Kyoto Maybe Later

When you enter Kampala your olfactory and respiratory organs are attacked by the thick layer of exhaust from the taxis and tidal waves of dust and effluviums. The vehicles definitely do not have to pass smog checks. And my lungs and nasal passages are made to suffer as I hack up strange black stuff.

I can only guess that when it comes to any concerns for global warming, Uganda signed the revised version of the Kyoto Protocol Amendment. They signed the Kyoto Were a Developing Country So Lay off Treaty. I thought the Los Angeles air was terrible, but compared to Kampala, that air is like a nice hike up a mountain during the springtime.

If the smog does not bother you than surely the visible build up of trash will. When I recently cleaned the apartment, I went to dump the trash and looked around for an outside trashcan. I was instructed to just dump the trash in front and we would burn it later. Wh-wh-wh-what? (I did a cartoonish double-take) Burn trash?!!! This was not just a suggestion because we’re too lazy to buy a trashcan. No, everyone here burns their trash. They have to burn it because there is no trash pick up. You burn everything. Plastic. Toxic cans. Everything. And when the trash refuses to burn you become a pyromaniac and sit there with your match until it does burn.

Growing up in Alabama, we had this Auntie Litter cartoon on television. She had litterbugs merrily dance and sing to educate children to think twice before rolling down your car window and chucking out your juice box. So needless to say, I was conditioned. When I finished a piece of candy here I held onto the wrapper for three days, because I had no place to throw it away.

No one has a place to throw away their trash . The streets build with clutter and the remnants get picked at by marabou storks. If there was an Ark, these birds should have definitely been left off of it. What pigeons are to Americans, the marabou storks are to Ugandans. Think giant-sized hunchback Jim Hensen muppet pigeons with wrinkly bald heads and googly eyes and you have an idea of these creatures.