The chaos, uh, continuetheth?

Day 3. Moderately better than Day 2 (and as of today - Day 14 - the trend of slight improvements day-to-day has continued... with only a few hiccups).

Headed out in the AM with Tony's club. Failed to get our respondents at the first club (this has been a recurring theme, and an unending wellspring of Daniel's Anxiety), and learned that our matatu driver was a royal a-hole. Tony had gone with him to try to pick up some respondents in the matatu to bring them to the church where we'd be doing the surveying, and he apparently

A) whined non-stop about the condition of the roads and the wear on his vehicle (not any worse than any other roads, and we had contracted all of these matatus through a central guy who would be responsible for paying for any maintenance costs)

B) started jerking his foot on the gas/clutch in order to make it seem like he was running out of gas and whined about us not giving him enough gas

C) whined about us working him too hard (the length and breadth of his job involved driving us to meet with a club in the morning, then taking a nap, then driving us to meet with a second club, then taking a nap, then driving us home... God forbid we ask him to do 5 minutes more driving)

D) stopped the matatu at one point in order to call his boss right in front of Tony and loudly complain about the above points A) through C)

Tony got so fed up he just told him to go back and went the rest of the way by foot.

Aaaaanyway. We managed to get the second club to meet with us earlier than planned. And the scenery was... divine

Daniel's Anglican Church Tour of Uganda continues

John delivers the instructions for the group behavioral games(I should do a post sometime about some research theory.... and what the hell "behavioral games" are

One of the more finished churches I've been in lately

Threatening clouds

Hi neighbor!

Once I saw that things were rolling along smoothly enough, I decided to head back to town. I had the matatu driver take me much further along the way than necessary, mostly to show him that we weren't going to tolerate his crap, and then caught another matatu to town.

[Sidenote: on all matatus operating as "taxis" (these are privately-owned minivans operating along semi-fixed roots, so really more of "buses", yet confusingly called "taxis"... and then there "special hires" which are, uh, normal taxis), there is a broadly-painted statement that "This taxi is licensed to carry 14 passengers". I even noticed in a guide-book I'd skimmed shortly after arriving here the comment that the author "never saw a taxi carrying more than the licensed number of passengers". LIES! I can't even count how many times I've been one-cheeking it on a taxi seat, with between one and three total strangers' body parts entirely too intimately intertwined with my own. This day was a particularly lovely example: I counted 20 adults and 2 children in this taxi]

I had to do... something(s) in town but I can't remember what. Afterwards I posted up on the balcony of a 2nd-story restaurant for some lunch and work. I was famished, so did some pretty semi-rational ordering:

Tea

"Garlic mushroom toast" which I expected to be some sort of be-mushroomed garlic bread but turned out to be toasted sliced white bread with some sort of heavily garlicy (mmmm) mushroom-based gravy-mush

and

An "avocado salad" which turned out to be an avocado with some soy sauce poured on it, accompanied by a few slices of tomato.

That was about it for noteworthiness that day.

For the rest of the baseline-survey posts, I think I'm going to let them be more photo- and anecdote-driven, rather than trying to give a moment-by-moment blow-by-blow. On to the next...