Remember when I gave an example of the way business works in Uganda, as three men sitting there intently watching the washing machine wash? Keep in mind the "sitting there," part, although there are no more washing machines in this story.
I think I have mentioned that about three weeks ago, Miss B and I met with the Probation Officer for the district which the girls come from, to ask for a foster care certification for me to take care of the children. As part of the adoption proceedings, potential orphans need both a care order and then a report written up by their local probation officer, who is supposed to look into the children's situation, interview potentially interested parties, investigate if there is a suitable placement within the child's family, and then recommend the foster or adoptive placement as in the best interests of the child if that is the result found. It is a good safeguard for children and families, as the probation officer is a neutral party who should not be influenced by financial or emotional interests, as the orphanage workers or the lawyers could be. I absolutely support the idea and the principle of the probation officer's investigation and report. However, it also creates a huge potential for bottleneck, if the officer is overworked, prejudiced, or wants to exert personal power.
In our case, the girls are from Kampala, which is divided into five districts -- which sounds like it is already way too many cases for each probation officer (who handles a great deal more than adoption investigations, although I'm not sure what the full scope of their job is). Furthermore, all the probation officers have lately been replaced with new ones, so no one really knew them personally or their working style. The new officers are probably eager to do something different than the previous group, in order to avoid their fate, but it's also unclear yet what they are trying to do differently.
Miss Z, the officer for what I'll call District F, agreed to meet with us the morning after Miss B called her -- which now seems quite surprising. But rather than asking us questions or examining our paperwork or making appointments to meet the parents, she gave us a very long lecture, basically about how terrible international adoption is, except in extraordinarily circumstances such as the child had been totally abandoned for more than five years, was blind, physically handicapped, mentally delayed, and adopted by missionaries who had already been living in Uganda for years. I absolutely agree that international adoption should be a last resort for children, but the longer she went on the less realistic her examples sounded. Not to mention, we weren't asking to adopt the children (which wouldn't be her decision anyways), we were asking her to investigate whether she thought there was a valid reason to consider adoption as an option for the children! In the end, despite her negativity, she told us to "think very hard" about the children's situation before we came back to her.
We spent the next week doing research and compiling documents about the children's situation. This, apparently, is actually exactly what the probation officer is supposed to do when a case is brought before her, although to her credit (from what we can tell) Miss Z is doing the jobs of at least two people already. In this area, we have been fortunate, because the parents live in the same area of town as the orphanage and our apartment, and have been very willing to work with us. (I use "us" in the general sense; I have not and will not see the parents, as then it could appear later that I had bribed or otherwise influenced them.) In other cases, this type of research could take weeks, with going back and forth to a distant village and not finding people there. I don't want to disclose personal details about the children, which are not mine to share, so I will just say that every layer that was uncovered showed that the situation at their former home was even worse than had been originally noted. The simplest but most important feature is that both parents are dying of AIDS and its complications. As in, will-they-make-it-to-next-month kind of dying.
When we had the appropriate documents, Miss B called Miss Z for an appointment. Miss Z told her that she was busy doing someone else's job for the next week, to call back a week later, and hung up on her.
A week later, Miss Z did not answer her phone. She continued not answering her phone every day, except occasionally she would answer to say she was in a meeting, and hang up. After several days of this, Miss B and I decided to just go into her office and hope to meet her there, and perhaps she would take us more seriously in person. We went in on Wednesday. Miss Z was not there, but we left our portfolio of documents with a somewhat officious secretary-type figure, who told us we had to make an appointment, and to call at lunchtime or after five when Miss Z was not in meetings.
After which, Miss B discovered that Miss Z turns her phone off at lunchtime and after five.
So we went back in on Friday. The secretary-type person told us that Miss Z was out for the whole day, we had to call her and get an appointment, and that she had delivered our file and Miss Z had read it. On the positive side, she did give us another phone number to try reaching Miss Z; unfortunately, after answering it, she started to talk with someone else and dropped the call.
So we went back in today, Monday. But before I describe what happened today, let me describe some of these simple phrases. Like "printing out documents," or "going to see."
So as for documents, I had some papers from Miss B, some things that my husband had sent via email, something I wrote out on the iPad, and pictures both on my camera and that Miss B printed out. I needed to make several copies, for Miss B, myself, the lawyer, and of course the Probation Officer herself. (Actually, I will probably need even more copies later, but I decided that four was enough at a time!) I took my stack of papers to a little shack in the village, generously stocked with a full-size black-and-white copy machine, a computer and printer, a shelf with ink, staplers, pencils, erasers and so forth, and two very nice ladies behind the counter. My job was to sit there politely while the senior lady put everything carefully through the copy machine, which took about an hour and a half. To make color copies of the pictures, she put them through her inkjet printer, so each copy took several minutes.
Meanwhile, I saw the plumber walk by carrying some tall and shiny pipes. I was pleased to see him, as the day before he had started to fix my shower but stopped due to having the wrong size parts, leaving the shower in worse condition than it started. He was happy to see me, because as they do not believe in making appointments, if he arrives and I am not there his trip is wasted. So he went ahead to the apartment building and waited for me there, and when my copies were done I needed to go directly home instead of continuing to the photo shop. Later, I spent another hour sorting everything into the proper piles for the proper people, and making it somewhat organized.
The copy shop was just a copy shop, and since it did not have internet access (and the computer probably dated from before the internet was invented) I had to go somewhere else to get documents from email onto paper. So at home you would just click and press control-P; here it involves going to an internet cafe, getting set up at a station, waiting for the email program to load, waiting for each individual email to load, asking the shop-owner exactly where you should download the documents, waiting even longer for each document to download, perhaps discovering that one of them has downloaded into gibberish and needs to be repeated, confirming that they are formatted properly, THEN pushing the control-P. Then the shop owner brings the pieces of paper one by one, the documents have to all be carefully deleted from wherever they were downloaded to, the shop owner carefully counts the pieces of paper and decides on the fee, and then of course the obligatory minute or two (or five) to find change. (The only businesspeople who have change in Uganda seem to be those in the marketplace; the ones who are so poor they carry their entire shop around on their head -- they produce change quite quickly and effectively.) The whole process takes no less than 20 minutes. On the up-side, it has worked quite smoothly every time I've done it -- and so far, I haven't felt the urge to print out documents when it turns out that the entire internet is down, or the entire power grid for that matter.
Working smoothly is more than I can say for printing out pictures. To print out pictures, you must go to a photography studio, and in this age of digital pictures there are hardly any photo studios around any more. It just so happened that in my wanderings around, I found one on a side-street off the Gaba market, which is the one near our house. The first time I went by, I hadn't taken the pictures yet, but I asked about prices and when the pictures came out. It seemed that he could print out a couple of pictures pretty quickly, needed a day for larger orders, and charged 500 shillings per pictures (about 25 cents). I cleaned up the house to take pictures showing our little domicile at its best, and then it took a few more days to get back to the photo studio. That was when I had just found the proper equipment to download pictures onto the ipad, and the very morning I planned to go back to the photo studio I mistakenly cleared the card on the camera. The photo man and I could not figure out any way to get the pictures from the ipad, and after a while I thought that it would be easier to just re-take the pictures. Since I had to tidy the apartment for some of the pictures, and for the others go up to the orphanage when both children were there and have someone else photograph us all together, it took some days to do the pictures again. I freely admit that was all my fault, and not a Ugandan complication, but then it turned out by the time I had the pictures it was a day before we planned to submit them.
I wasn't concerned, and we went down to the village.... to find that the local photo shop was inexplicably but quite firmly closed. I thought that Miss B would have some ideas, but she said there were so few photo shops that they take them all the way into downtown to print them out there. We had an appointment in the afternoon, so I didn't have the two hours for the round trip -- let alone trying to find the right place in downtown. So I walked to Bunga, the village on the other side of us. I found two photo shops, one of which was out of ink and the other one required 24 hours to print out even one pictures (and I wasn't absolutely sure it would be done by then, either!). So the next morning on our way to the Probation Officer's office, we drove into Kabalagala to try and find a photo shop there. Kabalagala is a bustling area just outside the main city, full of bars and shops and tourists, so we figured we could find a photo shop, and we did. He said it would take him 15 minutes to print out my five photos, but it was more like 45. And what did we do in the meanwhile? That's right: we sat and waited! In the end, we had five very poorly printed pictures (all the pictures around here are printed very poorly), which cost 5,000 shillings apiece -- which you will note is a mark-up of TEN TIMES the price of poorly printed pictures in the village market.
So, speaking of being on our way to the Probation Officer's, let me describe the trip.Village F is a village somewhat adjacent to Gaba Road, only a couple miles as the crow flies, and not even very far considering the winding roads and traffic; since you don't have to go through downtown, it isn't even traffic-jam type traffic, just ordinary things like goats in the road, or a banana truck backing up, or swerving around the 12-foot steel rods on the back of a bicycle. Yet for each of these trips, I have left the apartment around 7 am and not come home until after 11.
I wake up early, get everything ready, awaken Emerson at the last minute, brush his teeth and bring him upstairs where he can stay with the neighbors. I walk to the orphanage to meet Miss B, and half the time I wait a while for her to arrive (only half the time, though!). Sometimes she has her car, but on Friday it needed to be fixed so we took regular transportation. We walked down to Gaba Rd and caught a mini-bus and took the hour-ish trip to downtown. Then we walked a few blocks to the taxi park and got on another mini-bus forVillage F. (Side note: the minibusses, which are public transportation, are called "taxis" here; what we would call a taxi is a "special hire.") The taxis wait until they are full to start, so we sat in the taxi park for a while before it started. The traffic police near the taxi park want to keep the major roads open without being innundated with mini-busses, so all the mini-busses drive to the first intersection, turn off their engines, and wait. Meanwhile, vendors run around trying to convince all the passengers that they need sodas and fried bananas and lollipops and handkerchiefs and so forth. After waiting somewhere between a few minutes and an hour, the taxis are all allowed to enter the road and move off in a giant river. Then it was perhaps a 20 or 30 minute ride to the right area of Makyinde, and fortunately we got out right in front of the official building, because it was pouring cats and dogs. I have described our somewhat fruitless meeting with the secretary; after which followed the whole process in reverse: waiting for a minibus with space to come by on the road, riding into downtown, walking to the area where the Gaba minbusses park, waiting for the bus to leave, waiting for the intersection to open, and then the drive back to the very end of Gaba Road. This is but one example of how a brief meeting can take fully half of the day.
Today the meeting was more productive, so I will describe the morning.
First of all, Miss B was very sick this weekend, and looked very weak and tired when she finally arrived this morning. We brought Buttercup with us as Exhibit A (the potential Exhibit B was in school), and I don't know if it helped soften any official hearts, but I'm quite sure Buttercup thoroughly enjoyed her morning out of the orphanage, complete with an extravagant amount of lap time. Which is one benefit of waiting; if you are two years old and lonely. This time we took the car -- some gentleman who has not been introduced to me usually drives, and inevitably stops at a gas station and asks me for 20,000 shillings for gas money, which would take us well out into the countryside if he actually spent it on gas, but he puts only a couple thousand shillings in the car and we drive off.
We got to the office before anyone else, and Buttercup got to watch the man mopping for a while. I agree that it was somewhat fascinating, because the moppy part was so worn out it was only attached with a couple of strings, and so he had to use a special technique in order to not break the entire thing apart.
Eventually the secretaries arrived, and some of them greeted us cheerfully, as if we had become great friends with all our recent visits, and the snooty one more abruptly. Someone else with a folder and a hopeful look arrived and sat in one of the chairs, and eventually a man with a business-like demeanor came through into the other room and sat behind a desk. Various other petitioners came in, and either got their paperwork or waited for the man to see them. Eventually someone told us to go in to him and explain why we were there. He was able to get ahold of Miss Z on the first ring, and told us that she was on her way and to wait for 30 minutes. To my surprise, she did arrive in precisely 30 minutes, although she was in no rush to see us. By now, the room was quite full, with someone flipping through a giant 2-ring binder to find a certain record, others going in and out and waiting, and the full complement of secretaries, who work two-to-a-desk. The important people have their own desk, but were still both in the same room. So all around people are moving back and forth, and talking on the phone and getting their tea (for the secretaries), and having conversations in Luganda or African English -- I think even all the Luganda-speakers felt the need to converse in English in such an important building. It was good that Buttercup is a calm child, and I was very glad I didn't have either of the others with me! But even Buttercup was getting very gently bored, so I started playing This Little Piggy on her fingers, very very quietly.
Miss Z came out, and this was more or less our conversation:
Z: "You told him you left me documents, but you didn't leave me any documents. I haven't seen anything."
Me: "We left them last week."
Z: "I have a very good memory, and I would remember if you left me something. You didn't leave me anything when you came in."
Me: "No, it wasn't then, we left them last week."
Z: "What do you mean? None of my files are from you!"
Miss B, weakly: "They weren't in a file, it was an envelope."
Me: "We came in, and when we didn't see you we left them with the secretary."
Z: "There are no secretaries in this office!"
Me: "I'm sorry; I don't know their titles, I mean --"
Z: "Do you mean that lady?" (who wasn't at her desk)
Me: "Yes --"
Z: "The brown one?" (gesturing, which is good, because I find that description absolutely perplexing, as the lady in question is a bright dresser, and everyone in the entire building besides myself was more or less "brown")
Me:"Yes, the one with the curly hair."
And Miss Z strides off to find the "brown lady" and enquire about the documents. So much for the not-actually-a-secretary's assertion that Miss Z had received and looked over our documents!
Then followed a time where I think they looked for our folder in the other room, and they must have eventually found it and taken out the papers. Then Miss Z sailed back to us waiting on the couch, pointing to my cover letter.
"This is addressed wrong. This is not right," she scolded us.
Miss B and I were totally confused what could be so incorrect at the very beginning, so she decided to allow us a few more details. "It says Miss Z, Probation Officer, Makyinde District. But I am not the probation officer for that district, I am the (some other title I didn't quite catch). He is the probation officer for this district. You must address it to him. This is wrong." And she dropped the file on our laps and stalked off again.
It turns out that the gentleman we had spoken to an hour before, and never heard of before that moment, was actually the one we had needed all along. I am not sure if their titles and positions had recently been shuffled, or whatever possible other reason there could be for her previously meeting us in the capacity of local probation officer. By that point, we ought to have been somewhat indignant that we had spent three weeks trying to chase down the wrong person and no one had made the slightest effort to correct us, but we were just relieved that we did not have to deal with Miss Z any more!
So after another wait (during which I neatly crossed out Miss Z's name and wrote the new one in, which I think is relatively acceptable given that everyone knows how difficult it is to print out a new copy!), we met with Mr H. He asked us a number of questions that were actually germane to the case, and made another appointment with us for Wednesday morning, so he would have time to look over the documents. He asked for a couple more papers specifically, and indicated that he would need to visit the parents and my house before he could make any decisions. So that means that nothing in our lives is going to change immediately, but it will be a great relief if he actually does the visits and the investigations and everything like the probation officer is supposed to.
So we are going back Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, I have a couple more things to print out and send home, so it looks like Tuesday is full too!
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