On the Nile

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Maybe with good reason, a couple of readers have said that Uganda doesn't seem like much of a vacation destination. Now, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea about the country because it is not quite my idea of a vacation destination. To be sure, a lot of other people from within Uganda, from Europe, and every once in a while, from America, travel here for rest and relaxation. The most popular activities here are going on safari (which I think involves a khaki shirt and a national park) and river-rafting (an enjoyable activity made better in a country with enormous whitewater and no tort laws). Other options include gorilla ($500) and chimpanzee tracking ($50), mountain climbing ($400), bird-watching, bungee jumping, etc. Basically, lots of outdoor activities and generally, if they involve National Parks or guides, they are very expensive. A typical safari drive starts at about $150 US and a trip down the Nile's class IV rapids will cost you the same. If it's something that the locals would not do, it probably costs a lot of money. If you avoid these activities, you can travel the country for less than $10 a day. For a cheaper vacation, I spent a couple of nights at a place on the Nile River, northeast of Kampala, called "The Hairy Lemon." It's a hostel-style island resort with water and rapids flowing around both sides.
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For $20 a day, I had room and board covered, and a fine beach (free of the Bilharzia parasite, I'm told), and if I had fishing equipment or a kayak, excellent opportunities nearby for both. The Hairy Lemon's name apparently comes from a pub in Dublin. About a 10 minute paddle upstream is the Nile Special - a 10 foot tall wave on a class IV section of whitewater - so the Hairy Lemon is a popular destination for professional circuit kayakers who are looking for training in the off-season. The above picture shows a calmer section of the river, a long canoe ferry in the distance and matoke or plantain trees on the sloping bank behind. 
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The hostel itself was an adventure to get to via public transit - a three hour bus ride to Jinja from Kampala, an hour-long taxi ride down the west bank of the Nile, and finally, a 5 mile boda-boda ride down a dirt road to the dock where I was picked-up by Mike and Isma - two of my Ugandan hosts, and briefly, my ferrymen. The island was a version of paradise. It was a little tough to be surrounded by some of the best whitewater in the world and to not have a canoe, but it was a wonderful place to be stranded for a couple of days. 

For a good article on what whitewater rafting the Nile is like, take a look at this New York Times piece, "Wild on the Nile," from last spring: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/travel/24uganda.html
And a photo from the NY Times article to whet your lazy interweb palate:
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GaaGaa: Into the Night

To my mother, my apologies for not updating the blog in over a week. If anyone else is reading this still, I'm a little surprised. Thanks.

I left Arua for the long Easter weekend, which in Uganda is a fairly serious holiday, and that despite the large number of Muslims here. Nearly everyone in the country had a four-day weekend in celebration of Jesus Christ's being risen, so nearly everyone was either off to the village to see the family or across the country for a little God-given vacation. I enjoyed the latter. On the Thursday before the long weekend, on a last-minute whim, I ran down to town to catch the GaaGaa bus (the Ugandan version of the dirty dog, or greyhound) overnight into Kampala. According to almost every person I've talked to in Arua, the finest transport in the land is this overnight bus, which if you are able to sleep soundly for the 7 to 8 hours the bus takes to Kampala (or back to Arua), deposits you at your destination without a minute wasted. Or something. One of the curious twists to the GaaGaa overnight bus is that it arrives in Kampala (or Arua) at about 5:30am, and because it's pitch black out, and therefore full of criminals, everyone sits on the bus for another two hours until the sun comes up and it's safe to disembark.

Last Thursday's GaaGaa night bus did not go according to this plan. I happily got a ride from Kafu and Akuma, my co-worker's boyfriend and his brother, into town at about 9pm. Four or five buses were lined up along the dirt street, each departing at a slightly different time, and maybe, not all of them going to Kampala. For any passenger with questions, an announcer turned on a megaphone (this is standard) and began barking in alternating Swahili and Lugbara (possibly English and Buganda, too, but I couldn't tell) the destinations, departure times and other instructions. It was dark out, a few hundred people and their luggage - tubs of food, boxes of all sorts of things, bags, etc. - and this man was shouting with all the ferocity of an announcer at a dog fight or a cage match to the death. I couldn't make out the syllables in his screams, but he would pause to give a drawn-out "haaaaaaaaa.....aaah!" or an "......aha!" as if he had just told a joke, or a wise lesson that was lost on us. I have heard few things quite so strange. There are times here when the world comes to me like a dream in a fever; this was one of those times. And so, the buses loaded.

As the bus pulled away, the Sudanese man reeking of alcohol next to me turned my way and began speaking very lucidly about the upcoming elections in Sudan. I nodded as he spoke, and did not mention the smell. Both of us soon fell asleep, heads bobbing up and down. I woke up several hours later as the bus driver began shouting to the on-board mechanic. We slowed to a stop and light smoke began filtering into the bus as everybody hurried off onto the shoulder. A radiator leak had crippled our bus, and we sat on our luggage on the shoulder in the middle of a grand game reserve national park waiting for the next two hours for a replacement bus. The moon was high in the sky, the breeze was cool, and aside from the inconvenience of getting off the bus, it was not an altogether bad place to be at 1am. I talked a bit with a couple of Kenyan men who make a living out of driving Toyota Land Cruisers from Kenya to the southern Sudanese city of Juba for sale, then riding the bus back to Kenya. The older of the two men wore small spectacles and a safari shirt, smoking as he talked. He seemed very worldly. The younger Kenyan asked, "Is our predicament here in celebration of Good Friday?" The older one responded, "No, it is for April Fool's."

Our replacement bus arrived and we continued on in the night over the speed bumps, rumble strips and potholes of the Ugandan highway. The bus pulled into the waking, Kampala under pink-dawn skies at 7:30.

This House is Not a Home

It might only be of interest to a few readers, but I thought I should mention my living arrangement. In the town of Arua (pop.50,000), I live in a leafy "suburb" about a 20 minute walk from the center of town - or 1,000 Ugandan schillings by boda-boda, a common way to measure distances) occupied by wealthy Ugandans and mzungu, or white folk. It's fair to describe the concrete house within a barbed-wire compound as, truly, in the "colonial" style. It looks like must have been built about thirty years ago. Hard to say if that's pre-Amin or post-Amin construction. As with a lot of the European-influenced homes in Uganda, this one has large veranda where I spend most of my time, as long as there's daylight and no mosquitos, which is to say not much of the time. Heavy-duty barbed-wire fences or broken-bottle-topped concrete walls, along with guards is pretty much standard in Uganda. If there's no guard, thieves will do just about anything to break in.

Next to the main compound (on the right) is the servants' or boys' quarters, as they're called. This is also standard. The boy's quarters are small, the bathroom is less pleasant, etc. Debby, my boss lives there. I share the house with John, the program manager for the West Nile office. Despite the appearance in the picture, it is a large house. There are three bedrooms, a very spacious living room, a large dining room, a large kitchen and two bathrooms. Aside from the two beds, there are two small couches and an easy chair. There is no dining table, no chairs, no furniture in the kitchen, the dining room, one of the bedrooms or most of the living room. Nor is there hot water, an oven or a fridge. Kind of like camping, but with the addition of a large, concrete fortress. It is a strange, empty place, where sometimes, as I'm lying beneath the mosquito net, I feel as if I'm living in a modern art installation or museum. The only lights are compact fluorescents on the ceiling, so a kind of blue, clinical light fills the place. I've made things homier in my room with the addition of a kerosene lamp. 

The sun here bursts vertically out of pitch-blackness at about 7am, and plunges back into the same a little after 7pm. This is, like many things, a contrast to life in Minnesota.
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Here, Ojile eats dinner in front of the building. Ojile is one of the six guards who rotate between the "residence" and the office. He is also a charming, good-natured man, like many of the Ugandans I work with. It goes against my American sense of egalitarianism and self-reliance, but having guards seems to be pretty much a necessity here. 
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Back to Catholic School

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At the invitation of Janet Agenonga, the cleaner at the WellShare office here and the cook of my Monday through Friday dinners, I joined her family yesterday on a visit to her daughter Proscovia at St. Mary's Girls' Secondary School. The school is about a mile away from Janet's home, but the firm, loving grip of the Catholics keeps her daughter out of sight for three months at a stretch. I know this is nothing new for Catholic boarding schools, but I was a little surprised by the isolation. But who am I to say complete isolation isn't what girls between the ages of 12 and 20 need most? As far as I could gather, about 1,000 girls live and study at St. Mary's, many of them hailing from the Arua area. Parents are allowed one visit on one particular Sunday each term, so the the walled school grounds were covered with excited parents and siblings, enjoying a rare visit inside the walls.

The visit involved the four other Agenonga family children, along with Janet's husband, Richard, and a few cousins eager to see Proscovia, or Pross for short. I met the family where they live in the nearby village of Ediofe, which curiously is a sort of Christian enclave from the religious heterogeneity of the main Arua town. So, as any good Christian village sheltered from neighboring Muslims will do, Ediofe eats a lot of pork. This is kind of the pork capitol of the sub-county. In the center of the small village, you can spin around and count at least half a dozen "pork joints," many of them are walk-up shacks where you order your pork and then grab a seat at any number of bars. When the pork is fried or roasted, ready to eat, they bring it to you where you're sitting on a patio, drinking a cold beer. What a world, eh? Clearly, a case of Christian ingenuity.

I toured the school with Janet's family, following Pross around, trying not to get in any trouble as a 26-year-old white man wandering the grounds of a Catholic girls school. I listened as Pross, 16, talked about her studies and doted on the siblings and cousins she sees rarely nowadays. She wants to become a doctor, which will involve another couple of decades of studying, but could eventually lead to a lifestyle a little less austere than the one afforded to her by Catholic school. Included here are photos of Janet, her husband, Richard, her children, Mother Mary, an unusual statue of the school's founder, and the imposing school gates.

On leaving the school, we walked past an aging red stone church, which looked like it could've come from Italy. The sun was low on the horizon and shouting kids played football (soccer) on a wide dirt field. After seeing Janet and Richard's house, we walked a little down the hill to the center of town. There, Richard and I had a beer before I caught a ride back to Arua. It may have been a Sunday, but the din coming from the patio bars in the small town of Ediofe didn't show it. Drunks on the left, drunks on the right. Empty bottles littered the tables and you could see at least one flask of Ugandan gin (that is, not gin) passing around. This, I thought, must be the dark side of the pork joints. A different sort of Christian ingenuity. As best we could, Richard and I talked over the noise of the drinkers and beginning of the football match on t.v. We were interrupted by an especially tipsy man who insisted that I allow him to marry my sister. His words, as I understood them, were "I would like to confer with a lady like you." After making sure he wasn't propositioning me, I explained that I wasn't in a position to give away my sister. He persisted. I told him I'd get back to him.

"Food"

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By nearly any imaginable standard, I'm an adventurous eater. Aside from pine nuts and tripe, I will happily eat most anything on God's Green Earth. So when friends had moaned about the selection of food available in East Africa, I ignored them. Now I'm not so sure. I won't dismiss the Ugandan cuisine entirely, but it is a challenge. There are two major reasons for the difficulty I have with the food: (1) there is usually no salt or spice on anything, and (2) boiling is the predominant, maybe in some places completely dominant form of cooking.

See the above plate - which was actually a decent meal at Medinah's Restaurant here in Arua - starting clockwise from the upper-right: you've got pasted meat (a piece of, hopefully, roasted meat, in this case beef knuckle? Or is it spine? in a pool of crushed g. nuts, pronounced "GEE-NUTS" short from ground nuts, or as we call them in America, peanuts, lots and lots of oil, some broth and some other mystery material), sweet potatoes (boiled), matoke (that is, mashed plaintains wrapped and boiled in a banana leaf), beans, rice in g. nuts which I've generously poured over them, and a sort of bitter sauteed greens. A fine, cold bottle of Stoney sits out of view. Stoney is a ginger ale with a punch to it. There are couple of items missing from this plate if it was going to be representative of my experience so far. There would also be posho (boiled cornmeal or some variation of grain) and cassava root (boiled, I suppose). There should also be a clearer, larger piece of unidentifiable meat (maybe beef or goat).

There are some non-dinner items that I should mention, and will probably include somewhere else: tea with an unbelievable amount of sugar, all sorts of sweet sodas, deep fried dough varietals (like samosas, fried bread, chapatis, etc.) and blessed fresh fruit (I cannot complain about the bounty of Ugandan fruit - it is incredible) - passion fruit, guava, pineapple, jackfruit, sweet bananas, and on and on.

The result of this diet for Ugandans, probably like some 19th century Irish who survived on a diet of unsalted, unsweetened oatmeal and potatoes, is a sensitive palate and an insane loyalty to bland food. I've heard people argue about the quality of matoke, which is basically like listening to people argue about the quality of boiled potatoes. 

There is an Ethiopian restaurant here in Arua - conveniently called, "Ethiopian Restaurant" and without any sort of address of signage, much like some very chic, exclusive New York club. The tart sourdough flavor of injera and the spices of the veggie and meat stews is a very welcome contrast. But I've criticized the food on my plate enough, probably offending some Ugandan reader. It's not that bad. It just, as an American, requires some effort.

What am I doing in Uganda?

A brief explanation: I was working in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States (a full description for any of my African readers), as a coffee shop barista and a cheese monger. This was the off-season employment I had found to get me through to the on-season of leading a backpacking trip to Alaska through the Minneapolis YMCA Camp Menogyn in June to August 2010. But one can only make half-caf double soy lattes and cut aged cheddar for so long, or at least I could only do it for so long, so I jumped at the chance to volunteer in Uganda. I'm volunteering for a Minneapolis-based organization called WellShare International, formerly Minnesota International Health Volunteers. Some of the work WellShare does is with Somali immigrants in Minnesota and some of the work they do is in the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. All of it involves public health and a particular focus on women and children. I asked where I might be of some use, and I was directed to a malaria control and prevention program they are leading in the West Nile region, in the northwest corner of Uganda. The WellShare office here is in the town of Arua, though the programming is reaching many tens of thousands of residents throughout the region. 

The Uganda Malaria Communities Partnership Program is in its third year of a three year President's Malaria Initiative grant to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by malaria in the region (the laudable initiative was started by President George W. Bush and is continued now under President Obama). Here in the West Nile Region, malaria is the leading cause of death, and accounts for about 50% of outpatient visits to hospitals. It is about as serious a health issue as they get. The UMCP program is working in partnership with the Malaria Consortium and a Ugandan-based malaria organization, and most importantly through about a dozen local Civil Society Organizations, or CSOs. I should be listing more organizations and consortiums and partnerships, but it all very quickly becomes an alphabet-soup. I have discovered that Ugandans, maybe even more than Americans, have a peculiar fetish for acronyms. The important big picture is that these local CSOs (which are basically small non-profits) are getting the tools and training from WellShare to continue malaria prevention and treatment work in their respective sub-districts indefinitely. 

As for me, I'm familiarizing myself with the whole UMCP program and focusing on helping two CSOs in the town of Yumbe, Yumbe District, West Nile Region. When WellShare is done here, I want these two CSOs - Safe Motherhoods and Needy Kids - to be running smoothly, getting outside funding, and doing great work to fight malaria for a long time. 

For more information on WellShare Internationalhttp://www.wellshareinternational.org/

For more information on the President's Malaria Initiative, Malaria Communities Programhttp://www.fightingmalaria.gov/

Kampala to Arua and Beyond

This first photo is from the rustic, affordable front step of my "s/c" room at the Red Chili Hostel - that is, self-contained. Luxury of a certain sort. The second photo is from the passenger window of Peter Mugwanya's "Special Hire" as he drove me around Kampala on March 13th and 14th. A "Special Hire" in Uganda is not to be confused with a "taxi." If you ask for a "taxi" you'll actually get a mini-bus, also called a "matatu." At Peter's suggestion, I took pictures discreetly. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to me to find out that people in Uganda see cameras and they think money. If you take a picture of someone, they'll demand you pay, often whether or not you ask for permission first. The same rule can apply to vehicles or buildings owned by people. So, Peter suggested I take pictures without holding the camera to my eye - that way I wouldn't arouse as much suspicion. Hence, the goofy photos.

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Part V

This is, unfortunately, not my house, but instead the WellShare International West Nile Regional Office here in Arua. It was not so long ago a residential building, though WellShare has converted it into an office for about ten staff and volunteers. You can see a much-welcome storm cloud was coming from the east to break the 90 degree heat and humidity. The second photo here is from the same spot, but to the left, of WellShare's head security guard, James, standing proudly near his bike and security post. Security guard, you ask? Well, here in Uganda, the distance between the haves and the have-nots is pretty unfathomable, so some of the have-nots will break into to any building and steal anything. Violence is not a concern, but the safety of property is. Keep in mind that thievery is often punished by a lynch mob, and still, people are driven to steal. But James has a job and he's smiling.

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Part IV

These two photos were taken on my first drive to the town of Yumbe, 90km north of Arua, where I will be doing most of my work in April and May. This shot is probably of Maracha, a town en route. This is a pretty typical shot of the main street of one of these small towns (although you should keep in mind there's nothing typical about a skinny white man in the passenger seat of a Land Rover taking pictures) - dirt road, bikers, pedestrians, yellow signs advertising the South African telecom company MTN, etc. The second photo shows a couple of bikers in the side-view mirror on the same drive. It's worth mentioning here that the roads range from okay and paved to atrocious, washboarded and full of potholes that could destroy a car or truck. These towns are also much closer to the Sudanese border, where the weather tends towards dry and hot. There is a steady stream of semi-trucks streaming north into Sudan, where there must be some serious demand for what Uganda is selling. I should also take this opportunity to describe the mixed traffic. On the highways (and the "highways") there are cars, trucks, lots of motorcycles, even more bicycles, and even far more people. No one adheres to any dotted lines or shoulder demarcations; this is truly the open road. Driving in a car means constantly honking to warn slow bikers and walkers up ahead that you're barreling through. That way, women with massive loads on their heads can skip to the side of the road, and men biking with 50lb. charcoal loads have time to swerve into the ditch. 

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