250,000 Shillings

I want to start by saying that I love the comments that people leave, and if you want me to blog more, please leave more comments (or at least send me notes via email). With this said, the bandwidth and electricity have not been good of late, and that’s one of the real limiting factors for blogging, as is my time. I find it interesting that I’ve been busier on this trip than when I’m at home (at least when I’m doing NGO work along the way), and find that a good number of my hairs are turning gray. At this rate, I might be all gray by my return to the States. Now onto the subject at hand…

I had a really interesting conversation with an Anglican priest earlier this week. He was one of the town leaders in a community where the Bushenyi Alliance for Rural Health and Development, one of the groups with which I was working, was inaugurating a health clinic. He told me about the problems facing his community, as well as the resources, and shared with me that the typical farmer in his community will earn 250,000 Ugandan Shillings in cash over the course of the year. Mind you, this is above and beyond the food that they use to feed their families and crop payments used to pay rental on land, but it’s still only $130 in family income for an entire year! And to think that I’m struggling to live on $130 for a week around here. I don’t know how they do it. Or maybe I do, but the thought of it is so exotic that I refuse to really consider the possibility.

The cost of living in Uganda is quite cheap, and consistently so across the board…that is to say for people traveling with dollars. The boda boda rides that I wrote about in an earlier entry run anywhere from 25 cents to one dollar for the typical city ride. And today, we went for a ride to a refugee camp likely 30-35 km away from Gulu that ran us $2.50….and I found it expensive. Hotel rooms at decent places run $10-20 a night, food can easily be found for $2-5 a meal, and bus travel runs about a dollar an hour.

In terms of Ugandans who are not rural farmers, some folks with formal employment make as little as $60/month. Some, of course, make more, but even food service folks in the capital—where things are not always cheap—make only twice that amount. And today we met two groups of Congolese refugees who are supporting themselves through prostitution—they refer to it as “through any means possible”—and learned that the typical screw makes them fifty cents to a dollar, just about the same price as a boda boda ride. Honest question: which would I enjoy more?

But while Ugandans don’t make very much money, or at least a good slice of them don’t, there’s not a lot of poverty. In the North where I am now, there is definitely more since many people are displaced by war and without jobs and/or land, but conditions are certainly not dire. Uganda is a rich country. A rich country with problems, but that can be said about most places. What’s clear is that Uganda has it a lot better than many countries I’ve visited, perhaps most.