Hello, World.
I’d like to thank Monte and Tim for waving the flag for me. Yes, we’re OK.
The bombing is a tragedy, but it’s also a surprise. Everyone here is shocked. Uganda hasn’t had to deal with this crud since 1998. But now, here we are.
The Ethiopian restaurant was showing the World Cup. That’s exactly what we were doing in the cafe. It could have been us. I should be flipping out. I do that quite often, about lots of things. But in this case, I’m not really stressed out too much. I was worried about that my parents would think, so I made sure to call them at 2AM their time to let them know we were OK.
The newspapers here are graphic, as always. Out of the four or five we have access to, only one was suitable for the cafe.
As a (possible) side effect of the blast, the main data trunk lines bridging Kampala and Jinja have been damaged. This is on the heels of another outage thanks to a Seacom repeater problem and weather conditions which delayed the repair. All this to explain why I’ve been offline for the past two weeks.
After a good amount of research, I bought an MTN 3G modem which is giving me dial-up speeds. It’s enough to blog, but even email is difficult right now.
The timing is atrocious; I was just in the process of planning for DEFCON. But as it stands right now, I don’t have money for the flight, or lodging or anything. I’ve also been unable to coordinate the DEFCON booth. Tim tells me there’s a discussion thread somewhere, and I’m really appreciative for that, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to do much for quite some time. Bottom line is that I don’t think I’ll be at DEFCON this year..
As for us, we’re all pretty exhausted. The cafe has been open for nearly two weeks now, and as a family we’re at the cafe from 8:00AM to 11:00PM, and Jen and I aren’t in bed until well after midnight. But business is OK, sometimes. On our second night, we were packed. There were no empty chairs, and the food was taking 2 hours to get to the table. We learned a lot, and now things are better. The food is coming out quickly, and the quality is good. Folks are raving about our soft pretzels, onion rings and our “Burnin’ Love” burger, inspired by one of our favorite restaurants in the US — Red Robin. One of the game rooms is open with an XBOX 360, but the CD drive keeps getting “stuck” (says “Opening” and “Closing” but doesn’t “do” anything) and I’m afraid it’s on it’s last legs. The second game room is on hold (the money’s gone) as is the Internet (thanks to the above).
In our first busy night, we grossed more than the training center’s made in two months, so that’s encouraging. It’s nice to think that we’ve hit on something that could sustain our work and our life, but the word from a successful local business owner is that only 3% of restaurants make it and that restaurants are hardly ever “sustainable” — especially in Uganda — and that the business is cutthroat. Great.
So I’ll keep you all posted, and hopefully send some pictures soon. Thanks for your prayers and support, especially for the families affected by the bombings.
Johnny
