Arrive alive

Since I didn't have any plans for my first weekend in Uganda I didn’t hesitate when my colleague Moses invited me to join him for a Karate event in a town in western Uganda. Not because I am such a big Karate fan ;-) but I just couldn’t say no to the opportunity of seeing more of Uganda. The karate event would be in Fort Portal, a town situated close to the border of Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a four hour drive from Kampala we arrived and I was surprised  by the wonderful view of the Rwenzori Mountainsand by a pleasant temperate climate – more like a norwegian summer evening than a Ugandian one.

Fort Portal with the Rwenzori Mountains at the horizon.

 

Fort Portal is the seat of the Toro Kingdom and the circular building on top of the hill is the kings palace.

My colleague Moses.

Sunday was the day of the big event. More than 40 Karate-kas had come from Kenya, Rwanda and various places in Uganda to compete. First, the white, orange and blue belts had to show various sequences of movements that I believe they called Katas. Then there was a competition where there was some actual fighting. It was kind of funny that my first experience with "live karate" would be in western Uganda.

5 year old  Mpuuga, the son of one of the Karate instructors.

Moses and I were planning to take a bus back to Kampala at 4 pm. But the event dragged on and by the time we got on the bus, it was 6 pm and already starting to get dark. I knew that I should avoid travelling in the dark, but since we had to get back to Kampala I closed my eyes, laid back and tried to relax and hope that the driver would drive carefully.

He did not. On the contrary he was going 200hm/h, barely making the turns, overtaking every vehicle in front of us. My pulse started rising as I looked as Moses who was just as uncomfortable as I was. As an exchange student in Brazil in 2001 I came across a few really bad accidents and as we were speeding through the landscape some quite unpleasant pictures kept popping up in my head. If loosing the grip at that speed we would all be....ketchup, and I did not intend to end my life on the Ugandian highway 26 years old (at a certain point I was even imagening the headlines ”Norwegian woman dies in traffic accident crash in Uganda” ”only five days after arriving”,”body not recognizable” etc). Moses tried to talk to the conductor, but he just laughed at him. I figured that the reason for driving so insanely fast was to save money so I offered some money to try to convince the driver to slow down ,but again we were just met with laughter (now also from the other passagers who apparently wanted to reach Kampala as fast as possible). In the end Moses decided to call the director of the bus company. The director talked to to the conductor, but not even that slowed them down. At this point I was crying, and I was about to tell the driver to let me out of the buss (I would rather stand alone in the dark in a remote village than continuing on that death trap). Fortunately, we reached a part of the road where there was some construction work and the driver was forced to slow down, and I was so happy that the road continued like that until we reached Kampala and the jam made it impossible to drive that recklessly.

 

Kampala bus station

 

On my way from the airport to Kampala on my first day in Uganda a road sign caught my eye. The message was short but effective: Arrive Alive! On Sunday evening I really doubted that I would reach Kampala alive. It was a terrible experience! Statistics indicate that some 17,000 traffic accidents are recorded yearly in Uganda and road accidents claim up to 2,000 lives annually. And reckless driving is not only a problem in Uganda. According to Ronnie Kabuye Ssebunya, a road traffic safety expert at Lund University Sweden, almost 1.2 million people in the world are killed each year and 20-50 million are injured or disabled. Out of these, 85 percent are from developing countries, but ¾ of these causalities is from the sub-Saharan region. The reasons: poor road designs, failure to observe traffic laws and general lack of information on how best people can use roads.

For me it was a traumatic end to an otherwise wonderful weekend. I hope I will go to Fort Portal again, but I will strongly consider to rent a car, or at last travel during the day.

 

Over: The girls from Eric from Rwanda has a black belt in Karate. Here we are trying some capoeira.