July 6

July 6, 2009

Days Events: Shipping package, lunch, interview with Willie

My big assignment for the day was to ship Becky her package. She doesn’t know what she is getting yet so I can’t describe it here, but it was a 5 kilo package complete with books that I have already finished. Anyway, the FedEx was a mile and a half away in the community of Ntinda. After a lot of research I could only find FedEx Express in this town. Shocking I know, but nothing here is normal or expected. Also, this FedEx did not sell boxes and did not expect credit cards. This caused me to use a lot of my cash to send the package and thus cut deeply into my budget. This stuff was too heavy for me to take back in my luggage so I am still unsure which would have been cheaper. It’s done though. This took the rest of my cash so I had to strop by the bank and then Ginger and I tucked into the country club for an early dinner/late lunch. The club sandwich Panini and fries I had really hit the spot. I cam back and took a nap before we had to leave again for our interview with Willie. He is a butcher at the local Payless Grocery and sparked conversation with Ginger one day and agreed to do an interview with us.
We met Willie at Mochas, a local café that we really like. For the first time we had an informant beat us to the meeting. He was actually very interesting. He is 23 and just got his degree in community development. Despite the many NGO’s in town he has yet to find a job with his degree and has taken to being a butcher to make ends meet. He found out that he brought himself out of the slums yet still lives near by. He also discussed the complicated world of prostitution since he has many friends that are prostitutes. He offered to take us out on Wednesday to show us “real poverty” and get us in contact with a prostitute for an interview. I am pretty excited. He was a very interesting informant and gave us some really good insight.
We called it a night after that and got home around 9:00. I worked until around 4 in the morning despite the fact that my internet is out again. I then spent from 4 till 11 trying to sleep with only about 2 hours of success. No bueno.