From Silicon Valley to Swaziland, Rick & Wendy Walleigh [i love reading books .txt] 📗

Uganda

Part of my responsibility, beyond my work in Kenya, was to support Erastus, TechnoServe’s new country director for Uganda as he reestablished our presence, starting with an office in Kampala. So Wendy and I flew to Uganda. The flight from Nairobi to Entebbe (yes, the infamous Entebbe from the 1976 hijacking incident) airport is only about forty-five minutes. However, since it was an international flight, we arrived at the Nairobi airport two hours before the departure time. After touching down at Entebbe, it took us about an hour to go through immigration. Then there was the forty-five minute drive from Entebbe to Kampala; and I left out the drive getting to the airport in Nairobi. So overall it was a half-day trip for a forty-five-minute flight.

As soon as we landed in Uganda, Wendy said that memories of Entebbe and the Idi Amin fiasco associated with the 1976 hijacking began to haunt her. She had seen the movies Entebbe and Last King of Scotland and their scenes were spinning through her head. Thankfully, Uganda and the city of Kampala have come a long way since the 1970s.

Entebbe airport had a large runway and an almost-complete, newly renovated terminal. However, there were only a few planes on the tarmac. The terminal is much smaller and less crowded than Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi since Entebbe gets much less traffic. After passing through immigration, baggage claim, and customs, Wendy and I were picked up and driven to Kampala. The road out of the airport was very beautiful as it curved around Lake Victoria with its nicely landscaped median. I had been reading Lee Kwan Yew’s book about the development of Singapore and how he had insisted on beautifying the road into the city from Changi airport so that visitors would have a good first impression. I was sure that Uganda’s President Museveni had taken his advice. As we got farther along on the road into Kampala, it wasn’t quite as beautiful as the initial stretch, but as we compared our surroundings to Kenya, everything looked just a little greener, brighter, newer, and cleaner. It was obviously still a developing country, but Wendy and I seemed to detect a difference.

Based on population statistics, Kampala is nearly half the size of Nairobi, but it is really a much smaller city. The small city center quickly gives way to residential neighborhoods and low-rise commercial areas that spread out for miles and miles. We observed that some of the neighborhoods were quite nice with large homes and groomed yards. Other areas looked like the poor commercial and residential areas in the smaller rural cities in Kenya. In Kenya, electrical power was a problem as it went off frequently, requiring every office and residential complex to have a generator. The same was true in Uganda, but the outages were even more frequent. Sometimes they lasted for hours, but usually they were quite short. However, the unreliable power would often wreak havoc with electronic equipment. Every time the power went off at our hotel, the Internet connection was lost, and the server had to be restarted. One time, I was talking to our daughter in the United States using the Internet, and I had to restart the call six times.

Our original plan had been to visit TechnoServe’s current Uganda project in the western part of the country and then to have several meetings with donors. However, our African experience had taught us to be very flexible. Erastus and his senior staff were working on a proposal with a very short deadline. Consequently, he had no time to go with us to the field, and it would have required two days of another person’s time just to take us to the field and essentially give us a tour. Although Wendy and I really wanted to see the team and the activities in the field, this didn’t seem like a productive use of resources, so we cancelled the field visit. The donor meetings fell through as well, so we spent our time, during the week, helping on the proposal and doing our Kenya work. The frequent power failures had damaged the server at our small hotel and there was no estimate on when it would get fixed, so we spent multiple days camped out and working in the luxurious business center of the Serena hotel in the city center.

At the end of the week, we felt we had helped as much as we could and were ready to take a few days off for touring. While we were primarily working to help the poor, we did want to take some personal advantage of our location. Our destination was Murchison Falls, Uganda’s largest national park.

The roads north of Kampala toward Murchison Falls were not nearly as nice as the road in from Entebbe. Full of deep potholes, they were as bad as or worse than the roads in rural Kenya. As we drove for hours, my engineering mind kept trying to analyze the road problem. As I observed, the paved surface seemed to be quite thin with only compacted dirt below. Consequently, when a small hole developed, it exposed the dirt underneath to the rain. As the rain fell, it softened the dirt and undermined the paving at the rim of the hole. Since the edge of the paving surrounding the hole no longer had support from below, it would break off. The hole became larger and the cycle of decay would start again. So pretty quickly, any small hole got wider and wider and deeper and deeper until it became a pothole that could break an axle. The same process occurred at the edges of the roads. The paving surface was undermined and over time broke off in little pieces, which made the road edges look like they had been nibbled away by a giant invisible monster. Of course, over time the road narrowed with many sections being about one-and-a-half-lanes wide.

We had lots of time to observe the countryside. For most of the trip, the vegetation was very green and very lush. This meant that the soil was rich and rain was abundant. Unlike Kenya where only 20 percent of the land area is suitable for agriculture, much of Uganda is composed of very good farmland. So although many Ugandans don’t have a significant cash income, they can at least grow enough food to feed their families.

Once inside Murchison Falls Park, we drove 80 km (50 miles) on a single-lane dirt road. It was very rough, but no worse than the pock-marked paving that we had just left. Along our drive through a densely forested region, we stopped to observe a tortoise crossing the road. As we stopped, the car was immediately filled with a giant swarm of tsetse flies. They seemed to be instantly everywhere, filling the space inside the car and attacking us. Our driver, Dominic, immediately grabbed a magazine and started furiously swatting and trying to swish the flies out of the windows with one hand as he started the Land Cruiser with the other. Simultaneously, I grabbed the insect repellant and chivalrously gave it to Wendy who began bathing every exposed piece of flesh. Then I did the same, a little more judiciously while concurrently swatting and swishing. Dominic started the car and began to drive as we opened all of the windows. We all continued waving our arms wildly. Within a short time, we were able to either kill the flies or get them to leave the vehicle. No one had been bitten, but the intensity and speed of the attack had been startling. Tsetse fly bites are painful, and they do carry sleeping sickness.

Our first destination in the park was a point above Murchison Falls. As we learned, Murchison Falls is not a high graceful waterfall; it is a thundering cataract where the full flow of the (White) Nile River is forced through a narrow canyon and over multiple cascades. Approaching the falls we heard a constant load roar from the water as it accelerated through the canyon and bounced against the rock walls. As we got even closer, the whole earth seemed to pulsate under our feet from the force of the water.

After viewing the powerful falls from above, we quickly drove 35 km downriver to the ferry that we would take to cross the Nile and get to our lodge. Because the ferry only runs every hour, and we were going to be close for catching the five o’clock ferry, Dominic drove aggressively on the dirt roads and got us to the dock by four-fifty. However, someone had decided that there would be no five o’clock ferry that day. We would have to wait until 6:00 p.m. We smiled, got out of the car, and began to casually walk around. TIA; we’d learned to adapt, but sometimes it would help if they served cocktails.

At 6:00 p.m., Dominic maneuvered the Land Cruiser on to the ferry, essentially a barge with two large rotating drive engines. We walked on and rode across. Our lodge was perched on a small hill very close to the river. This proximity allowed us to be continuously serenaded by the rumbling bass grunts and roars of the hippos that populated the river. At dinner we got another treat when a family of elephants invaded the pool area, just below the second floor dining porch. One elephant came close enough that his trunk could nearly reach us. Maybe he wanted to sample our dinner, but it was just out of reach. The staff attempted to shoo the elephants away, but the elephants were in no hurry to leave. The staff was no match for the elephants, so they gave up and after a while the elephants left when they were ready.

Having seen Murchison Falls from above, the next day we wanted to see it from the river below. The lodge ran boat trips up the Nile to just below the falls, and on this day the trip was so popular that a small boat was being used in addition to the large launch. Based on our prior experience on the Zambezi River above Victoria Falls, we chose the smaller boat because it could maneuver closer to shore and provide more intimate views of animals by the river. The smaller boat didn’t have a bar, but Wendy and I weren’t interested in cocktails in the middle of the day. However, we discovered that, under certain conditions, the smaller boat had other disadvantages. As we motored up the river, the skies darkened, and it began to rain. The wind picked up just as the thunder and lightning began. Unlike on the large, fully covered launch with roll-down side shades, the weather was a problem for our little boat which had only a partial roof and no side protection. The rain was pelting us at a forty-five-degree angle from a constantly shifting direction. I had an umbrella and tried to manipulate it against the wind in a progressively losing battle until the roof began to drain onto my seat when I totally gave up and just got as wet as nature wanted to make me. Our captain got a little worried about being the highest point on the river as the lightning increased, so he pulled the boat against the shore of a small island. The surrounding high ground and trees provided some protection from the lightning, but he warned us to be vigilant for crocodiles and hippos approaching the boat. After a while, the rain stopped, and we continued our journey up the river. We got a great view of the falls, and by the time we were back at the dock, our clothes were dry. Nylon backpacking clothes work great in Africa.

The next day as we drove