The last week has been chaos. I went in on Tuesday to pick up my passport from the immigration office which I had left there the previous week to get my visa renewed. Long, exhausting, frustrating story short, the Commissioner of Immigration has retained my passport, refused to extend my visa, and declared that if I don't get a plane ticket home by Friday (as in this Friday past, the 29th), I will be fined $30/day for each day that I stay here after that. Luckily, we have made some phone calls and found a lawyer who should be able to get my visa renewed. At this point, however, I'm still not sure if this will work. I just want to know one way or the other what is going to happen.
To make everything even more complicated, there have been riots recently in Kampala. The opposition party leader who lost the recent election is still crying about it and has been doing everything in his power to use his supporters to create chaos under the guise of protesting commodity prices and inflation. News Flash: Prices are increasing worldwide, not just in Uganda. Corrupt as the president and the NRM party may be, they don't really have too much of a say in the matter. So basically, the riots have just been ignorant young people who just want something to lash out about.
Rest assured, I am safe in Ndejje. Everything is as quiet as ever here. The closest thing we've had to riots is people cheering and hanging from the windows of passing taxi vans and drunk people spouting gibberish about Museveni, the government, and gas prices as they stagger along the dirt roads. I don't think the people of Uganda will be organized enough, or motivated enough, to pull something off like their North African counterparts. Then again, I've learned never to make the mistake of ruling anything out here.
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