Just like the airport, some weighty flies flew through, small ones were trapped. Even on release, someone had to offer to take them back to their home in Kiryandongo, about 260km away.ĭuring the first two days at Central Inn, the gates were a little of a cobweb. It’s on the third day that a good Samaritan offered to pay for their room, where they were quarantined for fourteen days. Perhaps due to a language barrier or shock, they hardly talked to anyone. After the reunion-gone-sour, they spent two nights in the open tent in the hotel courtyard.
It made sense, but why it did not apply to the driver that had as well interacted with people at the center and hotel workers that trotted in and out was a special kind of logic.
The reason was that they had interacted with the quarantined and were therefore a risk too. When their daughter was returning to the USA two days later, the ladies were denied exit from the hotel. They headed to her room and their driver was allowed to leave. The duo then headed to the Inn, and were allowed to drive in.Īccording to the accounts that some of us got in bits much later after leaving Central Inn, their plan must have been to spend some time with their daughter who had only come to stay for a short while in Uganda. At the airport, they learnt that she had arrived earlier and had been quarantined at Central Inn. They had gone to Entebbe airport to receive their daughter. One of the interesting first cases to show the irony of the Central Inn gates involved two South Sudanese refugee ladies living in Uganda. We thank Ssentongo and his publishers, Ubuntu Reading Group for allowing the republication of this excerpt. It did not take long for people to begin contesting the state’s approach to the COVID-19 crisis and as a contribution to the Contested Truths Series, we republish ‘Escaping from Quarantine’ – part four of Ssentongo’s book.
Through Ssentongo’s eyes and ink, we not only learn of his dreadful experiences in Uganda’s isolation centres but also of other people – Ugandan and non-Ugandan. While the Ugandan president praised self and staff for putting the coronavirus in check through the state’s isolation centres, the people under state quarantine presented a different reality. With the publication of QUARANTINED, Ugandan intellectual and philosopher, Jimmy Spire Ssentongo has painted a behind-the-scenes picture of how the Ugandan state handled the coronavirus disease. Few published works of creative non-fiction exist on COVID-19 in Africa.