As usual I am writing too much, so I will break up this up into parts.
In my final blog from our last trip to Uganda, about 16 months ago, I noted that the Ugandan government, which has kept itself in power for 25 years now through “democratic” elections, was coming up woefully short in many aspects of governance. One aspect in particular was the terrible state of its roads, especially the main artery running from Kenya through Kampala, right past our old place in Mbarara and on down to Rwanda and Burundi. I wondered how a country so desperately looking to boost its economy could allow its main avenue of commerce to remain an absolute crumbling mess of vehicle killing potholes. When we left they had just begun to renovate a small section of the 150 miles between Kampala and Mbarara. Fast-forward 16 months to our friend Herbert picking us up from the airport the other morning and explaining that the government has been furiously working on the road as of late (probably no coincidence that fresh elections are due for Feb. 2011).
It was amusing to note that while driving through road construction zones back in the states is typically a giant pain in the butt, here, the half-renovated road is actually far better than the original. The section from Kampala to Masaka is in stage two of the renovation meaning they have gotten rid of most of the deadly potholes and have laid a layer of base on the road in preparation for the asphalt. The base they use here is extremely dusty with fairly good size rocks that fly up from speeding busses cracking windshields (our car had 8-9 solid rock impacts on the windshield). However, the flying rocks are not the problem so much as the unrelenting dust from the multitudes of vehicles rushing back and forth. The road is left with base only for several months to be compacted by the vehicles before the asphalt gets laid. The problem is that there are no water trucks to continuously spray the road, combined with the fact that southwest Uganda has just suffered through a very hot dry season and the rainy season is already two weeks late. The road became so dusty on several occasions that we had to stop the car until it cleared enough to see. None of this was a big deal to us, as we were traveling in the safety of a car, but much of the population in this area live or work along the road in places called trading centers, and there are always numerous people, including small children, walking or riding bikes on the shoulders of the road. The unimaginable amounts of dust settle in thick layers on everything in sight, including on the crops and banana tree plantations, which is not at all good for either. One can only imagine the effect this dust has on people’s lungs everyday for months at a time.
I discussed this very fact with some local friends in Mbarara because we were chatting about individual rights and the rule of law. I was explaining that, though we certainly have many problems with the US political system, we generally have a sense of accountability among our officials. If a political official ignores important issues for a long enough period of time, or commits enough egregious errors, that official will eventually be voted out of office in a free and fair election by constituents who are sometimes more, sometimes less aware of their individual rights. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case here in Uganda. I asked my friends if they thought most Ugandan people had any idea what their rights were and they laughed while shaking their heads, no! My friend Gordon used the dusty road as an example as he explained that a villager covered in dust will look at the road and boast that this is development while not even contemplating the damage to his health and livelihood. This is exactly the type of constituent the government wants, naïve about, yet supportive of a project that should have been done a decade ago.
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