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Welcome to Kampala

Reflecting on a month in Uganda, part one

By Malte Ahrens

January 15^th, 2015

Do not let the peaceful tranquility of the ochre-stained sky and half-light illuminated hills fool you. Sunrise may be calm, but the day is nothing but. The sound of badly-timed two-strokes fills the air, the smell of charcoal stoves grilling gonja and cooking chapati wafts eminently, and the ordered movements of dawn are replaced with a hive of bustling energy and vibrant businesses.

Welcome to the capital. Home to almost two million people, it is located centrally in the East African country, not too far from the shores of Lake Victoria. With its hills and wetlands teeming with Impalas when the British arrived in the late nineteenth-century, it quickly became known as Kampala. Uganda is home to a rich history dating back at least fifty-thousand years, per paleolithic evidence. Central in the East African Rift, with a favorable climate and reliable rainfall, its lush rainforests were quickly transformed into highly productive agrarian lands. Over the next millennia, Arab traders, British colonists and Indian labourers came to the land of the Baganda people (literally, Uganda, in the Luganda language) leading to the 1962 declaration of the modern state of Uganda and independence from Great Britain. Today, with a population of just under forty-million, Uganda is the world’s second most populous landlocked country, after Ethiopia. Over half of Ugandans are children, and almost four-fifths are under thirty. It is a beautiful, vibrant and young country.

Welcome to Uganda.

Sunrise over the Butabika hills, as seen from our Luzira Inn (Red Chilli Hideaway)

BUGOLOBI Market

I like markets. The hustle, the bustle, the bartering, the diversity, the opportunity: the life. Done right, they epitomize non-zero sum transactions - business where all involved profit, unlike, say, eating a cake, where the size of your slice directly impacts the amount of cake that others may feast on.

In Uganda, markets line the streets and fill the suburbs; business is everywhere - street side vendors, stores operating out of brightly painted repurposed shipping containers, corrugated iron shacks, stalls under bright umbrellas, textile markets, and supermarkets (including, more recently, international mega supermarket chains from Kenya (Nakumatt) and South Africa (Shoprite)). Drive slowly enough through the right streets, and your vehicle will be swarmed by entrepreneurs selling groundnuts (peanuts), gonja, clothing, and household goods (plastic cups, pots and pans, etc.).

Bugolobi market, a four-decade old center of commerce that began as half-a-dozen stalls roofed with papyrus leaves, is tucked in the upmarket hills of the suburb. Perhaps over one hundred and fifty stores fill the hectare of land bordered by the diamond-shaped arrangement of Airtel-red stacked shipping containers. Most stores are housed along this perimeter, with its center a vibrant fresh fruit, vegetable and meat market. Hills of matoke (starchy, green bananas that are generally served boiled, then mashed), shaded by broken cardboard boxes, form the contour lines, while the freshly skinned carcases hanging from the rafters, filling the space underneath the open corrugated-iron structure, provide the waypoints. An incredible sensory experience.

We stopped at one of these stalls, a chapatti stand manned by a teenage trio. Three boys, going into their sophomore year of high school (Senior-four, it’s called in Uganda) were spending their summer holidays at the market. Underneath a bright-red Coca Cola umbrella, they cooked chapatis, the Ugandan spin on the worldwide classic water and flour unleavened flatbread, selling them for 1000 Ush - about 35 US cents; and rolexes, an omlette with a garden variety of vegetables inside, all wrapped in a chapati, for 2000 Ush.

Hungry, we ordered some rolexes all round. Quickly, eggs were beaten in green plastic cup; peppers, carrots, and onions were chopped; some spices and salt was added; and the mix was poured onto the sizzling charcoal-heated hot plate. The eggs, which were stacked three layers high in the corner of the stall, under a second kaleidoscopically-colored umbrella, were unrefrigerated. Sold with their wax coating still protecting them, these eggs do not require refrigeration and can last for several weeks, even at room temperature. Also interesting to note, is the color of the yolk: a bleached-white shade of pale-yellow. With limited xanthophylls (yellow pigments e.g. carrots, corn, and soybeans) in their diet, most East African chickens lay eggs with yolks that miss out on that bright-orange color we have come to expect. A minute or two later, the slightly-pale omelette was done, rolled up with the chapati, wrapped in a plastic bag and placed into a recycled paper bag. Recycled, from old printed copies of Winners Betting Ltd.’ s soccer betting odds for the December 18th pan-Europe games.

Lunch in hand, we thanked the trio, paid and continued to tour the market.

We found a tailor offering custom shirts and dresses starting at seventeen-dollars, express-made in two days. Fabric could either be chosen from a limited in-store stock for another fifteen dollars, or you could bring-your-own.

Nearby, we bought airtime at a local Airtel store. One gigabyte of 3G data for a few dollars, some minutes and a new SIM card. When calculating change, the attendant hesitated, made counting motions, quietly mouthed numbers, looked to her colleagues, and finally borrowed a calculator. She may not have been confident in counting, but she did have access to a calculator.

We met Nora, a young women selling dried mushrooms and hibiscus tea from the Northern plains, promising vitality. Together with her business partner - and her business partner’s young baby boy, who lay naked on the floor, hidden behind a fluttering red curtain - they ran their self-described “social enterprise” from a humble second-story corner store. Throughout our conversation, she would intermittently turn the refrigerator on and off, cooling the already prepared tea housed in its freezer comparment.

The idea of a social enterprise is an interesting one. It lies littered on a stage with fellow words and concepts whose meanings have been questioned by disregard and overuse. Any business, by its very nature, exists to connect people in a transaction where both benefit. Sometimes that profit may lie far in the future, too far, maybe, for us to truly grasp; other times it may be hidden by our own biases; or, in its creation and division, people are forgotten and ideals are lost, but economic profit comes hand-in-hand with social profit. The question is when, where, and for whom?

And that, that comes back to the most fundamental question of anything we do: Why?

The produce section takes up the central space, surrounded by the bright-red painted stores

In and around kampala

Remarkably, chemical supply stores were not that hard to find. Stock was good, if a bit aged - the sulphuric acid had lost some of its molarity, and the aluminum had long oxidized into a slightly less useful white powder (aluminum oxide - one of the active ingredients in many sunscreens). More on this later.

Motorcycle taxis (Boda-Bodas) are everywhere in Uganda (and East Africa, in general). Cheap, quick and easy to find, they're fantastic - and often the only way of getting around. They are generally clean and very well maintained. You also have the blue-striped white Toyota Hiace shared taxi vans - matatus, they are known as, in Swahili. They service main routes along main roads - handy if you know where you are going. All round, these “informal” public transport systems are great. Sure, they may not be the clean, quiet, anonymously upholstered, air-conditioned mass transit that we see in our Western cities, but they are efficient and, most interestingly, have character.

Commerce by Candlelight

These markets continue well into the evening. Most are open for two-thirds of the day - from seven to ten.

Light, like most forces of nature, has always been a great equalizer - we all struggle in its absence. The advent of oil lamps, and then electric lighting, changed that, however. While we all still struggle, our struggles are no longer equal. It’s absence brings great clarity to the hierarchy on the streets - from those sponging light from the odd street lamp, to those sitting around a flickering paraffin wax candle, to those standing behind a short wooden table illuminated by a sole kerosene lamp, to those with a walled store and elaborate motorcycle battery / generator system, wealth is obvious and poverty even more so.

Streetside night market on Old Kira Road, Kamwokya

Night affords us the freedom to fill the deep, dark, black voids of our vision with our imagination - anything and anyone. That same freedom, however, can also bring out the worst in those who see it as a veil. Walking around Kampala during the day in a group of half-a-dozen mzungus* certainly raises attention and the odd comment or ogle. Later in the village, the long flowing hair of the women on our team was a frequent choice of attempted barters - a goat for a head of hair, a few chickens for another, and apparently (only?) a dove for my own short hair, after I interjected.

The night, however, was piqued with cat calling, wolf whistling, free tongues, and purposeful movements to ‘bump’. Patriarchy remains, as it does in most geographics and societies. “Wrong” places and “bad” times are ascribed everywhere, but should they really exist? Do they really exist?

*from Kiswahili, literally meaning a ‘dizzy person’, it was used to describe the first European explorers of East Africa with their aimless wandering (read: “exploring”). These days it is a blanket word used to refer to white-skinned people, though, depending on where in East Africa, it can also refer to ‘rich behavior’ rather than skin color.

Grilled goat with matoke (plantains) and posho (cornflour porridge)

Fruit stalls in the dusk traffic along Old Kira Road. A traffic policeman looks on.

The Mengo Kisenyi scrapyard

Connecting the suburbs of Mengo and Kisenyi, between Gaddafi’s Mosque and the Mengo Palace (Lubiri), is Mwanga II Road. Just off this four-lane wide road (during the day it is more like two to three lanes, with parked cars and motorcycles, stalls reaching the road and crumbling potholes on either side) lies the Mengo-Kisenyi metal scrapyard. Anything, from bicycle gears and rebar threads, to industrial boilers and hydraulic rams from giant mining excavators can be bought here. Decide what you want, inspecting the steel and shopping around, and as part of the deal, you get it cut to size by one of blue overalled teenagers who’s called over with his little hacksaw. With every armful of parts bought, a new truckload comes in. If you are selling, almost anything is accepted and, by the end of the day, it will be reduced to its constitutive parts by a dozen-strong team of workers wielding oxyacetylene torches, hammers and hacksaws, all while in singlets and flip flops.

To me, scrapyards are sandboxes filled with great hunks of steel potential. They are brilliant, and so was Mengo-Kisenyi.

The loss of neighborhood hardware stores, perhaps slowly to be followed by supermarkets, may mostly be replaceable with diverse online catalogs and almost unbelievably-fast shipping wholesalers like Digikey, Amazon and McMaster; but the loss of curated physical spaces, not unlike libraries, is tangible. They are spaces through which one can walk without too much intimidation, even when not an expert. You can touch, you can feel, you can look, you can smell, you can pry and you can prod; you can step back and imagine possibilities; you can navigate the aisles like the scribbled dog-eared pages of a book. We're losing the physical experience.

There is a time for exploring, and there is a time for browsing. Sometimes you see boundless possibility where others see garbage, scrap or junk; and other times, it is vice versa.

We need more of those moments.

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The bicycles that aren't scrapped are used for transport

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Dismantling of an industrial lathe with an oxyacetylene torch in flip flops

Storefront and home, tucked in the corner of the scrap yard

Karim, scrap yard worker and weightlifter

Katende's Workshop

We had an idea. Lindsey’s research had shown the merits of case hardening - the process of heating metals in a carbon-rich environment, infusing the outer surface of the metal, strengthening its chemical lattice. This increased strength, while also increasing brittleness, could help extend the life of key parts of a charcoal production machine. After the carbonized and then ground plant matter is slurried in a solution of water and a binder (often powdered cassava or its extracted starch, tapioca), it needs to be shaped. To speed up the process, our community partner was using the equivalent of a sausage maker - an archimedes screw in a long pipe forcing the charcoal mix together and out a tight end, to form two-inch diameter cylindrical briquettes. The charcoal slurry is prohibitively abrasive, particularly on the screw, so Lindsey proposed to case harden it. To test this, we bought two steel rods and rebar at the scrapyard (total cost: about $20) to make into screws which we could evaluate live in the field. Katende, a local fabricator with his machine shop on Old Kira Road, worked with us to make it happen.

Making is what transforms ideas to ideals, materials to machines, and resources to things. From cooking to constructing, soldering to ligasing, drawing to building, weaving to welding to writing, to make is to be able to do anything. It is to be free, to determine your own destiny, to create, not just consume; to play, not be played.

Resource constrained environments breed makers. Plato discussed it in The Republic, Book II two millennia ago, talking about the beginnings of the state - “and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention” - and everyday we see it all around us. It is the celebration of the human spirit: life doesn't just go on, it gets better - and we can make it so.

That’s not to say that in light of all the problems facing us today, from inequality in opportunity to poverty to preventable suffering and death, we be complacent. Seeing the world for what it can be, not just for what it is, is what moves us forward. That required naïveté places you on the razor-sharp edge between dream and vision. At times, it can feel like all the world’s a stage, illusive and allegorically cave-like - symptoms of questioning your own ability to make.

Put aside the doubt. What would you do if you could do anything?

Taking a break from building the screw - welding rebar around a steel rod to form its flights. Orange sodas all round!

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A brick press - fill with clay and use the levered press to push them into shape

A candle making machine - pour hot wax on the top, let the 500 molds fill up, and let cool via the liquid cooling system

Another brick making machine: clay gets ground by two heavy rollers and ejected out the other side, into a brick form.

A plastic shredding machine, for recycling PET bottles and other plastics

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The motorcycle chain acts as a variable resistor (controlled by the green L-beam) for the welding transformer (smoking)

Lindsey and Dan going over the shopping list at the scrapyard

Kampala Hospital

Sh*t happens.

Within two Hillsong hymns playing over YouTube, my blood was taken, urine analyzed and a CBC done. Impressive.

Sometimes you get sick. Most times you just deal with it, sometimes with help from doctors and drugs, and you move on.

Life is not all that different in Uganda, or anywhere in the world, really, it just comes down to access. And access to preventative healthcare, as is all too often still the case, remains dictated by access to money. It’s not necessarily a lot of money:

A consultation with a GP (waiting maybe ten minutes in the emergency room): 20, 000 Ush

A blood test (CBC - complete blood count): 10, 000 Ush

Assorted drugs (Ibuprofen, IV Ceftriaxone, etc. - five days worth of each): 10, 000 Ush

All up, that’s about twenty-one dollars. Not a lot by most western-standards - even less so, considering that this is before health insurance. For most Ugandan’s, however, it can be quite the burden. Four-fifths of the population live with less than a US dollar-twentyfive a day (not adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) i.e. adjusted for the fact that goods and services are, generally, cheaper in Uganda - adjusted, the number falls to 37.9% living under US $1.25 / day). Earn under a dollar-a-day, and you generally spend between half and three-quarters of your budget on food (Duflo and Banerjee, 2007).* Assuming, then, that you dedicate all of their non-food budget to medical expenses, one of my visits to the emergency room would have cost you your discretionary income for at least a month.

With just one doctor per ten-thousand people (WHO, 2010) - forty times lower than in the United States - and total health expenditure, both public and private, per person of just $44 annually (versus $8, 895 here in the US) it is no wonder that health care remains inaccessible to many. But that’s not all.

The sphygmomanometer’s velcro cuff had lost its stick, so I was asked to hold it in place with my free hand; no tourniquet was available, so the nurse fashioned one by tying a latex glove around my arm and fastening it in a knot; no ASOT antibodies were available, so the test was sent to another lab; and bandaids were either out or missing, so we fashioned one out of my hand and some cotton wool.

Stock and supply chain remain an issue. So what? There are indeed material things that are life saving - autoclaves, incubators, centrifuges, preventative vaccinations (we should note, though, that funding or a country’s income-status do not entirely dictate this - for example, even Rwanda has higher HPV vaccination rates in the target population than the United States (CDC) (WHO)), etc. - but this was not the case. Where things were not available, they improvised, and very well. Too often, it seems, we accrue more value to processes, machines and the sterile, than to the kind, impassioned and brilliant doctors that serve us.

*the research is not perfectly transferable, acknowledging varying geographies and people, and that Duflo and Banerjee’s research is PPP adjusted.

One of two 1g Ceftriaxone doses per day - photo by Dan Sweeney

The road to Soroti

With the last dose of the antibiotics injected into my veins, one sextillion - about as many grains of sand as there are on earth - ceftriaxone molecules gushing through my body to the beat of my heart, searching to bind to the proteins required in bacterial cell wall synthesis, and neuter them by torsioning their structure, we were ready.

The next part of our journey took us north, into the hot, dusty, rust-stained plains of Uganda. The six-hour ride on mostly paved roads takes you around Lake Kyoga, through rainforests and along tea plantations. The day’s journey for the three of us (the others had gone ahead, as we stayed behind for the daily hospital visits) in a private car, cost 400,000 Shillings - about $140 US. Along the way, you pass through small towns, now sprawled along the highway, spreading longitudinally. Slowdown and veer to the left of the widened lanes, and your vehicle - motorcycle, car or bus - is immediately swarmed by an armada of blue Pepsi vested entrepreneurs selling everything from roast chicken to ice-cold drinks, each for 1,000 Shillings.

With some roast gonja (sweet plantain) in hand, wrapped in 9mm-ruled notepad paper, we were on our way once more, into the sunset and, then, the deep blackness of a night not shroud by light pollution.

Till the next installment - learning, teaching and building learning spaces in Soroti.

Stop on the side of a road, and you're swarmed with sellers of all sorts of delightful snacks

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Nightime overtaking of a lorry stocked with sugar cane, jerry cans and people

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