The main road to our apartment - note the machine gun toting boda rider!
Last September, a sign went up on the main road from town to our apartment. It announced that “for the next two weeks” our road was being upgraded and there would be unexpected closures and delays.
A year later, this project feels no nearer to completion. At one point, the main turn closest to our place was completely cutoff by a 10-foot wide ditch. I came home from an evening meeting and had no way of going the last one kilometer to our apartment. Google maps wasn’t working due to the sporadic data access so it took me one hour, in the dark, to meander around the back side of our hill, through slums, dead ends, and very narrow roads with no streetlights to find an alternate way home. It was dicey and not one of my favorite memories of living here.
In theory, the government agency that “improves” our roads is attempting to widen this main thoroughfare. It feels like the developing world’s version of the I-405 road work in the Seattle area. A Chinese contractor won the bid for overseeing the work. You can spot the managers. The workers are all Ugandan laborers. Women tend to be the flaggers and they direct traffic by waving one red flag and one green flag made from colored rags tied to the end of short tree branches.
Every day the road is different. There are no streetlights so if you drive at night, it feels a bit like an arcade pinball machine when you don’t really know where the ball is going to go next. They are obviously concerned about our safety because they put up massive “speed humps” (18- 24 inches high) every 100 meters or so to make sure you don’t drive too fast. Most sedan cars have to come to a complete stop and go sideways across the hump to make sure the car doesn’t bottom out. This also assures that traffic goes even slower. There are unmarked drop-offs at many points in the work and new drainage wells encased in cement that simply pop-up in the middle of the road. Nothing is marked or lit. OSHA or any US Department of Transportation would have heart failure. The lawsuit possibilities are endless. But no one seems to care.
There are a few day-to-day consistencies on this project. Each day, there is thick dust covering the road. The water trucks travel back and forth throughout the day spraying water to cut the dust. This conveniently creates a muddy soup which in turn assures that your just washed car will be caked with red dirt by the time you arrive home. Much of the grading and structural work is done by hand. There is a significant amount of “fill” dirt required so overweight trucks briming with soil go past our compound multiple times a day to backfill an area we would call “wetlands” in the US. These trucks have destroyed the poor-quality tarmac road in front of our compound. We doubt it will be fixed after the main road’s completion. And sadly, there is no concern for water and drainage remediation to help assure the long-term integrity of the project or security for nearby homes or businesses.
Interestingly, we walked down the street one evening to see where the trucks were procuring the fill. We talked to the security guards for an apartment building at the base of the street where the trucks turn. He assured us that the soil had been purchased from Idi Amin’s daughter who owns a parcel at the top of our hill. (Idi Amin was the corrupt third president of post-colonial Uganda). I’m sure that the contractor got a “discount” for this purchase.
The good news about this entire situation…. The government published a handy guide for maneuvering potholes and bad roads. (See the flyer above). Better yet, this pothole guide doubles and triples in the program because it’s relevant to driving on EVERY ROAD IN KAMPALA!
How incredibly thoughtful.
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