is this really happening?

so i'm at a dinky internet cafe down the street from the hotel we've been quarantined in for days. i don't have much time but i just wanted to let everyone know that i'm safe and well. i'm sure many of you have heard what's going on in kampala. things aren't good. i don't really have time to go into detail right now, but i think american news has started to cover it, and if not, check bbc and/or the uganda newspapers ("daily monitor" and "new vision"). in a nutshell, there's been rioting in kampala for the past few days over the kabaka (king) of the buganda kingdom's impending visit to another region. we're currently staying in a hotel outside of the city, a few miles from the airpot, just in case. luckily we're scheduled to leave for rwanda tomorrow and we'll be gone for a week, so hopefully things will have settled down by the time we return. if they haven't, i really don't know what the plan is. our academic directors aren't being incredibly open and informative; i don't know if it's because they don't want to scare us or what, but it's making the whole thing even harder. everything's very surreal -- not just the fact of the violence, but also the fact that we've been whisked away and placed under "hotel arrest," hearing only the occasional gunshot from afar without really knowing what's going on. i have a more extensive, detailed post that i typed up on my laptop and i'm going to post it next week when i have access to wireless again, even though it'll be outdated. i love you all so much and i'm fine and i'll be in touch with mom and dad regularly, so don't hesitate to contact them for updates.

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Obviously this post is a little outdated, but I wrote it on 9/11 so I could get everything down while it was still fresh in my mind. Needless to say, things changed quite drastically in the hours after I posted on the 10th. Perhaps you’ve heard, in the news, from mom, etc., but I’ll do a recap here anyway.

So we’re sitting in class at Makerere University on the afternoon of 9/10. (I’m making this sound so foreboding, right?) Partway through the most interesting lecture we’ve had yet we start hearing gunshots outside and seeing plumes of smoke rising around the city. Come to find out, riots were breaking out around Kampala due to a situation that, technically, has been brewing for many, many years. Essentially, in this particular case, the kabaka (king) of Buganda, the largest and most powerful kingdom in Uganda (let me break it down: the Baganda people live in Buganda, a kingdom in Uganda, and speak Luganda), who holds no official political power but possesses a great deal of unofficial “cultural” influence, has been planning to visit Kayunga region on Saturday, 9/12. Yesterday (9/10), however, the Prime Minister of the Buganda kingdom went ahead of the kabaka to prepare the way. We were initially told that the Prime Minister was kidnapped, but I think in reality he was just barred from entering the region. (We haven’t really had a lot of access to the news other than the occasional broadcasts in Luganda that they’re airing here at the hotel, so some of my facts might be incorrect.) Anyway, the government doesn’t want the Kabaka to travel to this other region for fear that he’ll stir up animosity toward Museveni’s regime, and as a result, many Baganda people in Kampala began rioting to protest this. (As our academic directors explained, though, this particular incident just happened to be the catalyst for expressing a discontent that is much more deeply-rooted than might appear on the surface.) As the riots began to get out of control yesterday, the police called in the military and unleashed tear gas and bullets on the rioters, who were burning things (esp. tires) all over the city and looting. I believe the death-count has reached 8 by now, but rumor has it that some of these were the result of trampling and weren’t directly at the hands of the police.

So as all of this is unfolding, they put the University on lockdown and won’t allow anyone to leave. So here we are, a bunch of confused and restless American kids, locked in a classroom for about 4 hours waiting for an opportunity to get out. Initially, the academic directors thought that we’d be able to go back to our homestays, but as time passed it became obvious that most of the routes to our homes were dangerous and impassable. So finally they brought us to where we are now, Naigara Hotel, which is aways outside of Kampala and very close to the airport, just in case.

This whole thing is so, so surreal – especially the fact that we’re locked on the premises of this hotel while we hear gunshots all over the city. Driving to the hotel last night was pretty sobering. Tons of people were streaming down the streets, forced to walk home as most public transportation wasn’t running (most of the riots occurred at the taxi parks). That and the fact that a bunch of the kids in my group were acting like stupid Americans, laughing and joking about how exciting this whole thing was. I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve heard about foreigners at the start of the Rwanda genocide. Obviously what’s happening here doesn’t even begin to compare to what happened there, but I know that, in the first few hours of the genocide, all of the foreigners (read: white people) except for a few were immediately shipped safely out of the country while Rwandans begged to be let onboard. The fact that we, who in all likelihood weren’t in any actual danger, were immediately loaded into vans and driven out of the city and into safety while passing hundreds of people who had to walk home in the dark in the midst of riots . . . it was sobering and it’s haunting me.

Tomorrow is the day that the kabaka’s actually supposed to visit Kayunga, so it remains to be seen what the day will bring. I’m not scared, and I haven’t been scared at all (I have my ticket to safety [a.k.a. my U.S. passport] firmly in hand, right?) I suppose this is probably the most valuable learning experience I could be having, eh? Though being locked in a hotel is getting a little tiresome. Anyway, they sent drivers to various parts of the city today to pick up our things from our homestays (again, we’re nestled in safety while others risk their lives for our materialism….is my cynicism getting nauseating yet?), so we’ll have our stuff soon. Also, we’re leaving for the West and Rwanda on Sunday, so we’ll be out of the country and hopefully things will settle down by the time we return.