boda-boda blues

5.11.08

We ditched our boda-boda driver. He simply wasn’t delivering. In the last post I explained our frustrating second day of research. Well, the next day was worse, and I realized that we may not have been getting reliable information from our driver, Geofrey. Here’s the deal. In these extremely rural areas that we’re traveling to there are no road signs. The only way to know if you’re going the right way is to shout at someone at the side of the road for verification. Often there isn’t any sign for the schools we’re looking for, even right in front of the buildings. We think our driver wasn’t able or willing to find the schools, and so he either told us they had “collapsed” or that they had changed names. The fact that a school has closed isn’t exactly that uncommon; since the vast majority of the schools in Uganda are private, the turnover is depressingly high, and many schools—especially small ones in rural areas—close after only a few years of operation, if they even make it that long. L

But it is suspicious that this would be the case with 7 of the 9 schools we attempted to track down in one day, when the other research teams had much higher success rates. Well, we are out in the middle of nowhere, Martha and I thought, maybe we happen to be in a particularly difficult area. But then add to this the very subtle things like the fact that Geofrey was never please with the very fair fare we offered, and always tried to bargain with us at the end of each day when our professors had explicitly informed us that we were in no position to be negotiated with, as they had arranged the boda-boda drivers as contracted work and previously agreed on a set hourly wage. To my credit, I was very firm (bargaining isn’t exactly my strong suit, but I’m getting better). Also Geofrey was asking for money for food in the middle of the day and making us wait while he took a break on the steps with the local fellas. I finally drew the line at this; Martha and I don’t make him wait while we go get lunch—we don’t even take a lunch. We bring bottles of water and our Nice biscuits (kinda like coconut flavored graham crackers), which we shove in our mouths intermittently while on the boda-boda between interviews, and we’re lucky to grab a banana every other day. While other research teams raved about how great their drivers were, we were left wondering if we could really trust ours. I didn’t feel like he was on our side. And I wondered what his conversations were like in Luganda when Geofrey would pull over to a boda-boda stage to ask directions from other drivers—I knew they were talking about us Muzungus on the back of his bike, but what they were saying I obviously didn’t know, and I wondered what advantage Geofrey might take of that. Geofrey frequently got honks, beeps, and thumbs up from fellow boda-boda drivers—presumably in reference to his passengers—and he returned the sentiment. I finally realized on the long ride home of an even longer day that Geofrey didn’t take pride in his job. I didn’t appreciate how we were treated, and I felt I held him up to no higher standard than I hold myself, so we dropped him.

The good news is that our new driver Jonny is much better, doesn’t do the things that made me suspicious of Geofrey, and is more competent. In fact, he’s down right awesome. The bad news is that the new boda-boda isn’t as powerful as Geofrey’s, and Martha and I are frequently left to climb big hills behind the exhaust pipe.