Pretesting in Gulu

Wed through Fri of last week I spent in Gulu doing more survey pretesting.

Fortunately this time I actually managed to get the survey formatted the night before leaving, so I didn't have to set up office in the bus. I did, however, have to get up, pack, get to the office to print a couple copies of the survey then get to the bus by 8am, after about 10 hours of sleep in 2 days (and you all know how I need my 8 hours).

I got on the Post bus (runs mail around the country, so fortunately runs on time) at 8am, read a bit about election drama (Museveni lookin' for a way to discredit Busigye... again, Otuno blaming Musevni of feeding Joseph Kony and the LRA money to keep them existing as a convenient political enemy...), then discovered that the back row of the bus was empty. Sacked out for a solid 3 hours. Pretty sure it saved my life.

Finally some dude smacked my leg to get up 'cause he wanted to sit down. Jerk.

At a bus-stop, bought a baggie of peanuts for 500 UGX (~$0.25) from the window of the bus

As soon as they saw the muzungu lean out the window, I was pretty much assaulted through the window by maize, peanuts, cassava, water and live chickens.

Got in at around 2:00, met up with a colleague who's based in Gulu and an enumerator, briefed them on the survey and got cracking. The first couple times through the questions with a new enumerator is always a bit rough so it wasn't tooooo interesting. After ~5 hours of pretesting, called it a day and went to man-handle some (DAMN good) Ethiopian food... I guess Gulu is closer to Ethiopia than Kampala is?

Day two. Up at 7.

I like the texture and pattern of this second-hand shirt I bought here, so I took a picture of it.

Kampala is basically a gigantic thrift store. You know all those clothes you donate to Salvation Army and the like thinking you're doing good? Well this muzungu says thank you!
Seriously, though, it's an interesting situation, and an excellent example of the double-edged sword that is aid/development: the West ships a ton of clothes here for free, microentrepreneurs buy it up for dirt cheap and resell it for slightly-less-dirt cheap - business happens, money circulates, and people are happy. But at the same time, the local textile industry is driven into the ground because even for as cheap as labor and materials are here, they can't compete with free stuff from the West.

Aaaaanyway. Off my soap-box, onto a boda-boda to a youth center

(left my helmet in Kampala, fortunately there is MUCH less traffic in Gulu and I wasn't ever traveling far)

Before I saw this picture, I didn't think AIDS was so bad. Now, though...


Waiting for the next respondent

It was interesting to try to pick up language differences between Luganda (predominant in Kampala) and Luo (one of the Northern languages)

Blood drive goin' on over there. Funny how I won't be able to donate blood for (at least) a year when I get back, though, since I've been to a malaria-zone...


Bored waiting for the next respondent, and these socks make me happy:

Planets! Thanks for letting me steal them, Mitch!

Walking back into town after a solid 8 hours of pretesting when the sky opened up and released a rainy fury. Took shelter in an overhang and figured I might as well work on the survey...

(this beast dominates my life lately)

Debriefed until about 10:30pm, walked back to the hotel in the rain. Discovered that the place was locked down tight and the guard was passed OUT... using his gun as a pillow. The guy was out so hard that I actually had to physically shake him to wake him up. Fortunately he had my key. Aaaand back to sleep he went. Way to guard.

Walked into my room and discovered one of the more perplexing situations of my short life:

WHY would you dress a bed... sideways?

Not gonna lie, I had to fight pretty hard to get situated in bed that night.


Day 3. Up at 7 again.

As an alternative to Kampala thrifting, I had this shirt made by a local tailor, of Congolese "kitenge" fabric. Rad!


Revised the survey for a couple hours at Cafe Larem - apparently onwed by some USAid folks


then printed and headed to the youth center for a couple more pretests


Post office


Got a couple more respondents in, then caught a bus back towards Kampala. Unfortunately this one was FULL. Opened a book, put in my headphones, and tried to keep my butt from falling asleep every 5 minutes as I was wedged between two new best friends...

one of whom decided to buy some live chickens on the road.

He was pretty stoked on his 2 chickens for 20,000 shillings (~$10)

Grabbed some snacks at a bus-stop. Grilled goat meat skewer and a grilled sweet potato for 1000 UGX ($~0.50)

Gulu is a strange place. It's been in the limelight for a while because it's the biggest town in the area of the North where Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army was for a long time kidnapping children to be child-soldiers and generally terrorizing the place. Because of that, it's become jammed with NGOs of all varities, though the LRA has significantly diminished in size and threat over the past several years, and relocated to the DRC/Sudan/CAR. There's definitely a higher density of bazungu (non-African folks) than in Kampala, but what's even stranger is that they're all around my age.

And the place is rife with more hints at the problems with the aid/NGO/development world. For instance, there's a significant amount of construction going on - mostly of hotels, and mostly for visiting-for-work bazungu (like yours truly). The problem is that as soon as the area is stable enough and the economy developed enough to support construction projects of this type, the NGOs will start pulling out, taking with them the would-be customers of said hotels... let's just call this the "NGO bubble" and move on.


Aaaanyway. Back to the big city.

I spent most of Saturday in meetings, but in between I managed to get myself a haircut! I call it the Bi-Directional Fade: fade up into head-hair and fade down into beard. Hah!