It’s my grandfather’s fault that I’m here. I mean, apart from literally existing – he’s partly to blame for that too, of course – but a peculiar value system of his has dragged me (not quite kicking and screaming but certainly in the days leading up to my departure, reluctantly) to this terracotta dust city of Kampala, Uganda. 

My grandfather’s philosophy, shared by my mother in a (thankfully) diluted form, is that there are only two luxuries your money should buy: education and travel. Obviously, after two weeks here I can safely say that, despite what I had previously thought, everything my money bought at home was a luxury. Even the places I chose to spend that money were luxurious – especially if I shopped online. Inevitably, I have started to acknowledge my privilege beyond the limited thumbs-and-fingers viewfinder of European perspective. In England, I am lucky; in Uganda, I am impossible. Nevertheless, I only had a vague inkling of that reality when I first applied to volunteer with SMEs in developing countries. Of course, with hindsight I can see that my motivations were, quite frankly, naïve, but still very firmly rooted in those inherited values of education and travel: I wanted to learn and teach, and I wanted to go somewhere new to do it. 

Two months ago I received a phone call to let me know that, after many long weekends of assessments and daunting interviews, I had been selected for the Department for International Development’s International Citizen’s Service Entrepreneur scheme (DfID ICSE) and the charity I would be supporting was called Challenges Worldwide. I was going to be travelling to Uganda, living and working in an East African city. I was going to a country where homosexuality is punishable by life impisonment, and where 1 in 13 people are estimated to be living with HIV/Aids (for comparison, in the UK that figure is 1 in 100,000); a country where as many as 1 in 3 adults is illiterate and the rich-poor divide is further sharpened by the distinct lack of a middle class.

This is a country where you can buy squidgy sweet mangoes and dark, vein-skinned avocados on the side of the road for 10p; milk chocolate Bounty bars for 12p; and a Penguin Classics edition of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for £2 brand new (just as well, because there’s no legal minimum wage).  Uganda is a country powered largely by renewable energy, and a protected home to the last silverback gorillas. Bordering six countries, including the unstable Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda’s inflated defence budget has been funding controversial military intervention in Somalia’s ongoing civil conflict, while also pushing back the threat of Al-Shabab militants. Most refugees from surrounding countries don’t immediately flee to boats on the Med or conceal themselves in the undercarriage of Boeing 747s: they find and make new homes here. I learnt all of this through talking with my Ugandan counterparts who, despite being so engaged and on-point, probably won’t vote in next year’s general election; not because Russell Brand told them to ‘politically disengage’, but because their vote quite literally won’t count unless the cross is in the right square. 

I can’t describe the Venn diagram intersection of emotions I experienced for the eight weeks before I boarded that flight. Actually, I’m making it sound like they have subsided or at least stabilised; they haven’t. I genuinely don’t know what to make of anything here. I suppose Uganda reminds me of a stubborn teenager; buzzing with energy and potential, but not getting the straightforward guidance it needs to make decent, informed decisions about its future. Its leaders are lazy and arrogant; too long pampered by a system that exists only to keep them lazy and arrogant. Billions of dollars of aid and long-term multilateral loans has made President Musaveni considerably more accountable to the international community than to his own people. Piles of plastic rubbish and burning tires line the dusty tracks of Kampala’s streets; there is no waste disposal service here. Police require ‘facilitating payments’ to carry out their most basic raison d’être, i.e. investigating crime. Perhaps most tellingly, the budget for the upkeep of the presidential residence – that’s a single, fairly modern building – is more than the entire budget allocation for the agricultural sector: the same sector that employs over 90% of Uganda’s citizens, and accounts for more than half of the country’s GDP. That’s not to say that the opposition parties would be any better, even if their political martyrdom implies staunch democratic principles. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that democracy is even the political system best suited to Uganda’s development, or for improving the standard of living for its population. But I will push that thought back into the darkest recesses of what I thought was my fairly liberal mind.  

Certain things really aren’t so different from home. A couple of nights ago we all went clubbing; I had a Bacardi and Coke Zero, made friends with a bouncer, and danced on a sweaty treetop dance-floor to Clean Bandit. There were more overt ‘bump and grind’ moves than would perhaps be standard at home, but it looked exponentially more fun than the awkward straw-chewing, hand-waving, sterile swaying which best describes my own dance style. I call it the ‘Muzungu’.

When I walk back home from work, I see mothers collecting their uniformed children from school, calmly nodding to the uninterruptable burbling stream of playground injustices and elaborate stories explaining clay-red stains on Daz-white knee socks. Our host family watch TV while eating, switching bizarrely between the serious Al Jazeera and the gossipy E! Tonight channels. My host's mother recently described Keeping Up With The Kardashians as her ‘guilty pleasure’. Even our electrical plugs are the same. It might not be home, but there are so many moments of shared human experience that you could close your eyes, click the heels of your shoes together three times, and realise that it's not so hard to find the familiar.