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you think gas prices in the u.s. are high? check this out: $6.65 a gallon for diesel. no joke. you say, what?! why?! the answer: uganda is in the middle of an ongoing diesel shortage. the gist of the problem:
- uganda is landlocked.
- uganda is dependent on its coastal neighbors (kenya, tanzania) for imports/exports.
- diesel and petrol (aka fuel, gas) get to uganda thru mombasa, the big kenya port.
- there is a “problem” with the diesel pipeline that delivers fuel from mombasa to uganda.
- a work-around exists, but no one’s willilng to do it because whatever it is it incurs lots of taxes - an extra $20 per 1000 litres/265 gallons.

we thought our cutting-it-close experience in ishasha was an isolated event. little did we know. according to today’s new vision (major ugandan newspaper), uganda needs 1.5 m litres of fuel per day but since the diesel stopped coming in, the country’s been receiving only 30% of that. i hear from our u.s. embassy insider friends that the embassy sends a daily email to all employees telling them which gas stations in kampala have diesel. sadly, we’re not embassy insiders so when we get near 1/2 a tank we start looking for diesel. we used to wait until closer to empty, but now you can’t trust that you’ll find diesel soon enough to not run out of gas somewhere you don’t want to run out of gas. on my way out of town on wednesday, i stopped at 5-6 gas stations before i found the one with diesel. i could tell i’d gotten lucky from a long ways away as i could see the cars, lorries, and matatus pouring out onto the street as they waited in inordinately long lines. when we finally got to the pump, i had to negotiate with the station manager to let me have 80,000/= ($45) of fuel instead of the rationed 20,000/= ($11.50) he was allowing everyone else. sometimes it pays to be a mzungu, i suppose.

my mom tells a story about waiting in lines at gas stations in the early 70s with my infant brother, kyle. it was the height of fuel rationing in the u.s. she’d put him in the car to entertain him and they’d go wait in line for hours in the summer heat. i always liked picturing my 20something year-old mom living thru the well-known history of the 60s and 70s, but i never thought i’d be living it too…35 years later. but, here i am. in uganda waiting in line for fuel, hoping i’ll be able to get enough to get where i’m going, wondering where the next fuel is going to come from. the double whammy is that i’ve bought 3 project vehicles in the last 10 months, every one of which is diesel. if we don’t get reliable diesel soon, we’re going to be s.o.l. until who knows when.
it doesn’t help that in those 10 months, the power of the USD$ has been dropping like a rock. in july the exchange rate was over 1900 UGX (ugandan shillings) to 1 USD. now it’s hovering below 1700 UGX. if that doesn’t mean anything to you (i didn’t really understand exchange rates either until i started having to live them on a daily basis), then this will help. our monthly budget is 1m UGX. when we withdrew 1m shillings from the bank in july, our u.s. bank account was debited $526, now when we withdraw 1m shillings we’re debited $593 (atm’s rate is 1685). we spend more money (almost $70 more) to have the same buying power here (1 million shilllings = 1 million shillings). sometimes 1m shillings will buy more, sometimes it’ll buy less. right now it’s buying a lot less diesel.