Still no sign of Bono

The first thing we noticed about Uganda was how green everything is. During the six hour flight from 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. The source of the 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.

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 and European ex-pats are travelling here to work, so we hope this may be of use to them, and to our friends and family who want to see what we’re up to. As doctors, we’ll try to paint a picture of Ugandan healthcare, and as Wazungu how we see the country’s culture and society.