Walking Kampala (Uganda)

On Uganda being a country song

(There is so much to write about Kampala. So this is the first of what I hope is three posts.)

I wasn’t surprised the first song I heard in Kampala was an old American one. I wouldn’t have guessed it was one by Patty Loveless though. Yet it soon made sense, because Christopher, my cabbie for the drive into the city¹, fit every Country Music fan stereotype: He loved God, his family, and his country, although in this case, Uganda not the USA.

He also loved beer, so he was open to the idea of stopping for one, or maybe two or even three, at one of the roadside clubs. He was further sold on the idea because there was an Euro cup game going on he wanted to watch, although he didn’t say that. Instead he said he wanted to make sure I was safe. “It’s better you have a beer here. Not downtown. Downtown has many many prostitutes. They will rob you.”

So we stopped at a club that I have no idea why he chose. We passed hundreds that looked the same: a wood, brick, tin shack with a hand painted sign out front, a TV and fridge inside, and a sound system that costs more than everything else combined. A system so loud you could hear it from the road twenty yards away — an accomplishment given the other noises. It wasn’t for the ease of parking. That required two boys to help him navigate the open pits, junk piles, and men lounging in the dirt field fronting the club. It also didn’t seem to address his prostitution concerns, although I might have misjudged the four salaciously dressed young women lounging around, playing Candy Crush, and eyeing me like a giant white ATM. If so, I apologize, and I’ll re-calibrate my global prostitution model.

An hour later I was at my downtown hotel, loopy from thirty-five hours without sleep, but giddy to have made it, to have navigated two flight delays, a dysfunctional but kind passport control, and finally able to sit down to a meal. But that, I was told, didn’t exist downtown at 9 p.m. Not according to Google, Yelp, or Rita at the front desk. She suggested I eat in the hotel restaurant, and she, like Christopher, scolded me for even thinking about going out, especially to the one listed bar, Top Pub, a quarter of a mile away, “Do not go. That is very dangerous. Bad women who will rob you. Bad men who will kill you.”

The hotel restaurant was open, although it took an hour and half for my grilled chicken and rice to arrive. When it did, I was past done for the evening.

The next morning I began to understand the foolishness of what I’d gotten myself into. The idea that I was going to walk ten miles across town, or even five, was absurd. Walking the one mile to buy the necessities for my ten-day stay, since my “Executive Suit” didn’t come with toilet paper, soap, bottled water, or more than two minutes of hot water, turned into an hour-long slog of dodging motorcycles, semis, vans, people balancing anything and everything on their heads (including twenty-foot-long razor sharp metal rods), mud puddles, garbage piles, vendors, chasms, and sickly begging toddlers. By the end of the round trip I was filthy, drenched in sweat, and bordering on heat exhaustion.

Yet I kept at it, building up each day, watching the locals and learning the system. The answer was clear. Nobody walks ten miles, and if they do, it’s motivated by desperation, not curiosity, because they’re so broken they don’t even have the ten cents for one of the ubiquitous shared vans, the Matatus, that slowly run up and down the main streets. Or a dollar for a Boda-boda, the even more ubiquitous motorcycles that can charge more because they’re a clever solution to Kampalas hours-long jams. You jump onto the back of a 150cc dirt bike, hold on, and let the driver hack the traffic— weave around semis, zoom down the mud shoulder, zigzag around pedestrians, or even drive on the wrong way the side of the road, because it’s the spirit of the law that matters. Whatever it takes to get you wherever your going as quickly as possible.

Getting anywhere in Kampala becomes a game of time, risk, and cost analysis. Walking is the cheapest, slowest (although not always for distances under two miles), but also dangerous. You have to be constantly alert, and if you aren’t, you might come shockingly close to getting speared in the back by lumber jutting from a passing Boda-boda (like me). Or you might get slapped in the head by a side-view mirror. Or you might slip into an open sewer as the ground gives. Or you might get your ankles tangled in rusty razor-wire.

What you don’t have to worry about is other people. Nobody has come anywhere close to threatening me, although they have, through their curiosity, interest, and sometimes genuine and other times calculating kindness, slowed me down.

There is an increased viscosity that comes with being white in Kampala, a retardation of movement and progress from all the hands reaching out to touch you, all the requests to sell you something, all the offers to help you, all the shouts of friendship, or all of the above.

I am a mark, an attraction, that everyone globs onto, because I am a white, an outsider, a Muzungo, something I’m constantly told, and the source of endless fascination.

Being a Muzungo means I am very rich, very uptight, always in a hurry, pushy, but mostly naive. I am an over-educated fool, removed from the realities of life, and easily scammed. All these things I’ve been told directly, without a drop of irony, or embarrassment. As one young man I was walking with said, it’s also why I get dirty,

Me to him: I’m always impressed with how well put together people are here. They live in cement brick homes without indoor plumbing. The streets are dirt with rivers of mud. The air is choked with smog and smoke. And yet a woman walks around in spotless crisp clothes, immaculate heels, done up hair, and a face painted to perfection. I get back after ten minutes walking and I’ve got dirt everywhere. Including in my mouth

Him to me: That’s because you muzungu are dirty.

Me: what????

Him: You don’t know how to stay clean. You don’t respect your body. You don’t know how to avoid dirt, because you have removed yourself from it and wash up with a hundred tanks of water.

All the hands reaching out to me, all the pestering, while annoying, is also completely understandable. I am a highly visible outsider, and so almost certainly have more money, more connections, and more power than ninety-nine percent of Ugandans. I can help them, and since I’m here, I probably want to, or should. I saw the same thing in Senegal, although in Kampala while the requests are equally blunt, they are far less aggressive.

It’s also why, after only six days here, I now have close to thirty Ugandan names in my WhatsApp. Everyone, no matter how fleeting the interaction, wants to stay connected. Sometimes it’s a targeted request, like Christopher who wants to be my full time my driver. Mostly though, it’s only a vague “I want to be your friend.”

Many of those numbers come from two bars, one being Top Pub, the place I was told on my first night to never go to. Despite that, or maybe because of that, I went the second night, and wasn’t surprised to find it’s more welcoming, and less dangerous than I was told.

Top Pub does have plenty of prostitutes, although they are easily parried with a “I’m not interested” or if that fails, an “I am sorry, but I’m married to the church.”

I’ve made a few friends in Top Pub, including J and her “uncle².” I like J because she has the wits to understand I’m seriously not interested in sex, and so quickly pivoted to the long game of getting free drinks in exchange for answering all of my questions, and maybe, just maybe, figuring out another way to either convince me or leverage me. She, and her uncle, are not included in my WhatsApp contacts though, because J broke her smart phone a year ago and doesn’t have the cash to get a new one, and her ex-husband is a worthless man who left her with two kids, debt, and a broken-down motorcycle. She’s also not a prostitute you see, “because all the prostitutes around here will rob you and that is not what I do, so be careful. That is why I should walk you back to your hotel, for safety. These bad women will sweet talk you, then call a friend, who will wait for you outside and rob you. That is also why I should go with you up to your room, for safety. The maids also steal from you. I won’t. I can clean your room and after that maybe I use your shower.”

The other bar I go to is a twenty-by-twenty room, with no name, no bathroom, no windows, nothing other than plastic chairs, a stocked deep freeze, TV, and a sweet sound system perfect for any US club circa 2000.

This bar isn’t on any map, and I only found it when I told a guy hawking me shoes that all I wanted was to watch the soccer game, and he got up from his stall to escort me into an alley so thin, dark, and damp that I hadn’t noticed it before, except for a foul smell. He walked me a few feet in, pointed to a flight a stairs twenty yards deep, and left.

Whatever surprise the twenty five guys inside had seeing me melted away when I pointed to the game on the TV, gave a thumbs up, and was gifted a chair and a beer. I repaid the beer gift a few drinks later.

Despite the heat, despite the warm beer, despite the bathroom being a pit (a surprisingly clean one) you have to navigate to with a flashlight, I absolutely love this bar, and it’s become my local. Or at least the place I now watch Euro cup games. I respect the twenty-year-old girl who keeps it humming. I respect her competence and hustle. Serving the needy regulars both in attention and beer, while also delivery bottles into the alley and the surrounding homes, shops, and restaurants.

It’s the cliched place where everyone knows your name, and everyone who comes and goes does so with a round of hugs, fist bumps, yells, and high fives.

I’m not deluded enough to think I fit in, or ever will, or am in anyway part of the current scene.

I’m welcomed instead because of a shared, “I just want to watch the game with other people, drink some beer, and maybe make a friend” ethos. A recognized global and universal desire to not be alone. To be physically and mentally warmed by the proximity of others.

It also has given me one of strongest images I have so far from this trip. One I won’t forget. The young dad holding his sleeping daughter while watching the game. It’s a crappy photo that doesn’t fully capture his good father stoicism amongst the tumult.

Fifteen minutes after I took it, she woke up, rubbed her eyes, looked around, whimpered, and he left with her. Even though the game was tied and nearing closure.

Maybe I’m too much of a romantic, too much of a soft heart and reading too much into it, but it moved me to tears.

That I know of the alley bar, much less go to it. That I go to Top Pub for the beer not the girls, makes me an odd Muzungu, but I’m still a Muzungu.

I’m also odd to Ugandans because I choose to walk, despite having the money for a cab, or at least a Boda-boda. I do that because that’s the point of this newsletter, but I also do that here because of the risk calculation thing I mentioned before.

Boda-boda’s appear to be the best deal for the money, because they’re the fastest, but they’re the most dangerous, and so the least appealing to me. A Mario Kart come to life, complete with oil slicks, banana peals, and competitors zooming past from power boosts.

I’ve taken three out of desperation, when my body was worn down by hours of dirt, heat, and chaos, and feeling trapped, needed the certainty of a speed boost. I hope to never take one again.

The second ride was the closest I’ve come to thinking I was going to die in the last few years When my teen driver swerved to pass a semi that been kicking up dirt into our eyes for two miles. I initially applauded the move, sick of being bombarded and stung by pebbles, but as he accelerated a jeep surged into the middle of the road, at a right angle to the front of the semi, attempting to cross to the other side. My driver did a quick evasive maneuver — a breaking and a not-so-gentle slide between the jeep’s front bumper and oncoming traffic — all of which we somehow miraculously missed. Except for my knee, which lightly scrapped the jeeps’s grill.

For the remainder of that ride my helmet-less head was immersed in images of slamming into that jeep. Vivid cartoon images of the driver flung into a passing semi, and me crumbled in the road thirty yards away, a tangle of broken and cracked bones, either already run over by oncoming traffic, or soon to be. Of waiting, if somehow still alive, for an ambulance to work it’s way through the miles long jam.

When I tell locals, including those in the professional class, that I never want to take a Boda boda again, they laugh at me. Oh you Muzungu. Everyone does it. It’s part of Ugandan life. It’s an accepted risk. Realistically, you can’t live in Kampala without them. Especially if you want to go out and do things. The layout of the city, the sprawl, the surging organic growth without an accompanying built infrastructure, the density, the poverty, necessitates it.

That widespread acceptance of a stupid risk leads most foreigners to conclude that “life is cheap” in Uganda. That and the filth, the poverty, the childhoods of tragedy, the malnutrition, the abysmal health care system that turns a bad infancy into a chronic affliction.

Life in Kampala is certainly harder, but Ugandans don’t view being alive as any less of a gift than we do, as having less value, but rather understand more deeply how transient it is, how fleeting, how temporary, and as such, to value our time here more.

You need to make the best of what you have, and so you hang onto your family, your tribe, your God, and whatever good you can find.

That recognition of the good of life, an optimism that beguiles circumstances, I’ve heard, either directly, or indirectly, from almost everyone I’ve spoken to in Kampala, in Top Pub, in the alley bar, along my walks, from my cabdrivers, on the street, and most of all, in the churches. Uganda is very religious, which makes perfect sense to me. (More on that in the next piece.)

In that way, Ugandans value life more.

The usual platitude is you should visit Uganda (or Senegal or Vietnam) to see appreciate what we have in the US. To gain perspective. And that’s true, at a material and daily life level. Being here in Kampala, even as a tourist, isn’t easy, and it’s leagues harder for residents.

Given that, every hour I’m in Kampala, including now, I’m eagerly anticipating being gone. I miss the cleanliness, ease, functionality, and safety of the developed world. I’m counting down the days until I can leave, dreaming of AC, steady WiFi and most of all, healthy air.

So I’m not some silly poverty romantic, but despite my desire to leave, I’m not miserable, and I appreciate being here, because not only are Ugandans genuine, it’s also allowed me to see more clearly what we in the US have lost and devalued: community, compassion, and most of all a human spirit.

Writers usually describe that human spirit as “Kampala is vibrant,” or Ugandans are “full of life!” and there’s some truth to both. The more profound truth though is that Ugandans understand more clearly the good of being alive.

My most recent WhatsApp contact I labeled “Country Song guy.” He’s a cab driver who picked me up from a fishing village on the edge of town I walked to. It was a long, tough, painful (emotionally and physically) walk and the village was a filthy, poor, depressing place.

Yet, in the middle of it I met a young man selling pirated content who could, in a matter of minutes, download, and then burn, whatever movie, song, or show you wanted, including those released today.

He was sitting in his small wood shack store blasting country music, Allen Jackson’s “Gone Country” to be precise³, and explained he “was an American born in Uganda.”

While he isn’t, and will probably never legally be my countryman, he did embody the cartoonishly happy, upbeat, and relentlessly optimistic American trope that movies traffic in, despite his bleak surroundings.

Between his Allen Jackson, and my first driver Christopher’s Patty Loveless, country music was on my mind when my new driver, Jonathan, picked me up.

Then Jonathan, while maneuvering through traffic, told me how his wife had recently left him, via a text from Saudi Arabia where she had gone to be a maid, that said, “I’m marrying someone else,” and how that left him with three young kids to raise, alone, jobless, with car payments, and other bills piling up.

He said all this without a touch of sadness, in fact he was downright giddy, which he explained was because “He prayed to God.”

His life was a country song, only missing the faithful dog, hence his name in my phone.

Then it all clicked. My six-day Ugandan Patty Loveless to Alan Jackson to Jonathan trajectory made perfect sense. Country Music’s heart, it’s fundamental spirit, is about an optimism despite pain. About seeing the spiritual good, despite being surrounded by the physical bad, which is also the lesson from my six days here in Uganda.

Uganda is the embodiment of a country song, because the focus is on the good, no matter how hard it is to see, because it’s there.

At the end of the ride, as Jonathan and I were exchanging numbers, I asked him one last question, something I’ve asked every Ugandan I’ve talked with, “Would you leave here if you could?”

Most have answered, to my surprise, with an emphatic no⁴.

Jonathan was one of the first to answer yes, and when I asked why, he said “So that I can leave Uganda and evangelize to more people. To show them the power of Jesus. I believe you don’t realize his power in America.”

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(I have five more days here, then I go to Nairobi. Until next week!)

1. I famously say you should always take a bus into the city from the airport. Not to use a cab. In Kampala that’s not an option. The airport is 30 miles away, and as you will see, cabs are one of the few safe options to get around.

2. “Oh, I just call him uncle because we are part of the same Tribe.”

3. I hope this video works

4. Maybe that is putting lipstick on a pig. Spinning something as positive as possible because they would never have the chance to leave. It could easily be, but the speed with which they answer, and how similar it is to what I’ve heard in the US when I ask people in “destitute” towns why they haven’t moved and they look at me like I’m crazy because the question is crazy, and when they do answer it’s along the lines of “Why would I do that, this is my home.”