Uh-Oh

While still a bit jetlagged, I was eager to get started working on the various projects that brought me to Africa in the first place.  We had previously decided that Joline and the kids would wait until next week before beginning their visits to the orphanages and the juvenile prison, but that I would go in on Monday.  My driver (it still feels odd and a bit uncomfortable to have a driver) picked me up at 8:00 a.m.  By 10:00 a.m., my world had crashed in ways that made my chest and left arm ache.

I had assumed that I would be sharing an office with Shane Michael – one of my former students who is working here in Uganda for a year as a Nootbaar Fellow, assigned to the Commercial Court as a mediator.  But when I arrived, the court manager showed me to my own office.  This office had previously served as a second office for the Principal Judge (the head of the trial court system in Uganda) whose main office is at the High Court a mile or so away.  Since he wasn’t using this office regularly, he kindly released it to me.  It is quite large and has its own bathroom and chilled bottled water dispenser.  So far so good.

A few minutes later, Shane popped in and we had a chance to catch up.  He is top notch all around, and has made some good progress on laying the groundwork for the projects we will be working on together.  He informed me about a few meetings he had scheduled for us this week and next, and provided me some other important details.  Shortly thereafter, the court IT person showed up and asked me if I needed anything.  “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you could change all of my computer’s settings and delete all (and I mean all) of my data files – Word, Word Perfect, Excel, Pictures, videos, links to and passwords for websites – everything must go.  And while you are at it, please, please disable my ability to connect to the Pepperdine server to retrieve my e-mails.”

That is what she apparently thought I meant when I said, “Is it possible to connect me to the internet via the Ethernet cable coming from
the wall behind me?”  I really need to work on my Ugandan accent because my inability to communicate is causing major problems.

She left with my laptop and returned an hour later asking me to create a password so I could access the court’s network.  I thought that was odd, but I obliged and she left again.  By noon, I knew there was a problem because when she brought back my computer and turned it on, the “user
name and password” boxes I normally had to fill in were gone.  Soon thereafter, I discovered that all of my data files had been deleted, as well.
All of them.  That’s when the chest pains started.

She had reconfigured my computer to meet the specifications of the courthouse computers, and apparently assumed that I came to Uganda
looking for a completely fresh start.  When I explained to her (through tears and snot bubbles) that I needed my data files, she told me that she would consult with her colleague to see if he could recover them.  I barely resisted pin-cushioning her with my pen.

That afternoon, her colleague told me that I didn’t need to worry because he could run some software on my computer and retrieve “most” of the
deleted files.

“Most?” I asked.

“Almost all of them,” he responded with a smile.

“Um, why are you saying ‘most’ and ‘almost?’”  I questioned.

“Don’t worry – you will be happy when I am done,” he assured me.

“I will be ‘happy’ if I get all of them,” I replied as nicely as I could.

I told him that I needed to talk with our IT folks at Pepperdine to see what they had to say before I let him run anything on my computer.  That evening, David Dickens (Pepperdine’s IT department guy who has embodied patience and professionalism in the midst of my near hysteria) called me before 7:00 a.m.  He was able to walk me through getting reconnected to Pepperdine’s server and helped me confirm that the files were, in fact, gone.  He assured me that there was a way to recover the data that had been saved the last time the back-up system Pepperdine has in place, but they would either need to mail me the CDs (which could take a month to get here), or they could send them to me over the course of several hours via a high-speed connection.  Oops, don’t have one of those.  Is “dial up” one word or two?   In the end, David’s advice was to allow the court IT guy to run the software to recover the files.  He seemed confident that the files could actually be retrieved.

The next morning (Tuesday), I surrendered my laptop to the Ugandan IT guy and he set to work.  I checked on him in the mid-afternoon, which is when he showed me some connecting cord that had wires spaghetti-ing out of them in all the wrong places.  He explained that the jacked-up cord was necessary to complete the recovery of the files – something about moving the files from my computer to a hard drive, doing something to them, and then returning them to my computer.  We will have to start again (from square one) tomorrow when he gets another cord, he informed me.  “Perfect, I was hoping you would say that.  I have really enjoyed feeling incredibly unconnected and unproductive during my first two work days in Uganda.”  Actually, I just said “thank you.”  He is really trying to help and seems pretty competent and knowledgeable.

On the good side of the ledger, Joline and I have run three days in a row, which sets a modern-era record.  On the really good side of the ledger, I had goat stew when I went out to lunch with one of my Ugandan judiciary friends on Monday.  And I don’t saw this tongue-in-cheek – I say
it goat-flesh-wedged-between-back-teeth.  Goat is quite tasty.  When I get back to the U.S., I am going get me a goat or three and spark a culinary craze for the “other, other white meat.”

I hope to have a more favorable report in the next 24 to 48 hours.