African adventures: an intro

"The first rule in Uganda is that there are no rules."

My new friend, Charles, stated this bluntly as we sped down a two-lane dirt road toward the country's capital city of Kampala.

He was referring to the terrible traffic that cripples this city of over 11 million residents. Cars compete with giant buses, pedestrians balancing baskets of fruit on their heads, and the occasional long-horned cow for precious driving space. Motor bike taxis (called boda-bodas) with beautiful African women perched delicately on the back seat weave dangerously in and out of the street. There are no lane markers, stop lights, or sidewalks. There is only chaos.

Loud, dirty, glorious chaos.

The lack of rules and order in Uganda extends far beyond transportation. The government is terribly corrupt, and bribing must be done in order to accomplish almost anything. The amount of car exhaust and smoke hanging in the air would give an EPA employee a panic attack. The concept of time is also skewed--African time runs anywhere from one to three hours behind schedule. And the rest of the city is an abstract painting of red dirt, bits of trash, pounding music, and a constant sea of people.

This scene would no doubt be terrifying for some to witness. But the rawness of life here exhilarates me in a way that nothing ever has, or probably ever will.

My first 10 days in this very new and mysterious continent have been a whirlwind of sights, sounds, and smells. Sharing in this experience are eight other students from the University of Colorado, plus professors and staff members from the Global Livingston Institute (GLI). Our three week class is entitled "International Development in East Africa," and encompasses many facets of this highly complicated and volatile issue.

GLI's motto is "listen, think, act." A basic premise of the class is that too many solutions have been implemented in the developing world by those who acted before truly understanding the needs and capacity of the community. Of course, there are a plethora of factors as to why international aid has caused little growth in developing countries, including political instability, corruption, exploitation, colonialism, slavery, war, disease, a lack of infrastructure, holy shit I could go on but I won't. In a nut shell, we are here to identify problems, analyze the solutions being implemented, and form our own conclusions.

My time is too short--and the internet access far too slow--to detail everything I have experienced in the past two weeks. The short version is this: I have witnessed the most extreme poverty of my life in the slums of Kampala. I worked with refugees who fled from the Lord's Resistance Army in Lira--including the former child bride of Joseph Kony. I witnessed a massive dance party at a prison in Jinja. And I have been thinking deeply about my immense privilege as an American, and wrestling with white guilt, on the daily.

Hopefully I will have more time to write about my experiences in the coming days. Until then...

Spray-painted sign on a girl's school in rural Uganda

I found a baby goat! It does not look pleased..

This guy pulled the sunglasses off of my face and started modeling. Taken in the Katanga slum during a mini-health clinic we put together. 

Katanga slum, Kampala, Uganda

Street kids in Kampala

The peanut struggle is real, y'all. 

Street market... somewhere

A white rhino grazing on some delicious grass

This is the road... yeah. 

Best bad translation to date