The 24 days I spent in Arua flew by much quicker than I thought they would. It felt like the final week of my time there moved the quickest. I really didn’t spend more time working with the students during that week than I did the other two weeks of the class. Dealing with my injury made it so I had to move a lot slower and had to start getting ready for the day a bit sooner than I had the rest of the time. I was able to take off the sling when I showered, but I had to make a concerted effort not to move my left shoulder or arm while the sling was off.
It’s somewhat difficult to clean yourself with one functional arm. Somehow, I got it done. Putting the sling back on was a bit difficult as well, until I figured out how to use the bathroom door frame to ease the strap to the point where I could reach it with my good arm, so I could bring it around and attach it in front. The only difficulty was when I was getting ready for demo day, as my blazer was a bit thicker than the t-shirts I had been wearing. Luckily, I caught one of the neighbors outside and had them help me bring the strap across.
There were a number of times when I first arrived overseas that I felt a bit helpless, like a small child. I had finally gotten over that by the time the final full week in the country came across, and then I went and injured myself. I was then back to relying on the kindness of others to get me through my adventure. The people of Uganda are probably the kindest and most generous people I’ve ever met. They made me feel right at home and were always friendly. I don’t think I could have picked a better place to fall off of a ramp into a parking lot. I felt helpless again, but I knew everyone was there to support me as I finished out the project.
With the course sessions and demo day behind us, Gerard and I made out plans to get back south, first to Kampala for the night and then on to Entebbe in the morning, so I could get to the airport around 8:30 am, three hours before my flight back to Qatar was to take off. On the way north, I hadn’t seen a lot of animals in Murchison Falls National Park because we didn’t make it there until the middle of the day. Since Arua is much closer to the park than Kampala, we could leave Arua between 4 and 5 am, travel the two hours of rough roads before the sun rose, and get to the park first thing in the morning when things were cooler. This meant that I spent a good portion of Monday getting everything together for the return trip, packing as well as I could with one good arm.
We were on the road by 5 am Tuesday and got into the park around 7:30 am. Once inside the park, we turned onto a side road and spent the next couple of hours chugging around the park, looking for some of the bigger animals that we weren’t able to spot the last time we came through. We saw a ton of Ugandan kobs, a bunch of warthogs and water buffaloes, and a number of birds. We spotted a couple of elephants when we got as far as we could from the main road, and we also came across a few giraffes as well. For some reason, there were a couple of giraffes just hanging out by the main road – I was told that these were older giraffes that had been left behind by the rest of the herd.
We also stopped near Delta Point, where the Albert Nile (which becomes the White Nile in South Sudan) exits Lake Albert at its northern end, close to where the Victoria Nile dumps into the northern end of Lake Albert. Gerard got a picture of me at this point, and then we went back to the main road, crossed the bridge over the Victoria Nile, and stopped for lunch. We still had a long drive the rest of the way to Kampala at to our AirBnB – a different one than the one at which we stayed at the beginning of the trip, closer to Lake Victoria and an easier drive to the airport in the morning. Luckily, the road is in much better shape between the park and Kampala, so the drive went pretty smoothly. We got stuck in evening traffic in Kampala, and the sun had nearly set by the time we found the place we were staying. Due to some recent construction, the view of the lake was somewhat obscured, but the place was great and my bed was incredibly comfortable.
I didn’t want to get up early the next day, but I had a plane to catch. I had no idea how the check-in process was going to go when we got to the airport – as chaotic as things had been when I first arrived in the country, I figured that there were going to be some hiccups in the process. Also, it was a big plane going to the Middle East, so the lines were going to be a bit closer to what I’ve experienced in Denver, not the small airport experience I get in Cedar Rapids. It wasn’t too bad once I got through the first checkpoint and first set of baggage x-rays and metal detectors. After that, I checked in for the flight and exchanged most of my remaining Ugandan shillings back to U.S. dollars at the forex window. I hung onto about 10,000 shillings in case I wanted to get a beverage to drink while I waited to board the plane.
Remember, the airport economy is always much more expensive than the outside world.
Kampala is very pretty in the evening.
Entebbe only has four gates and two jet bridges – Gates 1 and 2 feed into one jet bridge, and Gates 3 and 4 feed into the other. Since there are only four gates, you don’t find out which gate is your until shortly before the plane starts boarding. Arrivals come in through one of the jet bridges and feed down onto the ground floor. Departures are contained to the second floor – you enter on the second floor of the airport and stay there. Among the gates are a cafeteria and a handful of stores. I got one last Ugandan Pepsi for the low price of 7000 shillings and took a centrally-located seat until one of the airport employees announced that Gate 4 would be ours.
It took a while to board the plane, but it was nice to find my seat once I got on the plane. It was a few hours to Doha from Entebbe, and a late lunch was served on the plane along with tea and coffee. I took a short nap as I started to let time float again, the way I had on the trip to Uganda. I wanted to get a little bit of sleep on the plane, because my flight back to the United States from Qatar didn’t leave until close to 2 in the morning local time, and I didn’t want to be completely zonked out in the Doha airport.
My first stop in Qatar, once through the arrival security checkpoint, was the duty free shop to pick up some chocolate for my wife and kids, as a thank you for putting up with me leaving the country for a month to go on this adventure. Nearly a month later, and they still haven’t completely worked their way through the eight massive chocolate bars I brought back from the Middle East. My second stop was the Burger King in the food court for a bacon cheeseburger and a side of onion rings, all for the low price of $17. Burger King onion rings have never tasted so good – you don’t realize how much you miss little things like that until you can’t get them for a month.
I was able to take a nap in a central part of the airport, with my alarm going off about half an hour before the plane was supposed to start boarding. I didn’t know that there was going to be another set of metal detectors and baggage x-ray machines right before we boarded the plane – I’d never experienced this configuration before. At this point, my person and my stuff had gone through five different sets of metal detectors and x-ray machines between the Entebbe and Doha airports. Once on the plane for the United States, I quickly dozed off again, waking up to eat a few hours later. At that point, we were over eastern Europe, taking a long arc over Poland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and into the United States over Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, where we landed in Dallas in the middle of the afternoon.
After landing, there were two more checkpoints left in order to officially re-enter the country and migrate to the domestic terminal where the flight to Cedar Rapids would be waiting for me. Going through Customs and Border Patrol was a snap, because I filled out the CBP app before I got on the plane from Qatar and activated it when we landed in Dallas. I don’t think it took more than 30 seconds to move through that part of the process. The final step was to go through TSA one more time, to enter the domestic bubble. I’ve gone through that process so many times that it’s practically second nature – shoes and belt off, stuff out of my pockets, laptop in its own bin to go through the x-ray machine.
Once I was through, I could breathe a sigh of relief. I was back home. Well, almost back home. Home enough that I could rent a car and drive the rest of the way if I missed the flight. Once I found my final gate, I found some ice cream and a beverage. After a month of fresh food, my body was craving artificial colors and flavors.
My tract NEEDED PRESERVATIVES.
The two hours back to Iowa were uneventful. My system wasn’t totally back on American time yet, but I stayed awake until about 10 pm that night after time-floating most of the 14 hours on the long international flight. I didn’t unpack anything that evening – I just wanted to spend time with family and get hundreds of gigabytes of videos uploaded using our fiber Internet instead of the sometimes near-dial-up speed I’d been using in Uganda. The speed would vary significantly based on the time of day – if I needed to back up files, I’d let those upload overnight, as it seemed that I caught the best speeds between 2 and 8 am, when most people were asleep. 7 pm to midnight was the slowest, probably because everyone was consuming content online.
The only work I did in the following three days was to copy all of the videos, pictures, and other files over to one of my external hard drives that I use to edit videos, and then imported everything into Adobe Premiere Pro. I started to pre-render some of the video files, but it said that it was going to take several days, so I canceled that process – I’ll render everything once I’ve cut out a good amount of the silence at the beginning of the recordings, before each class began, and silence when I was trying to get students to get up in front of the group and share what they learned. Two hours of class will probably distill down to 45-60 minutes of usable footage. The raw demo day footage also has the gaps during various technical difficulties that I need to cut out before I render anything.
I took the rest of the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday after I got home to rest and relax, spend time with the wife and kids, and get over any remaining jetlag. I had to be completely ready to be up and running by Monday morning because I had a full day of work ahead of me. Right before I left for Africa and after I wrote my last pre-trip blog post, I was named the new director of The University of Iowa’s Undergraduate Student Incubator program. I finished teaching my curriculum overseas just in time to step into a similar role here at home. My task is to teach a class every Friday and rebuild the program now that the corona times are ending. In addition, I’ll be taking on some of the teaching duties of the Venture School program, splitting the fall course lectures with Scott Swenson. Scott is also helping me with the incubator program as a coach, and his entrepreneurship course at Cornell College is presenting at 1 Million Cups Iowa City on October 19. 1MC Iowa City has a tradition of hosting the Cornell group’s final pitches, first when Julie Zielinski was teaching the course, and continuing with Scott. It’s one of the great things we get to do to promote student entrepreneurship, along with hosting the Hawkeye Summer Accelerator in past years and now hosting a showcase of the Builders + Backers Idea Accelerator teams after they finish their programming.
So, now I’ve got a desk over at the Bedell Entrepreneurship Learning Laboratory on campus and hosting open office hours in that space each morning. I’ve given a number of tours to students interested in joining our program – over half a dozen just in the first three weeks of class. We’re hosting a barbecue and open house on September 28 over lunch, and we’re hoping that a number of students smell the cheeseburgers cooking and come check out our program. My team and I are plotting different ways of reaching out to students, especially first and second year students as well as the high school kids who are visiting our campus before they decide where to attend college. The sooner we interact with these students, including through campus tours pre-admission, the stronger the program will be in the coming years. A couple of the students who I’ve talked to about the program didn’t even know our facility and resources existed before this year, and at least one of those students is a senior. We’re actively fixing this issue this year – we absolutely have to be more visible earlier in the student experience.
I had a great deal of Imposter Syndrome kick in during my first week on the new job. I’m one of the youngest people among the staff, and my brain sometimes can’t handle that I’m actually qualified to be where I am. A few years ago, I had a dream that I remember clearly to this day – I was sitting in a suburban office behind a huge desk, piles of papers strewn about. I was in charge of a couple of teams, but I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I’d been hired for an executive position but couldn’t remember what the position was. Panic set in as I tried to find out what my role was in this large company. There wasn’t any resolution to the dream – I woke up and that was that. I know what I’m supposed to be doing with the incubator, but that feeling of panic still occasionally happens when I’m starting something new and I’m learning on the job. I’m doing fine now, and I have incredibly supportive coworkers who have dealt with my never-ending questions as I get up to speed on everything. This experience just made me think of that dream – one of maybe three dreams that I’ve ever remembered after waking up.
Now that we’re a few weeks into the semester, things have calmed down a lot. The students are busy building their businesses. I’m in the middle of recruiting new students to the program, and I’ll be present at a few events over the semester, to help guide students into our funnel. We’re gradually getting the BELL resettled and spruced up after two years of minimal use due to the pandemic. It’s occupied most of my time since returning from Africa, just because there was such a learning curve to everything. Now that everything is falling into a routine, I can start digging into a number of projects that have been patiently waiting. Also, I get to start revising some of the material for the incubator – I have a number of things that I’d like to implement during spring semester that I feel are missing or confusing in their current state. It will be interesting to see what I can do to fill the BELL with amazing students working on world-changing businesses.
There’s not a lot of traveling left for me this year – running the incubator means that I have to spend most of my time on campus. However, there are a few things I have planned for the rest of the year. Check out the next post to find out what’s on the horizon.
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