Kakira: "It's a different world..."

After work today, Ruth took us around the Madhvani Group complex, which encompasses Kakira Sugar Works, a sweets store, a guest house, a huge garage, a lot of houses for employees/owners, a school, and probably a bunch of other stuff. At one point, while we were walking down one of Madhvani's paved roads with perfectly manicured bushes and lawns on either side, Becky said, "This reminds me of Disney World." Yeah, it's that different.

First we went and saw the main hall, which has tennis courts, what looked like a stage, and two gyms (one for men, one for women). Then we went to the temple--Madhvani employs a lot of Indian Hindus, and as far as I know this is the only Hindu temple in the area. It was small, but still really pretty.

One of the first buildings we actually went inside was the Guest House, which was hands-down the nicest building I've ever been in while here in Uganda. It might as well have been an American hotel for rich people visiting the Florida beaches. It even had a VIP cottage called the Lion's Cottage (it has a metal gate outside it with two huge lions carved into the doors). The place had leather couches, white floors so clean I could see my face in them, running water, a nicer shower than the one in my house in Cincinnati, a plasma TV in each of the two huge bedrooms...I was like, "I'ma live here from now on. But seriously, we need to bring the other GESI people here and have a mzungu party."

We moved on to wander through the residential section of the complex, which has houses in it that could very well be homes seen in Beverly Hills (I'm not exaggerating! They were crazy nice!). The grounds were pristine and beautifully landscaped. The Madhvani complex never loses power and every building has running water.

Only half a mile away, people live in houses made of mud pasted onto sticks. They can't get any water, let alone clean water, except by stealing it from Madhvani--the water at the station is diverted from the company's irrigation lines that water the sugar cane. Most people don't have electricity in their homes and their last priority is landscaping--if there were even any plants left in the village to work with.

I know that last paragraph rings of indignation and righteous fury for the plight of humankind, but I understand that there are two sides to every story. Madhvani is part of the reason that Kakira is as populated as it is, and it employs a lot of people in its offices who otherwise wouldn't have stable work. They already take a lot of responsibility for many of the people that they employ, giving them housing that's nicer than anything they could afford otherwise and providing many of the employees' children with good education.

But the Madhvani Group is the reason that Kakira is, in large part, a slum. It brought scores of people here from all over Uganda, especially people from the north who wanted to escape the war there, to work the cane fields. But they fired a lot of those people--the laborers at Madhvani do not seem to get much consideration--and most couldn't afford to get back to the place they had started from. Even if they had been able to go back, many of them had been away for 5 or 10 years--what was the point? And many of those from the north had been fleeing from Joseph Koni's holy war, and had no motivation to return. So they stayed put, just outside the barbed wire ringing the compound's walls, and Kakira grew.

So that's Madhvani and Kakira. I came home after touring the compound and sat under the stars, which were unusually bright tonight. I sat and ate a coconut that I bought in the market, and despite all of the problems that I'd seen, I felt really at peace. I listened to the now-familiar prayers from the mosque and just thought that I was happy to be here. That may seem incongruous with the entire post above, but I thought I'd put it in since it was important to me.

Thanks for being worried everybody--it's okay, I have money that I'm using to buy bottled water from the supermarket. I will surviiive...