Flew into Uganda this morning for reporting. Touched down in Entebbe, then took a taxi to the capital of Kampala.
Observations from the cab to Kampala:
Compared to Kenya, Uganda has its crap together in crazy ways.
Take advertising. In Kenya, fresh advertising always seem bizarrely out of place. Your driving down the potholed road, past stores that look like they were last painted when the Cosby Show was on Thursday nights, and there's a brand spanking new add for a cell phone or a bar of soap. It looks about as organic as those CGI animals and people Lucas stuck all through the re-release of the good Episodes. Once you chug past the Nairobi billboard, you won't see another one for oh, two or three hundred potholes. Instead of inspiring you to buy, you think "Wow, there's still one more sucker left in this economy who's spending money to advertise stuff nobody's buying. I thought that stone was wrung dry."
On the side of the road here, storefronts are freshly painted, their marquees advertising everything from Maxipads to Pepsi. Billboards come past you in even succession. The bananas people are selling aren't any less brown than the ones on Kenya streetsides, but here the stand is as wide as the side of an Explorer. In Kenya they're as wide as the front of a wheelbarrow. And I don't have to tell you the brown banana game is all about selection.
Watching all this, I did a wierd thing. We sped past a kid selling ears of corn. He waved to me, and I smiled at him. In Kenya, I'm in permanent not-reacting-to-attempts-to-engage-because-they-inevitably-turn-into-requests-for-money. I don't even make eye contact with people when I'm in a speeding car, because if I did, that would would make me a scared mzungu who likes to say Hi as long as he's in a moving vehicle you can't catch. Better to just have a hard and fast rule: If you innitiate interaction when I don't know you, then I assume you're looking for money.
But when people don't look to be in such desperate straits, your gut doesn't tell you to treat them as desperate people. Nairobi is a brutal maneating place, and its desperation leaks out to the rest of the country. And where Nairobi can't leak to, Somalia can. Yuck: Kenya's full of leakey crimey places.
But Uganda? Quiet and functioning with overcast clouds. Kinda like Ohio.
See, I do like people.
