Operation: Buy a Car

Let me preclude this story by saying that this mission would not have been completed without the enourmous help and connections of Charles Muchunguzi, Amber’s advisor at Mbarara University. So…
On Thursday, October 23rd I went with Charles to the capitol city of Kampala to procure a vehicle, mainly for use in Amber’s project, but also to give us a little freedom to go when and where we please. At 1 in the afternoon Charles and I walked down to the gas station to catch a bus. As you can imagine, the bus schedule here is very loose. You can wait for hours for a bus to show up and then wait for hours for the bus to fill up before it starts moving again. Charles happens to know the manager of the bus company in Mbarara so we got the inside information that a bus won’t be coming until 3 at the earliest. However, one of Charles’s friends just happened to be at the gas station getting her car serviced just before heading to Masaka, a town halfway between Mbarara and Kampala. Our likelihood of catching a bus there is much greater so we climbed in her car, with another woman and two children, and headed out amidst torrential downpours, thunder and lightening.
After a 45 minute wait for the bus to fill in Masaka (not bad) and being subjected to very bad music videos of Africans acting like gangsters and divas during the 3 hour bus ride, we arrive in a very dark, and very crazy, Kampala. There are so many people! And they’re all trying to sell you something! By candlelight! The bus depot can best be described as total chaos and, for that matter, so can the entire city. It’s 7 o’clock and we’re tired so Charles and I make a plan to meet at nine the next morning to go talk to his car dealer friend (another connection).
9 a.m. Turns out the dealership, I use this term loosely like the bus schedule, is very close to my hotel. So we tell them our criteria for a vehicle and one is presented to us immediately. It is a 1994 model of the popular Toyota Rav4 with 75,000 km on the odometer. Seems low to me but the engine looks to be in good shape so we take it for a test drive and to Charles’s mechanic (another friend) for a buyers check. Turns out when looking at the underside of the car it’s in pretty bad shape. Understandable when you consider the roads. Even in Kampala there are potholes so big that two lane roads are turned into one lane roads while everyone takes a turn at going around the grave size hole. They also have a practice of putting speed bumps the size of hippopotamus’s in the road where they want the traffic to utterly crawl. These are called “sleeping policemen” and a lot of cars bottom out on them so they have to take them at an angle which again turns a two lane road into a one lane road and all the while the boda-boda’s (that’s a scooter taxi) swerve around everyone and from every direction.
So the car needs about 1 million Ugandan shillings worth of work to the suspension and drive train. They’re asking 9 million, which is, of course, the inflated dealer price so I tell Charles I won’t buy it unless we get them down to 7.2 at least (the exchange rate is about 1600 shillings to 1 U.S. dollar, you do the math). No go. The lowest they go is 8.5 so we talk to a few more people there, look at a few options but there’s nothing that fits our criteria perfectly. Now, the way the dealership works is thus. We’re on a city block that is lined with parked cars from end to end. There are also three or four parking lots on one side completely stuffed to the gills with cars. Some being worked on, some being washed, some being parted out. They’re all for sale, however, certain cars are owned by certain people so if there’s one you like you have to find the owner of that car and they may or may not be there. Anyway, after about an hour of looking and waiting and talking and making phonecalls a car that fits our bill shows up. It’s also a 1994 Rav4 but in much better shape. He’s asking 9 but we, and by we I should say Charles, get him down to 8.8 million. We do the test drive and look underneath and it’s in great shape. I don’t think it’s been outside of Kampala much because the suspension is like new. All that’s left is the paperwork which, let me just say, takes a long time and requires more negotiating as to the wording of the bill of sale and when will the title be transferred, details that without Charles there to manage I would have been screwed. So at 5 o’clock that afternoon we sign on the agreement on the hood of the car and we’re rolling in Uganda! Now I’ve got to figure out how to drive in this city (they drive on the left here, most of the time) and where to park it. Luckily my hotel is not far.
7:30 a.m. Saturday I wake up with the intention of going straight home. A quick breakfast and I’m out the door, pretty sure of the general direction I’m heading. I’ll spare you the detailed account of the next 7 hours and just tell you I took a few wrong turns, headed out of town on the wrong road, realized this after 60km, ran dangerously low on funds for gas, had to find some friends who just happened to be in Kampala too, borrow some money from them, get a better map than the out of date piece of crap I had, get good directions, drive thru downtown for the 4th or 5th time to get to the road home. The 5 hour drive home towards the sunset was quite pleasant compared to the previous 7 hours stuck in traffic and going the wrong way. Yeah, the street sign system, and I doubt there is one, is pretty loose too. If there is a sign it could be the name of the street, the name of the neighborhood, or the name of the bus stop which is named for the business that was there at the time of putting up the sign. It’s not that they are so relaxed or don’t care about having an infrastructure. The leaders seem so wrapped up in their image or their status that a lot of the budget gets spent on things for them. The mayor of Kampala drives a Hummer. I wonder how many potholes could be fixed or street signs put up for the price of one of those. One of my problems that day was that my map, 2 years old, showed a roundabout that had been removed about a year and a half ago and turned into a four way intersection. The reason why was not revealed to me. It has been my experience that roundabouts always work better than four ways. And the President of Uganda, Museveni, just had his house on the lake completely remodeled by the Chinese. Meanwhile the people of Uganda suffer from many problems that, to our standards, seem unacceptable. And they pay about 30% of their income to taxes.