Already a weekend away

Only my second weekend in town and I decided it was time to get away.

Ok... that's not entirely true. My adoptive friends decided for me it was time to get away. Actually, a pair of those adoptive friends had their wedding party last weekend, so they decided for all of us that it was time to get away. Whatever - the important part is that I spent the weekend - from late Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon at a lovely place called Ssissa up a hill about 20 miles outside of Kampala. And it was awesome.

On the road to Ssissa:

From Ssissa

Friday was actually Ugandan independence day and a national holiday... not that that meant I didn't have a meeting plus a couple hours of work. Sheehsh. Aaaaanyway, we arrived at a little club called Ssissa, well up a dirt quasi-road Friday evening and spent about an hour just coming to terms with the view. Helllooooooo Africa!

From Ssissa

Moses and Jillian had their wedding ceremony in early September but, for reasons I forgot to ask about, had their party this past weekend. If you have the chance to go to a Uganda wedding, go for the second half. The first half is pretty much a long stream of long speeches by relevant folks which, while interesting for their cultural nuance, had the tendency to get a bit... rambling. One relative of Moses treated the 100ish guests to a long ambling diatribe about what a wonderful success his bank is. I needed to know that.

Oh! One highlight of the speeches was that one of Moses' relatives told Jillian that they're giving her a cow as a wedding present! HAH! It must have been a runty baby cow, though, because I investigated and there were definitely no full-cow-sized wrapped packages on the gift table. Also the local band definitely played a song at one point that had "hakuna matata". Hah! I'm in Africa and someone said hakuna matata!

As, in my experience, is characteristic of weddings around the world, shenanigans ensued after dinner as the beer and wine flowed. I had long conversations about totally irrelevant topics with people I didn't know (including a freelance journalist - that was a pretty interesting one), I drank some beer that renewed my despair about the developing world's distaste for beer with flavor, I saw my boss get down to some Ugandan music, and I got down to some Ugandan music (by "got down" I of course mean tried not to worry about how much of a doofus I was making of myself by trying to imitate my brand new Ugandan buddies).

The lodge had beautiful cabins for rooms... but not enough. So I slept on a cot in a tent! I love fake camping! (I was about 8 feet from the cabin some friends were staying in, complete with hot shower and flushing toilet... talk about roughing it). Saturday morning was a bit rough for everyone, but that just made the day that much more relaxing: no one could really muster the energy to do much of anything beyond read. And read. And read. And nap. Nothing like being in a comfy chair in an open-air lodge during an African thunderstorm to put me right to sleep.

Can you figure out where I slept?

From Ssissa

The lodge:

From Ssissa

Most of the guests left later Friday night or Saturday morning, so Saturday evening was much mellower. It actually got cold Saturday night so we spent the evening blanketed and couched around a roaring fire, enjoying pleasurable conversation. Wait, scratch that. It was me and 4 girls on a couch... I'm sure you can imagine the conversations I had the pleasure to be privy to. If I hadn't been so damn comfortable...

I was thrilled to discover that Sunday presented the same phenomenal view as the previous days. Fortunately, however, the storms stayed away for the first half-day so I could watch my petite female flatmates trap-shoot. What we discovered: Kate, the somewhat-firearm-experienced 5'1.75" (by her report) Kansasian couldn't hit the broadside of a quickly-moving clay-pigeon-sized barn. She hit 1 of 25 targets. Hannah "Sharp-Shootin'" Schwing, the timid Texas-bred never-touched-a-gun mysteriously also 5' 1.75" vegan took down 7 out of 12. Well played.

Sharp-shootin' Schwing:

From Ssissa

Well that was about the long and short of the weekend: read, read, read, eat, nap, read, watch little girls shoot big guns. And back to town we mosied. I'd love to say that the nice relaxing weekend made for a nice relaxing Monday, but I'm still in the midst of the frantically-try-to-learn-how-to-do-everything-while-being-expected-to-do-everything first few weeks of work. Example: I'm going to be sent up to the North of Uganda to teach another IPA Project Associate how to use a program I don't know how to use. Woo!

And on that note, click here for lots&lots of pictures:

Ssissa Lodge

No real theme... but some pictures!

First of all, check it out! You can see where I live (You have to copy and paste the link into a browser):

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=102142699161213526741.00047566939e340cbfd7a&ll=0.310443,32.626503&spn=0.002806,0.003535&t=h&z=18


It looks just about as soulless from the ground, too. It's the inside that matters, though, right? Here's a sneak peak:



Yes, it is bigger, more spacious and generally more comfortable than my apartment in Berkeley was. And it has a washing machine! And a gas stove! I had to travel clear to the opposite side of the planet to finally have these luxuries.


Sooo in the process of making my living space even more livable, I bought myself a new foam mattress. Except I didn't really "measure" my bed before buying the mattress. So what do you do when your foam mattress is about a foot wider than your bed? Equip your flatmate with a bread knife and sick her on it:



A few people have asked me about the weather here. Yes, I am only about 25 miles north of the equator. And yes, it is POURING rain right now. And actually kinda cold. Uganda in general is actually fairly high-altitude, meaning that we don't get that stereotypically hot&steamy air-so-thick-you-can-almost-drink-it equatorial clime. Instead it's actually pretty nice. There have definitely been a few moments of "holy crap it is Africa hot!" but the weather tends to be pretty variable. Today's a good example: when I left the house at 8:15 it was bright and sunny and bordering on hot. At noon it starting thundering, lightninging and POURING rain. I don't remember the last time I heard thunder like that - it sounded like someone was shelling the office.

Aaaanyway, this kind of weather makes choosing one's attire in the morning a bit tricky... especially when one's mode of transportation to the office is the back of a motorbike-taxi. Hence my awesome traveling-to-work get-up on Tuesday:


I was going for the pastel-spaceman-commando look.

And 30 seconds late, voila!




And a completely unrelated pretty picture of Kampala from the hill of Makerere University:



Ok, that's about the end of my themeless rambling for the evening. Have a nice yesterday!

I love hybrid words!

But credit where credit is due: thanks Matt for the monumental effort it took for your wee little brain to combine my name and the country I'm now in to come up with... UGANDANIEL!

Though I will say Ugandaniel just barely won in a photo-finish with Afrikatz.
Kampalatz came in a pretty distant third. Mostly because it sounds like a traditional dish in Eastern European cuisine.

But first, a word of warning: this is probably going to be a text-heavy first post. I have a lot to tell and I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to start carrying my gigantic camera with me around town. But soon!

So I’m officially a week in! And I don’t have malaria yet! Or a parasite (I think)! Or a shrunken head!
Am I being insensitive yet?

Anyway, things have actually started off pretty well. The trip halfway around the world (from LA, via Detroit and Amsterdam, to Entebbe) was remarkably uneventful. The only real features I can remember noting were that the window-washers in Amsterdam have amazingly overly-Batman-esque utility belts and that I don’t think serving curry as a meal option on an airplane is a great idea. After 23 hours of traveling (but 33 hours after I left), I arrived in Uganda. My new employer had arranged to have a taxi pick me up so I got to feel mildly important for having a guy waiting for me with my name on a sign… and it wasn’t even my brother with a “Dummy Katz” sign.
Before I left, my boss had put me in touch with a friend of hers who was looking for a flatmate, so I arranged with her that I would rent the room for a month and then I will decide if I want to stay (and she’ll decide if she wants me to). I had very little idea what to expect, but when I arrived Monday evening, I found the flat actually surpassed what hopes I’d allow myself. It is spacious, open, airy and in a former army barracks courtesy of Idi Amin. We are located in a neighborhood called Bugolobi (I love saying that name) which is located a bit on the outskirts of Kampala. It’s close enough that I can take a long walk or a short boda-boda (motorbike taxi) ride to just about anywhere in town, but far enough that there’s actually grass around, as well as space for me to run (and thus maintain sanity).
All 5 of my roommates are as agreeable as the space itself. Kate and Hannah are both friendly and welcoming, and have been wonderfully willing to show me around town and allow me to tag along with them. The other 3, feline, roommates provide plenty of entertainment and have yet to prove themselves anywhere near as irritating as my Brazilian cat-companion.
I hope to take a video-tour of my apartment soon, which I’ll be able to upload to youtube and post here. Keep an eye out if you want to see what living in Africa as a gringo (“mzungu”) researcher looks like!

My first few days are kind of a blurry mess of sloppy sleep scheduling and impressions of Africa. Kampala is definitely a serious city with the usual mixture of city-goods and city-bads. Traffic is abysmal and exhaust fumes can be ghastly. On the up-side, restaurants are aplenty and entertainment profuse. I have actually allowed/forced myself to take it pretty easy this past week – I’m going to be here plenty long to get to know my surroundings intimately and I wanted to make sure I started work relaxed and well-rested. I’ve done well on the relaxation front – I’ve blown through a couple books and taken copious advantage of the flat’s stock of DVDs and couches – but rest has been somewhat more elusive. Despite my medical professional parents’ urgings, I opted not to take Ambien on the flight, or since I’ve been here. Thus, I slept sparsely on the flights and have been all over the place since I’ve been here. On Tuesday I awoke at 6am, on Wednesday at 2:15pm (to a text message from Hannah asking for some confirmation that I was alive), on Thursday at 5am and Friday at 10am. I determined that my packed-out foam mattress may have been the culprit so yesterday Kate took me mattress-shopping (she has a car! Oooooo….), which was an adventure (picture a teeny little Toyota with a full-size foam mattress folded in half tied to the roof with twine and a mzungu clambering into the passenger seat through the window because he tied the door shut). Last night went somewhat better, hopefully the situation continues to improve.
Aaaaaanyway, on Thursday I actually traveled about an hour from Kampala to Jinja with my boss (from here on to be referred to as “Pia”… because that’s her name) to sit in on a training session for the enumerators (the people who actually go out and interview/proctor surveys in the field) on another study. It was a nice excuse to see some pretty countryside and meet some more folks, and tired me out enough for a serious nap when I returned home in the afternoon. Friday evening a friend of Kate and Hannah’s had a dinner party and Saturday night I was introduced to the ex-pat scene at a local bar.

And today was my first day of work! I will be the go-to guy for 2 studies that Innovations for Poverty Action (poverty-action.org) is starting on microsavings. For the sake of space/reader-sanity-maintenance I will limit my descriptions one of the studies will look at the effectiveness of a couple different types of incentives for getting people to open and use savings accounts and the other will study the effects of providing financial literacy counseling to teenagers. And both of them are still pretty much on the drawing board, so I get to see them all the way through to fruition! HOLY CRAP I HAVE A LOT TO LEARN.

Ok, I’m going to force myself to stop here… I could easily continue rambling for quite a while. I will do my damndest to keep this sucker pretty up to date with the goings-on of my African life… and replete with pictures! I miss you all – please feel free to leave comments below the post so I know my typed words aren’t falling on deaf ears. Or deaf eyes.