Viendo Llover en Makindye

Wooden shacks with scrawny chickens running around next to kids who are just as skinny; burning piles of garbage here and there.

Guys making charcoal in tiny ramshackle tin-shanties while pygmy goats hunt for nibbles outside.

You do see slums like Makindye in Venezuela, of course. But not really that many.

And certainly none within a 10 minute drive to Parliament.

As an east-side caraqueño, my instinct is to steer well clear of places like this. It’s an instinct honed over decades of dismayed parental admonitions and that pervasive, well-founded collective paranoia that’s so thick on the ground back home. Truth is, steering well clear of slums is what I would’ve done on my trip to Uganda, too, if it wasn’t because my AirBnB room turns out to be right in the heart of the slum.

That’s the first thing I don’t get. I’m staying at a really nice house, with a gorgeous garden and a smattering of young aid workers in residence. Nobody in Venezuela would invest to make a house this nice in a slum this crappy. Caracas common-sense falters from the start out here.

As I arrive, my French AirBnB host warns me gravely about pickpockets. “You must be careful: they are very good at it. The worst part is that you may not notice you’ve been robbed at all until you get home.”

I try but fail to suppress a laugh. “You’re worried about…pickpockets?!”

I go out, tentatively, to try to get some ingredients for dinner. Ladies up and down the street keep little wooden stalls with a handful of vegetables for sale: some eggplants, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, maybe a cabbage and an avocado, and a couple of things I can’t identify.

Something deep in my caraqueño psyche is friggin’ scared. I know I’m not supposed to feel safe in a place like this.

But very quickly I realize…I do.

It’s hard to quite put into words but, within minutes, you feel it. There’s absolutely no sense of menace to this place. No malandro culture. There’s none of that tension that’s slowly made Caracas unlivable in the last twenty years.

The facts are stark. In 2011, there were 183 murders in Kampala. Murder in Caracas, which has twice the population, is running at about 4,000 a year. There’s nothing remotely like the frenzied gun-culture of the Latin American slum in Makindye. When — exceptionally — someone is kidnapped in Kampala, it’s national news for days on end; it’s that rare. (And then this happens.)

Makindye melts away the old caraqueño defensive crouch pretty quick. Just like all the tourist guides said, a lot of the smaller kids stare at me in amazement and point, saying “Mzungu! Mzungu!” (“white guy!” “white guy!”) You just don’t see that many mzungus around here. But that’s about the extent of the excitement. The adults mostly ignore me, or just greet politely.

I stop at one of the vegetable stalls and the lady is slightly thrown. I guess mzungus aren’t her core demographic. The kids stare, amazed, but one stern look from her and everyong goes into hyper-polite mode: speaking softly and doing their best to serve.

“The tomatoes are 100 shillings each, sir, they are very sweet” the lady says. I’m doing arithmetic in the back of my head. Let’s see 100 divided by 2,600…that’s like 3 or 4 cents. More expensive than a liter of gas in Venezuela, I guess, but still.

“Here you are, sir, thank you very much for coming,” she says with a soft voice and a smile, handing me a black plastic bag. A smile! A soft voice! ¿Qué verga es esta?!

Of all the ways Kampala’s third worldness is radically unlike Caracas’s, this is the one that jumps out at you first: the soft voices. Nobody shouts. Again and again, I find myself asking people to repeat themselves: I just can’t hear them.

Number two on that list is cleanliness: a combination of garbage fires and tiny goats probably accounts for it, though on the larger streets you always see street-sweepers complementing their work. Poor though it is, Makindye is cleaner than some of the nicer Caracas neighborhoods, and radically cleaner than any comparable Venezuelan slum — though, of course, there are no comparable slums, that’s the whole point.

Number three is the strange rural feel to the place. Every fourth plot is a banana patch, every rancho has a little vegetable patch out back. There are chickens and goats everywhere, and if they’re making charcoal next-door it’s because that’s what people use to cook, every day.

I remember reading that the slums around Caracas were once like this: way back, when the first generations of country people were squatting on them, they would plant little conucos and try to keep up rural mores in the city. By the time I was born in the 70s, though, that kind of countryside-in-the-city feel was already a bit of a relic. But here it’s clear: I even saw a cow with her calf bumming around between banana trees the other day and, did I mention, GoogleMaps insists we’re just a 5.6 kilometer walk from parliament?

I’m old enough to remember when the dominant bureaucratic euphemism for Caracas’s slums was “las zonas marginales.” It’s an outdated, odious misnomer, but one that made a certain spatial sense in its time: Caracas, like most Latin American capitals, has a formal core surrounded on all sides by a sprawl of unplanned slums.

But nobody would think to call Makindye marginal. In purely spatial terms, slums here are not on the margins. Slums are the core, encroached on here and there by enclaves of formal construction and fringed, especially to the north and east, with Valle Arriba style suburbs catering to Uganda’s military and commercial elite, or to its sprawling NGO-expat community. Those are Kampala’s zonas marginales, not Makindye.

Kampala has its La Lagunitas, but it has no Country Club and no La Castellana. The toniest bit of Ntinda, Kamapla’s wealthiest suburb, is nicknamed “Ministers’ Village” with admirable forthrightness about the wealth that the politically connected can amass here. “Ministers’ Village”, now that’s what I call marginal.

None of this is to soft-sell the daunting problems Kampala has: the terrible incomes and non-existent infrastructure, the rampant HIV, the corruption and all the rest. The poverty here is unmistakable, it’s real, it’s in your face, it’s extreme.

It’s just that poverty has a flavour, as much as a degree. The social scientist’s penchant for quantifying it and measuring it, for reducing it to a number, can’t account for this. Is Kampala poorer than Caracas? Is Makindye poorer than Petare? Do questions like that actually mean anything?

As night falls, you can see the kerosene lights coming on in Makindye. You see electric lights on in maybe one shanty out of every 4 or 5. In Caracas, shanties are famously decked out with satellite dishes. Here, even electricity is out of reach for most, TV a distant dream, and satellite TV entirely off the radar. There are plenty of obvious ways Makindye is much, much poorer than Petare.

But then women and girls walk around Makyndie alone, at night, without a second thought. Nobody wastes money putting bars on windows to keep thieves that don’t exist from stealing stuff they don’t have. The informal nighttime curfew so many in Venezuela have grown used to would scarcely be comprehensible to people here, who socialize intensely at night, outside their huts, as their kids play around them.

There’s poverty here. A lot. But there’s no economic chaos. Inflation runs at 6.7% — ojo, that’s per year— and the thought of having to stand in line for hours to buy staples, or of being just plain unable to find anti-retrovirals, strikes the Ugandans I’ve met as totally unthinkable.

There’s poverty. But there’s none of the hostility, none of that pervasive sense of decay that just seeps through Caracas’s pores. There’s poverty here — a lot, not a little — but it would never occur to a teenage boy in Makindye that the way to wealth and power and status and respect in his community is to grab a gun and start terrorizing his neighbours.

So is Makindye poorer than Petare?

Well, is it?