I happened upon this adorable website today with a little video that I tried every which way in the world to add to my blog so I could share it with you…but alas, you should all know I’m clearly computer illiterate.When my daughter, Jenny, saw the post, she emailed me and said, "call me about images and links." So, this video is brought to you by Jenny!
The story made me smile all over. There is a group of young kids in Uganda that have built the FIRST skate park in their country. By itself I guess that doesn’t sound like such an amazing feat, but it was! It really made me feel giddy with HOPE for them! After you watch the video (it’s only 5 minutes) follow the link to their website and spend a little time getting to know them. Just ten kids living in a district of Kampala that came up with an idea to skateboard and then made it happen! That is not the norm in Uganda. YEA Uganda skateboard union!
What I had been thinking a lot about and working on, before I took a detour to the skateboard site, was getting around in Uganda. Certainly something Mike and I have been doing some talking about lately. For us to drive there will mean;
• taking and passing a driving test (I barely did that here!);
• learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road with a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car!
And I can’t even imagine how a right handed person EVER learns how to drive a stick shift (very common in Uganda). My left hand doesn’t do a whole lot of things…holds my watch…holds the steering wheel while I’m text messaging with my right hand (kidding…just seeing whose paying attention!)
Your first impression of a frenzied road in Kampala propels your senses into a bemusing bedlam. Every passing vehicle is truly within just a hands reach of your own. This must be where mothers all over the world picked up that tired old saying, “keep your hands in the windows or you’ll lose them from a passing car.” Vehicles converge from every direction with any semblance of rules completely cast aside. Brazen horns blast persistently and as you seek to relieve your anxiety with a deep-breath, well, your respiratory organs are attacked by the thick layer of black exhaust fumes hovering in the air from the taxis. Vehicles do not have to pass smog checks.
There are a few other differences in Uganda when it comes to getting around. It doesn’t take your bottom too long to notice that the “roads” are really more like four-wheel drive tracks. Every time the car bottoms out, you feel you must apologize to your driver for clearly being so portly to be weighing down the back of the car so much.
The c
rumbling roads are pocked by random cavernous hidden potholes. (and those are the roads that actually have some tar on them.) Occasionally your driver will also have to manuever around arbitrarily placed mountain size piles of dirt intended for road repair, while at the same time swerving so as to avoid a head-on collision with oncoming road-dominating suicidal trucks on a fragment of tarmac that is not wide enough for two vehicles.And just to make things a little more interesting, the roads are packed with pedestrians, bicyclists, cows, students, an occasional goat, chickens, market shoppers, carts, futilely whistling policemen, cars driving the wrong way in lanes that don’t even exist, and swarms of reckless boda-bodas cutting in between all the bumpers. And you don’t have much room to move…there are deep ditches on either side of the street.
In Kampala Japanese vans are called taxis and the man behind the wheel who has spent a fortune on this second hand vehicle and must work the rest of his life to pay his debts and survive at the same time is called a taxi driver. The people who walk everywhere they go and can’t travel very far, are those who cannot afford to buy a taxi, or even a ride in a taxi. They’ll probably live longer that way too! A taxi ride for most costs almost the same amount of shillings they’ll take home for their days work.
We only had to endure this type of taxi travel two times during our visit. You slide back the van door to a jungle of plastic covered animal print seats. They’re made to seat 12 (12 very slim people and only if you all can synchronize your breathing) but the drivers intend to defy the laws of physics every single time and force 17 people in. It was good that I was traveling with my husband, because I’m not sure what strangers lap I would have ended up on otherwise. The only real way to do this is in layers sort of. I imagine it’s wise to introduce yourself to each additional person the cab driver picks up along the way, as they’ll either end up on your lap, or you on theirs.
Boda-bodas, mentioned above, are these rather dinky motorbike taxis and major form of transportation in Kampala...if you don’t count walking. I did not experience this personally…I really had no desire to die my first trip to Uganda. They are speed demons…on the roads that are rocky, full of holes…and trucks. Big trucks. Fuel tankers in fact, that regularly blow up in traffic accidents in Uganda.
Both men and women passengers sit side saddle, leaving one nothing to hold on to, which the locals seem quite used to. While I was white knuckled for them, they would often be reading a book, balancing a load of sugarcane on their head, or clutching tightly to their live chicken dinner for the evening. (How and what Ugandans balance on their heads is worth its own blog entry; keep watching!)
I was trying to pay close attention to driving in Uganda. I realize I won’t always have the good blessing of the precious driver we had on our visit. (the people of Uganda won’t have the good blessing of me having my precious driver!) It seems the only road rule I recognized is to never vacillate; not when turning, not when breaking, passing, or any other driving action. I’m not confident enough to obey that rule, however. I did notice that if you can make a really mean face, it could help.
If you are a mzunga (have we talked about that yet? That’s “white face” in the luganda language) and you are involved in an accident of any sort, it will always be your fault. This is okay apparently, because the police are simply looking for a bribe.
You will also see many young men using bicycles to move their impossibly heavy loads. And they seem to always be going uphill. Both ways. So maybe this is where our fathers got their stories of having to “walk to school every day, up steep hills, both ways.”
There is one stoplight in the large capitol city of Kampala. We didn’t stop at it. No one stopped at it. We were told it was put in for the Queens visit a couple of years ago. It’s right outside a large new hotel that was also built for the Queens visit. None of the locals can afford to stay there.
There is something that’s working in my favor when it comes to driving…Most of the people have no concept of time. While it’s embarrassing to be 15 minutes late in the U.S, it’s quite acceptable to arrive several hours late in Uganda. When making travel plans in Uganda, assume there will be a communication breakdown at every level. Don’t give specific times when making arrangements. Give time frames. Like, I will meet you for lunch between Tuesday and Thursday.
You know, I’m thinking that as I pack for Uganda, I should throw in some knee pads and elbow pads…and a skate board. That would be a traffic stopper, huh?
Don’t forget to check out these awesome kids at
http://www.invisiblechildren.com/blog/2008/03/18/uganda-skateboard-union/
