Catharsis
This entry is bitter. I wrote it after a difficult week and while ill. I hate to be negative, but I really did feel better after writing it. And perhaps including the difficulties gives a more accurate portrayal of life here. Keep in mind, in real life I actually love Uganda and the people. The experience of a foreigner, however, also includes some negatives. Here are a few of them.
* * *
I’m fed up with Uganda. I’ve fought it; as everything goes awry and falls apart around me I think “don’t fall prey to the perils of culture shock” and “stay positive, don’t import North American expectations to a foreign climate.” But, you know what? Denying anything is wrong doesn’t make me feel any less annoyed. I need an outlet, and this blog is it.
This place is whack -nothing works, nothing makes sense and nothing gets done. And Canada is no better. Some of my problems here could have been avoided if Canadian bureaucrats (nudge, nudge, National Student Loan Centre!) were capable of dealing with anything but the most mundane situations (that is, situations that don’t involve Canadians moving to Uganda).
Target one: Immigration officials and taxi drivers
Let me tell you what happened when I first arrived in this country, over 5 weeks ago. I got in a line at the airport for people who already had visas. When it was my turn, the immigration officer examined my passport with my $240, 12-month Ugandan visa in it and gave me a stamp allowing me to stay in the country for one month. Visas purchased abroad are simply not honoured, and somehow my program has been sending interns here for two years without being informed of this.
I draft letters from my employer attesting to my situation and make copies of my return plane ticket. Then I mosey on down to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I find the immigration area, and am directed to stand in a line. There are two clerks working, they are sitting in a room together, their little wicket windows not four feet from each other. After about 30 minutes I get to the front of the line. The clerk examines my materials and tells me to get in the other line. I proceed to the second line and wait another 20 minutes. Then I present my materials to the other clerk. She examines them, says “you need the form” and looks at me blankly. I inquire about the possibility of her providing me with said form, which to her credit she does. Then she tells me to fill it out and get back in the first line again.
I don’t know if you caught that, but the two clerks are sitting four feet away from each other in the same room, and the first clerk, instead of reaching over and handing me a form, got me to go and wait in the second line. Brilliant. Finally, I submit the form and am told it will be ready in one week. About three weeks later it is ready. I then need to go to a particular branch of a particular bank to pay the 90,000 shilling fee. The fee must be in cash of course, as credit cards, bank cards and travellers cheques are not accepted in this country. If you pay in U.S. dollars, they must have been issued after the year 2000.
I decide to take a matatu there myself, as it is very easy to get to. So, I go to the bank, pay my fee, pay an additional previously unmentioned fee, and then wait 40 minutes for them to process it all. Finally I’m ready to head back to the office (all bank visits must be done during office hours, as the banks are only open from nine to three). I hail a matatu and say “I am going to Kamwokya” Kamwokya is an area of town right by my work. The conductor nods his head. This makes me suspicious, so I say “So you are saying that this taxi goes to Kamwokya.” The conductor says “Yes, it is going to Kamwokya.” I climb in and start to space out as we’re stuck in a terrible traffic jam. I stare at a traffic sign that says “Changed priorities ahead” and marvel that, in a city with so few traffic signs, they manage to get ones that are philosophical. I’m sitting in a crowed minibus taxi in tropical heat, which involves a lot of baking and smelling other people’s sweat. So one spaces out just to help deal with it all.
We drive for a long time. I am feeling slightly dizzy from the heat and am distracted by the man sitting next to me slyly trying to put his arm around me without me noticing. He’s as graceless and obvious as a teenager pulling the old “yawn and reach” on a hapless movie date. (Yes, a constant part of my existence here are my omnipresent suitors.) After completing my altercation with the man, the conductor says, “Mzungu! Where you going?” to which I reply “Kamwokya.” Everyone on the matatu gasps, and I realize that we must have travelled far, far away from Kamwokya. I say to the conductor “You told me you were going to Kamwokya” and he says “Sorry.” I say, “You lied, why did you lie to me?” He says nothing. I get off without paying.
I am hopelessly lost, and head back the way I think town is. I get off in a familiar area called Wandegeya, knowing I can get a matatu to work from there. But everything looks unfamiliar. I stop a person on the street. He is very helpful and nice. I tell him I need to get to Kira Road. He says no matatus go to Kira Road from here, I need to get a boda boda motorcycle to go. He hails one for me and says to him “take her to Jinja Road.” I say, “No, I need Kira Road.” And he says “You want to go to Jinja Road.” Jinja Road is in the opposite direction. I thank him for his help and walk away.
I hail the next matatu and say “I need to go to Kira Road, where Kamwokya is, does this taxi go there?” The conductor says yes and I get on. Things start becoming familiar and I realized I had actually been on the right route to take a direct taxi back to work when I asked the gentleman how to get to Kira Road. And the taxi I was on was going in the exact opposite direction, back downtown. I say to the conductor, “Where does this taxi go.” He ignores me, but a customer says “Old Taxi Park.” I call out “stop right here!” in Luganda, all the while chastising the conductor for lying to me. He said “You go old taxi park, then to Kira,” which is about as direct as standing at Yonge and Bloor Station with the intention of going to Bay Street, but instead of taking the subway west for one stop, travelling east all the way to Kennedy to get on a westbound train to Bay. So I didn’t pay that guy either.
Finally got back to work. My little jaunt took three hours. Still need to finish processing the visa, but my ability to do so has been hampered by the fact that the president of Uganda decided at the last minute to declare Monday a national holiday so we can mourn the death of the father of the nation cum repressive despot. And today I’m being treated for a parasitical infection, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Target two: National Student Loans Centre
This is where Canada demonstrates its whackness. It’s not Uganda’s fault, but it happened while I was here so it’s coloured my experience. I won’t set out the endless bureaucratic snafus, but basically it took NSLC 3 months to process a one-month application, being rude and unhelpful all the way, and almost denying me relief from my student loan payments while I’m here, despite the fact that my monthly payments are more than my total income on this internship. So, an intern funded by the federal government almost needed to abort her internship due to the actions of an agency funded by the same federal government. After dealing with NSLC, I found Ugandan bureaucracy comparably friendly, capable and efficient.
Target three: Illness
In four weeks, I have missed three days of work, all due to illness. One day three weeks ago, and two days last week. Last week I took some of the Cipro given to me by my travel doctor. I woke up this morning feeling very ill so I decided to finally go to the (very expensive and not covered by health insurance) doctor. He told me that no one uses Cipro here. It was over-prescribed and the bugs here have developed resistance to it. Remind me to thank my Canadian travel doctor for charging me $30 to meet with me for 6 minutes to prescribe me medication that doesn’t work in my destination. Way to go Canada!
I had to give a sample, and was made to suffer the humiliation of standing at the door to the lab holding a stinking plastic cup while the lab worker ignored my knock at the door. I eventually just walked in and put the cup next to him. He didn’t wear gloves while he smeared blood and poo onto his little microscope slides. And this is the ultra overpriced clinic favoured by foreigners as being the best thing going.
Turns out I have giardia, a parasitical bowel infection. Finding out I travelled to Uganda to catch the Beaver Fever of the Canadian backcountry is the best news I’ve gotten all week.
Target four: The impossibility of getting work done
You can see the link to Gulu Walk on this site. If you don’t know what it is, you can apprise yourself by reading the link. If you don’t know why people would walk for people in Gulu, here’s the short version:
1) There is a place called Africa.
2) In Africa, there is a country called Uganda. Yes, I’m sure it’s not in the Middle East.
3) There’s been a war there for the past two decades. Every so often the Western press does a piece about it and the whole world pretends that they’ve never heard of it before.
Anyway, my role in the Gulu Walk was twofold:
1) Promote the walk to a bunch of people by sending out an email and putting a blurb about the walk in our newsletter.
2) Participate in the Gulu Walk.
With respect to the newsletter, we had to wait for everyone to submit his or her articles. Unfortunately, someone who writes an integral component of it couldn’t provide their submission until it was too late to get the newsletter out in time. Ok, so nix that. Hakuna matata.
With respect to the email, here is what happened. On Wednesday October 12 I met with the person organizing the Kampala walk. On Thursday October 13 I wrote the text of the email and gathered the several hundred email addresses. On Friday I finished gathering the addresses and was ready to send the email after lunch. However an IT guy came in and without notice took my computer away to wash it, which is necessary because of all the dust.
On Monday our internet connection was down.
On Tuesday I was sick at home with giardia AND our internet connection was down.
On Wednesday I was sick at home with giardia AND our internet connection was down.
On Thursday our internet connection was down.
During this time, I visited internet cafés numerous times. I needed my big list of email addresses to send the mail though, and that was on my computer at work. I put them on a disk, and without fail whenever I tried to put my disk in a net café computer the Blue Screen of Death would pop up and the computer would crash. Yay Windows 98.
On Friday our internet connection came back up in the afternoon. Fine, it was the day before the Gulu Walk, but there’s nothing wrong with a last minute reminder. I tried to send the email, but couldn’t sign into my work webmail. I went to the café, now that I could email my list of addresses to another account and access them from the café without using a disk. But the webmail was totally down. It was 4:40 on Friday the day before Gulu Walk. Too late to do anything else. Luckily there had been lots of other promotion.
So that’s Africa. With a week and a half of notice I can’t manage to send a single email.
But all was not lost, I could still participate in the walk itself! I had a flyer and I had viewed the website. Both said the walk started at 1 p.m. and I had confirmed that verbally with the organizers. On Saturday I left my house at 11:30, thinking this would give me plenty of time to get to Makerere University, which is perhaps 3km away. I was told to take a taxi to the Old Taxi Park, and from there get one to Makerere. So I got stuck in a traffic jam on the way down. And the first taxi driver lied to me; he said he was going to the Taxi Park but he really wasn’t, so I had to get out and wait in the traffic jam for 15 minutes for a free matatu going my way. Then I got lost in the Taxi Park and couldn’t find my taxi. The Taxi Park is an acre of parking lot teeming with hundreds of identical white minibus taxis, with almost no signs anywhere. A half hour later I was on my way to Makerere. I got there at 1 p.m. sharp, which is a long time, but was perfect because the walk started at one. The campus is big, and I circled the whole thing. No sign of the walk anywhere. Finally I gave up and went home, getting back at 3:30. A four-hour trip for nothing. Marvellous. On the way back I realized the directions I was given were bad. By going all the way to the Taxi Park, I was doing the “travelling from Yonge to Kennedy to catch the subway to Bay Street” thing again. I could have saved an hour of travel time. No surprise the directions were bad. People here somehow find their way from place to place, but I think it must be by chance, as if you ask someone how to get somewhere, half the time they will be completely mystified and send you in the opposite direction.
I found out that evening why I couldn’t find the walk. They left an hour early. Now, I am used to Africa time, which means that everything is always late. But early? Now I need to show up an hour early for everything, because half the time it will start an hour early and the other half of the time it will start 2 hours late?
I can’t take it.
Anyway, so as you can tell, I haven’t gotten a lot of work done in the past week. I’m keen to get cracking, but was again thwarted on Monday by Museveni’s surprise national holiday. So here I am today, keen to work. Giardia. Doctor’s visit takes hours. When I get back there is a power cut.
I also have not been able to access files I regularly use since my computer was washed. They removed a hard drive from my computer without telling me first. Had I known, I could have copied what I needed. But I was not informed, so the files are lost to me.
I purchased some paper to print out articles I’m using for my work, since I frequently have problems finding paper. Last week, ALL I needed was a functioning internet connection. None was forthcoming. This week, ALL I need is a functioning printer. Of course, after 5 pages the toner runs out.
I know I’m not in North America. I know that outside my home continent worshiping speed and efficiency above all else is verboten. I know things will not work as smoothly as I’m used to. But does everything need to go wrong at the same time? I think this must be exceptional because all of my colleagues are also frustrated.
All I want is a single day where I can do work. One single task would be enough, so I can feel what it’s like to cross off just one thing from my to do list. Yes, I find other things to do in the meantime, but lately ALL my time is spent “finding something to do in the meantime.” Maybe I’ll take a breather and go travel to Kennedy Station. I need to get something on Bay Street.
* * *
I’m fed up with Uganda. I’ve fought it; as everything goes awry and falls apart around me I think “don’t fall prey to the perils of culture shock” and “stay positive, don’t import North American expectations to a foreign climate.” But, you know what? Denying anything is wrong doesn’t make me feel any less annoyed. I need an outlet, and this blog is it.
This place is whack -nothing works, nothing makes sense and nothing gets done. And Canada is no better. Some of my problems here could have been avoided if Canadian bureaucrats (nudge, nudge, National Student Loan Centre!) were capable of dealing with anything but the most mundane situations (that is, situations that don’t involve Canadians moving to Uganda).
Target one: Immigration officials and taxi drivers
Let me tell you what happened when I first arrived in this country, over 5 weeks ago. I got in a line at the airport for people who already had visas. When it was my turn, the immigration officer examined my passport with my $240, 12-month Ugandan visa in it and gave me a stamp allowing me to stay in the country for one month. Visas purchased abroad are simply not honoured, and somehow my program has been sending interns here for two years without being informed of this.
I draft letters from my employer attesting to my situation and make copies of my return plane ticket. Then I mosey on down to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I find the immigration area, and am directed to stand in a line. There are two clerks working, they are sitting in a room together, their little wicket windows not four feet from each other. After about 30 minutes I get to the front of the line. The clerk examines my materials and tells me to get in the other line. I proceed to the second line and wait another 20 minutes. Then I present my materials to the other clerk. She examines them, says “you need the form” and looks at me blankly. I inquire about the possibility of her providing me with said form, which to her credit she does. Then she tells me to fill it out and get back in the first line again.
I don’t know if you caught that, but the two clerks are sitting four feet away from each other in the same room, and the first clerk, instead of reaching over and handing me a form, got me to go and wait in the second line. Brilliant. Finally, I submit the form and am told it will be ready in one week. About three weeks later it is ready. I then need to go to a particular branch of a particular bank to pay the 90,000 shilling fee. The fee must be in cash of course, as credit cards, bank cards and travellers cheques are not accepted in this country. If you pay in U.S. dollars, they must have been issued after the year 2000.
I decide to take a matatu there myself, as it is very easy to get to. So, I go to the bank, pay my fee, pay an additional previously unmentioned fee, and then wait 40 minutes for them to process it all. Finally I’m ready to head back to the office (all bank visits must be done during office hours, as the banks are only open from nine to three). I hail a matatu and say “I am going to Kamwokya” Kamwokya is an area of town right by my work. The conductor nods his head. This makes me suspicious, so I say “So you are saying that this taxi goes to Kamwokya.” The conductor says “Yes, it is going to Kamwokya.” I climb in and start to space out as we’re stuck in a terrible traffic jam. I stare at a traffic sign that says “Changed priorities ahead” and marvel that, in a city with so few traffic signs, they manage to get ones that are philosophical. I’m sitting in a crowed minibus taxi in tropical heat, which involves a lot of baking and smelling other people’s sweat. So one spaces out just to help deal with it all.
We drive for a long time. I am feeling slightly dizzy from the heat and am distracted by the man sitting next to me slyly trying to put his arm around me without me noticing. He’s as graceless and obvious as a teenager pulling the old “yawn and reach” on a hapless movie date. (Yes, a constant part of my existence here are my omnipresent suitors.) After completing my altercation with the man, the conductor says, “Mzungu! Where you going?” to which I reply “Kamwokya.” Everyone on the matatu gasps, and I realize that we must have travelled far, far away from Kamwokya. I say to the conductor “You told me you were going to Kamwokya” and he says “Sorry.” I say, “You lied, why did you lie to me?” He says nothing. I get off without paying.
I am hopelessly lost, and head back the way I think town is. I get off in a familiar area called Wandegeya, knowing I can get a matatu to work from there. But everything looks unfamiliar. I stop a person on the street. He is very helpful and nice. I tell him I need to get to Kira Road. He says no matatus go to Kira Road from here, I need to get a boda boda motorcycle to go. He hails one for me and says to him “take her to Jinja Road.” I say, “No, I need Kira Road.” And he says “You want to go to Jinja Road.” Jinja Road is in the opposite direction. I thank him for his help and walk away.
I hail the next matatu and say “I need to go to Kira Road, where Kamwokya is, does this taxi go there?” The conductor says yes and I get on. Things start becoming familiar and I realized I had actually been on the right route to take a direct taxi back to work when I asked the gentleman how to get to Kira Road. And the taxi I was on was going in the exact opposite direction, back downtown. I say to the conductor, “Where does this taxi go.” He ignores me, but a customer says “Old Taxi Park.” I call out “stop right here!” in Luganda, all the while chastising the conductor for lying to me. He said “You go old taxi park, then to Kira,” which is about as direct as standing at Yonge and Bloor Station with the intention of going to Bay Street, but instead of taking the subway west for one stop, travelling east all the way to Kennedy to get on a westbound train to Bay. So I didn’t pay that guy either.
Finally got back to work. My little jaunt took three hours. Still need to finish processing the visa, but my ability to do so has been hampered by the fact that the president of Uganda decided at the last minute to declare Monday a national holiday so we can mourn the death of the father of the nation cum repressive despot. And today I’m being treated for a parasitical infection, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Target two: National Student Loans Centre
This is where Canada demonstrates its whackness. It’s not Uganda’s fault, but it happened while I was here so it’s coloured my experience. I won’t set out the endless bureaucratic snafus, but basically it took NSLC 3 months to process a one-month application, being rude and unhelpful all the way, and almost denying me relief from my student loan payments while I’m here, despite the fact that my monthly payments are more than my total income on this internship. So, an intern funded by the federal government almost needed to abort her internship due to the actions of an agency funded by the same federal government. After dealing with NSLC, I found Ugandan bureaucracy comparably friendly, capable and efficient.
Target three: Illness
In four weeks, I have missed three days of work, all due to illness. One day three weeks ago, and two days last week. Last week I took some of the Cipro given to me by my travel doctor. I woke up this morning feeling very ill so I decided to finally go to the (very expensive and not covered by health insurance) doctor. He told me that no one uses Cipro here. It was over-prescribed and the bugs here have developed resistance to it. Remind me to thank my Canadian travel doctor for charging me $30 to meet with me for 6 minutes to prescribe me medication that doesn’t work in my destination. Way to go Canada!
I had to give a sample, and was made to suffer the humiliation of standing at the door to the lab holding a stinking plastic cup while the lab worker ignored my knock at the door. I eventually just walked in and put the cup next to him. He didn’t wear gloves while he smeared blood and poo onto his little microscope slides. And this is the ultra overpriced clinic favoured by foreigners as being the best thing going.
Turns out I have giardia, a parasitical bowel infection. Finding out I travelled to Uganda to catch the Beaver Fever of the Canadian backcountry is the best news I’ve gotten all week.
Target four: The impossibility of getting work done
You can see the link to Gulu Walk on this site. If you don’t know what it is, you can apprise yourself by reading the link. If you don’t know why people would walk for people in Gulu, here’s the short version:
1) There is a place called Africa.
2) In Africa, there is a country called Uganda. Yes, I’m sure it’s not in the Middle East.
3) There’s been a war there for the past two decades. Every so often the Western press does a piece about it and the whole world pretends that they’ve never heard of it before.
Anyway, my role in the Gulu Walk was twofold:
1) Promote the walk to a bunch of people by sending out an email and putting a blurb about the walk in our newsletter.
2) Participate in the Gulu Walk.
With respect to the newsletter, we had to wait for everyone to submit his or her articles. Unfortunately, someone who writes an integral component of it couldn’t provide their submission until it was too late to get the newsletter out in time. Ok, so nix that. Hakuna matata.
With respect to the email, here is what happened. On Wednesday October 12 I met with the person organizing the Kampala walk. On Thursday October 13 I wrote the text of the email and gathered the several hundred email addresses. On Friday I finished gathering the addresses and was ready to send the email after lunch. However an IT guy came in and without notice took my computer away to wash it, which is necessary because of all the dust.
On Monday our internet connection was down.
On Tuesday I was sick at home with giardia AND our internet connection was down.
On Wednesday I was sick at home with giardia AND our internet connection was down.
On Thursday our internet connection was down.
During this time, I visited internet cafés numerous times. I needed my big list of email addresses to send the mail though, and that was on my computer at work. I put them on a disk, and without fail whenever I tried to put my disk in a net café computer the Blue Screen of Death would pop up and the computer would crash. Yay Windows 98.
On Friday our internet connection came back up in the afternoon. Fine, it was the day before the Gulu Walk, but there’s nothing wrong with a last minute reminder. I tried to send the email, but couldn’t sign into my work webmail. I went to the café, now that I could email my list of addresses to another account and access them from the café without using a disk. But the webmail was totally down. It was 4:40 on Friday the day before Gulu Walk. Too late to do anything else. Luckily there had been lots of other promotion.
So that’s Africa. With a week and a half of notice I can’t manage to send a single email.
But all was not lost, I could still participate in the walk itself! I had a flyer and I had viewed the website. Both said the walk started at 1 p.m. and I had confirmed that verbally with the organizers. On Saturday I left my house at 11:30, thinking this would give me plenty of time to get to Makerere University, which is perhaps 3km away. I was told to take a taxi to the Old Taxi Park, and from there get one to Makerere. So I got stuck in a traffic jam on the way down. And the first taxi driver lied to me; he said he was going to the Taxi Park but he really wasn’t, so I had to get out and wait in the traffic jam for 15 minutes for a free matatu going my way. Then I got lost in the Taxi Park and couldn’t find my taxi. The Taxi Park is an acre of parking lot teeming with hundreds of identical white minibus taxis, with almost no signs anywhere. A half hour later I was on my way to Makerere. I got there at 1 p.m. sharp, which is a long time, but was perfect because the walk started at one. The campus is big, and I circled the whole thing. No sign of the walk anywhere. Finally I gave up and went home, getting back at 3:30. A four-hour trip for nothing. Marvellous. On the way back I realized the directions I was given were bad. By going all the way to the Taxi Park, I was doing the “travelling from Yonge to Kennedy to catch the subway to Bay Street” thing again. I could have saved an hour of travel time. No surprise the directions were bad. People here somehow find their way from place to place, but I think it must be by chance, as if you ask someone how to get somewhere, half the time they will be completely mystified and send you in the opposite direction.
I found out that evening why I couldn’t find the walk. They left an hour early. Now, I am used to Africa time, which means that everything is always late. But early? Now I need to show up an hour early for everything, because half the time it will start an hour early and the other half of the time it will start 2 hours late?
I can’t take it.
Anyway, so as you can tell, I haven’t gotten a lot of work done in the past week. I’m keen to get cracking, but was again thwarted on Monday by Museveni’s surprise national holiday. So here I am today, keen to work. Giardia. Doctor’s visit takes hours. When I get back there is a power cut.
I also have not been able to access files I regularly use since my computer was washed. They removed a hard drive from my computer without telling me first. Had I known, I could have copied what I needed. But I was not informed, so the files are lost to me.
I purchased some paper to print out articles I’m using for my work, since I frequently have problems finding paper. Last week, ALL I needed was a functioning internet connection. None was forthcoming. This week, ALL I need is a functioning printer. Of course, after 5 pages the toner runs out.
I know I’m not in North America. I know that outside my home continent worshiping speed and efficiency above all else is verboten. I know things will not work as smoothly as I’m used to. But does everything need to go wrong at the same time? I think this must be exceptional because all of my colleagues are also frustrated.
All I want is a single day where I can do work. One single task would be enough, so I can feel what it’s like to cross off just one thing from my to do list. Yes, I find other things to do in the meantime, but lately ALL my time is spent “finding something to do in the meantime.” Maybe I’ll take a breather and go travel to Kennedy Station. I need to get something on Bay Street.
posted by Cara at 5:51 AM
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