"Promoting Prosperity Through the Rule of Law"

Back in Kampala, we spent the week conducting a seminar through the International Law Institute’s African Centre for Legal Excellence. Luckily, we had a small class: Margaret, from the Tanzania Insurance Board; Robert, who worked for the Kenya Power Authority; Isaac, from the Zambia Telecommunications Agency; another Isaac, from a high-end Kampala law firm; and Daniel, a lecturer at Makerere, who we met at the conference in Nairobi. Having a small group and five days to spend with them made this training session one of the highlights of our trip thus far.

Plus, these participants had a good sense of humor. The participants in the other sessions -- including a group of Southern Sudanese legislators studying legislative drafting and Tanzanians studying good governance -- could not believe that legal writing could generate as much laughter as it did. For example, in a debate among the participants on the reasons why lawyers should or should not use “legalese,” we heard all of the standard arguments, but this time we heard a new one. According to Robert, at least in Kenya, legalese can be used to pick up girls in bars. We had a hard time imagining this technique working in the U.S.: “Hey baby, want to come up and see my res judicata?”

And during the week, we learned as much from the participants as they did from us. Enlightening lunchtime conversations tended to focus on the problems with African leaders; law firm politics and billing practices; and some of the more esoteric traditions from different tribes, including hiring someone to sleep with a woman’s dead body if she refused to be “inherited” by her husband’s relatives after her husband’s death and having a father-in-law deflower his son’s new bride.

Just Like Home . . . Almost

When we told people that we were going to spend seven months in Africa, they worried about where we would stay, what we would eat, and what we would do to keep ourselves occupied. It seems that they envisioned us living in huts, eating nothing but bananas, and spending our free time gathering firewood and carrying water on our heads. Life in Kampala, however, is practically like life at home . . . with just a few exceptions.

After spending a couple of days at Gately-on-the-Nile, a lovely little hotel in a converted colonial home located in Jinja, the town at the source of the Nile, just about two hours north of Kampala, we returned to Kampala to prepare for a training session at the International Law Institute next week. We’re back at the Mosa Courts Apartments, but we’ve moved downstairs into an even bigger apartment (for the same price) with two-bedrooms and three bathrooms, one of which we’ve designated as the toothbrushing bathroom to make sure that we get use out of all three. Our apartment is equipped with DSL internet as well as cable TV.

On Saturday, we went to the mall to see Music & Lyrics with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Before the movie, we had lunch at a restaurant/specialty shop at the mall, where Mimi found the one thing she had been missing: bagels, lox, and Philadelphia cream cheese. On Sunday, we had lunch – a lovely salad nicoise -- at a local café complete with wireless access. And this evening, we watched CNN’s weekly showing of The Daily Show with John Stewart – the international version.

And now for the exceptions: When we come home from the mall, we usually come by boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) to avoid the uphill walk. The salon in hotel only charges $15 for an hour-long massage. And then there’s language. While English is English, our English doesn’t always translate. After having cleared out the diet soda selection from our local mini-mart, we ventured further a field and found Diet Coke, in bottles, at yet another gas station. When we discovered that there was no bottle opener in our room, we called housekeeping to bring one to us. About an hour later, someone from housekeeping arrived with a light bulb and said she was told to replace the bulb in one of our bedside lamps. Oddly, we have no bedside lamps, but she was convinced that one of us had called to ask for the bulb. After several minutes of confusion, we determined that somehow when we said “bottle opener,” they heard “lightbulb.” And so it goes . . .

We Built It and They Came

One day last year, shortly after we had decided to spend the semester in Africa, Laurel stopped me (Mimi) in the hall at school and said: “I think we should have a conference. We should invite some people from the U.S. and some people from East Africa and bring them together to talk about ways to teach legal writing.” I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical. How were we going to finance this conference? How would we find potential participants? And, even if we found them, would they really come? But those of you who know Laurel know that once she makes up her mind to do something, it gets done – one way or another. So we got some money; we (with the able help of SU 2L Lyn Arnold) made some brochures; we sent out emails to embassies, law schools, and law societies all over eastern Africa . . . and we waited, hoping that someone would want to come to our party. And, lo and behold, people started to respond and actually wanted to come, which meant, of course, that we had to organize a conference for them to come to.

While it is easy to announce that you are going to hold a legal writing conference in Nairobi, making that conference happen is much more difficult. You have to pick a conference site based on pictures on websites and postings on Trip Advisor; many of the people that you want to invite do not have reliable email access; and setting a budget using foreign currencies that change from day to day is, if nothing else, frustrating.

The good news is that Mimi is, by both day and by night, a wannabe travel agent and was able to find a hotel, purchase airline tickets for 20 of our African participants, and book rooms for more than 40. (Despite a small crisis two weeks before the conference when we were told that the conference hotel was short about a half-dozen rooms.) She is now on a first-name basis with all the agents at the Kenya Airways office in Kampala and can, if you ask her, tell you the flight schedules for all of the flights going from not only the U.S. to Nairobi but also from Entebbe, Dar Es Salaam, Addis Ababa, among others. The bad news is that just one month before the conference, after most of the tickets had been purchased and the hotel had been paid, the United States government issued a travel warning for Kenya, suggesting that Americans “seriously consider the risks involved in traveling in Kenya” based on a series of recent carjackings. (Yes, we intentionally waited until after the conference to mention the travel warning to our friends and families. We did tell the conference participants.)

It is, therefore, an understatement to say that, a week before the conference, we were nervous. On the plane ride from Uganda to Nairobi, we made a list of all of the things that could go wrong: the hotel would be a dump; we would not have enough rooms; we would have scheduled the flights for the wrong day or city; we would have done the math wrong and not have enough money; or one of the conference participants would be mugged.

Our fears were for naught. We were met at the airport by Daniel, who was, until a few years ago, one of the President of Kenya’s bodyguards. He took us to the hotel, the Fairview, which resembles a British manor house set in a tropical garden, and our fears were set to rest. Later that afternoon, Daniel took us on a quick tour of the city, which on a Sunday afternoon is as nice (or nicer) than most U.S. cities (during the week, it is still nice, but the “jam” makes getting around quite difficult). In recent years, the government has rebuilt the roads, replanted the gardens, and, it appears, picked up every scrap of litter. Thus, from the downtown area, you would not know that Nairobi is frequently referred to as “Nairobbery” or that it is the home to Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, housing close to three-quarters of a million people in 2.5 square miles.

Things got even better when we returned to The Fairview a week later for the start of the conference and met with Anita, a Kenyan who graduated from Seattle University School of Law last year, who we had hired as our conference assistant. Despite an unscheduled 30-hour layover in Detroit on a non-stop from Seattle to Amsterdam, Anita was full of energy and had finalized the arrangements for the field trips for the U.S. participants. (Later in the week, we held a contest for worst travel experience. Anita’s travel nightmare was rivaled by Adam’s – he was supposed to transit through Dubai, but had an unplanned diversion to Kuwait – and Benga’s – on his flight from Lagos, Nigeria, the airline lost his luggage, including his laptop, and as far as we know, it has never been found.)

Most of the U.S. participants arrived a few days before the official start of the conference to go on “field trips” that Anita had organized for us. On Monday, Anita and her aunt, Kate, took a group of about six of us to woman’s hospital, which has established the only Rape Crisis Center in East Africa, and to a women’s law clinic where Kate, a fourth-year law student (and high-school teacher and mother of two small children), volunteers. (On Monday morning, Laurel had a field trip of her own, visiting almost every bank in Nairobi trying to get enough cash to reimburse the African participants for their airfare. Unfortunately, she was not successful, and while the hotel finally agreed to let us take cash out on our credit card, it came with a hefty fee.)

Then, on Tuesday, when almost all of the U.S. participants had arrived, we had “tourist day.” We started with a visit to the Maasai market where many of us overspent our budgets on local crafts. Next, we visited the Karen Blixen house, where we took turns standing on the lawn and saying, “I had a farm in Africa.” Then, at the Langata Giraffe Centre, we not only hand-fed endangered Rothschild giraffes, but the more adventurous in our group (see Jana McCreary below) put the pullets between their lips for a big wet giraffe kiss.



For lunch, we headed to Carnivores, a Nairobi landmark, where the all-you-can eat meatfest escalated from chicken, beef, lamb, and pork to crocodile, ostrich meatballs, impala, and zebra. And to wash it all down, the dawa, a tasty and potent mixture of vodka, lime juice, honey, and sugar. After lunch, we waddled back to the bus for our last stop of the day, the Bomas of Kenya, a cultural center where we watched a variety of dances from different ethic groups and toured displays of bomas, or homesteads, from different regions in Kenya.

On Wednesday, we went back to being law professors, and dressed up to visit the courts, the Kenya School of Law, and the University of Nairobi Law Faculty. A highlight was lunch at a typical Nairobi restaurant where we tasted local favorites, including a variety of stews (chicken, beef, and innards, among others) accompanied by rice, ugali (maize porridge) or chapatti (flatbread), and chatted with Nairobians on their lunch breaks.

The conference officially started on Wednesday evening with a pool-side reception sponsored by the Legal Writing Institute and the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Several of our U.S. participants, however, showed up a little late. They had gone with our bus driver, Maurice, to the Kenyan version of Wal-Mart to pick up a few things. On the way there, the bus was pulled over, the police took Maurice’s license, and they told him to drop everyone off and return to pay the police off. Apparently, according to Maurice, that is one of the dangers of “driving while white” (or “driving with whites”) in Nairobi.

Within minutes after the reception started, the Americans and Africans were deep in conversation and the reception, which was scheduled to end at 7:00 p.m., ended well past 10:00 p.m. Among other things, we learned each others' traditional greetings. (See below for Lisa Hatlen practicing a traditional Ethiopian greeting.)



The next three days were packed with presentations by participants from the U.S., Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria on topics ranging from how to teach various aspects of legal writing to the relationship between legal writing and clinical education to the role of effective legal writing in the enhancement of human rights and the rule of law. We were also treated to dinner speeches by Camille deJorna, a consultant for the American Bar Association (and, we learned, first cousin to Lani Guinier), and Okech Owiti, the Dean of the Nairobi University Faculty of Law. At dinner on Friday night, Anita and Kate treated us to an elegant fashion show in traditional long dresses and matching hats. (Mimi, however, could not pull off this look.)




Although the presentations and speeches were all excellent, the informal conversations among the participants at tea breaks and over meals; in the lobby and by the pool; about students, teaching, and the successes and frustrations of the profession are what will be the lasting impression for most of those who attended. In fact, the conference went so well that at the last session, the group decided to form a new organization. Although as of yet this organization does not have a name, it does have a logo (thanks to Lyn) and a mission: to advance the teaching of legal writing in Africa and to promote to further exchange of ideas between U.S. and African academics teaching in the area of legal writing. High on the list of the organization’s goals are book exchanges, additional training sessions and conferences, and faculty and student exchanges. More information to come.

Planes, Trains, Donkeys, and Dhows

After two days in Nairobi, getting to know the city and finalizing details for the upcoming conference, we headed out for a seaside escape at the Kenyan coast before the arrival of the conference participants. The first leg of the journey – from the hotel to the train station by taxi – was the toughest, taking us over a half-hour to travel less than two miles in the Nairobi rush hour traffic, or “the jam” as it’s called here.

Our first-class cabin on the overnight train ride to Mombasa had seen better days, but the ride itself gave us a great opportunity to see some of the Kenyan countryside. The service on the train, however, was stellar. The train manager, the car supervisor, and the car attendant each came to our compartment, introduced themselves, showed us how to lock the window and doors, and practically tucked us in and read us a story. The dining car was a throwback to colonial days, with waiters dressed in all white, some with turbans; china bearing the “KR” Kenyan Railways logo; and cutlery and tableware (included covered butter dish) embossed with the crown. We dined with our neighbors, a French couple who had just come from safari, and the dinner conversation, a mishmash of English, French, and charades, improved steadily with the intake of Tusker beer. The greatest challenge of the somewhat jerky ride was the toilet – of the squat variety, but luckily with a handrail for stability.

By the time we arrived (only four hours late), we had less than 24 hours to spend in Mombasa, Kenya’s second city, so we started the sightseeing immediately. First stop: the Old Law Courts, which has been converted into a small museum with an exhibit on Swahili culture and dress. Next stop: Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese in 1593, then overtaken by the Omani Arabs, then the British, and back and forth nine times until finally falling into British hands in 1875 and remaining with the British until Kenyan independence in 1963. We then headed over to the old town, but before we could get very far, we met Humphrey (“Call me Humphrey Bogart”) who became our unofficial guide. Winding our way through narrow back alleyways past homes with traditional wood carved doors, we learned to distinguish between the Arab doors, bordered with a chain that signified the slave trade; the Indian doors; and the Swahili doors. We wandering through the markets: the spice market; the Indian market; and the market operated by Mombasa’s newest immigrants, Somali refugees who began arriving about 15 years ago, and, according to Humphrey, offer the best quality and the lowest prices. We also made a stop near the old dhow port, now made close to obsolete by the huge commercial port on the other side of the harbor. Today this port is used by dhows transporting goods from Zanzibar, Somalia, and other ports of call on the Swahili coast, but in the past, it had been the last point that thousands of people would see before being packed into ships and sent off as slaves.

The next day, we flew to Lamu, which now vies for our title of “best place on earth.” We stepped out of the plane onto the sandy airfield; collected our bags from the thatch-roofed hut; and walked, with the rest of the passengers, to the wood-planked jetty to catch the dhow into town. After a quick crossing from Manda Island, we landed in on Lamu. The island has twenty thousand human inhabitants, ten thousand donkeys, and two vehicles: one belongs to the District Manager and the other is a donkey ambulance. However, with no paved roads, the vehicles get very little use.

We wove through the maze of small streets and alleys to Jannat House, an old Swahili home converted into a guesthouse. The central courtyard (which now has a small swimming pool and a bar) is surrounded by guestrooms on the first and second floors and a ring of terraces on the third floor. Each of the terraces is furnished with couches and daybeds piled high with overstuffed pillows. With midday temperatures well over ninety, we retired to the terraces for the afternoon activity: pretend to read, doze off, drink a beer, repeat. By four or so, the air started to cool and people and animals stirred back to life, with the braying of donkeys, the cries and laughter of children, the chanting of the Muslim call to prayer, and the insistent buzzing of flies.

The next day, we forced ourselves to make a move off the terrace and wander around town. As we did, we were greeted by hundreds of school children, all in uniform, with the typical greetings of “Jambo,” and “Hello, how are you?” In Lamu, however, we never heard the usual requests for money, pens, or candy. Lamu is a predominately Muslim island, with mosques at every turn, 56 in total, and only four churches. Life here moves very slowly, and we had little trouble falling into the rhythm of the island. We’d walk for a bit, stop to chat or a look at what the local vendors had to offer, have a cold drink, watch the world go by, and move a bit down the street for another drink. (And tried to get the donkeys to drink orange Fanta with us.)

For lunch, we stopped at a small place facing the sea for our first of several meals of fresh cracked crab. While we waited for lunch to arrive, the owner of the restaurant taught Laurel to play bao, a traditional African game involving moving small seeds around a hand-carved wooden board. Later that evening we wandered back to Jannat House, through the narrow backstreets filled with too-skinny cats and Muslim women, clad in all-black bui-bui’s, silently appearing out of the shadows.

After two days in town, we moved out to the Peponi Hotel, a swanky resort on Shela Beach. We had been told to come down to the main jetty at noon and that Abdul would find us and take us on a dhow out to Peponi. And, because Lamu is the kind of place that it is, we did and Abdul found us. Peponi, which means “paradise” in Swahili, is just that: a resort in the old colonial style but that treats its staff extremely well and takes an interest in the environment and local community. It’s the kind of place where you walk in at 10:00 a.m and the same old British guy is sitting at the corner of bar drinking gin and tonics and smoking cigarettes and has probably been there since before independence. But on the other hand, when the maybe-four-year-old son of one of the staff members sits on the floor of the bar tentatively approaching the hotel’s resident dog (a “stray-and-stay” who just wandered in one day), the British guy speaks to him in fluent Swahili and gently coaxes him to pet the dog.

We moved to the veranda and were immediately handed welcome drinks. Laurel took one look around and decided that we had walked onto the cover of Travel and Leisure: a white-washed porch with rows of hard-wood deck chairs overlooking the Indian Ocean, crystal clear and dotted with dhows sailing from island to island After a quick dip in the bathtub-temperature sea, we joined an excursion to see the hatching of sea turtles. Admittedly, we were both a bit skeptical that seeing turtles crawl from their eggs and make their way to the sea would be as thrilling as it had been made out to be. Two hours later, we found ourselves among twenty or so tourists, gasping in awe, clicking our cameras, and cheering the tiny turtles on. The proprietors at Peponi had actually convinced the main turtle poacher on the island (apparently, turtles or their eggs are used to make a traditional aphrodisiac) to become the main guardian of the turtles by paying him for each turtle egg hatched and a premium for each turtle to return for mating season. We returned for dinner: our second crab meal, this time with three kinds of melted butter, one plain, one with minced ginger, and the third with minced garlic. And for dessert, fresh mango ice cream with a nice glass of port.

On our only full day at Peponi, we started with an early morning water-ski on an inlet set among the mangroves, where the ocean is like glass. After breakfast, we waded along miles of pristine shore, collecting perfect sand dollars and watching donkeys carrying saddle bags full of sand move up and down the beach. For lunch, more crab, and that evening we took a sunset cruise on a dhow, the wooden Arab sailing boats that have plied these waters for centuries. Simple boats, with detachable sails that can move to catch the wind from most any direction, the dhow is a surprisingly efficient and stable vessel. Accompanied by Habib, Nawa, and Isaac, and with Laurel at the tiller, we sailed from Lamu to Manda, meandering through channels between the islands, before heading out to sea to watch the sun go down. When Laurel asked for advice on where to go or when to turn or whether we were going to hit a rock, a tree, or another boat, the answer was always the same: “Hakuna matata, as long as the dhow keeps moving, we’re just fine.”

The next morning, we had hoped to go out on a snorkeling expedition, but we were told that the tides were wrong. Instead, we decided to rent a kayak and paddle along the shore where we had been the day before. We started off in a dead calm sea, but when we rounded the point, the current started to pick up. We went a bit further and the waves started to break on the kayak. We decided to pull ashore, rest, and regroup. That was our fatal mistake. While we managed to get to shore with minimal incident, once we were on shore we realized that we could not get the kayak back out past the surf: not even after we had carried the (very heavy) double kayak 500 feet down the beach and not even when the poor donkey guy that we accosted tried to help us. We (actually the donkey guy) managed to push the boat out past the waves and Laurel managed to get in, but before Laurel could untie a paddle and before Mimi could catch up with the boat, not one, but two, waves hit the kayak knocking it, and Laurel, back to shore.

At that point, we gave up. Mimi parked herself next to the kayak on the sand, and Laurel walked back, announcing to the kayak rental guy: “You know something’s wrong when only one client returns and she’s on foot.” After some negotiation, Laurel hired a speedboat to come save us. After being towed out past the surf, we had no problems paddling back, but now we were escorted by a small armada – Salim in the kayak to our side and Bongo in the speedboat pulling up the rear. We arrived back at Peponi with just enough time for one more lunch on the veranda before getting back in the dhow for the ride back to the airport.

“The Judiciary Laid Down Their Tools”

Upon our return to Kampala, we read some disturbing news in The Monitor, one of the local papers. That Thursday afternoon, for second time in two years, police officers surrounded the High Court to rearrest prisoners who had been released on bail. There was a confrontation between the judicial officers and advocates and the police, resulting in injuries to one defense counsel and one police officer. While the government and the judiciary have presented widely differing accounts of the incident, the judges have announced that they will go on strike -- the first time since independence -- until they receive an apology from the executive branch. As of today, the executive has stated that the incident was regrettable, but has not apologized. Protests are expected during the week. We are currently in Kenya, but watching the local papers carefully; in fact, we have written a letter to the editor, supporting the judiciary in its attempt to abide by the rule of law, but so far it has not been published.

Strolling Around Sipi

Laurel got a chance to do at age 55 what she did not get to when she was in college – stay in a backpackers’ hostel and spend two days trekking around Sipi Falls, a series of three waterfalls in the eastern part of Uganda that sits in the shadow of Mt. Elgon not far from the Kenyan border. On our first afternoon, we toured the local villages with our guide, Alex. Alex, at age 19, had to leave secondary school when his house burned down. He is working as a guide to earn money to allow him to return to school. On our short walk we made a number of friends, especially among the children and the women, who invited us to share in a millet-based local brew with them. However, they thought that our fascination with livestock, particularly a litter of piglets, was a bit strange.

We spent the second day walking from one waterfall to the next. From our camp, we descended to the bottom of the first fall, a 95 meter cascade. From there, we climbed back up (see, e.g., Laurel on the ladder) to the top, then to the second waterfall at 65 meters. Finally, we hiked to the last fall (with a stop to put our feet in the freezing pool at the top of the second fall), which measured 87 meters.

That night, to reward ourselves, we decided to have dinner at a more upscale camp very close to the first waterfall. While the food was quite good, it turned out that no one else was there, and so, with the roar of the falls in the background, we pretended that our private dining room was in a large ship on rough waters.

Hot, Dark, and Steamy (but not in the way that you may be thinking)

While our trip to Mbarara got off to a shaky start, our trip to Soroti got off to a steamy one. About four hours into the six hour drive, the fan belt on our Judicial Studies vehicle broke, resulting in steam spewing from the engine . Unfortunately, the timing could not have been worse. We were, once again, quite literally in the middle of nowhere, and within a few minutes the skies became dark, and we were engulfed in torrential rains. Although the battery on the driver’s phone was dead and the secretary's phone was out of minutes, luckily our phone worked, and we were able to call the judge who heads the Judicial Studies Institute, who was in another vehicle ahead of us. To make a long story short, we were able to purchase two ropes and, using the judge’s car, tow our car about 20 miles to a police station.

Now for the hot and dark: While the morning of the first day of our training session went off without a hitch, things went downhill after lunch. First, the room was like a sauna, which made it difficult to keep people awake during a presentation on small-scale organization. To compound the matter, as we moved to Plain Language vs. Legalese, the power went out, making us realize why the word “power” is in ‘PowerPoint.” We were able to re-organize our afternoon sessions, but we were in the dark until about 10:00 that night. Finally, when room service knocked on the door with the fruit salad that Laurel had order several hours earlier, the lights came on. Needless to say, had we known that you could get power from room service, we would have placed an order much earlier.