What about the roads?

I wanted the title to include something with deep meaning for me. For me the roads in Africa tell the story better than anything. In Uganda, Kenya and Sudan when you travel the roads, you can tell just about everything you need to know about that place.

For one thing, all of the roads are really in very bad shape. In fact some of the very best roads I encountered in Africa were worse than anything in America. But it is not just the quality of the roads that is tell, but also what you find on and around them that are important.

In the Yumbe district of Uganda (the northwest corner), you find very few houses close to the road. Really you would think that almost no one lived there, except if you looked close. When you slow your SUV down and start watching the edges you will see paths. Each path lead to a group of house and branches out from there. I have personally walked for miles down these paths meeting all sorts of people along the way.

I have found that people tend to define their places by the speed of transport. Think about this for a minute. In Africa it seemed that every couple of minutes driving down the road, my driver would say we had just passed this place or that place. Coming from the western US, where you can drive for over an hour before coming to a new place, these Africa places always seemed to close together. It was only when I realized that I was the only motorized vehicle around, that everything made sense. It took them up to an hour to get between those places that I could drive in a few minutes. They were spacing places out in time, the same way we do in the US.

Dispite all the differences, I always came back to the realization that we were all the same.