The first thing we noticed
about Uganda Qatar we flew over the blank Arabian peninsula
and the Ethiopian desert, so it was a relief to see the landscape covered in
foliage as we descended over Lake Victoria into Entebbe Airport Nile is claimed to be to the east of
the airport, but as we drove on into the south-west the landscape remained
stoically fertile. Given that it hasn’t rained once in four weeks, the rainy
season (March to May) must be particularly Biblical.
Mbarara itself is a
relatively wealthy town. It was sacked by advancing Tanzanian troops in 1979 as
Idi Amin’s regime came to an end, but has since reinvented itself as an
important transport hub between Kampala (the capital) and roads into the south-western
provincial towns, as well as Rwanda, Tanzania and DR Congo. It continues to be
the fastest-growing settlement in the country, and has a large University,
which is where we are based.
If you take a walk along
the main street, you will quickly abandon all your pre-conceptions of
sub-Saharan Africa and witness a town which
has abundant facilities and a population aspirant for the goods and services
which westerners take for granted. There are restaurants, mobile phone shops,
electronic goods salesmen, banks, a cinema, and a battalion of boda-boda
drivers.
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| Mbarara High Street |
The boda-boda is an East
African institution which was originally used to transport people across
borders without the inconvenience of a passport check (hence boda-boda – ‘border
to border’). Today they are small motorbike taxis which charge a pittance for
you to sit on the back and be taken to your destination of choice. Helmets are
rare and road safety is non-existent. Most of the bikes have religious
observations daubed on them, such as ‘Pray to God’ or ‘Allah will save you’; a
frank admission that you can only survive their terror with the assistance of
higher beings.
There is an atmosphere of
near chaos at all times, which can be in turn, amusing, terrifying, annoying
and spectacular. Huge arguments will break out amongst large groups of people
apropos of nothing, every business has a somnolent guard with a pump-action
shotgun (do bakeries really suffer armed robberies?), and traffic junctions are
a mêlée of Arc de Triomphe proportions. Imagine a hot Salford
and you will be some way to acquiring an accurate vision of Mbarara.
Aside from working our way
through the ‘M’ section of our medical dictionary we’ve settled in well, and we
hope to upload more posts to give people an idea of what life is like in
Mbarara. It seems that more US
