Bureaucracy

I knew it was inevitable—as an administrator of a new school, I would be obligated eventually to visit government offices in Kampala and somehow try to navigate the red tape involved in getting the school licensed etc. I’ve been able to put it off for a while, but this week the time came to start the process in earnest. Fortunately, I don’t have to start right from scratch as people here have already made contacts in the Ministry of Education and Sports and are familiar with the basic process. Arleen took Evacy (the Ugandan Headmistress) and me to Kampala to introduce us to people who could be of assistance and to show us how to find the appropriate offices.

Many of the things I expected of a trip to visit a government office occurred:

1. We had to go through an inefficient security process before entering the building.

2. We opted to take the stairs (since taking an elevator would require more trust in Kampala’s power supply than we were willing to give) and the offices we needed to visit were on the top floor.

3. The offices were off a very narrow, dark hallway packed with people waiting to see various officials, and when peeking into open doors, I saw offices with the entire desk and shelves covered in random piles of (no doubt) very official and important papers

4. We had to interrupt the secretary of one bureaucrat as she was eating her lunch at her desk only to find out that the man we came to see was not available. She did help us by giving us his contact info so we could make another appointment on another trip to Kampala

5. In order to pick up copies of some pertinent documents, we had to visit the “photocopy room” located in a 6’X8’ room in the basement of the building equipped with a single photocopier. There was another security routine to endure here as well, and Evacy had to sift through a large stack of dog-eared papers to determine the ones we needed. Then the lady (who'd also had her lunch interupted by us) had to photocopy the ones we’d chosen on a slow machine that didn’t automatically photocopy double-sided copies so each sheet had to be fed through manually. Then a receipt had to be prepared by hand for the $1.50 we’d spent.

6. We discovered that another office we’d intended to visit had moved to another building and the man that we needed to see there was away at a course.

7. Just as we arrived at another office to pick up old copies of exams, we learned that the woman who could help us had just driven off, leaving the room locked. In fact, she passed us in a car as we entered the parking lot.

It was actually not a total waste of time. We made some new contacts that could be useful; I now know where to find these places and what to expect when I go, and we picked up some helpful documents. Despite the bureaucratic hassles that we experienced we were encouraged by a sign we saw posted on the stairwell of one of the buildings we visited. It was a photocopied piece of paper hung beneath the No Smoking sign, and another urging people to “use a low voice when speaking on cellular phones” and the message typed on a computer notified readers that they were “entering a zero corruption zone.” Good to know!