Extortion, Pork, and Photo Shoots

This week started off in fairly normal circumstances with Derek and I working with ILF on their stove project and brainstorming about our business. Tuesday we learned how interesting things can be here. We were planning a day of meeting various groups that work within a farming co-op and learning how they operate. We had a full day of driving planned and were going to the supermarket in the middle of town to get some water and snacks for the car ride. We popped into the supermarket for about 5 minutes and came out to our truck had a boot on the tire. Derek and I were pretty confused because our driver had been in the car the entire time and we didn't understand how someone gets a boot on their car while they are still in it. We saw that he was arguing with a few men and they were pointing to notebooks that they had and kept flipping through them. What had happened, as our driver explained, was that these men worked for the city and said that we owed money on a parking ticket. Our driver had a handful of paid tickets and they had no proof of the outstanding ticket but said that it was back at their office and when they went back to get it, then we could get the boot off. If we wanted it off now we had to pay 30,000 shillings (about $22). We told them to forget about the money and sent our driver to the office to inquire about the ticket. He eventually came back with the men's boss and said that there had been no proof of the ticket so their boss was going to make them take the boot off. The city workers had come back and, with their boss in attendance raised their price from 30,000 to 60,000 to take the boot off of the car. We were with a few Ugandans and they all recognized it to us as extortion. Derek and I were frustrated and I ended up being pretty harsh on one of them. The time that they were holding us could have been time that we were helping other Ugandans out. They ended up walking off and their boss was stuck with us. The whole affair ended with a police officer coming and inquiring as to what was going on. After having the situation explained to him he immediately began to attack the municipal worker who had come with our driver as being the reason that foreigners fear Uganda. He went on to say that people in his profession only cheat and that they are ruining the entire country. The police officer gave us clearance to saw off the boot and a large crowd had gathered to watch. After the boot was gone we finally got moving again and the whole situation seemed to be just a big waste of time. The men who had put the boot on the car were apparently going to be arrested for their attempted exploitation. It was interesting to see that the police officer was the moral authority over someone who worked for the local government. It was nice to know that at least there was someone who had the authority and the judgment to take a stand and help us out.

The rest of our day was pretty unremarkable in comparison to the morning. We met with the co-op and saw a ton of chickens. We learned that there are a number of different farming practices that are done in the urban areas in the South that are just being introduced to the North. Some of them sounded like sound business ideas that could very well if implemented correctly and the co-op was hoping to diversify its portfolio. There had been large farming co-operations before the civil wars had started and now the government is encouraging the formation of large commercial farming co-operations. It is good to see there is the idea of taking something that everyone does to survive and trying to generate additional income in the form of commercial farming instead of simply subsistence farming.

The rest of this week we have been involved a bit with closing out our professor's time here and networking with local businesses. We are getting to the point where we have to realize what legal status we need to obtain here in Uganda in order to fulfill our organization's goals of encouraging the development of business ideas through education and loaning. The next few weeks should fly by as we have quite a list of things to accomplish. Hopefully soon I will have some news of the development of our organization.