A Day in the Life

I actually wrote this a week ago; due to a few things going on in work which I mention, I thought it best to leave it until now before posting.

It's a bit of a long one - you've been warned! ....but there was no other way to cover the full range of unpredictability in a Ugandan day.

Thursday evening in Kampala. I'm sitting outside an internet café with my laptop balanced on my knee, watching the bustling Kabalagala evening pass by, just down the hill from Muyenga. The upholstered bench I'm sitting on looks exactly like the benches they place beside departure gates at airports, and given that it's probably been reclaimed from somewhere else, its entirely plausible that's exactly where it used to be found. On the other half of my bench sits a Ugandan woman who runs the clothes shop next door; it's more or less a hole in the wall hung with brightly coloured dresses and shirts. On a plastic garden chair beside her sits another local woman; the two of them are probably in their twenties or thirties. Business is slow this evening so they're gossiping and chatting, sometimes doubled over in laughter. Funny how you can identify flirting and salacious gossip even in a foreign language.

People cluster around the mouth of the internet café, where I sit tapping my laptop and admiring the view. Thumping African music is playing quietly on a speaker inside so that all you can hear is the bass and the rhythm, and people waiting for computers sit outside the entrance on other benches, so that the people wandering up and down the road stop and congregate. A man wanders by with a closed Tupperware box balanced on his head and a scoop in his hand; the box is full of deep-fried grasshoppers, stripped of their legs and wings, a speciality this time of year which people snack on like popcorn. He stops to say hello to the two girls, they all know each other. He scoops them a palmful of grasshoppers each as a favour and wanders off. He'll return in twenty minutes when his circular meandering brings him back this way.

It's the fine hour of a Ugandan evening. Humidity falls away so that the evening air is as soft and warm as the buttery light of sunset. Dusk – every day – is absurdly beautiful. The sky changes to baby blue and the clouds turn ivory and gold, whipped as softly as creamed cake batter. The light turns dusky, as if you were looking at the world through a veil or a mosquito screen. Suddenly there is an almost imperceptible moment of twilight perfection; so short that its over before you've even recognised it. Twilight lasts mere seconds; on the equator it turns from evening light to blanketed dark within a few moments. At ten to seven it will be the sunset hour of leisure, but by seven it will be uniform night.

A cable snakes out of the café underneath a doorframe, and reaches for my laptop. Hence, my outdoor internet connection. An hour costs about 30c euro. I watch the boda bodas whizzing up and down the road, and the passage of human traffic that is as much an evening stroll – people out to see the neighbours – as it is the route home. I'm waiting to meet a friend to go for a bite. I met Niamh from Fermanagh at Murchison Falls last weekend; both of us turned up alone and joined the same tour group. She'll arrive about an hour later, along with some people from her hostel – two I'll have met before and two I don't know, all of whom I'll most likely never see again. Sharon, a friend from work, will wander past and find me outside the internet café, so she'll end up coming along with us, and Paul, another friend who I very randomly got to know not long after I arrived in Kampala, will also drop by. We'll sit in a garden bar lit by lanterns on tables, and have a couple of beers – Kenyan Tusker or Ugandan Bell – with plates of nyama chomo - slowly-cooked, barbequed meat, with a bit of coleslaw and fries - chipsi. Around eleven, we'll have our bill added up three times before they eventually charge us the right amount, and then drift outside to laboriously negotiate with taxi and boda drivers to get home. That's how most Ugandan evenings go – food, drinks, random people, spontaneity, overcharging.

But I don't know any of that yet. For the moment, I'm happy to observe and subliminally type as I wait outside the café. I'm recovering from a day at work which stressed me out more than usual.

A typical day? There's no such thing, but this one had the hallmarks of trouble. It started when I woke before 7.00 to the sound of Jojo complaining to Mama Sharon downstairs; it sounded like he wasn't too happy about eating breakfast. I couldn't hear Mama's soothing reply from upstairs. I press snooze until 7.45 out of sheer laziness. Sarah and Jojo are already on the road to school. Throw on clothes, then down to the kitchen. Fight with flimsy matches to light the gas grill and throw in some bread to toast. It will take too long to boil water in a saucepan for tea so I don't bother. Shake my hair out and scrape on a little foundation by the mirror in the dining room while watching so the toast doesn't burn. Mama Sharon watches me, amused. Still biting down the toast when Uncle's waiting for me at the gate.

Uncle is my boda driver - he's Tata Sharon's brother. He picks me up around 8.15 and for 30c takes me over the hill to work, bumping through the stone quarry, twisting through the billowing morning dust, free-wheeling downhill on the other side to save fuel. I let myself in through the hatch in the gate and head into the office, where Joan is mopping the floors with a wet cloth, bent in half at the waist and laying her hands flat on the floor. I hook up my laptop, then later unhook it and move to the other side of the room while she mops around my desk and wipes down the table. I check to see if there's hot water in the Thermos; if not I put on the kettle and will fill the Thermos with what I don't use. Instant nescafé and two spoons of brown sugar; if we're lucky we'll have powdered milk, but we haven't had petty cash to buy more since we ran out two weeks ago.

Work; check emails and headlines. The Guardian and Irish Times are the two obligatory first-looks, but depending on what's happening in the world I'll look elsewhere later. Half my emails every day are usually from mailing lists – I've signed up to as many as possible to keep up to date on things, but it means that I'm bombarded with press releases and urgent appeals and reports.

Except this morning we don't have any internet. Ronnie has tried to call the internet company but he can't get through; this means that they're being bombarded with calls and complaints, so the whole network must be down. This is ironically a good thing as it means that we don't have a problem with our server, our account or the line into the office. The cut could last for an hour, or all day. We'll see.

In the meantime, I start typing up notes I took yesterday while talking to a human rights defender who has been in trouble this week. I met him at a training workshop we ran in Kampala, a follow up to the session in Mbale a couple of weeks ago, and the last in the current run of workshops. I won't name the defender or mention anything about his case, except to say that he'd been in detention for two days before I met him, he was bruised, had been threatened, was fleeced for bribes, and is staying with friends - essentially homeless - because they know where he lives. “They” are state actors; I won't say what kind.

We chat for half an hour between ourselves in the office, and I start looking at information I'd downloaded for research on various different things. The internet eventually comes back before 11.00 – miracle! - so I go back to the case notes and send them to an organisation working locally on human rights defenders who might be able to help, as well as to Front Line. I also check my emails, finally, and find that a press release has been issued last night in which Margaret and three other UN independent experts have condemned the recent killing of Bety Cariño in Mexico, called attention to the deteriorating situation for defenders in the country, and demanded an immediate investigation so that the perpetrators can be brought to book.

The issuing of the press release is great – the timing is bad. The press release was issued yesterday, and it's already lunchtime. I've lost valuable hours to try to send it to newspapers, journalists, bloggers and NGOs who might be interested – the most influential of which have deadlines and don't want to hear about yesterday's press releases. I start copying and pasting and emailing. In breaks between various bits of the training session yesterday I had begun listing sources which had previously reported Bety's killing as my first targets to push the press release; if they've been following the case and are interested, they're more likely to follow up.

The entire afternoon feels like a race against time, and I don't think I've been very successful. Finding contact details for the individual journalists who might be interested is maddeningly difficult. A couple of bloggers respond and thank me for the release, asking me to keep in touch if I have other information in future. At least a few potential partnerships have been made, but by 6pm this evening a search on Google News shows the statement appears on only four websites – and two of them are UN sites. I feel crushed.

The whole thing will take on a new dimension tomorrow when the Mexican government responds to the press release, criticising it as unfair and unconstructive. Of course this turns our statement into a story in a way that wouldn't have happened if they had just ignored it: most of the Mexican media report on it. Success, from our point of view. But I don't know about any of that yet, and this evening I'm tired and disappointed.

In the middle of all of this, my contact at the local defenders' organisation replies to me and tells me she has worked previously with the guy I wrote to her about, and wants to try and help. But she has been ringing his mobile phone and it's turned off; this is unusual here and she's very worried. I start trying to call him; it takes a while but I get through. He's fine, but more state actors patrolled his house all night last night, presumably to make sure he doesn't go back there or else so they can pick him up again. He is happy to hear I've been talking to the other organisations, which he will call tomorrow. I have some other ideas for things we can try to do, but they're for tomorrow.

We break for lunch quite late today, after two. Sharon goes with lunch boxes to collect food from a local lady who cooks outside her house over charcoal fires, partly shaded by a thatched shack. A meal costs under €1 and is so filling that usually I don't eat much in the evenings when I go home. The food is plain and weighted towards starches but tastier than you'd give it credit for. I'm liking it more than I would have expected although the lack of choice does get to me some times. There are days when I'd basically kill for a toasted special. Due to a combination of my having been out for a drinks the night before and it being later in the day, I am ravenous and I practically inhale my food. Today its beans, rice, greens and sweet potato – not the orange yams which we call sweet potato, but a sweet, waxy version of white potatoes which I haven't come across elsewhere.

During the afternoon I'm still trying to send out the press release, fighting to find journalists and trying to track down the troubled defender when Margaret reminds me that I was supposed to have talking points ready for her for a speech on Sunday. She's been asked to talk about employer-employee relations, not human rights related at all, and given my lack of managerial experience (!) quite a challenge for me to write about. I've been struggling with it for the last week, trying to come up with various ideas. She was happy with my initial draft but asked me to interview the others in the office so as to have a few different people's perspectives, experiences and anecdotes. I haven't been in the office for the past two days so I haven't started this at all. The problem today is that everyone else is as busy with other things as I am, and trying to pin them down and ask them dry questions about what they “most value in the workplace” takes most of the rest of the afternoon.

At this point its 5pm, normally the time we finish – I'm lucky in that people are staying late to work today. I don't have my own keys for the office so I normally finish up when the others do, usually dragging myself away from the internet connection. Working late means that I'll have time to input the answers to my workplace-related questions into the talking points. Margaret checks emails at home in the evenings and very early in the morning before coming to work, so I need to send them to her this evening. She's just heading out the door to cross town and get to a radio station in time for an interview at 7.00pm when I press send. She'll read them and can make suggestions which I can work on tomorrow before she gives the speech at the weekend.

I realise everyone's waiting for me so I frantically pack up – my laptop, charger, phone, notebooks, sunglasses – and rapidly spray on some mosquito repellent. It goes on every evening between 5 and 6pm, regardless of whether or not I'll be staying indoors, regardless or not of whether I'm wearing long pants or sleeves. I get bitten anyway, no matter what I do, but I make a show of fumigating as if it'll make me feel better. Alex has the car waiting for Margaret – I ask which direction they're taking and take a lift down the hill into Kabala. We schedule half an hour together tomorrow to review progress regarding various things – research, review projects, compilations of references from UN reports, flights to be booked - which I'm supposed to be working on. Nothing I did today was scheduled (at least not before yesterday); the two days before that, I was out of the office. As you may imagine, getting around to the longer-term projects I'm supposed to be working on is somewhat difficult.

Outside the Italian supermarket I say goodbye and jump out of the car, and decide that to kill time I may as well take a seat outside the internet café across the street, and watch the evening go by...