Lobster in a Bucket

Hittin the Streets Uganda Style

Dear Friends,

I've always enjoyed depictions of pathetic beaurocratic inneficiency in film and books. The other day it hit a little closer to home. When your car is broken into in America, the correct response is to immediately dial 911. An officer will promptly come out to where you are in his car and investigate. He may take some finger prints, get statements from you and your friends, maybe a guard. Then a nice neat report will be filed. Maybe, your stuff will be recovered, but probably note, but in any case, the details of making a crime a crime, in the eyes of the law, are short, simple, and hassle-free. Not so in Uganda.

This is the process, without too many details of what I went through when all my stuff got stolen. I'm writing this for humor's sake, please don't pity me. Once I saw the condition of the car, the absence of my stuff, and realized that, obviously, I had been robbed, I began to look for some assistance. I found the head of security for the mall. He was a big old, kind of fat, old man. After looking at the car he exclaimed, "What is hahppenen heeahh?!?" While it was fairly obvious to me, it remained kind of unclear to him. For the next 15 minutes or so, at every new revelation of theft: I.E. the other cars that had been broken into, the subtle signs of forced entry. again, I was confronted with the question, " What is hahpennen heeahh?!?"

The police, at least the ones low enough on the ladder to actually do police work, and not just drive around to meetings, have no cars in Uganda. So to file a report, I had to go back to a police station in the car, that had been robbed, pretty effectively ruining the scene of the crime. I had to make a report for two reasons, one, the US government wouldn't give me a passport without one, two, the insurance company, if there was one that covered my stuff (I'm now pretty sure this isn't), will need one. So we went to the station. We filed a report, which consisted of saying what happened to a secretary who hand wrote the report on paper, I signed it, and then left.

When I went back to get a report the next monday I sat in a room for about 3 hours full of detectives trying to avoid work. Well to be fair, they may not of really been avoiding work, I'm not sure that a cop can do much work without a car, a cell-phone, or at least a typewriter. When I finally got my report, I was berated for disrupting the scene of the crime, by driving over to them to make the report. They then asked me to take them over to the mall. My co-worker, Mark, took them in the violated vehicle. I jumped out of the moving car to try to make the embassy before it closed. At the mall, it became very clear that these two detectives were more interested in shopping, than investigating. After all, what could they do? Mark got annoyed with them and told them it was time to go, they asked for us to pay for their rides back to the station, Mark just took them instead.