The Jam

One of the first things you hear about in Kampala is the jam. Traffic jam. And let me tell you, I will never again complain about traffic in Ann Arbor or going through Chicago. Kampala takes the cake.

A trip of 20 km can take anywhere from 15 min to 2 hrs if you leave at the wrong time of day.  Notice in the intersection above, no stop signs, traffic lights, traffic police, anything. There's also no dream of people treating it like a four-way stop. The other picture is a road, meant to be a 4 lane highway, but the money was poorly managed and two were all that were completed.

This is one of the nicely paved roads in Uganda! The mountain in the distance is Mount Elgon, near Mbale, which we passed through on our way to Tororo. The vehicle heading toward us is a Uganda taxi, or a Matatu. Matatu drivers are some of the most aggressive I've ever seen. They seem to think they are able to squeeze those 14 passenger vans in to spaces many people wouldn't even walk... This two-lane, paved road is considered a main way. There are some roads with four lanes, but many don't even need to have lines, because drivers like to create their own lane anyways.

What the roads more often look like in Uganda - dirt with the biggest potholes I've ever bounced through.

Other ways you see people moving around include privately owned cars, private hires (private taxi drivers), Boda-bodas (motorcycles that can be a quick way to your destination, but also dangerous, depending on the caution of the driver), bicycles and trucks. With all these moving many, many people around, you can imagine how congested the small roads become.

All of the above mentioned vehicles will carry anything from produce, to furniture, to coal (as pictured below). It's amazing the things you see on a boda-boda in Uganda.

We got stuck behind this truck one day when we were in the field training children in out study. It is hard to see, the with the potholes of this road, you wonder how more don't get stuck. But hey, why not just use another truck to push it through?

Construction, bad parking, small roads, anything and everything contributes to the jam.

There are an estimated 1.2 million people in Kampala with thousands of people commuting in and out of the city every day. With only a few roads leading in and out of the city, you can only imagine the morning, evening and weekend commuter times... Work, vacation, meals, everything is planned around the Kampala jam.

It is not uncommon to pass big guys like this in the road. Long horn cattle are everywhere, even in a big city like Kampala. They often just wander on their own and I am constantly wondering who they belong to. These horns are not even the biggest I've seen around.

I have always felt very safe moving around the city. I stick mostly to walking, but will hop in a matatu if there's someone with me. A few days back, however, the hovering danger of the Kampala jam was made very real to me when I spent a morning shadowing in the adult casualty ward of Mulago. A little while before I arrived, there had been a large accident on one of the main roads involving at least 9 cars and over 50 people injured. Almost all of them seemed to come through out unit that morning. The head nurse mused that there would continue to be many more trickling in throughout the day. Some chose to go to local clinics first, then were referred to Mulago due to the severity of their illness.

That morning made me grateful for my own safety traveling about Kampala the past few weeks and also for the experience of seeing trauma triage following a disaster first hand. The doctors and nurses knew exactly what to be prepared for and worked seamlessly as the Ugandan Red Cross started bringing in patients on stretchers.