two. The other reason that I picked the rooms I did was that the entire bathroom functioned as the shower. The shower head was at one end of the bathroom, and the drain was next to the toilet, at the other end of the bathroom. I made sure that everything that lived in the bathroom could get wet – the toilet paper holder was enclosed, so the roll wouldn’t get ruined by splashed water. The bathrooms over there also had hoses that functioned as bidets – that was probably the most helpful tool in the entire room. There are times when the AssBlaster9000™ would be quite helpful back here at home.
The main thing that I had to remember to do each night was to secure the mosquito net. The rainy season was just starting when I got to Arua, and that meant standing water – mosquito heaven. A few of them got me on the feet the first night, because I hadn’t applied bug spray to my feet that morning. Starting the next night, I put some bug spray on my feet after I took off my socks. A spider must have gotten into the bubble at some point, too, because about a week into the adventure, I noticed what looked like spider bites on my right foot and a bit of cellulitis. Then again, it could have been one of the local geckos, because I saw a couple of them crawling on the walls of the apartment from time to time over the month I was there. Those bites and the cellulitis faded away after a couple of weeks, so I wasn’t too worried. The mosquitoes always got in because nothing was truly sealed up – a benefit because there wasn’t any air conditioning.
Air conditioning would have been somewhat useless anyway – on many occasions, mostly overnight, the power would go out. There was a solar array on the roof of the apartment and a couple of backup batteries, but they just powered a handful of outlets in one part of the apartment. When the grid was down, the fridge and the electric appliances in the fridge was not functional. I could still charge my cell phone, computer, and other electronics from the four working outlets, and the TV and satellite receiver still worked. I had my Internet hot spot plugged into the battery backup as well, so I could still use the Internet, even if the main power supply was down. Infrastructure problems seemed to be the main issue holding back some serious development in that part of the world – many businesses, especially those that served food and drink, had backup generators because of the unstable power supply.
The backup battery would beep every time the power was cut or restored. I got used to it over the course of the month, but the first night was rough. Actually, I got used to all of the various noises both inside and outside the apartment by the second week or so. Occasionally, there would be a pack of dogs howling outside the walls of the apartment complex. Other times, work crews would start fixing the dirt road in front of the complex right when the sun came up, around 7 am. Roosters would always start announcing themselves first thing in the morning. I didn’t really need an alarm clock while I was there, between the activity outside and my own body’s confusion about which time zone I currently occupied.
Best building name ever.
Saturday was incredibly busy. According to my phone, we walked several miles over the course of the day, moving between different stops around Arua. Gerard and I visited Razaki, the third partner in this Reciprocal Exchange program. We were able to use his office as the meeting point where the representative from the local cell phone company met us with my local SIM card and all of the paperwork. I’m not sure if it’s still active, but I got a secret Ugandan phone number! I really just needed the SIM card for the ability to transmit data, so Gerard found me a personal hot spot that I used for the duration of my time in the country. It was a neat little device – the battery lasted about 2 hours, so I could take it with me if we were going to go exploring, and I took the charging cord with me if I knew we were going to be away from my apartment more than a couple of hours.
We also visited a grocery store on the edge of the central business district. It had six aisles, only two of which had food – the rest was everything from dishes to cleaning products to other home goods. There was almost nothing refrigerated or frozen, probably due to the power situation. It had a bit of a dollar store feel to it, just much smaller. I spent a few thousand shillings on snacks and beverages that I wanted to try, and we started walking back toward the apartment. On the way back, we detoured over to Bamboo Village, but the people we needed to talk to in order to pay for the venue were not in on Saturday – we stopped by again on Sunday to settle the bill.
We took the rest of the day off Saturday because we were going to spend most of Sunday being social at a local music event called Afro Brunch. Many of the local eateries were attached to either an event venue, a hotel, a bar, or a combination of the three. We had lunch at the restaurant where the music festival was happening as the event organizers were testing the equipment on stage. We brought a couple of lawn chairs so that we wouldn’t have to sit on the ground. There was live music during the day, and then a deejay took over as the sun began to set. I got to meet a number of locals, including a few people who were going to be in our class over the following three weeks.
I didn’t mind staying out a bit late on Sunday since our class on Monday wasn’t until the late afternoon, in order for the students to put in a full day of work before attending. I built the curriculum around people who were working full time, so there wasn’t a ton of homework beyond conducting customer discovery and reading Talking To Humans, so they could better conduct those interviews. Getting everyone to show up on time was a challenge, though. We were supposed to start at 4 pm Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but we ended up delaying the start until roughly 4:30 pm, as the students slowly trickled in.
This was the first lesson from my trip: time has a different level of importance outside the United States. If a class starts at 4 pm here, everyone is here right around 4 pm and we start on time. That wasn’t the case over there, and the people who did show up on time didn’t seem to mind waiting for everyone else to show up. The only place where meeting times seemed to matter was when we visited universities both in Kampala and in Arua, and even then, there was a little bit of quiet waiting involved. I admired the level of patience I saw in people while I was there.
Many things just seemed to happen… eventually. There were a lot of buildings under construction with just the first floor completely finished and occupied, and the rest of the building above it unfinished. Was it a money issue, or had the construction crew been abducted? In a way, it really felt like I was at home – so many different projects started everywhere. I know what it’s like to start so many things and not have the time or the resources to complete the tasks. Any more, it’s that I take on too many things, get things started to show some progress, and then it takes me twice as long to remember where I left off among the different projects.
There are only 24 hours in a day, and I still have a tendency to try to cram 28 hours worth of work into the 16-18 hours that I’m actually awake. I’d certainly get a lot more done if I didn’t have to sleep.
As I worked through the curriculum with the class, I could see a change in many of the students over the course of the three weeks. I saw iterations and pivots in the businesses, and I could see the students begin to open up to me and to each other. When I asked them to get up in front of the class and present what they had learned, it was incredibly difficult for most of the students in the first couple of sessions. However, by demo day, nearly every student was able to fill their seven minutes talking about their business and what they had learned, and then some! We had a few very social people in the class who were always able to get up and present in front of the group without too much coaxing.
Many of the students also took advantage of the office hours I held at Bamboo Village, the same venue as the class sessions. Classes were held Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the office hours were in between, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I looked forward to the three Thursdays we had our office hours, because we transitioned from talking with students about the course material to trivia night – water and pop during office hours transitioned into adult beverages paired with popcorn and grilled meat after 7 pm. Team Chicken Wings did pretty well the first two Thursdays, but we struggled on the last Thursday I was there – the categories were incredibly difficult on that last Thursday. Sometimes, the questions really required local knowledge of the region or the country. I know now what it’s like to be the foreigner.
After trivia, they would crank up the music, and the place turned into this crazy outdoor nightclub. We were lucky that the rain held off each of the Thursdays – our prime spot for trivia was several feet from the nearest shelter, as were the prime spots for most of the participants. A number of the students would come by for trivia or afterwards for drinks and dancing. The party never really got started over there until 10 pm or later, and the nightclubs didn’t get really fun until midnight or later. Unlike here at home, the bars don’t really close over there. The party just keeps going until the sun comes back up and it’s time to grab a nap before work.
On the one Friday night when Gerard and I enjoyed some night life, we specifically didn’t go to the club until after midnight. The pre-party was, believe it or not, at the nearby gas station. The entire lot was filled with cars except right around the gas pumps, which were still operational all night. Music blasted out of a Bluetooth speaker and the usual line-up of beverages were available for purchase inside the convenience store for a few thousand shillings each. (Pop and water usually ran about 2000 shillings, roughly 50 cents. Bottles of beer and cider were 5000-6000 shillings each, $1.50-$1.75, even at bars.) The guys next to me were enjoying some local whiskey, but I stuck with Tusker Malt, my favorite of the beers I tried. I usually had Tusker Cider during trivia night, 5000 shillings each.
Speaking of drinks, I did my best to work through the variety of beverages available in Uganda. First, the pop tasted better there than it does here in America because they use ACTUAL SUGAR. High-fructose corn syrup has not made it to that part of the world, and I hope it never does. I still preferred Pepsi to Coke, as I do here at home. However, there was a local contender, Riham Cola, that tasted almost exactly like Royal Crown Cola – both Riham and Royal Crown were originally meant to be Coke ripoffs, and it was hilarious that they ended up nearly identical half a world apart. Other American favorites I found were Sprite and Fanta, which were a bit closer to their American versions. Pepsi had a local fruity pop called Mirinda. There was also a lemon flavored pop Krest, which was an acquired taste. Riham’s orange pop was Sky View, and it was my least favorite of that category. Each of the three drink manufacturers also made an energy drink – Pepsi’s was Sting, Coke’s was Predator, and Riham’s was RockBoom. Predator was my favorite, with RockBoom at a close second. Sting tasted fine, but had a gnarly aftertaste.
I worked my way through local adult beverages as well. I started with Nile Special on the recommendation of Gerard, as he said it was popular with tourists. It tasted like a number of German lagers that I’ve had before – if they were going for that style, they nailed it. Tusker made a number of drinks – Tusker Malt, Tusker Lite, and Tusker Cider. Malt was fuller-boded than Lite, but they were both really good, similar in style to the Nile Special. Tusker Cider smelled and tasted like sour apple Jolly Ranchers at first, but mellowed out after a few sips. Savanna Cider was ridiculously sweet and somewhat harsh – I was disappointed by this, as it had been talked up by a number of Mandela Washington Fellows when I told them about Cider Finder. Smirnoff Ice tasted identical to the American version and transported me back in time to 2005. The last beer I tried was Club, the Beer 30 of Africa. It smelled faintly of beer and tasted like water. 0/10 would not buy again unless severely dehydrated, and even then, I would just get the Smirnoff Ice.
After pre-partying at the Total station, it was on to the Capital One Club for a couple more beverages and some music and dancing. The place was absolutely packed when we got there, and like pretty much everywhere in Arua, we ran into people we knew. We enjoyed beverages and music until about 4 am, at which point my body remembered how old I am and needed some sleep. I started to notice a pattern with the music, both at Capital One and at Bamboo Village – certain deejays like a handful of songs, and they get played again and again. This created a kind of soundtrack for the experience, like a radio station in Grand Theft Auto. I heard some newer songs, a lot of older songs, reggae-infused versions of Post Malone songs, and some really great local stuff, much of which was in the local languages. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it certainly was catchy.
Believe it or not, I didn’t spend all of my time goofing off. I only had a couple of Sundays off the entire month I was over in Uganda, including the Sunday we were at Afro Brunch. Most days were packed with teaching, office hours, meetings with the students at their places of business, or meeting with various local big shots. We always seemed to be moving around, either on foot or in a tuk-tuk if the distance to travel was more than a mile or so. The furthest we traveled in town was through the Barifa Forest to Muni University, to visit the student incubator program and meet some of the faculty. We had a couple of great discussions with the folks there – I’m hoping to work with them on some projects in the future. We also took a tuk-tuk over to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so I could see an international border in person. It’s a bit of a drive to either the Canadian or Mexican borders from my house, so I wanted to take the opportunity while I was that close to another country.
I managed to make it until the last week of my trip before I injured myself. Needing to take out a bit of money from the ATM to cover the trip back to Entebbe for the flight home, we stopped at one of the local banks which required climbing up a ramp in order to reach the ATMs. On my way back down, I slipped off of the ramp which had a bit a mud, sand, and moisture from the overnight rains, and landed shoulder-first in the parking lot, dislocating my left shoulder. I’ve never felt such pain before in my life! Luckily, we had a tuk-tuk standing by to take us to a meeting that morning, so we canceled the meeting and I was taken straight over to a local emergency clinic where I could get some pain medication and an x-ray of my arm and shoulder. At that clinic, I was given some pain medication and sent on my way. I spontaneously relocated my own shoulder during class, but as I was gesturing at the screen, I re-dislocated my shoulder. Luckily, one of my students ran his own clinic, and was able to re-relocate my shoulder and got me a sling to keep my arm and shoulder still for the remainder of my time in the country. All in all, my healthcare adventure in Uganda cost between $50 and $60 – a far cry from the $1500+ I would have spent here in America with insurance.
I managed to make it through demo day with my shoulder in a sling – nearly four hours of presentations by 17 students, with a couple of breaks in the middle due to power issues and technical difficulties. We presented certificates of completion to those 17 students along with 3 others who weren’t able to attend the demo day but had attended all of the class meetings. I was so incredibly proud of my students for putting in the kind of effort they did over three weeks, even with their busy schedules and all of the technical hurdles they had to overcome in order to create their slide decks. I’m beginning to edit all of the video footage from the trip, including the demo day presentations, and it’s fun to watch them present all over again.
And just like that, it was time to say goodbye and head south toward Entebbe International Airport again. Continue on to the next post to read about the return trip and traveling through multiple airports with an injured shoulder. It’s not nearly as terrible as you’d think.
You must be logged in to post a comment.