First few weeks of Uganda

I have arrived in Uganda!! It actually has been almost 2 weeks. Decided to start writing up a blog, inspired by my roommates Naishin and Katharine. My Japanese blog about Fuqua isn’t getting updated so frequently so I hope this one does a bit better.

I landed in Kampala May 15^th and I’ve been living at this house owned by a landlord named Janet Frida (?). She is a super big woman and seems extremely motherly. But turns out she’s a scumlord just like the ones in Berkeley. After my roommates arrived, they noticed how unsafe it is. I never really gave a second look but I was the only white person in the entire neighborhood, a girl, living on my own in a house… The 15 year old kid who the landlord calls “askari” (guard in Swahili) and his little brother are super sweet but definitely wouldn’t be able to protect me from scary robbers. It really never hit me the first week and a half I was living there. So naïve…

Anyhow, we moved to “Backpackers on Natete Wakaliga Road”. Yeah! This is the total muzungu hangout. It’s a youth hostel. With a pool table, bar, restaurant, and a campground. My roomies and I are sharing a room & I feel like I’m back in Tau House again =) Hey. It’s not a bad feeling. Just something I didn’t expect from my MBA internship. I’m pretty confident that I have more stories to tell than most from 2^nd week into my internship…

I went out in the “field” today for my first time to conduct interviews and focus group discussions with women in Kalerwe. My project’s a market research project for producing low cost sanitary napkins in Uganda. BRAC (the organization that I intern at) does this in Bangladesh and it has proven to be fairly successful. They sell sanitary napkins for half the price of what the imports cost. A lot of women use newspaper, rags or anything they can get their hands on since the imports are so expensive. As u can imagine, this just isn’t very good for you… Maybe the next decade, BRAC will be making low cost tampons….

It turns out most of the women I interviewed already uses sanitary napkins… although they would love to have ‘em available much cheaper. But granted, these women are not the poorest of the poor. They receive microfinance but they all have businesses & can sustain themselves.

The research assistant Prossy showed me around the slums of Kalerwe. It was definitely worth looking around. Some of the houses are made of mud and tin. The houses are crammed together so