Getting a mobile phone

Yesterday we went to get a cell phone. We were at the New Vision, where we are training, and so we got a “special hire” outside the building, a car and driver you can negotiate an amount to take you where you want to go. “I am called George,” the driver told us. We climbed in his ramshackle car, sliding across the seat because only one door worked. He had parked at the top of a pothole, and the car scraped painfully down the deep hole and onto the road. Not the first time, from the looks of it.

Once out of the pothole, the car sputtered, coughed and died sporadically. Fortunately, it was downhill for the first several yards so we coasted. It was a stifling day, hot and sweaty. “Sorry, Madame, the windows do not go up and down.” Okay. Fine. We’ll sweat. We really need a phone.

The driver worked that engine, still sputtering, still dying. Bill and I looked at each other; we knew what was going on – no special hire keeps more than a couple of drops of petrol in the tank. George explained rationally, “It wants fuel.” No kidding.

The car then died a rather permanent sounding death – right in front of the slaughterhouse, my least favorite place in all of Kampala. It stinks and you can only imagine what happens there … sometimes you actually see cows trying to escape. We don’t eat beef while we are here.

So Madame starts hyperventilating and I-am-called-George pumps the gas peddle, turns the key over and over and somehow we limp to the Total station, where he puts a minimal amount of fuel in and we are on our way.

We go around in circles to avoid the ubiquitous “jam” and eventually get to the phone store, the headquarters of a company named Orange. We buy a phone (red, what a missed marketing opportunity) for the equivalent of $15 and go back to find George. Far down the street, he had parked, on top of a pothole. We got in, scrape. George dropped us at the market, and we found our favorite vendors from two years ago. “You have been lost to us. How is it there?” they women say, meaning how is America. Hard to answer.

Onions and tomatoes in hand, we pass by the ladies at sewing machines in the corridor waiting for walk-ins, then by my old tailor, Teddy, in her little shop. We’d reunited with her the day before, so we just waved at each other. Then past the chapatti guy, past the sheet holding used shoes for sale in the dust and sun, past the girl sound asleep with her head on the airtime sales table.

We stepped over tons of rebar poking dangerously from the dirt, passed the squashed plastic bottles and bags and assorted rotting garbage drifted against the curb, dodged boda-bodas taking a short-cut. I realized I was smiling, and I said to Bill, “This place is so difficult and frustrating. But it’s also so much fun!” And so we went home.

Yes, Eric, Africa gets in your blood.