[beat]

I once had a co-worker (in IT) from Uganda. I was having lunch with her and another co-worker, sort of a generic American conservative. He said something ignorant about working harder or something with regards to Africa, she just went off on him. She asked him if he'd ever had to step over the bodies of his neighbors as a child.

Of course, she went on to get a western education and move to the US, but she never forgot how lucky she was.

[wgerard]

Yeah, it was quite a reality check to hear our host talk very nonchalantly about how Amin took his father away and had him killed - it was just so common that men of his age had their fathers murdered by Amin, that it didn't even seem to register to him as unusual (of course, that's just my interpretation).

Definitely put my own problems in perspective.

[beat]

This got me to do a sad reality check. Since reading Hans Rosling's Factfulness, I've started using a decline in birthrate to Western levels as a proxy for nations getting their shit together. But checking Uganda, they're still above 5, declining slightly now but not precipitously.

Idi Amin, awful as he was, is the past now. What's the present like? That's what matters for countries that have yet to modernize. And it looks to be not good yet. Every nation in Europe was ruled by an Idi Amin at some point. They got better. African nations will too, someday. But I really want to see more African nations on that rapid-modernization cycle that we see in places like Iran, China, and Vietnam.