What about in your village?

One day on the way home from a training, Theresa and I were chatting with Yowasi, the chief New Vision driver, who has been both a good companion and a source of insights into a part of Uganda quite different from the urban, relatively sophisticated world of the journalists we work with.

We told him I like to swim for exercise, and that Americans HAVE to exercise to stay fit, since we spend so much time at desks. We commented on how physically hard so many Ugandans work -- doing nearly everything by hand, from the daily laundry to building tall buildings and highways. In our country, we said, people use machines to do all those things. Theresa talked about watching a man digging a latrine, working in a narrow hole nearly twice as deep as he was tall, under the hot mid-day sun.

Yowasi laughed, as he nearly always did at our remarks, but he agreed. Some of those latrine holes are as much as 30 feet deep, he added -- the man needs a ladder to go in and out. And he sort of accepted the fact that in Seattle we use machines for heavy jobs. "But," he asked, "what about in your villages? What do they dig with in your villages?"

Another time, he asked about something he had heard: "In America, do you use the card to pay for goods?"

Well, yes, we told him. We hardly ever pay with cash (which is the only way most people pay for most things in Uganda -- as we did last year, for a car we bought for $8,000 -- paid in a very large stack of Ugandan bills worth about $10 each).
"But in your villages -- do they have the card there?" he asked.

It is an excellent way of triangulating on an important element of Uganda. Life is still very different in Kampala (or the handful of other major cities) and in "the village." Everyone, even in Kampala, still has a village, the place they come from and where extended family still lives. They routinely talk about things that happen "deep in the village." People who live in villages still can subside with little use for cash (luckily, since there is little way to earn it), growing their food and bartering -- but when they need money for health needs or school fees, it is a problem. No, nobody in the Ugandan village uses "the card."

Things will gradually change -- but for now, the gap between Kampala and the village can sometimes seem nearly as striking between Seattle and Kampala.