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• Thursday 10 February 2005
  
• Sunday 13 February 2005
  

Thursday 10 February 2005

K. M. Peterson, a friend from long-ago, just called me to test his set-up of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). No big deal, you say; we're all using VoIP these days. Well, how many of you are doing it from Kampala, Uganda? (I'm impressed, and wish I was with KMP. So many things I want to see in Africa.)

Above you see KMP at Lake Victoria, at the place where the Nile River starts its 6695 km (4184 mi) trip to the Mediterranean Sea.

You see his long-sleeved shirt and pants? A prudent measure to prevent mosquito bites, in addition to the anti-malarials he's already on. KMP says "at 0912 Friday morning it's around 28 °C [82 °F]. We're 0 degrees 21 minutes north of the Equator." I'd be having a hard time not wearing shorts or one of my kilts.

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 09:41:18 +0300
From: K. M. Peterson
Subject: Uganda

Hi there,

It's late Sunday morning as I write this. I'm sitting in my hotel room - it's extremely nice:

I got to the hotel around 0100 local time (1700 EST), after having not really gotten any sleep since I left Boston. I was up at 0900 the next morning, and had a nice breakfast and waited for my boss to arrive back from the safari he'd gone on.

Sunday night, dinner at the house of the head of one of the projects here; only the first of many compounds with an armed guard opening the gate (all of the offices and hotels have them). Beautiful place, up on one of the hills, and a lovely dinner. After dinner, we had scotch sitting up in their yard with a view of the city.

All this week: lots of running around, lots of meetings, dinner with various people. Meeting technical consultants and vendors in the hope of helping these offices work better. 

Thursday, we went to Jinju, a large town about 90km East of Kampala. We went to visit a couple of field offices and look at their Internet connectivity, and their issues. After we completed that task, we had lunch at an Indian restaurant and went to the Nile. The source of the Nile, actually, where it leaves Lake Victoria and begins its journey to the Mediterranean, 4000 miles from here. I sent an image to my friend Michael Sattler who put it in his blog, with commentary. [KMP is referring to the entry at the top of this page. --M]

I was treated to an evening of Kampala Nightlife on Friday night/Saturday morning; out until 0400 visiting music venues, disco joints, and places where, um, people like to go to meet other people for temporary liaisons. It was all quite interesting, and great to see another facet of life here. Also, at most of these places, I was the only white person there, so also interesting.

Next week, looks like more work, perhaps working out the consolidation of several Internet connections for the main offices of two of the other projects. We'll see.

• Life here is fairly interesting. We've walked a few places, but most of the time the projects provide drivers for us. Hey, what a change: you actually need an SUV here, since the roads are so terrible (and by this I mean some of the roads in the city look more like the "offroad" you see in the SUV ads).

• It's extremely strange to be a minority here, and somewhat exotic.

• Lots of guns, and sometimes it looks like 10% of the population work as security guards. I wonder if the companies have a competition each year to see who has the snazziest uniform? Every evening as we're going home, the streets are full of people in their uniforms, with their rifles (haven't seen a handgun as yet) getting ready to go to work.

• The air is very dirty. No apparent pollution controls on the cars. I'm finding I'm coughing a bit from time to time, although it doesn't bother me. Also, we're at about 1400m altitude, about 4600', so my workouts at the gym here are a bit more challenging.

• I seem to have adjusted to the time zones, although I was not sleeping well (still have a lot on my mind) for the first 5 days or so. I do seem to be well-awake at 0600 every morning.

• I'm pulling down the Boston Globe almost every night, so I'm keeping up fairly well on what's happening at home.

• The first days were partly cloudy, with lots of air pollution, but it's been clearer lately. The temperature is delightful though, in the 80s. Jinju was very nice, somewhat cooler and very clear; a pleasure to get out there.

• No mosquito bites as yet, but I'm faithfully taking the antimalarial drug Malarone.

• All the expats are extremely nice. Everyone seems to stick together, and there's a really interesting culture of Americans. Steve (our Sunday night host) went over to Marine House (that's USMC) at 0200 on Monday to watch the superbowl.

• The women from Boston who were killed in the plane crash in Afghanistan last week were from a company that JSI's president helped start, and they are in the same kind of business that we are, so that hit everyone in this community hard.

• It's very strange that when I wake up at 0600 everyone else I know is about to go to sleep.

• The currency here is the Ugandan Shilling. Since I was warned to bring new $50 and $100 bills, I got a good exchange rate (Ush 1680/$1), so I'm carrying around hundreds of thousands of these things. Another interesting thing.

• Everything has dust on it.
  

• There's a pool here:
  

• And the lobby is basically the gym as well:
  

• There are always large numbers of people walking in the streets. The comfort level of mixing cars, bikes, motorcycles, and pedestrians is much higher here. This would be an interesting place to drive (cars are right-hand drive). No accidents yet, but it sure is exciting.

• Electrical power is 220v, 50Hz, so I have an adapter and a transformer. So far, everything works fine. Even this Dell laptop...

• Food: only "native" food we've had is at lunch. The office has someone who makes lunch for us, so I get the "beans, rice, and meat" which is good. Otherwise, there's lots of foreign food; we had pizza the other night. Last night we had dinner out at a Belgian restaurant..

• I made two assumptions that turn out to be faulty: there are no ATMs here that I've found that will take any of my cards, so I'm being careful spending (which is a shame, because the per diem is pretty generous). Second: no way to phone home at this point, as my cellphone is US-only. Phone cards don't work, at all, and the number AT&T gave me for credit card use doesn't work either. Everyone here has a cellphone, and I won't come here again (or anyplace else for that matter) without a GSM phone.

• I did, however, finally get a VoIP box over here at work. It's a small thing, plugs into a network connection (Ethernet), and you plug a regular phone into it. Once it's online, and "registers" itself, you pick up the phone and get a dial tone, and dial just like you would in the US. The good news is that it's extremely inexpensive, $60 for the box, and $17/month for 500 minutes of calls; the bad news is that if you don't have a sufficient amount of bandwidth it's useless. It works fine at 0600 here (no one is online) and yesterday from the office, but they'd like to use it at 1630 when the US offices are opening at 0830, and that's prime time for network utilization, so we just don't know how well that will work out.

• But all the rooms here in the hotel do have Internet, and I am doing lots of email and using the phone early in the morning...

• So, I'm fine... more later in the week. I miss all of you, but it's a hell of a job, isn't it?

_K (At +256 31 227222 if you're so inclined to call me ...)