Uganda Day 1

I left Vienna at 5:00 in the morning with the project team leader, who happens to also be the closest approximation I have to a university advisor here. After a ten-hour flight with a one-hour layover in Amsterdam, we arrived in Entebbe, Uganda, safe and sound. In Entebbe, one of the project members from the Ugandan university met us at the airport and drove us to the guesthouse in the capital city of Kampala, where we stayed for the first two days before the other 36 EU- and East African project members arrived. The official occasion of our gathering was the 12-month meeting of the 36-month project. For me, however, the gathering served primarily as an on-site introduction to the project, to the country, and to the people involved.

The ride from the airport to the university guesthouse was definitely more exciting than the flight from Vienna to Entebbe. First, I forgot that Ugandans—like the British—drive on the left side of the road and have their steering wheels on the right. As a passenger sitting in the back seat on the left side of the car, I felt like we were going to crash at every turn. My worrying was also not confined to tight turns; traffic in Kampala is crazy enough that you could easily get into an accident while sitting still. Cars drive in every single direction: forwards, backwards, left, right, diagonally; the lanes painted on the streets are only used for decoration, when there are any lanes painted at all. Most of the „streets“ in Uganda are actually dirt and/or gravel paths, completely covered in potholes. (More about the joy of potholes on long journeys when I tell about our eight-hour trip to the rural town of Kitgum a little later.)

After an hour-ride through the city of Kampala, we arrived at the university guesthouse, where we stayed for the first two days of the trip. I did not at all expect such upscale accommodations. In fact, this was probably my biggest surprise of the entire trip. I had expected to stay with local organizations (churches, schools, etc.), but as European partners we were treated as royalty. This made the us-vs.-them (Europe vs. Africa) dynamic particularly difficult to avoid. Granted, the other East African partners—those from Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia—also stayed in the guesthouses and hotels, but even the hotel management gave special attention to the “European tourists”. And essentially, we were tourists. We worked on the project during the day, but at night, we visited and ate at restaurants finer than anything I would ever visit in Austria. I wonder what the people who perceived us as tourists would say to us if they knew we were working to give them access to clean water and sanitation. Would we still be dumb tourists? Would we be condescending foreigners? Or would the street people of Kampala greet us the same way the locals in Kitgum did—with open arms, warm hearts, and bodies ready to work?