Just a Boy's Blog: Alex In Africa

Driving through Kampala was one of the most interesting things I've done. There are few rules of the road, and even when there are rules they are rarely followed. We were taking pictures of the scenery around us and our driver Geoffrey said "take care of your phone." Nobody was entirely sure what he meant, but as we kept driving forward he said that people will reach in and take advantage and steal things if they saw it. Everyone decided the "photo shoot" was over and we started living in the moment. Motorbikes, or known as "poda poda" here in Uganda, weave in and out of traffic honking their horns. The motorbikes carry anything and everything, including four people at a time or a goat. Here is a time-lapse of 5 minutes in traffic.

One of my fellow travelers, Paul, posed the question "how are there not any accidents around here?" I'm not sure if Geoffrey was responding to the question or if he legitimately didn't mean to, but he bumped into one of the motorbikes and kept moving forward. Almost every store is a speciality store, and almost every item has a store. Playground toys, furniture, food, caskets, all of which have stores. It's so strange coming from a place where even though I'm "different" I still fall into the majority, where as here I stick out like a sore thumb. Speaking of thumbs, rules and regulations of voting are painted all over the city. One of the most interesting bits about voting in Uganda is that voting twice is illegal, and the way they monitor this is by painting a line on your thumb cuticle to show that you've voted already.

Geoffrey tells us there is an election within the upcoming year, so they are heavily promoting this across the city. The further we drove, the more the city looked like what you see in a commercial with "the arms of an angel" playing in the background. Children played in trash piles, cattle eat the same trash piles, and nobody seemed to care. One of my favorite things to watch is the fashion. Dresses and shirts of brightly covered fabric and exotic patterns stand out against the dull mud-red roads and terrain. Silks aren't too common, but they look amazing with the sun shining down on them.

We continued traveling down this unfamiliar road when Geoffrey took an unexpected stop. He got out of the car, and the car was the approached by 7-10 people, each attempting to sell something different. Geoffrey bought us pineapples and asked if we wanted to try to miniature fried bananas. There was no peel, but the outside was still hardened as if a peel were still there. Once you get through the chewy exterior, the banana itself was tender and sweet.

Geoffrey then bought us all water and we continued onward. We stopped at what seemed to be the most American thing in Uganda, a small restaurant that played country music, served burgers and fries, and made you pass through a metal detector to enter. I opted to eat a grilled chicken sandwich and once we finished our meal we began our journey again. Geoffrey told us that we were at the halfway point and sister Rosemary told us before we left we would know that we were in north Uganda when we saw straw rooftops. She told us how poor the government treated north Uganda in comparison to south Uganda, and her testimony stood to be true. As if we were suddenly on some Oklahoma backroad, the paved streets turned into gravel covered roads and the brick houses turned into straw covered shacks. Within minutes of being on the dirt road, we found ourselves sitting for a good while at a construction site. They would not let us pass because the road was being worked on and only one "lane" was open. At this stop, Geoffrey bought what Americans would call roasted corn. If you put roasted corn and popcorn on a scale with each item representing the opposite end, you would have what we ate. Finally we got to proceed only to find another wait down the road. Instead of waiting at the border line so oncoming traffic could come, several cars blocked the way and the construction workers refused to move the barricades. The workers told Geoffrey to proceed, and if the cars didn't move it was their problem, so Geoffrey did. The road turned back to pavement, but it was different this time. The pavement was full of pot holes, while only half of the road was paved at most. Anytime an oncoming vehicle was headed our way, either they would pull off the road or we would. It was really like a game of chicken, and if the sun wasn't enough to make us sweat, this not-so-fun game would be just the trick. One of the most remarkable things about traveling through these small "centers" (towns) is that everyone still smiles and waves at us and is just happy to be there.later on down the road, we came across a truck with something similar to a cage on back. Inside the cage seemed to be about 20-30 children, who were, as we discovered, going to school.

Throughout every center, both large and small, buildings would have advertisements for various things on top of them. These things ranged from Ugandan products and services to well-known American things like Pepsi or Mountain Dew. I asked Geoffrey why it was there, and he told us that businesses will paint the interior and exterior of houses if the house owner allows the business to paint their advertisement on top of the building. He described it as "one service for another."