My newest family planning advocate

"The whole of Kampala is like a market. In markets, there is no order. This one puts it here, the other one puts it there. No order."
- Bossa, 29 November 2008, Driving from Kololo to Bugalobi

My greatest insights here come from drivers. In contrast to the well-educated, lingo-loving, evidence-based professional staff who fill board rooms with intellectual talk of targets and theories and strategic direction, with Steno notebooks and yearly planners, all the while knowing that, to a large extent, we are limited by our need to respond to the desires of our funders, the drivers, when you get them talking, will tell it like it is. As an American outsider and admittedly one of those often far-removed "professionals", I am forever trying to get a handle on the culture and the context in order to develop the most effective messages and campaigns. My ears are perked for the words and phrases used when talking about any number of topics. I scramble to scribble something in my notebook or on a scrap of paper or send myself a text message whenever I hear a gem.

Bossa's market comment was a gem in two ways. Not only does it completely capture the chaos of the city, but is stemmed from a conversation about – and reflects an opinion of – Uganda's population crisis.

This particular conversation started, as most do, with a comment about the weather. In noting how unbearably hot I'd been in the last few days, Bossa informed me that no, I did not have malaria as I was starting to fear, it was the beginning of the dry season. Everyone was just as hot. And I quote, "It is too much!"

This lead to another conversation I've had a million times, about the unpredictability of the dry and rainy seasons in recent years. No one can make heads or tails of the seasons any more. And this is where the conversation usually ends, with my conversation partner and I throwing our hands up at the whims of Mother Nature, not going so far as to delve into global warming and the human impact on the environment.

But Bossa did. Unsatisfied with an unsettled phenomenon, he launched into passionate discourse about how our disrupted weather patterns are because there's not enough land, not enough trees. The development, it is also too much. The roads, they are too narrow. The jams, they are many. The buildings, they have increased. The people, they are everywhere.

The conversation couldn't have been more well-timed. I just so happen to be smack dab in the middle of developing of a discussion guide for use in community outreach sessions with men on family planning. In a country where the total fertility rate is 6.7, where your manhood is judged in part on how many children you father, and where the President encourages large family sizes so that there are many Ugandans, the sessions are meant to encourage critical reflection on the effects of overpopulation and motivate male involvement in family planning decisions (the most widely used method of contraception here is the injectable, one of the major reasons being so that women can contracept without their partners having to know).

With his "Kampala as a market" analogy, Bossa articulated, unprompted, exactly the message we're trying to promote...in a much more convincing way than I could ever do.

Let's get this man a raise.

(For the record, an hour and a half after we established it was the start of the dry season…it poured.)