I share the exit row with the daughter of a Ugandan member of parliament. She showed me how to play Sudoku and told me of her plans to go to university in South Africa, study business, and then return to “build [her] country”, which concretely means working in a bank for awhile. She has had friends and relatives die of AIDS, but sees the positive side of this with the family coming together and demonstrating how much they care for the soon-to-depart. She has had malaria many times.
We approach over Lake Victoria, celebrated by evolutionary biologists for its rapid radiation of Cichlid species after the lake dried out 15,000 years ago and mourned by environmentalists for its recent destruction accompanied by mass extinction of those Cichlids. The old terminal area has been taken over by the U.N. and other relief agencies for a fleet of high-wing turboprops that they presumably use to fly food into Sudan and other trouble spots. This old terminal is where Palestinians held Jewish passengers of an Air France plane hostage in 1976. The Lords of Poverty are represented by a Gulfstream G-V on the ramp.
The university computer science department’s driver welcomes me and we drive to Kampala over an astonishingly busy road. It after dark, but the sides of the roads are crowded with people walking in front of shops. Several billboards exhort young women to reject “sugar daddies” and “cross-generational sex”, noting that material possessions are not worth the risk of HIV infection.
My driver, Godfrey, comes from a village in the western part of Uganda. A lot of people live in the village, but there is no electricity. Many people have mobile phones and the service is reliable in the region, but charging them is a challenge. His wife is in the government hospital following a car accident. His opinion of the health care system is that it is basically worthless, but if you give money to a doctor privately your loved one will at least have someone looking in every day.
All of the hotels in town are booked by the Aga Khan, who is visiting with an entourage of more than 500. Part of the purpose of the visit is to discuss a large hydroelectric project that the Aga Khan is funding. I end up at the university’s guest house: no Internet, room the size of a monk’s cell, soft/saggy bed, no A/C, mosquito net. The TV in the cafe was showing a Mexican soap opera, dubbed into English, punctuated by commercials cautioning against cross-generational sex.