Lake Bunyonyi

Finally! Victory! I actually made it out of Kampala for a weekend, with the intent aim of... relaxing!

I didn't even bring my computer. That is serious dedication to the cause. It also helps that the law was on my side.... human subjects research regulations restrict me from being toooo loose with where I take my computer (since it contains data on human subjects research... uh... subjects).

I'm going to let pictures drive this post, since that's most of what anyone (myself included) really cares about! Just a couple stories...

To set the scene: remember the bedraggled tone of my post about field pretesting in Rakai, tack on a few massively hectic round-the-clock work-days and a delightful half-day spent trying to trans-continentally resolve trans-continental identity theft/bank-account-fraud until 12:30am Thursday (er... Friday).

The plan was to leave Good Friday morning (public holiday) at 6am for the ~8 hour drive to Lake Bunyonyi, thereby missing traffic and arriving at the lake early enough to enjoy some daylight. And then Jill (who was to be driving) called me at 11pm on Thursday to inform me that she was having car troubles and a mechanic would be coming in the morning, so hold tight. Long story short, we were finally in the car at noonish.

Getting out of Kampala makes me feel like this

Snack for the road, anybody?

And then we had the joy of dealing with a nation-wide gasoline shortage! Fortunately we managed to find a Shell station (ahhh... America) with fuel after only about 45 minutes of hunting. We decided to be smart and fill up a few extra jerry-cans to be safe. We tossed ("placed") them in the trunk, loaded up, and hit the road. The smell of gasoline was bothersome, but we figured it would air out and go away. Buuuut it didn't. In fact, it got progressively worse. Finally, after deciding we'd probably killed off enough brain-cells to forget about work, we decided to pull over and investigate. Sure enough, one of the jerry cans (read: former vegetable oil container) had a leak. Terrific. While Laura busied herself trying to clean the leaked gasoline out of the car, Jill and Selima communicated a need for a new container to a local lady in sign language and yours truly got his Macguyver on.

For extra safety!

(my favorite moment of this experience was when a girl walked by and asked us if that was gasoline or wine. Because logically we'd be tying jugs of wine to the back of our car?)

Aaaaaand off we went, right as rain and only a little bit high from accidentally huffing gasoline fumes.

Drive and drive and drive we did.

Sweet, they're still there.

Seatbelts are for sissies. So are seats. Or sitting.

Apparently this secondary school costs on the order of $5,000 per term.

Repping the Northern Hemisphere. Hard.

Jill proves her transhemisphericality.

Also, roads are for sissies.

Good Friday parade... or something.

See? By comparison our solution was quite safe.

A bit of a frontier-town feel, eh?

Aaaand that's about where photos of day 1 end. We made it to Mbarara before sun-down (route: Kampala -> Masaka -> Mbarara -> Kabale -> Lake Bunyonyi), at which point Jill expressed her desire to switch drivers (she'd been behind the wheel for about 6.5 hours). "Sure" your fearless narrator thought, "I can do this! I've driven twice for a total of 20 minutes in Kampala in a compact sedan, driving a lifted SUV at night on country roads for 2. hours should be no sweat!"

I have NEVER worked so hard driving, or been so exhausted afterwards. No streetlights, narrow roads, rampant pot-holes, oncoming drivers who feel the need to remind you of their presence by turning their high-beams on right when they pass, and the fact that African folks wearing dark clothing at night are damn hard to see... it was an adventure, to say the least!

But we made it! And I'll admit I was giggling uncontrollably most of the time (little-boy-monster-truck fantasies made real + nerves).

We stopped in Kabale and wolfed down one of the fastest meals I have ever seen four people concurrently eat - we were almost to the lake and ready to be there. The restaurant staff were clearly STOKED to have gotten the bazungu (for all of 5 minutes). Added to the general theme of fuel-related safety by hacking a small water bottle in half with my leatherman, sticking the small end in the gas tank, and, while Jill poured the extra fuel from the (vegetable oil) jug through water bottle, stabbing an air-hole in the back of the jug to prevent "glugging". Twice (two jugs of extra fuel) Macguyver round two, complete.

The boat ride across the black water in the black night surrounded by little black islands under a massively star-studded sky made it all worthwhile.

As did seeing where I was when I woke up the next morning.

Path from our cottage up to the restaurant/lounge

Byoona Amagara, on Itambara (sp?) island

The eight of us decided to disregard the ominous clouds and choppy waters and take out a couple dug-out canoes.

After about 45 minutes of failing miserably to go any definable, chosen direction, the rain started. My thought process went something along the lines of "Eff it!" and before I could give myself time to think I was diving out of the canoe into the water.

It's hard to describe the feeling exactly, but there was something about swimming in a beautiful lake in the pouring rain in Africa that was kind of amazing.

I realize it may sound silly to those of you freshly emerging from winter, but having the opportunity to be genuinely cold was wooooonderful. We bundled up and a few of us decided to put our heads together to remember how to play cribbage. Successfully! Cribbage became a theme of the weekend. And the Trans-Bay Alliance (former San Francisco resident + this former East Bay kid) held down the victors' title pretty consistently, thanks to hands like this:

Yeah, Justin. You already know you're about to get handled.

The other half of the Trans-Bay Alliance

The cottage, decorated with clothing soaked in the Rainy Canoeing Experiment

Hi Jupiter!

Swings should be everywhere, always.

"Haha! That cow is nudging Adam!"

"Haha! It's really going for him!"

"Hah- uh... wait. Adam, why are you running? Oh no now it's going for Laura!"

Laura: "GUYS SERIOUSLY GET THIS COW OFF OF ME"

[Audio track: little boys in tree laughing maniacally]

Adam makes trans-lake contact

Jill solidifies the relationship

"A UGANDAN CRESTED CRANE A UGANDAN CRESTED CRANE A UGANDAN CRESTED CRANE!!" (Uganda's national bird, on the flag and the state seal)

You can juuuust see our cottage sticking out over there

Crawdad-fisher's catch

Later, several of this little guy's family members wound up in my tummy.

Keeping it classy.

Mom and Mitch: next dogs' names?

Relaxing is reeeeally hard work.

Went for a long walk on the mainland on Sunday.

"Canteen" - must be a school

Ants are assholes. But at least they're really really efficient assholes. Gotta respect that a bit.

Mitch? Comments?

Found some little inn, comprised of 4 little bungalows and a 4-story turret. Played South African Monopoly. Ate the most expensive matoke, potatoes and beans I've ever had - 7000 shillings! (~$3.50)

Wound up back at the car and decided to drive around a bit.

This country is insultingly beautiful.

Driving back down to the lakeshore. I drove this road 2 nights previously in the pitch black.

Oh good! This makes me feel even better about my driving experience!

Canoed back to the island

"I grew up on the lake. That's why I am able to make the canoe go where I want it to."

Jerk.

The open-air shower. We couldn't figure out why the ladder was there...

View from the cottage

Aaaaand back to Kampala we went, despite the protests of the staff of the Byoona Amagara who told us we could continue staying for free, and even threatened to not call the boat to take us back to the mainland. I shoulda complied...

Jill means business.

Even the drive was pleasurable

Also also buses are for sissies.

This picture is purely for Mom: even in Uganda they've figured out to put soap in the squeegee-water at gas stations.

Some sort of inclement noise was coming from the front of Abigail's car. Justin and I discovered a screw had gone missing where it was supposed to hold together 2 plastic panels. And, Macguyver round 3, we fixed it with a safety pin.

"Let's stop and grab snacks at-- whaaaat?"

"Okay, how about Banana Chick Hunger Care instead...?"

And... homeward bound. Towards the storm (metaphor? pathetic fallacy?).

"Why am I here?", revisited

I had an interesting email exchange with my uncle recently, in which I think I did a much better job of summarizing (albeit longwindedly) some of the principles behind the work I'm doing here. The conversation continued quite a ways beyond these two emails, but I figured I'd share this snippet of the exchange here. It's a bit dense and a bit out of context, but I hope it offers some clarity.

And if you're really good and read the whole thing, I'll put up a post with loooots of pictures about the days I spent at beautiful Lake Bunyonyi last weekend...

Thanks Uncle Bernie!

Daniel:

I read the literature that you sent. I'm a little confused - As I understand it Innovations for Poverty Action is the agency that is collecting data for use in developing an educational program to encourage savings. What I don't understand is how encouraging savings will help a population that is 50% under 15 years old.

Shouldn't they be working on life expectancy?

Plus - How can a population that is in an "informal economy" actually have savings? Doesn't an "informal economy" imply cash transactions and barter?

Besides, why would they want any record of the amount of money they have - won't they then be liable to be moved into a more "formal" economy and be subject to taxes?

I am thinking back to your great grandfather who had a pushcart on the lower east side of NY. He existed in an informal economy and I'm willing to bet that he did not ever have a bank account.

What is the sort of commerce that these people are engaged in? Do they produce anything or are they just vendors?

What do they do with the money that they make - do they have enough of a surplus to put it into a savings account?

Bernie

Hi Bernie,

So for this project specifically, IPA is both developing the intervention as well as conducting the assessment of the intervention. Specifically, we've developed a financial education curriculum, which a partner organization will deliver to these youth clubs, and we will measure the impact of delivering that education.

Why are we focusing on financial literacy rather than a more "fundamental" factor, such as life expectancy? And why to youth?
I can understand the perspective that focusing on anything other than improving the most basic well-being factors (such as life expectancy) is a bit silly, particularly somewhere with such a low expectancy (49, if I remember correctly). There are a couple problems with only focusing on life expectancy.

First of all, Uganda's massively youth-skewed population is not necessarily solely due to low life expectancy. I have not done literature review on this topic, so take it with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that over the past couple decades, Uganda's wealth and welfare have improved pretty dramatically. Resultant (at least in some proportion) from this is a massive increase in fertility rate - Uganda has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Combining this with the civil war in the north and the HIV/AIDS epidemic (the former of which has ended and the latter has become dramatically reduced, in the past few years), which together did a pretty effective job of killing off a generation or so, and you get a pretty heavily youth-skewed population

Sticking to the life expectancy measure, though...
The first, and most fundamental, question is what determines/effects life expectancy? We could just focus on cause of death, pick the top cause and throw everything we have at that. But that's looking symptomatically rather than systematically. The argument could be made that improving a person's savings behavior will actually result in longer life expectancy. If someone can effectively put aside small amounts of money from the time they're 15, when they get some illness when they're 45, they'll be able to pay for treatment. Anecdotaly, it seems to me that this is often the massive constraint to people's well-being: being able to afford basic (and very cheap) healthcare. Teach people to be savers, and they'll live longer. Theoretically.

Ideally, I would love to measure life expectancy in our sample population across control and treatment groups, but the simple logistical problem is that we only have enough funding for a 1 year gap between baseline and endline surveys (and a sample population of only ~2800), so we will not have statistical power to see statistically significant changes in life expectancy.
At a more organizational-mission level, IPA is interested in more immediate, short-term outcomes/effects. The big-picture hope/idea is that IPA finds and replicates some results and then disseminates that result to the development world at large in order to contribute to guiding development down the most effective path. So with what we find in a project, we will say "if you want to cause X change in a population, the most effective way to do so is using Y treatment", and we will publish and present the hell out of it.
An intervention whose sole outcome of interest was increasing life expectancy would have to be so massive and long-term, that by the time the results of the intervention were ascertained, it would be years too late - the setting/context would have changed so dramatically over the ensuing years that the findings could very well be contemporarily irrelevant.

And why try to turn 15-year-olds into "savers"? Uganda has the massive opportunity for a sea-change. With such a huge proportion of the population still in its "impressionable" stage, creating culture shifts in the population now could drastically change the future of the country. If these 15-year-olds growing up thinking (and acting on the thought that) saving in formal banks is the way to go, a huge amount of investment will be pumped into the formal financial sector, raising the possibility for pretty significant national financial growth (more money in banks --> better credit/loan terms for borrowers --> easier to start businesses, buy welfare-improving durable goods, pay for welfare-improving services such as higher education and health-care, etc.).
Of course we're not going to see any effects that significant in such a small, short-term project, but we hope to see is significant enough changes in key indicator variables to justify encouraging relevant NGOs/development orgs to undertake the intervention. Or, just as importantly, if we find NO change from our intervention, we will publicize the hell out of it and tell everyone not to waste their money on this type of project, and instead try other interventions.

The other big-picture factor is that financial literacy education is becoming the new hot topic in development economics, but there is VERY little rigorous research supporting its effectiveness, so we're trying to contribute some definite findings (be they positive or negative) to that literature.


Regarding the issue of whether saving in a bank is "good" for someone - that's something we've struggled with. What we decided is that in this curriculum we're not going to encourage any specific behavior. Instead we're just trying to educate about different options and create rational actors, in terms of saving behavior. It very well may be that for a young person, it's more rational to save in box in their home, rather than in a formal bank (maybe the bank's too far away, charges fees that are too high, would cause intra-family conflict, etc). But regardless we want to educate that SAVING is the way to go, as opposed to borrowing (a lot of Ugandans over-borrow due to lack of understanding of the cost of borrowing, and wind up losing a lot of money or, worse, their homes or other important assets), and create individuals who can manage their money effectively (e.g., write a budget) and make educated choices about how best to use their money.
The potential of informal-economy income becoming officially recorded and thus taxable would fall into the category of reasons why a formal bank account may not be the best option for any one individual at any given time in their life. I actually do not know the official rules on the books regarding this, though - definitely something to look into!


There are a pretty wide range of occupations/money-making activities, ranging from basic service, to farming to market-vending to craftsmanship.
A lot of people will report that they just "don't have enough money to save", often because "all the money [they] make goes right back into [their] business", but you'll find that, first of all a lot of times that's not actually true and instead a result of a lack of understanding of cost/revenue/profit, and/or that so much money is passing through their hands that if they just moved that money through a bank account, they would make a pretty considerable amount of money in interest. It boils down to lack of education


Wow, I got a lot more long-winded than I intended to! Sorry! But I hope this clarifies a bit.

Good job! You made it through! As a reward, here are a couple teaser-pictures from last weekend:

Field testing in Rakai

Fiiiiiiinally got to get out to the field a little bit on Monday and Tuesday. I spent the days field pretesting the survey for one of my projects in Rakai district, a few hours Southwest from Kampala.

The idea behind pretesting is that I, sitting in my office in Kampala, can write survey questions that I think make sense and "get at" some concept, but when the questions are actually asked of real people, it turns out they either totally don't make sense, or are interpreted completely differently. So theoretically it's best to pretest a survey everywhere that it might be used, since different people may interpret questions differently.

An example: "percent" in Luganda is literally translated to "of 100", so "what is 20 percent of 100" doesn't work to understand a person's math skills if it's asked in Luganda ("what is 20 of 100 of 100") the same way as if it's asked in English.

Field pretesting is something I've been meaning/wanting to get out and do for a while now, but it's just been damn-near impossible to find a couple days when I don't have meetings or other things I need to be in Kampala for.

7am on Monday, I met up with Sam (one of our data collection team rock-stars) and found the bus headed the right direction. We boarded the bus and discovered it almost-empty. Bad sign. Why? Because public transportation (well... "public" - they are run by private companies) vehicles in this country will not move until they are FULL.

Two hours later, the bus actually started moving. Great.

Fortunately, I had pleeeeeenty to keep me occupied. Pia (IPA country director), Sarah (another IPA project associate) and I had spent all (ALL) weekend tearing the survey apart, and it had yet to be rebuilt. So I set up my office for the morning:

and got cracking. I spent a majority of the 5 hours of bus-time (2 hours waiting + 3 hours in transit) hacking away, less a few breaks to ease car-sickness. Fun!

We arrived in Kyotera, the main town in Rakai, found a decent hotel, I frantically finished the last-minute survey formatting and we struck out to find a printer. Heaven forbid a print-shop actually be able to effectively and efficiently print 2 copies of a 15-page survey... I let Sam deal with that headache. We finally got underway around 1:30pm. We pretty much just operated by walking up to people on the street and asking if we could have a few minutes of their time. It's amazing, if someone did that to me at home, I'd pretty much give them the finger and tell them to put there [insert convex body-part] right into their [insert concave body-part], unless they're gonna buy me lunch. But here, people loooove to answer completely uninteresting questions for way too much time!

Okay, there's a caveat though. At Sam's suggestion, we said we were "students" ("of life", I would mutter under my breath) doing our senior research. Sam maintained that as soon as you say "research organization" or even "researcher" people get veeeeeery suspicious. Interesting. Fortunately my Berkeley ID is still in my wallet! It came in handy a couple times.

Long story slightly less-long, we interviewed a chunk of people, fought our way through the survey a few times, and learned a whoooole helluvalot. We reworked the survey until about 9pm, hunted around for some food (Passover in Uganda means eating a whoooooole lotta matoke - steamed green bananas), and I tore apart and rebuilt the survey until about 1am.

Tuesday.

Up at 7. Breakfast. Back to inept printer-shop due to lack of options. Why would you expect a print-shop's printer to actually have toner? Allowed Sam to deal with that dirty-work, once again, while I called the parents to wish them a happy Passover (a full half-day after I started Passover... slackers!). Hopped in a "taxi" (a car operating as a mini-bus, along a set route - in Kampala they're minivans but in most of the rest of the country they're smaller cars):

with 7 of my best friends (4 across the front, including the driver) to Rakai town.

A funny dynamic- Rakai town is the district capital, yet a sleepy little country town by comparison to Kyotera. I'd been to Kyotera once before, to do some focus group discussions in November. I'm a fan. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels... home-y.

A local resident. Look, Matt! It's dinner!

Aaaaand back to pretesting. Since we'd spent most of Monday pretesting with more urban, shop-keeper-type folk, we focused on farm-type-folk on Tuesday. Thankfully they were even more willing to sit for a long chunk of time and let us survey them, and we were also becoming much quicker at surveying. Sam had to spend a good amount of the time speaking in Luganda, so it was a bit laborious, but even more interesting to have him back-translate to me and explain exactly how he had explained in Luganda.

Sitting on a straw mat, in the dappled sunlight filtering through racks of drying tobacco, learning about why a young mother deals with money the way she does, as her 2-year old son sits on her lap, playing with her mobile phone and staring at me with wide eyes... moments that redeem the daily bullshit of Kampala.

Around 4 or 4:30 we decided it was time to start heading back. Walked the highway

looking for a taxi. How would you like this to have been your boarding primary school?

-notice the right-most room is labeled "Girls Dormitory". Yeesh! And no windows.

Aaaand we walked

And finally found a taxi. Jammed ourselves inside

and headed back towards Kyotera.

I wound up crammed halfway between the front and back seats, and just as I was chuckling to myself about the fact that the driver would turn the engine off during any down-hill chunk of road, and noticing how low the fuel-gauge was, the engine sputtered and died. The driver battled valiantly, but the inevitable was inevitable.

Chug

Chug

Sputter

Done.

The driver hopped out and found a boda-boda (motorbike taxi) driver and gave him money to go to Kyotera and fetch some fuel. For reasons I cannot even venture to explain, no one got out of the damn car as we waited. And waited. And my foot fell asleep. And we waited. And I didn't want to cause some sort of cultural faux-pax (spelling?) and be the obnoxious muzungu demanding everyone got out.

After about 10 minutes Finally someone else made the first move and we all tumbled out of the car. Sam, ever the unstereotypical Ugandan (always in a hurry, impatient about delay), said he didn't think the boda-boda man would come back and since Kyotera was only a few kilometers away, we should just start walking, and maybe we'd catch a ride part-way.

And so we walked

We joked about asking an old man who bicycled by for a ride, but decided against it. Finally a boda-boda driver transporting a small sack of grain on the front of his motorbike pulled up and agreed to take us the last couple kilometers for 1000 shillings (~$0.50). Even Sam felt a little bad about the fare, but the driver seemed content!

*Note: collar popped to ward off sun.

Back through Kyotera

And found a taxi headed to Masaka town (towards Kampala). Rode for a few minutes in absolute luxury - the only 2 passengers in the car! And with a delightfully cheery driver.

Stared out the window at the Ugandan sky

and made it to Masaka town in no time. Found the taxi park and hopped in a taxi (a Kampala-style minivan) headed to Kampala. The taxi was mostly full so we were feeling good about our chances. Foolish us.

Fortunately I again had diversion- I spent most of the 45 minute wait on the phone, with Pia skyping from Kampala, Sarah on her phone in her office in Jinja (in the East) and one of the Principle Investigators for the project (Julian, Senior Economist of the Boston Fed, for those who've been keeping up) on his phone on a train in Connecticut. One of the more frustrating phone calls of my life.

Finally we started moving, after even all of the Ugandan passengers were getting annoyed.

Somehow, and I can't even begin to explain why, what should have been about a 2 hour drive back to Kampala wound up being a solid 4 hours. Even the Ugandans started getting frustrated for the last couple hours. Sam was damn near apoplectic - mostly because he missed the first bit of the Manchester United game (see previous post). Finally, exhausted, butt-sore from the padding-less taxi seat, and cramped from being squished in the back of the taxi, we made it back to Kampala taxi park. Hopped a boda-boda, and home around 11:30.

Aaaaand had a frenetically busy day today. I'll be crawling to Friday... when I'll be going to Lake Bunyonyi in the West to relax on a little island for 4 days with some friends! Couldn't come soon enough.

Damn I'm exhausted. But it was good to be out of the city for a bit, and learn a helluvalot!

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