On April 25, I posted The Russian Ugandan at Cafe Pap.

Pap, which sits just below Kampala’s Parliament and just above the main thoroughfare, is Uganda’s version of Starbucks, only with even more mediocre food and an even more stratified social milieu. Mbu, this is Uganda, where the average family lives on less than a dollar a day, and a cappuccino at Café Pap costs two days’ income. There are 28 million people in Uganda, 1.2 million in Kampala, and about 20 people at Café Pap at any given lunch hour.

I’ve been frequenting Cafe Pap much less now that the internet is no longer free (boo!), but I was there today around lunch time for a bit. After I’d finished my meal and was packing up to go, the owner of the Cafe came over to me.

“Are you Glenna?”

“Yes, I am. Why?”

“You wrote the article on Cafe Pap?”

She explained to me that one of the waiters at Pap was doing some googling and found my article and passed it on to her attention.

“I am so sorry our tables are not clean and the drinks were in plastic cups,” she said.

“Please, it wasn’t me who was upset. It was the man I was sitting with. That was what I was trying to get across in the article.”

She had read the article, sort of, at least, because she made references to some of the specific points I’d made, but she certainly missed the bigger point.

I was trying to write something about inequality in Uganda and how I came to understand something more about this reality that specific day. That I could afford to go to Cafe Pap all the time and the mad who I wrote about couldn’t.

She was defensive, calling Cafe Pap a community for backpackers, expats, and the Ugandan working class. I tried again to explain that my grief wasn’t with Cafe Pap itself, but was instead about something much bigger – that I was trying to chip away at understanding the fundamental inequality that exists between expats and locals, between those who can afford Cafe Pap’s cappuccino and those who couldn’t. I used words like “stratification,” and “understanding” and “imbalance,” but I don’t think I really communicated.

Her closing words were something about hoping the service was good enough that I’d continue to come back.

Afterwards, one of the waiters came up to me and said he’d read the article too and was also sorry about the dirty tables. Again, I tried to say something about a dollar a day average income and Cafe Pap’s $2 drinks.

“I don’t really think a dollar a day is true,” he said.

“Maybe not in Kampala, but if you consider the villages…”

“People in the villages have cows and farms and dairy and land. They are rich.”

I’m not sure which villages he’s been to, but the villages I’ve been to have all been less that idyllic. I’m not claiming to know more about Uganda than a Ugandan, just that since I’m a journalist, I tend not to go places that are not doing well and instead to gravitate towards places with the kind of tumult that will make for a good story. Where girls still marry their defilers and clean water is a luxury.

I don’t see too many villagers buying cappuccinos at Cafe Pap.