Post Three

Happy Fathers Day, particularly to my own father, who probably still thinks I'm insane for spending a summer in Uganda. Pops, crack open a beer over the BBQ pit today while you watch the road race in Sonoma. Jeff's due for a win, isn't he?

Travel:

We haven't traveled much as of late because the majority of us are working on our Law Review Case Notes, or a 3000 word essay that usually includes nearly 100 footnotes that also make up about 3000 words. Much like the rest of law school, it's a giant pain in the ass, particularly when I'd rather sit at the Jingle Bell Bar and watch the World Cup.

However, three weekends ago I went to the Ssese Islands, a group of islands in the Northwest corner of Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world. There's not much to do on the Island, but that was the whole point of going. I was dying to get away from the noise, smells, and general crowded nature of Kampala for a weekend, and the Ssese Islands are a perfect weekend away for silence and calm.

As an aside, to illustrate just how crowded Kampala is, here are three interesting comparisons:
Kampala covers the same amount of square mileage - 70 square miles - as Temple, my hometown of just over 50,000 people. This is also about 1/10 of Albemarle County's 726 square miles. And for my California friends, Malibu covers 100 square miles, 42% more space than Kampala. Imagine stuffing 1.4 million people into all of Temple, 1/10th of Albemarle County, and 70% of Malibu and you'll get some sense of how crowded it is here and why I chose to get away for a weekend.

To get to the island, we had to hire a driver to take us to Entebbe, an hour's ride away, and then hop on the ferry from Entebbe to the island. For $12, I rode "first class" in a very, very overcrowded ferry for three and a half hours. The view on the ride was pretty, but the scenery didn't change much as ferrys don't move very quickly. We did, however, see monkeys as soon as we got on the island, and somewhere on the ferry ride I crossed the Equator into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time in my life.

When we got to the island, two other people joined us on the bus that took us to the hotel - an incredibly intimidating British man covered head to toe in tattoos and his Ugandan girlfriend. They explained that they came to the island fairly regularly and that my group would be quite happy with the accommodations. Unfortunately, the resort had other ideas - the bus took us to a set of rooms guarded by a not so friendly looking ostrich. Despite selling us their premium rooms, they decided to put us up in a not particularly appealing room on the lakeside next to an outdoors club that blasted music until midnight. Fortunately, the Brit called the guy that sold us the room and threatened to beat him senseless when we got back to Kampala if the resort didn't give us a free night in the rooms we were promised, so after a not so comfortable night in the subpar rooms, we got a free stay in the nicer hotel.

On the second day on the Island, we decided to branch out a bit and walk around the island. It is important to understand that this island is in the middle of a lake in the middle of Africa with essentially no one on it. I was joking about just how screwed we would be if something happened as we walked towards 'town', if you could call it that, when we came upon two teenage boys. As I've mentioned previously, most of the people we have seen here are very, very friendly. This was not the case with these two boys, who asked our names and where we were from before displaying to us their foot and a half long rusted machete. We quickly did a 180 and quickly walked back towards our hotel, presumably much to the delight of the two boys that had scared us muzungus senseless.

After this brief scare, we decided it would be best not to leave the room, which thanks to a couple of boxes of wine and the beautiful views of tropical Lake Victoria, wasn't so bad. The food we were given was phenomenal - whatever fish they catch out of that lake provided for the best white meat I've had in my entire life.

We got a quality scare on the ferry ride home as well. While I was trying to nap on the ride home, the armed security guard for the ferry sat down next to me, reached into his pocket, gave me a sign not to say anything, and took a giant swig out of a bottle of vodka. Eyes bloodshot, he looked up at me, reached for his nose, and asked me if I had any cocaine. I told him that I did not and then sat anxiously as the only armed individual on the entire boat finished off his bottle of vodka while sitting oddly close to my side. He said he was Somalian, so I'm going to operate under the assumption that he is a pirate waiting for the appropriate amount of cocaine to get hopped up enough to get the gall to take over the ship soon.

Work:

We met Justice K two weeks ago and he gave us a fairly daunting project. Ugandan's Commercial Court does not have many of their cases online and available for research, so he wants us to fix that for them. Basically, we're taking every reported case that the Court has ever seen, reformatting it, making it search friendly by categorizing each case, databasing it, and putting it on CD and hopefully eventually online. In other words, we're attempting to make a very, very simple version of WestLaw or Lexis Nexis. This has occupied nearly all of our time while at work.

Interesting Occurrences:
- I felt my first earthquake last week, a 5.0 that hit not too far away in Lake Victoria. When it hit, I wasn't sure if it was an earthquake or if our shoddy building that's in the middle of construction was finally giving way.

- As we've grown increasingly comfortable with our surroundings, we've been more apt to explore the city. This has taken me to the YMCA to see a women's basketball game and to shoot around with a few of the guys in the men's league (consensus there was that LeBron should stay in Cleveland because that's where his family and friends live), to a bar with about 300 Ugandans and 4 Americans to watch the World Cup opener, and to three different nightclubs, among other places. Almost every single time I've gone out, Ugandans flock to us to become our friends. Inevitably, phone numbers are shared, and inevitably they end up calling me over and over and over again at all hours of the day and night. I had no idea why until about a week later.

Last Sunday, two of us decided to go clubbing after the World Cup games were over. Our strategy was simple - if we heard a club playing Wavin Flag, the incredibly catchy World Cup theme song, we'd go into that particular club. This strategy led us into a club that had three to four hundred people in it, each of them watching some sort of rap battle on a big stage in the middle of the club. The bouncer parted the sea of Ugandans to bring the two of us, the only white people in the club, front and center of the stage. I sure wish I got that kind of treatment in Hollywood.

While we were there we met a man named Elly, who explained to me that he knew about Fort Hood because he worked at Camp Victory near the Baghdad Airport. We exchanged phone numbers and met up to watch the US-Slovenia soccer game on Friday night. He came to dinner with the rest of us, ordered whatever it was that I ordered, and enjoyed a few drinks with us. I thought nothing of it until the bill came around and I finally figured out why us Americans are so popular. He had no money to contribute to dinner, so I had the courtesy of paying for his meal. From now on I'll know that while it's fantastic to share conversation with the many new friends we have met here, meeting them for dinner isn't necessarily such a good idea financially. As another Pepperdine law student put it, when someone here asks for your phone number, they're essentially asking you on a date for which they expect you to pay. Sorry, Ugandan friends - I'm taken.

- The biggest frustration with being here is being treated like a walking dollar sign. Everywhere you go, people are asking for money. It is quite the disheartening experience, too. About a quarter mile from our house is a food court where we often go eat. About 100 yards before the entrance are a group of 4-6 young Ugandan children who sprint towards us when we walk that direction, yelling "Hello! Hello! Hello!" with their hands out and follow us until we get into the food court. Each time, it is the same desperately poor yet unbelievably cute children begging us for money, walking all of six inches from our side. Although I very much want to give them the equivalent of fifty cents or a dollar, if you do so more and more children will appear out of seemingly nowhere expecting money of their own. I did manage to slip the equivalent of a dollar to a young girl the other day, but as soon as I did a bota driver took the money from her and she came chasing right back after me asking for more. The guilt that follows passing by a group of children begging for money is not a fun emotion.

- When I'm not being asked for money or for my phone number, those that I talk to want to talk about America - what I do there, what I think about our sports (particularly basketball), and where they would like to visit if they ever came to the United States. I'm starting to believe that a higher percentage of Ugandans believe in American exceptionalism than do Americans ourselves.

- I thought I was pissed at Jim Joyce for ruining Galarraga's perfect game a few weeks ago, but that pales in comparison to my incredible frustration at the end of the US-Slovenia game. If we fail to move on to the Round of 16, I'm hiking up to Mali and invading that referee's country singlehandedly.


I'll try to blog more frequently after my Case Note is turned in on Thursday. I'm hoping to head to Rwanda next weekend and am planning on going on a Safari to Murchison Falls over the weekend of the 4th of July, so I'll have more interesting things to blog about in the next few weeks.