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Published: January 29th 2008
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In what I’d like to consider an unfortunate coincidence, panic has swept across Uganda just days after my arrival. More than a dozen cases of ebola have been confirmed in the western Bundibugyo district in the past week - which, coupled with recent cholera and bubonic plague (bubonic plague!) scares, is further proof that you can’t spell Uganda without the letters H-O-L-Y-S-H-I-T. Already health workers and government officials are sounding the alarms. An article in the New Vision cites the cautionary words of President Museveni, who has “urged all Ugandans to stop shaking hands until the ebola pandemic is completely contained.” Beleaguered medical staff in Bundibugyo, meanwhile, have been especially hard hit by the highly contagious virus. New Vision reporters, covertly entering a western hospital, shed some possible light onto why:
The doors were not locked and there was no sign that this was an isolation ward. About five attendants walked in and out, some were wearing either gloves or masks, while others were not protected at all.
One attendant, dressed in white, was touching a patient with her bare hands, as if she was not aware of the danger. The reporter adds, inauspiciously:
No doctors were seen at the hospital.
While the full scope of the crisis remains to be seen, some analysts are already weighing in with suspicions of a government cover-up. With the first suspected case surfacing as early as August, they point to the odd coincidence that the full media shitstorm didn’t blow until early-December - or, to connect the conspiracy-theory dots, after the government had put the wraps on Chogm. Government officials insist the delays were a routine consequence of the time it took to send blood samples to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Given what I know of African postal services, this seems like a wholly plausible line of reasoning.
In Kampala, a few groups of aid workers have poured into Backpackers, expelled by their NGOs from trouble zones in the west. Others have fled their villages in the east - not for fear of ebola, but of the prospect of another weekend in the bush. Mona, a plump, pretty, boisterous girl from Berlin, bemoans her hard-luck life with a world-weary sigh; at 19, she’s already on her fifth trip to Africa, with a father working in the travel business and a mother running a
non-profit organization in Tanzania. She admits to having fewer illusions about what she might accomplish in Uganda than most of her co-workers, though she manages to steer clear of cynicism in favor of a resigned detachment.
“I don’t think Uganda will ever change,” she says. “It’s too deep in the shit to get out of it.”
She’s seen the depth of that shit first-hand: four months ago, when she first arrived with her NGO, she was assigned to a remote village that was, as she put it, “deep in the bush.” Charging her cell phone required a three-mile bike ride to the nearest village; in just a few weeks, she’d gotten jiggers in her feet and rashes on her arms and legs from washing with basins full of filthy pond water.
Teaching at the village school was a jarring revelation. The headmaster spoke poor English and came to her for impromptu geography lessons, asking if Germany was in England or what language they spoke in France. Most of the Ugandan teachers were young girls who’d dropped out of school in their teens. Bad students were generally considered to be possessed by “evil spirits”: their hands were tied at the wrists, and they’d be locked in a windowless room, crying and wailing until the spirits had left them.
“What do you do with people who live like that?” she wonders.
She only lasted a month before transferring to another village; with sporadic electricity and two shops in the center of town, it practically felt like Berlin. It was there that she was placed with the others staying at Backpackers: Jonathan and Charlotte, a couple from London; Shawn and Ally, a pair of young Canadians I’d met two weeks ago in Nairobi. They’d signed up with plans to work at the village orphanage, not realizing until they’d arrived that they’d have to build the thing first. It’s been a slow, humbling process - brick-laying wasn’t in any of the brochures - but in less than two weeks, the orphanage will finally be ready to open its doors. And in a country like Uganda, sadly, there are no shortage of kids to fill its cramped rooms.
In the meantime they’re grateful for this weekend in Kampala. The last time most of them had a drink was at “karaoke night” in the village bar, where a bench was set up for them in front of the stage (as the only white people in town, they were understandably the guests of honor). They were forced to sit through three hours of lip-synched improv, where the performers shook and swayed and mouthed along to all their favorite ‘80s hits, clutching microphones that were mercifully switched off. As guests of honor, they had to see the night through to the bitter end. It was, they hoped, their first and last night out in the village.
In Kampala, the nightlife offers a more familiar taste of bars and clubs, with even a few velvet ropes optimistically stretched across the buckled pavement. Coming from the bush, it must be a strange, welcome sight. The gang is giddy as we pile, Ugandan-style, eight deep into the back of a taxi; at a Thai restaurant, they slyly pass a bottle of cheap vodka around under the table, topping off their Krests and Cokes. We might be miles and years removed from the little white-steepled town where I enjoyed college life, but the thrift of their enthusiasm, their frugal joy, is chased by my own nostalgia.
We move the party to Bubbles O’Leary’s, one of Kampala’s best-known ex-pat bars. It’s a strange scene of aid workers and embassy employees and hip young Ugandans and carefully made-up whores. There’s a guy by the door in matching leopard-print pants and jacket and
kufi cocked at a raffish angle - a faithful reproduction of the late Joseph Mobuto, tapping his foot in 4/4 time. The girls drink and stumble and twirl across the dancefloor; there are intrigues in the yard, frantic decipherings of drunken text messages sent by a love interest in Masaka. We drink ourselves stupid and then again crowd into a taxi, the others using the poverty of volunteer life to help negotiate a cheap price. A good night is had by all. And on the way home, dozing in the backseat, I remember - however briefly - what a thing it is to be young, careless, clueless: wholly at ease with the pleasures of long, drunken nights and the wreckage of the morning after.
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Nice...
I like your writing style!