Back behind the wheel

We’re in luck and can borrow one of son Eric’s Maendeleo Foundation RAV4s for a little while, which means that WE have the adventure of navigating those potholes Theresa wrote about.

It’s fun to be driving in Kampala again, even though it does make you hold your breath at times. Barbara, the top editor at New Vision, assures us the potholes will disappear before long -- because the election is coming up, after all. But they are everywhere now, and there’s nothing even approaching linear driving.

Forget about lanes. Forget about the roadway itself. Everyone picks their own sinuous paths up over the curb onto the dirt sidewalks, into the opposite lane, in makeshift detours to avoid having your car disappear into the bowels of the earth. You regularly head directly at an oncoming vehicle, only to have both turn a bit at the last second and pass, the outside mirrors nearly brushing.

It is pothole choreography: bicycles, boda-boda motorcycles, container trucks, cars, and taxi vans all somehow wind in, around, and nearly through each other. The crawling speed these conditions demand must explain why nobody actually seems to hit anyone else.

The both horrifying and entertaining nature of driving here is just one more of the counterintuitive reasons that, as Theresa said, it is fun to be back. And it continues to surprise us when people welcome us back as friends – not just the people at our apartment, or even the market vendors in our neighborhood, but even the woman in the wine store in the expat neighborhood near the U.S. embassy where we went today to stock up (and to visit the only good meat store in Kampala). She remembered us from three years ago, and was glad to see us again.

That’s true too of the drivers for New Vision, who have always been great friends and provided us a window into a world of ordinary Ugandans. The other day as I was walking up the stairs to the office, I noticed our driver had taken my hand and was holding it loosely as we went along. It’s a relatively common thing here, for men to hold hands in a friendly way; I took it as another form of what people keep saying to us: You are back. You are welcome.