IPA Uganda needs a bigger office...

Room 1:


Room 2 (yes, some of the same people are in both rooms... taken on different days, but the point remains):

I actually should have taken a photo of this room today, when it was packed full of enumerator team leaders reviewing surveys and enumerators filing in to get paid. The office equivalent of a clown car!


UPDATE: Room 2 on Thursday. More accurate representation of late. Put your hands in the air for error rate checking! WOOOOOO!!!



What do you do when the office is too full and you need enough space to have a meeting? Buy a plastic picnic table and set up outside!


What about when everyone in the damn office is annoying you and you just want some peace and quiet?

Actually I was waiting to be joined for a meeting. And someone nabbed my camera.

Working reeeeeeally hard...



Fortunately, yours truly may have found our new office yesterday... fingers crossed for an office with water pressure, a big balcony and a view of the Bahai temple across town!
Friday happy hour on the IPA balcony? Ehhhhh?

Soccer colonialism? Or reverse-colonialism? Or something?

Uganda LOVES English Premier League soccer. To an unhealthy extent.

I have some American friends whose love for EPL I can't quite understand (Peter, I'm lookin at you), but I don't think even their misguided fanaticism (I guess I played soccer for too many years to enjoy watching a bunch of sissies squirm around on the ground and throw tantrums like 3-year-olds in the candy aisle) would lead them to doing things like naming a primary school after their team of choice.

No joke. "Manchester Primary School" - I definitely remember seeing a sign for that one somewhere. And the kids in the little primary school near my office run around on a playground decorated with logos of one team or another (Manchester United also, I think).

And I'm pretty sure I could pretty accurately sketch out of Arsenal's schedule, based on which nights I fall asleep to the roars of my entire damn neighborhood. Get enough sleep to do a competent job at work tomorrow? Or watch 11 guys who I'll never even see in 3 dimensions get paid too much to prance around and pretend to get knocked over, on a continent 4000 miles away? That's easy!

Now I'd be a hypocrite to pretend that my mental welfare can't be affected by the shenanigans of a bunch of hooligans I don't know following some arbitrary set of rules about how to play with a ball on a pitch of grass.
But at least I have SOME sort of tie to Cal football! I mean, I at least saw the guys on the team in classes (occasionally...), they wear uniforms and ostensibly represent the university to which I staked my reputation, and they occasionally almost beat USC.

But how does someone, born and bred and never-having-left Uganda decide that he will stake his happiness (and sleep schedule) on a team he has never seen, and to which he has no shred of actual attachment? Peter, of Arsenal fan-dome, explained to me that for him the process of deciding on a team was a deeply analytical one, involving a time-consuming and painstaking process of determining which EPL team's style he most supports and whose cultural and history he most identifies with. Fine, I can respect that. But I have a deep, deep suspicion that the uncountable masses of Ugandan (men) whose identities seem to be more aligned with who they "support" than even their (highly culturally salient) tribe have not each and every one gone through that same process.


Basically what I'm saying is: it's dumb.




Crowds around the doorway of a TV shop that happens to be playing some game that somebodies apparently care about. Enough to even watch from an opposite balcony.


There's a TV in there. So life grinds to a halt.



And this has nothing to do with anything: the Old Taxi Park

I just had a great idea for a blog:

a blog in which every post is just an apology for how long it's been since the last post.

I've been a bit out of my mind the past week: visiting Principal Investigators, data collection, preparing for WAY BIGGER data collection, filing for human subjects research clearance, writing surveys... living the dream. Aaaaand it's looking like it's gonna keep up at this pace (or more) through at least mid-April.

On the up-side, the rain has been awesome lately! Well, as long as I'm not boda-boda-ing around town to meetings all day. That gets interesting. Nothing says "professional" quite like walking into a meeting looking like a drowned rat in a trashbag. Keeping it classy, representing the muzungus (actually, "bazungu" for more than one "muzungu").

And in lieu of more substance... look! It's me working!

Frantically putting together all the materials my research team needed to get out to the field a few weeks ago. Notice the massive pile of things I screwed up on the floor.

Aaaaand Daniel tells a senior economist of the Boston Federal Reserve bank How It is:
Cool guy! We ran and drank beers and survey-pretested and survey-designed together.

*Note: I have trimmed both hair and beard since these pictures. The beard's grown back though. You may know me as Mountain Man Ugandaniel.

Aaaanyway. Off to bed for me. Maybe to Gulu (in the north) next week to do some more survey pretesting... hopefully. It would be nice to get the hell outta Kampala for a minute or two! My developing black lung could stand a day or two off.

Themes are for sissies.

So there's this little building at the end of my block in which there is the empty shell of what was clearly once a restaurant. I find myself randomly daydreaming about opening up a restaurant there. It would be rad! Okay, really I just want to open a restaurant there because I just want someone to open a restaurant there. And if I opened it, then I could hang out in it ALL the time! Sweet!

I'm trying to get Kate on board, mainly by telling her that a) we could dress the staff in Awava products and b) we could call it Kate & Katz! How could you NOT want to eat there?? We'd have sandwiches and smoothies and home-roasted coffee (Dave could come as a consultant to teach us how to roast in a popcorn-popper) and Ugandan food (but somehow make it have flavor) and avocado on EVERYTHING.

From Ugandaniel

Wouldn't you TOTALLY want to eat here? Seating outside on the terraced lawn too..

From Ugandaniel

Grrrrreat view (I like to come here to stretch after I run and enjoy the view)


In totally related news, I went to Ssezibwa falls with Lisa, Dave (why do I seem to find myself so regularly surrounded by Daves?) and Dave's buddy Joel for the day Sunday. It's about 25 miles outside of Kampala and was wonderful just for getting out of the city and breathing breathable air for a day:

From Ugandaniel

From Ugandaniel

From Ugandaniel

(really, really disappointed in myself for not peeing off this)

Went for a wander and stumbled upon this:

From Ugandaniel

Apparently this area belongs to the Kabaka (the king of the Buganda tribe)... and they use it for some sort of interesting juju magic sorta stuff. Yes, those are little spears in there.
...not gonna lie, kinda felt like Indiana Jones there for a second. Then I got the heeby-jeebies and promptly skeedaddled.


And on the subject of waterfalls and ju-ju magic, whoooooo loves African wax-print fabrics???

THIS GUY

From Ugandaniel

Bought this fabric for 5,000 shillings and had a local tailor it as a copy of another shirt for 12,000 shillings... all told ~$8.50 for a custom-made superrad shirt!

A close-up of the fabric (and a little bit of my BEARD):

From Ugandaniel

Friday night (chronologicality be damned!) was a pretty interesting night. A whole gaggle of us decided it was a good idea to pay 30,000 shillings to see (wait for it... wait for it...) R KELLY in concert. HAH. Seriously. R Kelly.
Zain - a local (?) phone company - has been advertising for this concert SINCE I got here. That's a solid 4 months of billboards and radio spots and, uh, more billboards. So you gotta go, right? For the spectacle of it all.

Well. Getting in was almost worth the price of admission. That is, if you're into paying money for getting yourself in the middle of several almost-riots and watching a cop bludgeon the hell out of some folks and having a gun fired into the air right next to your ear and having two of your friends be pickpocketed (almost three... but Dave managed to stare his would-be pick-pocketer into submission). Woo!

And then R Kelly graced us all with his presence for... 50 minutes. And he didn't even find it in himself to play a single ENTIRE song. It was basically like putting an R Kelly greatest hits album in a CD player and handing a hyperactive 8-year-old the remote: intro, chorus, next song. intro, chorus, next song.
Don't get me wrong. I was pretty okay with the short set (I think I first checked the time and groaned only about 10 minutes in). But most of my fellow concert-goers (and the next day's newspapers) were... less than thrilled.

How much was mR. Kelly paid for said (mini)appearance? SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. Not 750,000 shillings... 750,000 DOLLARS. wooooooow. All told, apparently Zain spent ~$3,000,000 on the show.

Also, a wonderful bit of logic-flow from Ms. Kate von Achen:
1. Uganda is viciously anti-homosexual.
2. as is evident from conversations with Ugandans, Ugandan newspapers, arguments from supporting lawmakers, etc, Ugandans tend to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia (as an example: a march of several thousand children a couple weeks ago in support of the anti-homosexuality bill, the overarching theme of which was "protect us from being violated"... hmmm...)
3. Therefore it can be ascertained that Ugandans are pretty vociferously anti-pedophilia
4. R Kelly is a (convicted? at least strongly-alleged) pedophile
5. a Ugandan interest therefore spent $3,000,000 to, with massive public support, host a high-profile individual who violates (pun intended) a powerfully important norm to Ugandan culture.

Oops?

I will say one thing for the man, though: he has an AMAZING voice. He sang a handful of (parts of) songs a capella... and I was honestly blown away. Nice to see a pop star who actually has very legitimate talent.


And remember. If work is ever just too overwhelming, you can always nap on the job:

From Ugandaniel

Leave Running Whitey alone!

This might come as a shock to those of you who know me well: I like to run.

A lot.

In fact, it's become evident over the past years that running is one of the few things that keeps me (mostly) sane [those of you who had the misfortune of being around me for the couple months I spent unable to run due to tearing a ligament in my hip from clotheslining my dumb self off my bike and landing on my U-lock, and had to deal with me being a moody ass for two months time can attest to this assertion].

As I'm sure I've mentioned to many of you, this city leaves a little (lot) to be desired in terms of runability:


Firstly: altitude. Kampala's at about 3900 feet, so the air is definitely a bit thinner than what I'm used to. Not a bad thing, though (my lungs felt great when I ran at home), except for the addition of:

Second: shitty shitty air quality. Dust + smog (emissions controls? Why would we want those? Then my boogers wouldn't be black!) + burning-trash-smoke = might as well wrap my lips around a tail-pipe while I run. Bad enough as it is, but let's not neglect the:

Third: traffic. I swear I have almost been de-elbowed by a matatu-mirror or flat-tired by a boda-boda more times than I want to count. As if my heart isn't already pounding enough while I run, why not tack on a couple near-maiming experiences to REALLY get my adrenaline going? But I can't focus all of my attention on dodging traffic because of:

Fourth: "CHOGM-holes". CHOGM is the biannual (?) Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting, held in a different British Commonwealth country each time. In 2007, Uganda had the misfortune of hosting CHOGM. By all means it certainly COULD have been an excellent opportunity for Uganda to bank on some serious international attention and make some serious infrastructural progress (read: fill potholes), but instead corruption (and its close friend, idiocy) reared its ugly head and excellent methods were invented for pissing away phenomenal sums of money. One of these involved the decision to erect street lights - only, of course, on those streets which the CHOGM-folks would be traversing. Buuuuut they just never made it as far as installing the streetlight. Instead, they just managed to dig a huge number of hugely deep hugely un-marked holes. Now lovingly known as "CHOGM-holes" (physical representations of the holes that money was uselessly thrown into over the whole CHOGM fiasco?). Lest the CHOGM-holes be lonely, there are of course the countless and continuously-multiplying:

Fifth: pot-holes. I've covered these aberrations of street-making in a previous post, so I'll just continue on to:


Sixth: Ugandans who apparently think the acme of humor to be harassing the poor damn running mzungu.
If you live in Kampala, mzungu's, though not necessarily "common", are certainly not a great rarity. And I definitely see Ugandans out for runs. But apparently the combination of mzungu + runner is just... too much NOT to comment on.

I'm out for a damn run. No I do NOT want to:
a) fist-bump you as you sit on your boda-boda.
b) respond to "MZUNGU HOW ARE YOU"
c) confirm my American citizenship
d) have an extended discussion about what you/I think of Obama
e) debate whether Obama is, in truth, a "son of Uganda"
f) watch you run next to me mockingly as you look back at your homeys for approval
g) ride in your taxi (okay... I suppose I can understand this one a little bit: clearly I'm trying to get somewhere quickly, and I suppose a taxi would be a bit easier than running like a doofus)
h) be fodder for whatever jokes you are making to your friends in Luganda (I'm certain at my expense)


Just let me RUN. I promise I'll be much more enjoyable to deal with if you do.

That is all. Until next time,

-Running Whitey.

You are welcome!

*Note, in Ugandanglish, the above title translates to "please come in", not "i appreciate your appreciation for the thing I did for you"


FIRSTLY: Guess what I did today? Field tested SaveMoRe! And it WORKED! (mostly)
Holy crap! I'm not a total failure!
Noooow to get all the million little details ironed out before implementation begins (and, uh, train like 25 people...)


Aaaaanyway, I'm not at work right now, so I'm going to stop thinking about work. I am at home, so I'm going to think about home.

Many many moons ago I walked around my apartment with my camera set on "video" and made a royal dork out of myself by annotating a tour of my apartment (complete with Kate making fun of me for having 2 takes).

Fortunately the East African internet wouldn't allow me to make an internationally known dork of myself. Instead I finally got my lazy butt to walk around my apartment with my camera on "picture" mode. Please, have a look around:

From Home Tour

Welcome inside. That's my helmet. And some jackets. And some shoes. And the side of the refrigerator waaaaay in the distance.

From Home Tour

You've now walked inside and turned around to admire our tasteful security gate and MASSIVE lock. And my helmet again.

From Home Tour

Rotating to the right faces you toward the living room. Pretty cool locally handmade furniture, Obama's face gazing on approvingly, a cool lampshade thingy, kitty-sighting #1 (Koopama I think... under the couch), the clothes-drying porch at the far end, and a suitcase inexplicably on top of some baskets.

From Home Tour

A full 180 and you're in the eating-nook. The washing machine just peeks around the corner because it knows it's out of place (currently pulled out of its normal spot for repair... Daniel's getting stinky)

From Home Tour

Through the eating nook to the left and we're in the kitchen. Gas stove (woo!), refrigerator, grass outside, some whiskey (weird, Bob Dylan just said "whiskey" write as I typed it), several-day-old popcorn (Kaaaaate?) and a power-strip at a probably unsafe angle.

From Home Tour

Another 180. Lotsawater, well-used coffee-making accoutrement, a photograph of mushrooms I've been meaning to ask Kate to explain and kitty-sighting #2 (Kasuku aka Little One aka devil-cat aka DAMMIT CAT WHY DID YOU EAT MY BREAD/COOKIE/WATER aka bowling-ball)

From Home Tour

Uh... just teleported back to the living-room. Hi Barack! Sorry your approval ratings are dropping, but we still like you, k?. Pretty baskets - the one on the left is mine.

From Home Tour

I like these baskets. What do you think, $60 at Pier 1 or Cost Plus World Market? Mmmm?
Try $8 on the street in Uganda! BOOM! As for getting it home... hm.

From Home Tour

KITTY-SIGHTING #3. Mbeezy. This cat is strange, but adorably so.

From Home Tour

The drying-room, unused, and the charming view out the window (same as out my window).

From Home Tour

Down the hallway toward the bedrooms. I see clean sheets in the distance.

From Home Tour

My room! I'm sitting at that desk right now. Photo of my family superawesomejumping on the beach gracing my desk. And look rrreeeeeeally close at the little table to the left of my bed and you'll see a pop of pretty-colored fabric from Honduras. Thanks Dave! (Rebecca- the bubblegum cigars are long-since consumed, and the rainbow-caribiner graces my backpack).
Chris's little asteroid print above my window and Rebecca's "Mira las luces!" print above-right of my desk.

From Home Tour

Walk in and turn right - my bookcase-o-crap. Brother-time, a pretty painted wooden Ugandan bird, some Ugandan pottery, Kirkland Signature-quantity almonds (picking almond-bits out of my teeth as I type), barely-touched GRE books and well-used deodorant (how to deal with a broken washing machine).

From Home Tour

Photos of friends, a krama scarf I got in Cambodia (brought for those cchhiiiiilllyyy Ugandan nights...) and another basket I like even more than the other one.

From Home Tour

See? It's a basket.

From Home Tour

Devil-kitty. Pretending she is not devil-kitty

From Home Tour

Kasuku makes a a unique and remarkable effort to appear as unlike Satan's four-legged spawn as possible to my American audience (which is probably consisting of... Mom).
I swear to all that is holy, though... if she so much as makes extended eye-contact with those almonds, I'm going to kitty-bowl her across the continent.

From Home Tour

Barriers!
and family.
and the bathroom down yon hallway.

From Home Tour

It's a toilet. I do not poop in a hole in the ground.

From Home Tour

I usually shower squatting. As if frequent bucket-showers weren't annoying enough.

From Home Tour

Look! It's bathroom stuff! In Africa!
And photo-cards courtesy of Awava (www.awavamarket.com - Kate's fair trade craft company), taken by Glenna Gordon I believe.

From Home Tour

Teleporting back to the living room (and time-traveling to daytime): the view from the couch. Television. African stuff. Baskets by Awava. Pirated movies.

From Home Tour

Aaaaaand how Yours Truly spends a good chunk of the time he's not at work panicking and shaking his hands at nipple level.

Say goodbye to Barack!

Home and back again

Hmm... a solid 7.5 weeks between posts. WHOOPS.

Soooo a general overview:

The last couple weeks in Kampala before going home were nuts. One of my projects ("SaveMoRe") is set to roll out on Feb 1 (well... it's looking like it will be Feb 8 now), so I had to get a whooooole buncha logistical business ironed out before going home for 3 weeks. Then again it's not like I was going home for 3 weeks of "vacation" - I spent a good deal of the first week and last week home working. Buuuut at least I was at home! Letting my Mom make me more steak than I've consumed in the last few months total. And pancakes. Wait a second... 3 weeks at home and I only had pancakes ONCE?? What the hell? Those of you who have had the honor of consuming my mother's pancakes will understand.

So other than the sorrowful lack of pancakeage, home was awesome. I spent the first week at my parents' house in Southern California, then a couple days in LA with DT and Dave, then a few more days in the Bay Area, and finally another week at home. It was fantastic to see the people and places I've been missing (oh Bay Area cafe culture... how you have spoiled me), though maybe not as "relaxing" as I'd hoped. Just being around the family had enough of a calming effect to make it allll worthwhile.


The trip back to Uganda was interesting. I had a 12-hour layover in Dubai between 15- and 8-hour legs of my journey. I arrived at 8pm, so I figured I'd venture out into the town for a few hours for some dinner and quasi-sight-seeing, then find somewhere to crash out in the airport. On the way out of the airport, I asked about 5 different Emirates Airlines staff if there was a lounge or somewhere that I could pass out for a few hours when I returned. Nada. Oh well, I'd just have to find myself a square of carpet somewhere.

It took me about an hour to actually make it out of the airport, not because of long lines or anything, but just because sometimes things that should take a normal person a short amount of time take me much longer. I finally found the metro station (fyi: best to follow the signs that say "metro" rather than trust your "instincts"), and made 2 instantsuperbestfriends. Well, one was, I think, some sort of employee of the metro system 'cause he (saw me looking confused and) asked where I was going, then told me where I should go and how I should get there. The other was the lady on the other side of the ticket counter. But I'm sure we're superbestfriends because she gave me an M&M. I metroed into town and discovered two things about Dubai:

1. The ENTIRE damn place is under construction. Seriously... it's absurd. It looks like they're trying to build Manhattan overnight!

2. Dubai brings new meaning to "not a pedestrian-friendly city". I mean, it brings a new type of meaning to it. Kampala is quite pedestrian-unfriendly, but just because drivers seem to get a kick out of mirror-grazing pedestrians and the "sidewalk" (read: dirt next to the road) is chalk full of gigantic holes for streetlights that were never installed. In Dubai, however, there just isn't anywhere to BE a pedestrian. It's bizarre! The city (what little of it I saw) seems to be designed with the assumption that everyone will use a car to get everywhere... there was not even a way to walk from one building to the building next to it.

Also I'm pretty sure I saw more dollar-value in cars in the 4 hours I was in Dubai city than in the 3 months I've been in Uganda.


I found the tallest building in the world! It was actually bizarrely hard to find. I kept just looking up figuring I'd see it from anywhere, but there are so many damn skyscrapers in Dubai that I couldn't find it (Mom- I thought of you asking a couple of cops where the Twin Towers were when we were in New York (rest of world: this was pre-2001.... the cops just looked at her and said "uh... look up"; we've given her shit about this ever since)).
It's really really really tall.

Then I walked around a mall for the last 30 minutes it was open. Learned what "Starbucks" looks like in Arabic. Saw an indoor ice-skating rink in the middle of the Arabian desert (didn't get to the mall with the indoor ski slope - next time!). Theeeen I wandered off in search of food and found an awesome little cafe nestled between 2 skyscrapers, in which I ate some chicken shishsomething and futzed around on the internet/read for a few hours, enjoying the Arabic being spoken around me. Did I mention I'm a sucker for cafe culture?

Finally I decided I should head back to the airport before I was too tired to be rational.
I found a hotel and asked how to get back (figuring I'd just take a taxi since the metro was closed, but hoping there would be a bus). They told me they actually had a free shuttle that would arrive in about 30 minutes. Sweet! I settled into a couch and proceeded to people-watch the rrrrrrridiculous crowd of young Dubaians (or probably not... apparently 80% of Dubai's population are non-native) filter into the hotel's hopping club. Apparently the shuttle was running late, so they wound up calling a hotel car to take me. Rad!


Back to the airport around 2am (flight at 8:30). TIRED. Airport was CROWDED. Asked several more Emirates employees about a lounge to sleep in. Nothing nothing. Found an Emirates cafeteria thingy in which passengers with 6+ hour layovers eat free. Rad. Ate lots of mac&cheese and mousse-on-bananas. Why didn't they tell me about this place? Good thing I stumbled upon it! REEEEEALLY TIRED. Found a fairly loungey chair. Not very comfortable but managed to pass out for about an hour and a half. Woke up fidgety and REALLY REALLY TIRED. After several minutes of shifting around and annoying everyone else on the row of connected chairs, I moved to the nice tile floor. Ugh. Passed out for another 1.5ish hours. Finally gave up and went to find my gate. Time passed somehow. MISERABLY TIRED. At the gate ran into an acquaintance from Kampala, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She'd arrived around the same time as me on Emirates. Why did she seem so rested?

Because apparently if you have a layover of over 8 hours in Dubai, Emirates will put you up in a hotel FOR FREE including 3 meals FOR FREE and a city tour FOR FREE.

BUT YOU HAVE TO ASK ABOUT IT BEFOREHAND.

Why the CRAP do they offer this if they're not going to TELL anybody? ARGH.


Aaaaanyway, it's back to the Kampala-grind. A few photos from Dubai:

Dubai