One Year Later . . . Same Uganda

One year ago – to the day – I made the same journey from California to Kampala that I just completed this weekend. So many things have changed during that intervening year. I have changed in ways I am still trying to fully appreciate. Our kids have changed in ways we can see, and ways we daily pray about.

Too many things, however, remain the same. The three-flight, 24-hour energy-draining marathon journey still bites. Hard. Try as I might, I can’t seem to get the scheduled sleeping thing sorted out. Not that I didn’t try. I went to the doctor to get a prescription of Ambien so I could catch some pharmaceutical “zzzs” on the plane. She was a new doctor, so I didn’t tell her I had a few pills left over from an earlier trip. Hey – she didn’t ask.

Dr. Feelgood told me that she could prescribe the 5mg or 10mg pills. Last time, Dr. DoLittle had given me the 5mg type, which had proven rather ineffectual. I think I responded a little too eagerly to the 10mg suggestion, so Dr. Feelgood hesitated and told me “the FDA is concerned about over-prescription of Ambien, and that their studies show that 5mg is sufficient to blah, blah, blah, blah.”

“I don’t want the nickels – I need the dimes. Can I have some please, please, please?”

She paused for a moment, so I pointed to the pictures of twin girls on her wall – “Are those your daughters? They’re soooo cute.”

She beamed, told me their names, then wrote me the script for the dimes. Flattery works every time.

Well, fast forward to the first leg of the flight on Saturday. When the time was ripe for me to pull a Rip Van See Ya for the last four or five hours of the LA to Amsterdam flight, which is when my Ugandan counterparts were sleeping, I pulled out the magic bottle of dreams and shook it into my palm. Out came several dimes . . . and a nickel I had added to the bottle when I was packing. I was pretty tired, and since Dr. Feelgood had said that the FDA studies showed no difference, I popped the nickel. Dumb. Really, really, really, dumb.

To say the nickel didn’t do Jack Squat to put me to sleep would be charitable to Jack. Jack didn’t crouch, or even hunch, let alone squat. His knees stayed locked the entire time. This, of course, meant that I slept most of the second flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi, Kenya. On that flight, Jack not only squatted, he folded like he was dealt a 2-7 offsuit up against a pair of Aces. Consequently, I managed to get myself exactly backward on the sleep cycle.

And things only got better from there.

The layover in Kenya was 90 minutes – plenty of time for the hard-working, quick-thinking luggage jockeys to ride the suitcases from Gate A to Gate B in the relatively small airport. I was sure things were on the right track when I was upgraded to First Class for the one-hour trip into Uganda.

But TIA – the oft-repeated phrase acknowledging things don’t always go according to plan in a developing world. After all, “This is Africa.”

Having had my luggage delayed on two of my nine prior flights to Uganda, I was the first in the crowd to sense a problem. I raced to the baggage desk and got there just ahead of the other 29 passengers whose luggage was also playing hide and seek. Anarchy would be an understated description of the scene that followed. Fortunately, I got my paperwork in and got out of the airport before the two South African mothers of screaming infants could completely dismember the hapless (and helpless) paper pusher at Kenyan Airways. The one bright spot in this episode is that I learned a few new cuss words in Africaans.

David Nary (Pepperdine Nootbaar Fellow in Uganda for a year) and his trusty driver Daniel were waiting for me in the passenger arrival lobby. The next flight in from Nairobi was not due to arrive until 9:00 a.m. the next morning, so there was no reason to stick around.

“Let me just stop at the Barclays ATM and get some cash,” I said. Insert card. Enter password. Select amount. 400,000 shillings ($150). Thank You. Printing receipt. Take cash. Take Cash. TAKE CASH.

No cash. Just a metaphorical middle finger staring at me through the blinking slot where my cash was supposed to be. The good thing, however, was that I had a receipt that said I actually received the air cash. Perfect.

I looked around and noticed a security camera pointed at the ATM. I figured it couldn’t hurt to make a record of the unfolding events, so I played a little game of charades. I did my best your-satanic-machine-ate-my-money-and-I-am-about-to-throat-punch-the-keypad skit. I wouldn’t be surprised if it made some sort of year-end YouTube awards show. It was that convincing.

* * *

The kind folks from Sixty Feet (Kelsey, Kirby, and crew) have graciously allowed me to stay with them (again) while I am in Uganda, so I arrived at their place around 1:00 a.m. This time, however, I wasn’t messing around with The Sandman. I popped a dime like it was a Skittle – 10mg of Ambien. Ten minutes later, I couldn’t see straight. Eleven minutes later, I couldn’t stand up. Twelve minutes later, I was drooling.

Four hours later, it was time to get ready for fun-filled day of plea bargaining. And hey, I was already dressed in the best clothes I had available to me.

* * *

Since I will be spending most of the week with David Nary, and since he has own court-provided driver, I decided not to rent a car during this trip. This left me responsible, however, for getting myself to and from the Kampala suburb where I am staying each day. Kampala’s automobile traffic makes LA gridlock feel like Utah highway driving during the annual BYU v. Utah football game. There is simply no way to get anywhere quickly in the city . . . except on a boda boda. So against my better judgment (oxymoron?), I sauntered up to a motorcycle stand and pointed toward town.

My next mistake was picking a driver wearing a helmet. My facially Einsteinian logic reasoned that people who wear helmets are safety conscious; people who are safety conscious about themselves will be safety conscious about others; I am an other. Makes sense, right?

Well, had my head not been wedged firmly in my own tailpipe, I would have would reasoned that people who wear helmets are less likely to get injured in a crash; people less likely to be injured in a crash worry less about being in a crash; people who worry less about being in a crash do less to avoid a crash; I am on the back of boda being driven by someone not worried about being in a crash.

On the bright side, it had started raining. Still more encouraging was the fact that it hadn’t rained in a while so there was a thin layer of dust and oil on the road. Better still, the driver’s tires were balder than my kids keep telling me I will be someday soon. At least I didn’t have to change underwear once we arrived (remarkably safely) at our destination – I didn’t have any underwear to change into because . . . they were still in Kenya with the rest of my belongings.

Speaking of my kids’ tendency to shovel compliments my direction, the one about me getting fat also resurfaced Monday morning. David was kind enough to loan me a shirt, tie, and suit jacket, when I arrived at court. I fell just a hair shy (only a sixth of a yard) of being able to squeeze myself into his 32-inch waist suit pants. The result threatened to land me on the front page of the Onion’s parody of GQ. Don’t believe me? Take a look.