To Kampala and Back

After nine years in East Africa, I still am able to look about and recognize how different life is here. The differences were very apparent to me yesterday when we drove to Kampala to get immunizations for Cooper and to do some shopping. Kampala is about 20 miles away from Entebbe, and it usually takes more than an hour in the car to get there.

The government knocked down several buildings and walls which were "encroaching" on the road, so we observed people working on the rubble several times as they tried to rebuild their businesses and homes.

The traffic is unbelievable when compared to the rules of the road in America. Motorcycle taxis zip in front of us and around us weaving in and out of traffic, occasionally even going in the wrong direction. A two-lane road becomes three lanes at a driver's whim. A bus and a van had an accident and were choking up the round about (and hey - that's a difference - we have round abouts!). It's hard to describe how people drive here but here's an example of one thing we saw.

The speeding driver of an SUV passed us in oncoming traffic, and three times he intentionally swerved and pushed oncoming public-service vans off onto the shoulder, where they could have easily hit pedestrians or motorcycles. In that stretch of road, we passed two sets of traffic officers and a police vehicle, and no one did anything. It was very much like that driver was playing chicken; in other words, it was horrifying.

As we left the clinic where Cooper got 4 shots, 2 Bandaids, and 2 pieces of candy, we were approached by men on each side of the car trying to sell their live turkeys from shopping baskets. Not exactly the frozen food aisle in November!

The billboards are sometimes boring, but often amusing. My favorite one, which sells chicken meat, says, "For the love of nice chicks with fat thighs!" and has a photo of a lady biting into a piece of chicken. I honestly can't tell if they're trying to make a pun or not.

Kampala is divided here and there into shopping districts which focus on one type of item. There is a road for fabrics, a section for hardware, a produce/meat market area, and the one we drove through was for office and paper products. It boggled my mind to think of having to get out of the car (if you could find parking!) to buy things like a stapler, a ream of paper, and pens - dozens and dozens of little shops, one on top of the other, crawling with customers. And how do you choose where to shop? You choose the place where you have the best relationship with the clerks or owner!

As always, we like to watch what will go by on the back of a boda boda (the motorcycle taxis). Yesterday we saw a man with a great big Nile Perch. There was a lady with her traditional gomesi, the fancy shiny dress with shoulders that come out of a Star Trek episode. A whole family on a boda. Two ladies with a blanketed baby sandwiched between them and the driver. Piles of mattresses. Piles of cooking bananas. Piles of pineapples on the back and front of the boda. Wood sticking horizontally out into traffic. Stacks and stacks of egg trays - how do they do it without cracking them on each pothole and speed bump? It's great entertainment!

The titles of stores are always amusing. During one stretch of road for about 1 or 2 kilometers, I wrote the name of every shop with a spiritually derived name: Hosanna Investments, Noah's Ark Takeaway, Mother Mary Supermarket, Holy Family Complex, Ebenezer Carpentry, and The Divine Grocery Store. How's that for shopping incentive?

Brightly colored dresses are hung outside clothing shops on very un-American hangars. These hangars hold the dresses by the shoulders but continue on down and span out into a huge semi-circle to insinuate nice round hips!

As we arrive into Entebbe, we pass by a small bay of Lake Victoria called Sesse. For the past several months it has been flooded from all the rain we got earlier in the year - the dirt walkway had disappeared, and the bottoms of the palm trees were submerged. The little beach is back now, and it's open season for laundry at the beach. People wash their clothes and then lay them out on the grass to dry - not what you see in America when you're at the lake or beach!

Although the traffic is always truly dangerous and incomprehensible, I'm grateful that I was able to notice some of the fun parts of African roadside life yesterday in an attempt to convey the wonder of it all to you.