I got my first introduction to Africa time early on in my stay here in Uganda while I was waiting for my bags to arrive from London. The first hints of the leisurely (lethargic? sluggish?) pace of work came when ordering food at the local hostel. Meals routinely took over an hour to be served even if I was one of the first people ordering food and somehow they still took forever even after I began to alter my orders to try to speed the process of getting calories into my hungry stomach. Eggs and toast can’t take that long can they? How about 1.25 hrs plus or minus a few minutes? In my two days at the hostel, I started to mentally adjust my day’s schedule to factor in waiting at least 1.5 hrs for each meal and tried to decide whether I needed food badly enough to spend that much time waiting.
When my bags arrived, I called the baggage delivery company at 8 in the morning to confirm they were there and see if they could deliver them right away. I was quite ready to get my bags since I had been waiting for two days and was rather scruffy and smelly from wearing the same clothes in the hot equatorial sun and not showering for all that time. Plus I wanted to get a decent start in heading north to the hospital that day. The hostel was only 10 minutes from the airport so I thought it would be easy for them to send a driver over with my bags. They said that they could deliver the bags but told me to wait for the driver to call regarding the delivery time. An hour passed with no call so I called them back and was told again they would contact the driver and he would call me. 45 min went by with no call and as it was now close to 10:30AM I finally called them and told them that I would pay for a taxi and come and pick up the bags myself. So ten minutes later when I was getting ready to leave for the airport, the delivery driver called the hostel to say that he was going to deliver my bags sometime around 11. I told them to not touch my bags as I could see visions of chasing my bags all around Entebbe and dashed for the airport before my bags disappeared.
I was reminded of Africa time today as I was waiting to be picked up for a community medicine day. I was riding along with an HIV counselor on a motorcycle doing home visits with HIV positive patients while he checked in to see how they were getting along and offered nutritional advice, encouragement and saw if they needed to come into to the hospital for new or worsening symptoms. My ride was supposed to arrive at 10 so I went back to the guest house a couple minutes early in case he arrived right at 10. I had a suspicion that it might not be 10 sharp so I sat down on the porch to read the The White Nile by Moorhead while I waited. Around 10:20, I walked over to the office to make sure they had actually told the counselor I was going with him since this was the first time I was supposed to go out. He assured me that the counselor knew so I resumed reading and didn’t concern myself with the time since my book was quite good and I had no idea when to expect him. Right around 11, the motorcycle arrived and the counselor said he was ready to go, so less than a minute later we were off. I was glad to finally be off and excited to get to visit some local people in their homes. The excitement dimmed somewhat when scarcely two minutes into the ride, the counselor mentioned he had some business in town to do so after our rapid exit we promptly parked at a storefront office on main street and proceeded to sit for 20 or 30 minutes waiting for one of the city government workers to arrive.
In both cases things worked out fine as I did get my bags and the community visit went off more or less as planned. We eventually made it to the community and it was interesting to meet the people who lived scattered around the area in their small mud houses and who were facing the daily struggle of subsistence farming while also dealing with the reality of being HIV positive. These events did clearly demonstrate the considerable cultural differences in expectations regarding promptness and work efficiency and it was a good reminder to me to always factor in more time than I think when planning my schedule in Africa and to always have a good book or soccer ball around to fill in the time.
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