Tired Road Warrior

I love to play Scrabble, but I’m not very good.  My friends and work colleagues routinely outplay me.  But I play on. 

In Scrabble, there are only a few “q” words that don’t require the vowel “u”.  One of those is “qat”.  Until recently, I had only a faint idea about its meaning or significance.

That all changed when I read a short article in a recent NG.  As it turns out, qat is a drug (stimulant) that is routinely used in Yemen and Africa’s Horn, but is illegal in the US and Canada.  In other parts of the western world (including the UK), however, it is very much legal.

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On “60 Minutes” a couple of Sundays ago, they had a story about gold mining in eastern–almost lawless–Congo.  Because of my obsession with nearby Uganda, the story was very much of interest.  And the story is very topical right now with the price of gold hovering around $1,100/ounze.  But I want to tell this tale backward.

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On June 12, represenatives from several NGOs and I arrived in Kampala, Uganda.  Our plane trip took way too long:  4 separate flights that covered 4 continents and took 48 nearly-sleepless hours.  Our Africa hotel was overbooked, so a friend and I had to stay in a nearby hotel.  We were staying in old Kampala, a working-class portion of the city.  That night after visiting an Internet cafe, I started to walk alone back to my hotel room over a route I wasn’t familiar with.  I wandered slightly of course and fell into a deep stone-and-mortar-lined ditch.  I cut my head and lost consciousness.  There was urban runoff flowing down the open sewer.  The rest of the story I have pieced together from witnesses I could find.

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Lately I’ve become obsessed with sub-Saharan eastern Africa.  It is a place that has been tormented by HIV/AIDs, war, over-population, corrupt and inept governments, and famine.  Just as you think things are calming down in the region, another disaster breaks out.  The current troubled area is eastern Congo.  Northern Uganda seems to be settling down, but Darfur is still a mess.  Kenya, where we thought there was hope, recently had a troubled election. 

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I just got back from a whirlwind tour of orphanage/schools, technical secondary schools, and several villages in rural Uganda.  We saw much of country in a little over two weeks.  Between traveling and visiting, we put in 12-hour days, visiting Masaka, Kabale, Bubwa Island (in Lake Victoria), Katosi, Iganga, Tororo, Kaberamaido, Lira, Gulu, and Karuma Falls.  The poverty is overwelming, but the Ugandan spirit endures.

School children near Tororo

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