Gonda-Uganda

Positive response to Rotary's consistent approach

2010-09-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

The Rotary 3H goat project in the community of Kitariro.

Hello all,

Below is an update written by Tor Erickson working on the ground in Kanungu District. The projects have moved forward with tremendous success in large part due to the ever increasing trust formed between the Batwa and Bakiga communities and our Rotary 3H implementation team. We have found trust building to work on multiple scales that include:

A consistent approach- Remaining consistent with our methods of community interaction and our expectations of community involvement.

A focus on individual relations with members the communities- This has seen a huge boost since Tor and I have nailed down the basics of the Rukiga language and can now interact on a higher level of engagement with the people we are trying to support.

Using existing community resources- We have maintained our efforts on using community based organization structures to run the projects while emphasizing community representation. We have also focused on using the existing skills of the communities as well as the material resources available to each community.

Update written by Tor Erickson:

The past month has been a good one for our Rotary Grant in the Kanungu District. In addition to marked progress on our deliverables, we have taken significant steps towards project sustainability as well. For the past few weeks we have been conducting an internal evaluation of our work carried out by the Batwa themselves. I will intersperse the following update with quotes from the interviews that have been conducted.

A spring protection in the Batwa community of Kebiremu was completed successfully, and initial talks with the Batwa and Bakiga communities there show a high level of participation, ownership, and overall sense of accomplishment. In the words of one man, when asked how he participated, "We all cooperated to carry sand and stones."

A local mason from Kanungu town directs the community of Keberimo for the protection of their spring. The spring serves about 40 Batwa and Bakiga families.

People have expressed great happiness with having a protected water source. The following sentiment from a Mutwa man was echoed in every interview conducted: "Before having this protected water, we used to fall sick almost every day. I haven't seen anyone sick since we got this spring."

A mukiga man looking to muscle up some stones used for the Keberimo spring protection!

Additionally, we continue to collaborate with the Bwindi Community Hospital on a spring protection at the mixed Batwa/Bakiga community of Mukungoro. The community there has nearly organized everything required for us to begin work; this includes bringing massive piles of rocks to the site, and organizing community labor for the project as well as food and lodging for the masons involved.

Sanitation work has leaped forward. In the last report I mentioned that work had begun on 3 latrines, at this point in time that number has jumped to 10 with a completed foundation at least. This means 10 Batwa families have invested the time and energy into digging a pit 16 feet deep to protect their family's health.

A Batwa couple stands next to their completed 16 foot latrine pit now ready for Batwa masons to begin construction.

When asked how they felt about the latrine project, people answered with things like, "I feel very good about this. People will not fall sick," or "I feel very good about this project so far. It keeps us from using the bush," or "It helps us so that we don't fall sick." Work on latrines has included one for a nursery school at Kitariro, which has included contributions from both the Batwa and Bakiga in terms of money, labor and materials.

A Rotary trained mason demonstrating a a local method of reed tying for building structures.

The work on these latrine projects has been conducted by our Batwa masons. These men continue to shine as intelligent and responsible community members and masons, capable of doing excellent work. They are now laying out foundations to square, pouring stepped concrete foundations on sloping hill sites, laying brick stem walls, building sophisticated and light weight ferrocement floors, and framing the walls and roofs of these structures without any sort of outside assistance whatsoever.

Trained Mutwa mason puts the finishing touches on a school latrine in the community of Karangara.

When asked how the vocational training he has received will be useful, one of the masons said "In case my latrine collapses I will build a new one using the knowledge that I learnt from the workshop," and another said, "I am getting some money from it, sometimes people call me and give me a job to build them latrines."

Goat shed in the community of Keberimo.

The goat projects are where some of the most interesting and impressive work is taking place. 10 months into the project our three communities continue to feed and water their goats twice a day, patiently planning and waiting for the time to 'share,' meaning when the herd will have grown large enough for every family to have their own goat to sell or eat. In only one instance have the communities sold one of their goats, and this was done to buy medicine for a sick woman and was completely within the limits of the by-laws that the community had decided upon. This accomplishment is impressive almost beyond words, and demonstrates with crystal clarity the ability of the Batwa to work towards long-term goals in spite of their extreme poverty.

The chairman of the Batwa community of Bikuto prepares a penicillin shot while our animal husbandry trainer, Henry, looks on.

In the meantime, however, the Batwa have been able to enjoy the benefits of the manure and milk of the goats. When asked why he wanted to participate in the goat project, one man said, "Because they are useful in that they can give us manure and milk for our children," and another: "So that after sharing I can get my own goat and when I get any problem I can sell it to solve that problem."

Healthy goats!!

All projects show good signs of sustainability, though there is still room for improvement. In Byumba, where we protected a spring source, the Batwa mobilized themselves to pressure the secretary of the spring committee to replace money that she had taken. They then removed her off the committee due to her poor transparency and accountability and are now voting to replace her with someone else. This shows a sense of ownership; that rather than have Rotary come in and replace the money, or tell the woman to comply with the community, they went and did it on their own. A number of participants in the internal survey stated a need for more education in the areas of animal husbandry and spring maintenance: "Education is required in measuring the drugs when injecting the goats in case they are sick."

-Update end-

Water tank in the community of Byumba serving 30 families, a school, and a clinic.

Thanks again for following our ongoing work in Uganda! Your comments and questions are greatly appreciated.

Opening communication lines

2010-05-21T05:08:00.004-07:00

By Sol Henson

The heavily cultivated hills of Southwest Uganda with the Albertine Rift Valley seen in the background.

I literally live tucked into a corner of the world. One of the few places I have ever been that you can drive into but no through roads lead out except the gnarled dirt track that brought you there. To get to this place you must first travel 10 hours from the capital, Kampala, and wind your way along the crest of the rift valley skirting the edge of the escarpment and then climbing up into a beautiful green valley cultivated to the gills. The road through this valley climbs its way past two small trading centers and then abruptly crashes into the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest with no way forward but to shed your steel carriage and take well worn footpaths into the forest south or into Congo west. Just one or two kilometers from the Democratic Republic of Congo Border and only one road leading out gives you the sense that urban civilization belongs to another world. Living here for an extended period of time requires that you travel regularly and/or make fast friends with those you are sharing this space with.

Sitting high above this valley atop one of the ridge crests stands two brand new sentinels with flashing red lights. The recently built MTN and Orange cell phone towers are a symbol of how rapidly technology is advancing in Uganda and showers a network signal down upon the small sleepy community of Buhoma.

For the last year I have struggled on a daily basis to pass a basic text or communication that would save me two hours of travel. The only place where network could be found was at a tea field that sits across from a notch in hills of the valley where a weak signal could seep through and provide a broken conversation. Many of these conversation necessitated that I drag a translator with me making the communications that much more difficult to coordinate.

Now…I can make texts to my best friends in the states from the comforts of the porch of my house as I look into the depths of the primeval Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Despite my feelings that Bwindi is no longer the secluded location it once was just one year ago, the benefits of improved communication have been immediate. I now make phone calls at will contacting communities where we have ongoing projects to pass along meeting times or key messages. Work is constantly evolving and without the ability to communicate, those changes can lead to angry and frustrated community members. Although only a small handful of Batwa have access to phones we are still able to contact them through their neighbors. Passing messages through intermediaries come come with their own issues however, it is far better than the alternative of missed opportunities due to lack of communication. Perhaps most importantly the Batwa now have an avenue, although limited, to communicate with me when a project issue arises or if they would just like to pass on an important message.

Too often the target of humanitarian work is on the poorest communities (ie the Batwa) who do not have access to cell phones and even if they did, do not speak Rzungu.

(Rzungu is the language spoken by the Mzungu aka English!) In most situations the Batwa must resign to speaking through middle men who often have their own agendas and/or opinions that can hurt the quality of the information being passed on, and in some cases completely change the meaning.

A group of Batwa brainstorming ideas for the sustainability of their goat projects. Their ideas are recorded on the butcher paper in the background by community members.

A meeting session that has moved into the cramped indoors to escape the rain.

In addition to improved phone communication we have focused on dialogue through meetings that engage and involve community members NOW. If you have been reading this blog it may come as a surprise to you that this 3H grant includes provision for community nutrition in the form of goat projects. Three Batwa communities have been provided one herd of goats each to care for communally and to share after the goats have multiplied. We felt like meetings in these communities were a great place to start to provide the necessary support for the ongoing projects but also to better understand unseen challenges and benefits to inform future projects.

Follow up for the goat projects has come in the form of a number of formal and informal meetings looking to bring out the issues communities are facing with the goats and what their potential resources are to find solutions.

Goats with their salt lick. These store bought bars of salt will most likely be replaced by local salt mined from the salt flats of Lake Edward.

Boys having a blast climbing around the goat shed. An unintended benefit of goats!

Raising goats as a community is a complicated undertaking that includes a large amount of coordination and cooperation and necessitates strong financial decision-making on how to benefit from the goats in the end. Holding these meetings has played a central role in our understanding of the direction the community wants to take the projects. Having this direction allows us to provide trainings and to encourage meetings relevant to community goals and concerns.

Innocent, a Batwa member preparing a syringe for an injection of Malaria medication.

Spraying goats to combat ticks and mange.

At times we are showered with questions about if we can provide work gloves, jerry cans, flashlights and other items that we see as provisions that the community must provide for themselves. Despite these superficial questions we came upon some major issues that the communities raised. These included needing more training on providing injections, better cooperation for feeding and cleaning, and wanting further trainings on using manure.

Following the thread of issues among the three communities we found that land ranked top among all concerns. Further probing into the issue we realized that crop raiding of the Batwa goats onto Bakiga land was a major issue that was exacerbated by resentment by the Bakiga neighbors of the goat project going to the Batwa. If you will remember from previous posts the Bakiga are the dominant tribe in Southwestern Uganda while the Batwa are a very small majority in both population, land ownership, and access to resources. This line of questioning and group discussion has led to some upcoming meetings between the Batwa and Bakiga about cooperation and compensation for the sustainability of the project. We’ve found that goats wandering onto neighbors land is not a question of if but a question of when and if communities are not prepared to deal with this issue, conflict will undoubtedly ensue.

Compounding the land issue is the small plots of land that the Batwa live on and the fragmented nature of the land. Keberimo and Bikuto Batwa communities live on two plots of land separated by Bakiga land and the community of Kitariro lives on three disconnected plots of land. This situation requires the Batwa to cross Bakiga property to graze their goats on other plots of land. I never thought this would be a big issue to just move goats from one plot of land to the next until I watched a group of hungry goats charge out from their shed in Keberimo. Surrounded by Bakiga crop land the goats turned into giant black and white locusts devouring cassava leaves and corn stalks. At that point I truly understood how fostering relations with neighbors is central to the success of raising goats and how necessary opening lines of dialogue was needed to be a top priority.

Community worker Beth Kyamazima working with the Batwa settlement of Keberimo writing down the ideas of the community members.

More to come folks. Let me know what your thinking as you read these posts!

2010-02-14T23:06:00.001-08:00

At long last my return to Uganda was realized as I stepped off the plane to a cool black night at the edge of Lake Victoria. I was immediately reminded how fast changes occur in this country as I took the accordion tunnel from the plane into the airport. Just one year ago the same airport spat me out on the tarmac to make my way across the runway and to my baggage. I’ve been staying at the Backpackers in Kampala for the last two weeks getting my bearings and preparing for what is shaping up to be an incredibly busy 6 months back in Bwindi. My time has consisted of a large amount of e-mailing back to the states and to the 3H grant staff down in Bwindi, two hour long phone meetings with Tor Erickson, and six hours of Rukiga lessons each day.

Accompanying me for the last week has been Chris Edwards, an eighteen year old volunteer from Nevada City who has signed up to put his shoulder to the Rotary 3H millstone for three months. He has jumped into the language lessons with me and is also assisting with the startup and design of our new Rotary 3H website (coming soon)! I was impressed by Chris’s ability to immediately pick up the Rukiga number system which in my mind has only been surpassed by his ability to down Coca Cola at a blistering pace.

A view of the Backpackers Hostel, where Chris and I stayed in Kampala.

The Rukiga language is one of several Bantu languages spoken across Southern and Western Uganda. Many tribes share the same core Bantu language. The language of Southwest Uganda is Rukiga of the Bakiga people (note the addition of an “R” to change the people name to the name of the language). The language instructors are a married couple Richard and Doreen who teach with great humor and with great pride of their people and language (Doreen is of the Bakiga tribe and Richard of the Banyankole). The at times grueling six hour daily lessons are often intermixed with conversations about American and Ugandan culture. The days are punctuated with hourly frisbee throwing breaks that Richard and Doreen have taken such a liking to I’m not sure if they will let me return to Bwindi with my old Ultimate Frisbee disc.

From left to right, Doreen, Richard, and Chris at our Rukiga lessons.

Starting the classes I immediately began making connections in the language that had eluded me for the past year. Just working on the pronunciation alone has provided me the opportunity to use the vocabulary that I already possessed from studying notes that I had found online. It is literally a key, unlocking these words that I had been struggling to use for so long.

The Rukiga language is filled with twists and turns that at times frustrate me and at other times provide me with new insights into the culture I have lived with for a year. What I have found is that the language is not so full of exceptions but filled with a vast multitude of options and ways to say what you want to say. Prefixes, suffixes, and infixes! litter the language changing the subject and meaning of verbs at right hand angles. There are scores of ways to greet people and ways to check in with how the day is going, how was the night, and how is the family doing. The language accurately represents the importance in the Bakiga culture for checking in on how your neighbors are doing. Ironically there is only one word for apologizing (and I think it is rarely used) and if you are looking for words of politeness you can forget it. Another interesting note is that the proper way to introduce where you are from is to say where your people are from because there is always an unbreakable link to your people that anchors you wherever you travel to.

Armed with an improved understanding of the language and a year of experience under my belt I am chomping at the bit to get back to Bwindi and to the communities. Understanding the reality and the complexities of conducting humanitarian work sits at the forefront of my mind. Thinking back I arrived in Bwindi with a masters degree in hydrology, a water testing kit, and the ability to say ‘how are you” in Rukiga. My ability to greet, I quickly realized, was the most important of those three items I carried with me.

What one sees when they visit Bwindi is that humans are the exact product of their environment and the way they interact with that environment. Recent arrivals from the West are invariably struck by the masses of people seen walking on the roads. On market day in the nearby town/trading center of Butagota, you might pass several thousand people just walking: to sell baskets or mats, to buy food for the week, to collect debts or pay debts, to make business deals, to buy clothes and on and on. There are virtually no overweight people. When you do pass someone with a few extra pounds around the waist you take note. They are the wealthy and influential people in the communities and are both respected and feared.

Just as there are no fat people you see few of the physical ailments that you often encounter in the West, like the back or joint pain associated with sedentary lifestyles. It is reasonable to ask whether the typical Ugandan villager suffers fewer muscle and joint ailments because of the physicality of life there or whether they are just able to ignore discomfort and pain because there is no alternative. Most likely it is a combination of the two. One invariably encounters women and adolescent children carrying 20 liter jerry cans of water or men hauling sacks of cement long distances on their heads or people working under hot and dusty conditions. I have a great deal of admiration for this type of physical work. When I express this to my partner Paul he will barely raise his eyebrows and nonchalantly state that these people are “used.” His meaning is not that the people are being used but that they are used to the hard work and the harsh conditions and that this type of work is what they know.
Batwa women carry large bags of sand for a spring restoration project.

I have found that being ‘used’ is something we can all relate to. We are all “used” in one way or another. Whether it is to commuting three hours a day and sitting in front of a computer for another eight or pushing 300lbs of matoke (green bananas) on a bicycle 4 miles a day we are all adapted to our current situation. I think we all know this but in Bwindi it becomes overtly obvious. Communities are also “used” in the way they are set up and organized which is based on village leadership, local government leadership and by the resources available to them. In a sense these communities exist in a type of equilibrium, which is to say that people know their roles in the community and work hand in hand to sustain their families with the skills they have and the few resources that are available to them.

By adding new outside resources or information to a community this equilibrium becomes disrupted. These disruptions can be positive, like in the case of effectively educating a community on the benefits of good hygiene and sanitation behavior. And they can be negative. I’ve seen a whole community collapse into angry quarrelling over being loaned a couple of hoes and shovels. (As a side note I believe this is one of the main reasons that the Peace Corps relies almost entirely on education of communities vs providing physical resources). One problem with providing resources is that they can be provided unequally. And even when they are provided equally they can still be perceived as being provided unequally. And perception can be an incredibly difficult thing to overcome where information is spread almost exclusively by word of mouth (one false rumor spread in Rukiga can take weeks if not months to sort out, stalling projects and creating arguments between community members).

Tor Erickson teaches a seminar to Batwa masons.

Batwa are often the intended recipients of outside resources as they are the focus of NGO’s and Missionaries because of their recent eviction from the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and because of their apparent squalid living conditions. What many people do not understand is that the neighboring Bakiga suffer from many of the same issues caused by poverty such as poor sanitation, malnourishment, and HIV and their communities are interwoven with the Batwa. Projects focusing on the Batwa must often include the Bakiga as well.

Because the Batwa are the target of so many humanitarian resources the Bakiga living in the same communities also look to benefit from the projects, and rightly so in many cases. Unfortunately the Batwa end up putting immense energy into projects, carrying bags of sand, cement, rock, and jerry cans of water and excavating large volumes of earth while the Bakiga refuse to work at all. However, when the projects are completed the Bakiga use the resources as if they were involved all along. Not surprisingly this causes deep frustration among the Batwa and leaves serious questions about where ownership lies with the project and who is responsible for maintenance.

One example of this occurred when we built a water tank in the Batwa settlement of Byumba. It was a resource where the majority of the community were Batwa, but there were 10 Bakiga families (about one third of the total families using the resource) who gathered water there, as well. It was a constant struggle to engage the Bakiga beneficiaries and in many cases they would only reluctantly work on the project, all the while knowing they would benefit from the resource. To this day the Batwa struggle to engage the Bakiga in the maintenance of the resource. The spring committee formed to manage the project is currently working with the local government to set up a system where the spring taps are locked and only those active in the maintenance of the spring have access to the resource. One can see how tenuous a process this is when you consider that all it takes is one angry villager, denied access to the water source, to come in and break the taps to ruin it for everyone. It is now up to the people to make the hard decisions on how to involve the entire community and we can only provide suggestions and continue to monitor the water tank.

Another challenge we have faced in the last year and will continue to face is trying to engage the Batwa in their own projects. Right now there are four Batwa settlements preparing to build family latrines on the Rotary dime. Our expectation is that community contribution includes digging the 15ft deep latrine pits and assisting with the unskilled labor during construction . In the past the Batwa have always received some sort of compensation for any work they have performed, even when they were the direct beneficiaries of that work. This compensation usually came in the form of food. The assumption was that the Batwa are so impoverished that food needs to be provided to support the labor because the families are too poor to provide it themselves. And the Batwa will agree wholeheartedly.

Providing this sort of compensation, however, adds a major complication to the process. The question then becomes are the Batwa digging their latrine pits for food or to have a latrine? And thus, if we provide food, is the community buy-in sufficient for ownership of the project, or can we tell if there is any community buy-in of the project at all? I’ve had many long, difficult meetings about this very topic with the Batwa where there has been a fair share of bitterness and anger. Many Batwa angrily tell me, “if you want to help the Batwa then help them in all ways.” Meaning, if you are going to help the Batwa build latrines, then pay them to dig the pits. Others, however, agree that the pit should be the responsibility of the families before Rotary gets monetarily involved.

Although, in the end we have the final say whether or not to provide food for this labor our intention is to engage the Batwa in dialogue to understand what keeps them from embracing such a great opportunity to provide sanitation for their families. We are trying to move at a slow enough pace so that so that we can understand what their capabilities are and so that they can understand that we cannot justifiably lay these projects into their laps. In an attempt to commiserate I once told the Batwa of the settlement Bikuto that I understood that it was hard to dig latrine pits without being provided food. As soon as the words left my mouth I realized it wasn’t true. I had no idea. The next day I showed up at Bikuto at 8 in the morning with a pick and a shovel and a gallon of water and began working on one of the pits that had been moving very slowly. The work was intensely hard and as expected my hands, unused to digging, blistered badly throughout the day. I learned two very important pieces of information that day: 1) that a pit can be dug in clay soil at a rate of 1 ft per hour and 2) this work can be performed on an empty stomach.

One must consider what the Rotary contribution to these projects will be. Rotary would be providing thousands of dollars of materials to build these latrines, we have trained 4 Batwa ferro-cement masons to build the latrines after the pits are completed (see the previous two blogs written by Tor Erickson), and we are paying the skilled labor to complete these projects. Where ,then, is the community’s opportunity to demonstrate buy-in to the project and to show that they are committed to sanitation. If they won’t dig their pits will they ever buy soap when they have some spare money? If they don’t participate in the construction of the latrines will they keep them clean down the road? Demonstrations of commitment now are the only clues we have that the projects will succeed in reducing water borne illness in the future.

Two Batwa makakuru (respected elderly women) hold bars of soap.

Workshop Post III

2009-06-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

Written by Tor Erickson on his four months building latrines with the Batwa.

Some of the names in this blog have been changed.

I first met James in his native village of Kitariro in December, 2008. We spent two hours together, mapping out future sites of latrines and talking with families he had grown up around and known his entire life. James had been appointed by his fellow villagers to help me with the task of recording the names of those who were slated to receive a latrine as part of the Rotary 3H grant. They chose him because he could read and write, and also spoke a little English. On our first encounter he was focused and serious. I liked him instantly.

James checking for square.

The second time our paths crossed was during the construction of the Rotary project’s first latrine. Some of the work for the latrine was voluntary, and some of it was paid. By showing up regularly and working hard, James managed to secure one of the paid positions. Nearly every day for a month I worked alongside him digging, mixing and pouring concrete, tying together the wire armature that would form the frame for the latrine, and mixing and applying plaster to that armature. During this time he showed an impressive capacity to apply himself to the task at hand and an equal capacity to speak out on occasion as an advocate for himself and his fellow Batwa workers. When a problem arose, and others would turn sullen and walk away, James would step forward and say his part with an energy that spoke of an intense, inner passion.

The third and last time that we would have occasion to spend time together was in March, 2009, in the village of Bikuto, a tiny collection of mud and grass huts near the edge of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. This time James had been chosen in a democratic process by his village to represent them in a skills-building workshop that I would lead, the goal of which was to place Batwa in the positions of skilled laborers in the upcoming construction projects called for in the Rotary 3H grant.

The nature of my relationship with James had changed since the construction of the first latrine in his village. At that time, his role was that of a laborer and sometimes mason, and mine was that of foreman. Sol and I hoped that during the construction of that latrine, some of the technical skills involved would be picked up by the Batwa workers, James included, but our primary purpose at the time was to finish the project in the way that construction projects are approached in the United States: as fast and cheap as possible. Since then we had established a different set of priorities. Our plan was to take a step back so that we could find the best way forward in working with the Batwa community.

Now my interactions with James would occur in a classroom setting. Success would not be measured by completing a latrine on schedule, or coming in under budget, but instead would be based on the answer to one question: did James and his seven other classmates in the workshop learn the necessary skills to complete construction of a latrine without outside help? We had one month.

Tor going over technical drawings with the workshop members.

The concept of the Bikuto workshop had evolved in the working conditions of the first latrine we built in the month of January. That experience had raised some tough questions about our approach and the attitude of the Batwa towards the Rotary project. In particular, we were forced to ask how to gather community support for a project whose initial conception and planning were undertaken outside of the community. There probably is no easy answer to that question but we thought that a start might be greater community involvement in the implementation of the grant, even at the more advanced stage where we found ourselves. We came up with the workshop as one way to facilitate that involvement.

This was at the end of January. As Sol and I discussed whether or not to proceed with the workshop, a major factor was time. My trip to Uganda was originally supposed to last for two months, and my return ticket had been for February 8^th. After a month in country I had changed that to April 8^th, but this still left us with precious little time to organize and implement the workshop, especially when you considered the way in which we wanted to go about it.

Sol and I had agreed that the selection of the participants in the workshop had to be democratic. The alternative would have been for the two of us to arbitrarily nominate participants of our choice (subject to the consent of the participant, of course). This would have been time efficient, but we rightfully feared that it would be a continuation of the sort of arbitrary exercise of power that had led to our initial problems with community involvement. By contrast, a democratic process of participant nomination, involving as much of the wider community as possible, would necessarily increase community participation and hopefully spark a deeper community response than we had been achieving. But democratic processes take time, and we were working with four different villages. This meant we would have to meet several times with each settlement to discuss the project, its scope, its intended purpose, and its methods. We would then have to ask each community to elect two representatives to attend the workshop, which would require discussion and meetings on their part. And if they needed more time or had more questions, there wasn’t much we would be able to do to hurry the process without threatening its democratic nature.

All this had to take place in the month of February, so that the workshop could begin in March so that we could conclude it by the beginning of April, when I was set to return to the States. February was a very busy month.

For weeks Sol and I traveled every day, sometimes together and sometimes apart. In the village of Kabyorwa we met with the Batwa in a circle underneath an emaciated shade tree. In Byumba it was on a patch of grass in the shadow of the newly constructed school. In Bikuto we perched on a bench on the edge of a ravine and in Kitariro I met with the assembled village in the carpenter’s shed. In each community we explained our plans and asked for feedback. In meetings that could last for three hours we brought first one, and then another, and then all four villages on board, each with the promise that they would choose workers by the end of the month, in time for the first day of class. On March 1^st, one day before class was set to start, I didn’t know of one single person who would definitely be there. I honestly showed up the first day simply hoping that there would be someone to teach.

Meeting held in the community of Kitariro. The women insisted on weaving their baskets while we talked.

II.

In all the time that I knew him, I saw James wear only two sets of clothes. The first was for everyday and work wear. It consisted of a pair of shorts, flip-flops, a collared, short-sleeved, knit shirt buttoned to the top, and an impossibly battered and faded red hat. He wore these clothes day in and day out, whether we were sitting in our makeshift classroom discussing fractions or pouring concrete in the baking, equatorial sun. The clothes were always clean.

His second outfit I saw only once. It was for formal occasions. It consisted of dark blue-jeans, lace-up leather shoes, and a crisp, new t-shirt. This is what he was wearing on the day he showed up for class. He shook my hand and then went to change into his work clothes.

The workshop was based on a simple premise. If we challenged and engaged the Batwa with something they judged to be worthwhile then they would respond by taking the initiative and applying themselves. The concept of ‘engagement’ was critical to our effort. Anybody who has worked in a job they didn’t care about knows what lack of engagement feels like, and anybody who has done work they care about deeply knows what it is to be fully engaged. You can’t force engagement, you can’t buy it with money and the only way I know how to measure it is in a conversation or by the look in someone’s eyes. And yet if we weren’t able to engage the Batwa we had the overwhelming feeling that our work in Uganda might produce some temporary changes in living conditions, but would leave the Batwa as a people no better off and perhaps even worse than before we had arrived.

The first day of class, it rained. Half of the total class was waiting for me when I showed up at 8:30 and I nervously hoped the rest would arrive soon (sure enough, by mid-morning the next day, we had a full complement of eight students). We crowded into the mud and grass hut of Bunan, a young man of 17 with movie star looks and an ever present sense of humor that was so soft and understated that an hour might pass before you realized he had been making a joke for your benefit. Hunched together in a room smaller than a walk-in closet I pulled out my tape measure while five sets of eyes followed my movements with interest. “This is a tape measure,” I said. “Has anyone used one of these before?” I waited for a moment for the translator, Philemon, to repeat the words in Rukiga. Five heads shook back and forth, no, none of them had. I swallowed. “Okay, well, today we’re going to learn how to use one. A tape measure tells you how long something is in feet and inches. This is an inch. And this is a foot.”

When the rain finally stopped and we emerged from Bunan’s hut, blinking at the light outside, we had spent over two hours in an abstract world of numbers. During that time everybody held the tape measure, everybody took turns reading it, and everyone measured something, again and again. Nobody wandered off, nobody took a nap, and there were no side conversations.

Bunan working on his tape measure skills.

The next day we set about building our classroom. I had spent many long nights thinking about this, and finally concluded that the workshop was going to fail miserably if we weren’t able to erect a shelter to keep the tropical rains off of us and our work. March 1^st marked the first day of the rainy season, and we expected to receive torrential downpours every single day we were working in Bikuto. I had conceived of a shelter made from locally available eucalyptus poles and plastic tarpaulins, but the specifics were hazy.

It was early morning, and all but one of the workshop participants had shown up. Everyone was milling around in an excited group, making connections with friends and relatives from different villages that they hadn’t seen in some time. “Okay, everybody, listen up,” I said. Conversation slowly ground to a halt and the group turned to face me. “We need to build a shelter,” I said. “With these.” I pointed to the poles. “And these.” The tarpaulins. There was a long moment of silence, people seemed to be waiting for me to say something else. I had no idea what that might be. “Now?” I suggested.

They exchanged looks, and finally Simon, one of the students from Bikuto, said, “We need tools.” We had tools. They needed nails. We had nails. They needed ladders. We built ladders.

An hour later I stood back and watched as eight Batwa men attacked construction on their new classroom, setting poles, hammering in cross beams, and dragging tarps onto the rafters. And from the top of a precarious, homemade tripod ladder, James led the way, hammer in hand, pocket full of spikes, working with a focus and ferocity that spilled over onto his fellows.

I began to feel hopeful.

III.

I’m not sure what it was specifically that caused James to excel in the workshop. Certainly a part of it was that he had at least a year of high school education, whereas most of the others hadn’t made it past third or fourth grade. And certainly part of it was that he was gifted with a natural intelligence and curiosity. He remembered things after being told one time, and if he didn’t understand a concept you could watch him working it over in his head, trying to sort it out until it made sense. And part of James’s success was due to his leadership abilities. Again and again the others would turn to him as a spokesman for their concerns or problems, and on any given project he would naturally take the lead, moving the others to their positions with short, snapped commands that grew quickly angry if he felt his performance standards weren’t being met, and then calm down just as quickly when they were . But I never saw this produce resentment or lead to a fight, and any crew James was working on produced the most efficient and cleanest results. I think his success was dependent on all of those things but none of them explained it completely. At least one other in the class had as much education as he did, and in the final exam that I administered, James finished second in both technical and verbal skills (first would go to James’s friend and neighbor, Godfrey, who aced the test with a grace and ease that left me choked up with pride). Instead, what it might have been, the common thread that extended through all of his work, was that James would invest himself in whatever it was that he applied himself to.

James had a habit when he was working of holding one hand, fist loosely folded, tucked just above the small of his back. To watch him he could have been a British gentleman out for a stroll, or the image that came to mind more often, an artist at work on his easel. With the other hand he would hold his mortar trowel or set of pliers and do the work in front of him. From time to time he would step back and appraise his progress. Whereas most of the others talked constantly while they worked, telling jokes and stories, or complaining about the factors in life that created hardship, James worked in almost complete silence. It wasn’t that he wasn’t personable, or enjoyed conversation. At lunchtime I could often hear his voice rising above the others in a tale about this or that, stories that usually ended in a cacophonous riot of laughter. Instead, I believe his silence at work showed a deep focus on the task at hand.

James in his Red hat standing next to Godfrey in his red shirt and Beth, our translator.

I could walk away for an hour and return to the jobsite and without a doubt point to the area where James had been working. The wire was tighter, the wire ties neater, the mortar smoother and more evenly applied, the concrete better compacted. This kind of attention, which is actually the ability to see oneself reflected in the products of one’s hands, cannot be taught, it can at best only be nurtured.

Teaching the workshop was exhausting and demanding. We had so little time, and there was so much to learn, that I pushed my students to the limits of what I thought they could take, mentally and physically. We would work as long as we could bear it in our open-sided classroom and then when the collective brain had reached its maximum level of saturation and attention began to wander, we would turn to back-breaking physical labor for a break. The raw materials involved in our latrines were sand, rock, cement, and water, and we carried all of those things again and again and again. I watched a 100 pound man sling a 120 pound sack of cement onto his head and jog with it up and down a valley. We raced with bags of sand and jerry cans of water. And when the day called for digging, the class fell to it with a vigor and determination that I was hard-pressed to match.

And then when our bodies were exhausted, we would sit down again in the shade of our classroom and return to the abstract concepts of square, and straight, and plumb.

The steep hillsides of Bikuto added greatly to the physical challenge of carrying 100 lb sacks of cement, sand, and gravel.

Some days were better than others. Some days I would struggle with and fail to get past what I thought would be one, tiny concept, and some days the attention of the class would be so scattered that we would simply drop everything and devote the day to work with a wheelbarrow and shovel. I had plenty of time to reflect back on teachers in my past, many of whom I had shared with Sol, and their infinite patience in dealing with us students day in and day out.

But then there would be days where the work flowed, and the students would jump to the next task, seizing initiative and leadership for themselves, taking the chalk from my fingers and drawing their own diagrams on the board to clarify the concept of fractions. I learned to live for those days and simply grit my teeth and bear it on the others.

Workshopers crowd around to get a look at one of Tor's teaching points.

And over time, the lessons started to catch on. Mixing concrete to a given ratio, measuring to within a quarter inch with a tape measure, building the wire armature for our ferrocement floors and walls, correctly placing steel reinforcement in the foundation, explaining the effect of water on concrete and mortar mixes, and, most difficult of all, precisely laying out the perfectly square perimeter of a foundation with stakes and mason’s line. Not everyone got everything, and there were some students who were clearly excelling: Godfrey and James from Kitariro, Bunan from Bikuto, and Christopher from Byumba, but as a group they began to consistently demonstrate the ability to complete tasks on their own. I took on the habit of splitting the class into two groups, leaving one to erect the plywood forms for the walls, or stretch wire mesh over the floor armature, while I worked on technical skills with the second group, and invariably when we went to check on the first we would find work progressing beautifully.

Kenneth, Tinfayo, and Bunan (from left to right) marking the depth that the concrete should be poured for the footing of a latrine .

I couldn’t help but notice that when I wasn’t around they were starting to perform more efficiently and produce better results than when I was. I could only assume that without me present they were tackling the problems on their own without relying on me as a motivational spur.

This was the best possible news we could hope for as after four short weeks of class I would leave Bwindi and any information or skills that I had failed to pass on would leave with me.

IV.

Christopher (Tofa) honing his skills with the square.

In the end there was a test. The test was a comprehensive review of everything we had covered in the past month. It had a technical, skills-based section that covered items like wire-tying, testing soil for its ability to support a structure, and laying out a foundation. The test also had a verbal section that asked the participants to name the four ingredients of concrete and to explain the function of wire mesh in ferrocement.

Passing the test meant a pay raise and a job working on future Rotary projects. Failing meant a handshake and a thank you. This decision, to make failure an option, was perhaps the most difficult choice we had to make going into the workshop. Our final decision was based on two factors. First, making failure a distinct possibility would give a greater sense of importance to the work in the class. The second factor arose from a practical standpoint. It was possible that Sol would be working with these people for a long time to come, and if they were unable to competently and efficiently perform the work he needed it would inevitably lead to problems. Better to confront the issue now, up front.

Administering the exam took just over nine hours. I met with one student at a time in the shade of our tarpaulin classroom. In attendance over the course of the day were a growing number of guests. The only thing we asked of a guest was that they participate in the exam by acting as an assistant to the student, holding the end of a tape measure or pulling on a sheet of wire mesh. The mood of the day was focused, but not somber. Bunan answered questions with the same ease and intelligence that he had exhibited for the past four weeks. Godfrey demonstrated a stunning competence and knowledge. James was so nervous and determined to do well that we stopped halfway through to take a break where he could take a few deep breaths.

For some of the others, it was more of a struggle. Those who had demonstrated a high level of engagement through the workshop saw it reflected in their performance on the exam. For those whose attention had been elsewhere, or who tended to take a backseat while their fellows did the lion’s share of the work or answered or asked most of the questions, the test didn’t go so well.

Of the eight students in the class, four passed. We informed people of their scores in the same way we had tested them, one at a time in a private talk. Sol delivered the news, but simply sitting there and observing when he informed those who hadn’t passed of the results was a gut-wrenching experience. Likewise, for those who had done well feelings of pride and happiness on my part were enough to bring tears to my eyes. As I tried to congratulate James on passing and explain in just a few short sentences what I thought his potential was, I was forced to stop a number of times as my emotions threatened to overwhelm. He watched me, his face an unreadable mask, nodded when I had finished, and turned around to walk away without a word before I chased him down to shake his hand. If all goes well, these will be the men to lead the Rotary construction efforts in Southwest Uganda.

It remains to be seen whether the workshop will produce the results we desired. In my time in Uganda I learned that community ownership of a project can be an elusive thing to catch. For now my hopes rest with four talented, young men, one of them wearing a battered and sun-weathered, red baseball cap.

Tor smiling for the camera and contemplating a sequel to his adventure in Uganda!

Workshop Post II

2009-05-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

Tor and community memebers from the Batwa settlement of Kitariro setting a latrine floor in place.

Written by Tor Erickson on his four months building latrines with the Batwa.

“Just a quick update on my final stage of work in Uganda. Starting on Monday I'll be leading a one-month workshop on ferrocement latrine construction in the Batwa settlement of Bikuto. If I’m able to make a single contribution to our work effort here in Africa it will be this workshop, so that when I leave in April the knowledge on how to build these latrines will stay here with the Batwa people.”
- From a letter to my parents, dated March 1, 2009

Bikuto is the most beautiful of the Batwa settlements in Kanungu District, a double cluster of mud and thatch huts spanning a deep valley. From a high vantage point in the village you can see for miles in all directions, and it's possible to be sitting in the sunshine and looking out across four or five ridges to a distant peak shrouded in black clouds receiving a heavy rain.

Photo of Bikuto environs
The people from Bikuto are tough and out-spoken. In my time there I found them quick to laugh and joke, but just as quick to turn heated or angry if they sensed an injustice or a slight. There was Petronea and her husband Tegume, always active at some labor and always ready with a joke or a smile when I would show up in the morning. Or quiet Furjenz and his wife Generous, a strident defender of her family and village’s rights, and possessing one of the more impressive sets of biceps in East Africa. Then there was Jackson and Charles, both noticeably taller and more reserved than their neighbors. It was some weeks before we learned that these men had come from the south, from the district of Kisoro on the border with Rwanda, with their families several years earlier.

Generous with her grandson Sol, believe it or not.

Our plan for Bikuto was one that we had developed over the past three months of work in Uganda. It derived from conversations with a number of NGOs and individuals doing development work with the Batwa. It was also a response to our experience of building our first latrine in one of the villages of Kanungu District. That experience, during the month of January, was instrumental in opening our eyes to the potential of development work to disempower those very people you are trying to help. It was also a hint that without the correct strategy working with the Batwa was not always going to be a joyous partnership of hard work and shared accomplishment.

This last was a point that was driven home during the construction of our sample latrine. Most of our work had been theoretical up to this point, and this was going to be the first time that the Rotary 3H project was going to ‘get its feet wet’ and actually build something. Sol and I had a lot of different expectations and apprehensions going into this project but generally we expected to enjoy widespread community support. What exactly this support would look like, we couldn’t say exactly, but we felt certain that we would recognize it when we saw it and that it would involve some form of ‘chipping in’ on the construction project without expectations of compensation.

What can I say? In retrospect those were naïve assumptions to the core and Sol and I received a brutal, overnight lesson in the realities of development work. This was perhaps best illustrated the day the chairman of the village was to put in his labor to complete the latrine.

As part of the agreement we had forged with the village, every family that was slated to receive a latrine from the Rotary project would contribute a day of labor to the construction of the first latrine. This seemed logical to us as the sample latrine we were building would be used by the staff of the community clinic and by a community carpenter’s shop. It also seemed to make sense to us because by involving the community members in the construction process they could begin to learn some of the skills necessary to work on their own latrines. This labor was supposed to be voluntary and without compensation.

The women of Kitariro after plastering a section of floor for a latrine.

Every morning I would show up after an hour long motorcycle ride and meet with the Mukiga mason who was providing technical advise and experience to the project and see who from the village would be working that day. Work would then begin and we would set about accomplishing whatever that day’s task was, be it pouring a concrete foundation or framing the walls and roof. I felt that the best way to produce a good work ethic on the job site was to work as hard as I could myself and set the tone, hoping that others would follow along. It didn’t take long for me to realize this wasn’t producing the desired results. A couple of days into construction the chairman of the village, a man with impressive sideburns and a smile that suggested someone with a few too many responsibilities on his plate, took his turn to represent his family in the construction process.

I remember working my hardest to tie together the wire armature for the floor of the latrine, baking in the sun, sweat pouring down my back, and all the while the chairman squatting back on his haunches chewing a piece of sugarcane, watching with curiosity. Through a translator I suggested he help with tying the wire. He shrugged. A bit later, I asked if he could perhaps cut us lengths of wire to make up the wire ties. He worked for a few minutes and then stopped, resuming his observational stance. I explained to him that our agreement was for a full day of work. Eventually he grew tired of my nagging and wandered off.

From left to right Mahano, Solomon, and Muhzei tying together a floor armature just before plastering with cement and sand.

The chairman’s attitude though extreme was not atypical. Anyone who spent more than an hour on the jobsite would realize that something was not quite right. The Batwa had little to no sense of ownership of the process. They were interested in receiving the end product, a nice, permanent latrine, but their approach to the work said that they felt they would get it regardless of how much effort they put in themselves.

This was discouraging. In fact, it was frustrating and disheartening to the extreme. We knew that at any point we could simply have spent a little more money, hired laborers and masons, perhaps even the same people who were supposed to be volunteering, and finished the latrine without a hitch. But there was something deep inside that balked at the idea, something that raised an eyebrow and cocked a head at the thought of paying people to do something beneficial for themselves, and something that asked the question ‘why wouldn’t they jump at the chance to help themselves and their community?’ So we hobbled through the first latrine, all the while vowing that the next one would be built under different conditions. In the meantime we had been slapped in the face with the question of ‘why’? Why were the Batwa acting this way? Why were they content to let a white-skinned foreigner labor away on one of their community projects while they sat idly by and chatted?

Sol and I simply refused to believe what the local Bakiga people would earnestly tell us at every possible opportunity--- that the Batwa were lazy by nature and would never make good workers. These comments stunk of racism and besides, we had both seen the Batwa move and work with impressive energy and force when they felt so compelled. There was something about our project that had failed to hook them. They wanted latrines, they understood the need, but they saw the work that we were doing as something totally external to them and their efforts. We had come from somewhere beyond and when we left there would be a trail of latrines behind us and the Batwa could work or not and it wouldn’t change a thing. It was at this time that we began to think of the nature of development work that had come before us, and the effects that it had had upon the Batwa. It also gave us a chance to reflect on the dangers of a development project that is conceived and initiated outside of the target community. One of the greatest chances for ownership, project conception, had already been taken out of the Batwa’s hands.

This was the fertile ground from which the workshop in Bikuto arose. We wanted a work environment with more accountability. We wanted a work environment that fostered a greater sense of community ownership of the construction process. And we had realized that the intangible things you leave behind you can be as or more powerful than the tangibles. In this case the tangible was going to be the latrine, and the intangible was how the community was engaged in constructing that latrine. Part of this engagement would be the learning of the skills needed to build it.

The typical approach when attempting some sort of a development project in a Batwa community in Kanungu district has been to hire skilled labor from the local Bakiga population and then utilize the Batwa to fill the role of manual laborers, carrying sand, water and other supplies, digging, and performing all the other odd ‘gofer’ jobs that a construction site demands. There are two main effects of this division of labor, neither one of them desirable from our point of view. The first was that paid Bakiga workers receive wages that were several times greater than the unskilled Batwa, effectively funneling a portion of the development funds out of the Batwa community. The second was a marginalizing effect on the Batwa as they watched outsiders do all of the ‘important’ work on the job while they themselves were left to do the menial labor.

Our hope was that a workshop whose purpose was to teach the necessary construction skills to build a latrine from foundation to roof to a motivated group of Batwa would circumvent both of these issues. We also hoped that a skilled Batwa workforce would go a long ways towards engaging the community and would give the Batwa people a greater sense of ownership of the project (imagine you live in a small town and a big construction job comes up, say, to build a new county library. In one scenario a local contractor gets the job and every day that you drive by the jobsite you see people you’ve grown up with and have known your entire life doing the work. You might feel like the new library was more a part of the community, or that by extension you had some stake in it because people you knew were doing the work. And if the day came when the library was asking for volunteers to help out, you might be more inclined to show up, since it was someone you knew who was asking. Now imagine how it might feel different if an out-of-state contractor were awarded the job and he brought in his own, out-of-state crew to do the work).

Batwa masons tying wires for a latrine floor.

This was our basis for the workshop. By the end of January we had committed to giving it a try. The only problem was that we had only a hazy idea of what the workshop would actually look like. Who would participate? How would those participants be chosen? What would the curriculum consist of? Where would it be held (this was before we had met with Bikuto and they had agreed for their village to be the host of the workshop)?

In the next blog entry I will go into detail about how we answered these questions and how the workshop itself played out in the month of March.

The Pace of Development Work

2009-04-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Tor and I with the members of our recent latrine building workshop. The lone woman in the photo is Beth, our translator.
(Note: This is the first part of a three part series describing our efforts to run a technical skills workshop for the Batwa in the month of March. The first and second parts of this series will focus on our efforts leading up to the workshop, and the third part will deal with how the workshop played out and the future of our work in Uganda).

It has been a hectic time here recently in Bwindi. I realized a couple weeks ago that Tor and I had only taken two short trips outside of Bwindi since Christmas. We were well past due for checking out some of the sights Uganda has to offer. I was also looking to find some much needed perspective on working with the communities here. Unfortunately, during this time I had to say goodbye to my close friend Tor Erickson who has contributed so much personal and professional support during the last four months.

To get away Tor and I took a great trip out to eastern Uganda with a young Dutch musician, Tina, who has been working with children in Gulu, a city in the war torn north, and her brother Tom. First we headed out to Sipi Falls, a set of spectacular waterfalls on the Sipi River which drains the western flank of Mt Elgon. Mt Elgon is an ancient volcano on the edge of the Great Rift Valley along the Kenyan border.

The lowest and largest of three spectacular Falls in the Sipi Falls region that drains off of Mt Elgon.

Our first experience of the mountain was in the waning light of dusk. Under falling darkness we could just make out the outline of a massively broad landmass lifting up from the flat plain. What we saw was not the form of a young, cone shaped volcano ready to rupture but that of an ancient volcano that had seen its day in the sun and was slowly, inexorably eroding back into the plain. Fittingly, the mountain took the form of a sleeping person spent from millions of years of geologic activity.

Tired and weary ourselves from hundreds of kilometers of driving we arrived at our lodge under the blanket of darkness. My first sense of Sipi Falls was the hushed sound of running water and chattering birds. All we could see was a faint, rugged ridgeline silhouetted against an imperceptibly lighter sky.

I greatly enjoy experiencing a place arriving for the first time while it is still dark out. Sight can often overwhelm our other senses. Darkness forces us to a more balanced use of our faculties, contributing to a more complete experience of a place.

We spent a couple days exploring this spectacular region. On the final day Tor and I hesitantly signed up to go climbing. We could only imagine the kind of climbing equipment we would find in a country that is known for squeezing every last bit of functionality out of a piece of equipment until it breaks for good and is then used for another purpose. We were pleasantly surprised to find up-to-date climbing gear and cleanly bolted routes. The rock was an old Lahar mudflow dotted with protruding chunks of stone that made for great handholds. The climbing was superb and during rest periods, in between climbs, we enjoyed fantastic views stretching out to northern Uganda. We finished up our climb and then were off to Kampala to run some errands and, sadly, to say goodbye to Tor.

Goofing off on the waterfall hike at Sipi. From left to right Tor, Tina, Tom, and our overprotective guide Fred.

Traveling around in Mt. Elgon I was struck (not for the first time) by how long certain natural processes take. How many millions of years did it take Mt. Elgon to lift up from the Rift Valley and then to wear down to the nub that currently exists? A nub thirteen thousand feet tall and encompassing twenty square miles, to be sure, but we have to remember that at one time it used to be a much taller mountain than Kilimanjaro.

These thoughts on time also made me think of how long processes take for humans. How do humans create the social structures that they live in and how long do those structures take to form? Africa has had its entire tribal social structure ripped to shreds by the division and the subsequent domination of the continent by European colonialists. Then, just as the people seemed to be coming to some kind of equilibrium with a new set of colonial rules, independence struck and the rules shifted yet again. It was a cultural whiplash that happened in an instant but its fallout has lasted for decades. The adjustments that people have made have been incredibly painful and have triggered side effects of lawlessness, corruption, war, starvation, oppression, and poverty.

It is the same for the Batwa. For thousands of years they lived in a social structure adapted to rules and guidelines set by the forest. Banned from the forest in 1994 they are now forced to live by a different set of rules, a set of rules that they lack the education and cultural background to effectively cope with. This is why humanitarian efforts that simply give money or goods, or implement projects without carefully consulting the Batwa and allowing them to organize to fully benefit from the projects can be so dangerous. Without the requisite education and community organization the projects will, at best, fail, and at worst community dynamics and relationships can be disrupted and dependence on outside handouts can become heavily relied upon.

Batwa Children of the Bikuto settlement hanging around at the drinking and bathing water source for the community.

One specific danger of the ‘charity’ style of humanitarian efforts is that much of the funding for these efforts can end up being funneled to those on the ground who have the best education or who sit in positions of power. Frequently these are the people least in need of help and rarely are they the intended recipients of the aid. Because of their local status as influential community members or their education they are the ones who are best able to communicate with and direct NGOs or philanthropists. As a result, funding for community development often does not effectively find its way to the people who are the intended target and instead money goes to those who can best communicate with the donors.

That is why it is so important that we work within communities to build skill sets, whether those skill sets be organizational or labor oriented, so they can truly be the owners and beneficiaries of the projects that come their way.

I feel we took a great step towards promoting project ownership and building community skill sets by running a latrine building workshop for the Batwa. The workshop was attended by eight community-chosen Batwa from four different villages. Its purpose was to teach the necessary construction techniques to build latrines from the foundation to the roof, without the help of any outside masons or carpenters. Tor did an outstanding job engaging the Batwa and teaching the necessary skills. In the next installment of this blog, I will leave it to Tor to describe the philosophy and background of the class. In the final installment, Tor will talk about how the month-long workshop actually played out and I will discuss where we hope to go in the future.

Pictures:

Cooking lunch at the conclusion of our latrine building workshop in Bikuto. Simon (left) was one of eight participants and Syverin was the cook for the duration of the workshop.

Members of the latrine building workshop. Above: Muhzei. Below from left to right is: Kenneth, Medad, Simon, Lokolo (pronounced Rokoro), Tofa, Tinfyo, and Moses.

Cutting heads. Syverin holds two chickens in their death throes.

Fisherman preparing their nets on the shore of Lake Edward in the fishing village of Kisenyi. Kisenyi is one of three villages surrounding by Queen Elizabeth national park because they were there before the park was designated.

The coolest kid in Uganda. Unfortunately it was a mammoth effort trying to get these shades back from him.

Tor teaching the workshop with Beth our translator and using a blackboard. Can you tell us what the 4 components of concrete are?...

Tor posing in front of the ferrocement latrine build during the workshop.

Tinfyo seeking cover during a windstorm in Bikuto. The thatch is blowing off of the building behind him.

Me standing in front of a massive strangler fig tree in Entebbe just south of Kampala.

Wild insect life on an island that we visited on the Nile. The first photo is of an unreal preying mantis type creature feeding on some a dragonfly. The second photo is a line up of dragonflies on a branch.

Keeping on

2009-03-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

The Batwa getting down at a recent visit to the Bikuto settlement. The dancing is a combination of a burst of quick jumps while stomping your feet down and some fancy foot work in between.

Agandi everyone,

Before I realized it February in Bwindi was gone in a flash. The guesthouse, where I take my meals, work, and find social sustenance, has seen many new faces and said goodbye others. This month we were graced with the presence of two pediatricians (Elizabeth and Annie) from the states, a neo-natal nurse from Denmark (Anna) as well as two med students from Denmark (Christian and Eva).

A photo of the February crew. From left to right (back) is Elizabeth, Annie, Der, myself and Tor and also left to right (front) is Apiyo, Carol, and Anna. Apiyo and Carol work as staff at the hospital and the rest are guesthouse wayfarers.

The guesthouse is such a great mix of culture, language, and background is. The conversations that you have over meals range across the globe (literally and figuratively) encompassing politics, religion, food, adventures…etc. Because of the strong hospital presence here, inevitably the conversations will turn to infectious disease, tropical ulcers, and the parasites that infest the local human population. This morning I realized how much my tolerance had grown here when I was able to happily eat my French toast with plum jam while Eva, told stories about patients vomiting blood full of hookworms!

Also this month we had a visit from Reno Rotarian Dr. Bob Clift and his wife and Linda Clift. Their visit was thoroughly enjoyable. We visited several Batwa settlements where projects are ongoing and they had the opportunity to see our approach to the projects and provide input. Bob and Linda really embraced the effort we are putting in here to build sustainable, community owned projects.

While they were here, Bob and Linda had a chance to sit in on a meeting for the goat portion of the project. Realizing that we know very little about how the Batwa cultural and social systems work Paul and I decided to hold a meeting where the Batwa have an opportunity to teach other Batwa. Mpungu is a Batwa settlement that is currently running a very successful goat project and we brought them over to talk to the beneficiaries of our goat project. The meeting brought out all kinds of issues and ideas that I had not thought of before. For example the folks at Mpungu seemed to think that perhaps the greatest benefit of having goats in their settlement is not for milk or meat but for fertilizer for their crops. It also brought out issues of land ownership and how the community needs to think about how to graze their goats and still be respectful to their neighbors.

Paul Muhwezi facilitating a meeting for the goat project.

Rotarian Bob Clift assessing the situation at the Batwa goat meeting at the settlement of Kitariro.

After the meeting Bob Clift expressed to me how important community ownership was becoming in his mind. He explained how he plans to bring that message back to his Rotary Club in Reno and to put a greater emphasis on the incorporation of community involvement. All I could do was nod in agreement. I’m looking forward to some of that feedback.

The Batwa breaking into dance with Linda Clift caught in the middle.

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It seems that my tolerance for discomfort has grown immensely since my arrival to Bwindi in September though I can definitively say it will never compare to the tolerance of peoples from Uganda. From walking miles and miles everyday to carrying giant stacks of firewood on their heads to piling 20 people in the back of a pickup that is already full of bags of corn flour, matoke (green bananas) and other supplies to making gravel by hitting large rocks with a hammer until they become small rocks. Paul, my Mukiga partner the other day tried to bring jerry cans full of gasoline into the cab of the truck as we were heading home from the field. I told him that the fumes were going to make me sick and he gave me a look of pity as if the poor Mzungu would never be able to make his way through Uganda without him. Which to some degree I cannot argue with.Pediatrician Annie hoops taking a photo of Batwa children at the Mpungu settlement.

Tor was talking to me the other day about how he didn’t think that he could return to the states and deal with complaints of people that were anything short of emotional or physical disaster. There seems to be much less sympathy for others misfortune here as life tends to hold a certain degree of heartache and physical suffering for everyone. It’s almost as if there is an intrinsic empathy and because everyone suffers there is no need to acknowledge it. Although open displays of sympathy for others is rare there is much humor and excitement in the Ugandan culture in sharing the stories of others misfortune. Many of these stories fall under the category of “if I didn’t laugh I would probably cry.”

For example:
Tor and I the other day were hanging out at a Batwa settlement, known as Bikuto, trying to set up a building workshop with the people there. We sent a gopher to pick up a phone number from the other side of the settlement that was down a ravine and back up the other side. In fascination we watched with the Batwa women the young man run full speed down into the ravine and back up the other side; the low lying tea plants allowing us to watch every step. On his return trip we watched his red shirt screaming down the other side of the ravine set against the light green tea leaves. Without warning he pitched forward cart-wheeled and slammed into the tea bushes. The Batwa ladies burst into laughter as Tor and I sat there with our mouths hanging open. He immediately recovered went back up the hill for the pen and phone number and continued his charge down the hill. Luckily he was not injured.Tor getting goofy with Petronea a Batwa woman with more character in her pinky than most people will ever show in their entire lives.

I feel like I have experienced every emotion possible since I arrived here in Bwindi. I think this spectrum of emotions just fits into a place like Bwindi. Great sorrow and great joy walk hand in hand here like no place I have ever been. The willingness of people here to move on with their lives despite tragic accidents or debilitating injuries is sometimes hard to make sense of being the westerner that I am. We tend to dwell on those times we were cheated or injured or lost big. Here I think that life is just too hard to dwell on what went wrong this would just lead to too many opportunities lost. It’s probably an experience that every person from the states could benefit from.Me showing off my first care package! It only took 2 and a half months to show up. It contained gummy bears, gummy ginger candy, socks (!), tea, bandaids, salaami, and much much much more.Photo of me defending my care package from Phillip by any means necessary. Phillip is the guesthouse cook.Butterflies of Bwindi. During the dry season the butterflies congregate in the thousands around standing water. It is a pure delight.

Scott Kellermann giving a thumbs up to the cow intestines and stomach linings hanging at a local butchery. Looks disgusting, smells awful, and tastes great (at least to the locals).

Annie Hoopes hanging out with a Batwa child from Kitariro during an outreach.

Gorillas crossing the road near one of the safari camps. The gorillas have been particularly active around the human settlements in Bwindi lately. This gives the Uganda Wildlife Authority fits when Mzungus see the gorillas without paying their 500 bucks!

An outrageously beautiful butterfly, speaks for itself.

Community with a capital "C"

2009-02-05T11:59:00.001-08:00

Batwa community members of Bikuto with Batwa Development Program staff member Levi Besingye (in the motorcycle helment).

Hello everybody! It has been an especially full month here in Bwindi as we attempt to get the water and sanitation projects off the ground. My days are generally composed of waking up around 7 am and driving a motorcycle down to the guest house where I will fill up on coffee and an omelet before talking over the days plan with my partners Paul Muhwezi and Tor Erickson. By 9 am we are usually off in the field working for community meetings or project implementation. Field work lasts anywhere from 6 to 14 hours depending on the day’s activities and then back to the guest house to compile notes, finalize community contracts, and check e-mails (and dinner!). I’ve found with all of the logistics and grant management that it has been difficult not to lose sight of the most important aspects of this work namely, community involvement in the projects and community awareness on issues regarding water borne illnesses.

All of my encounters with the NGOs (which are a heavy presence in SW Uganda) and local government here stress the importance of community participation but I am finding that there is a vast difference between what is spoken and what is implemented. One complexity that I did not realize coming into this work was that communities in Southwestern Uganda are painfully aware of the NGO presence here and will jump at the chance, if given, for community projects. Any help is good help?

I though my greatest challenge here would be trying to convince communities of the importance of the projects that we would like to implement. Instead communities are accepting the projects and in some cases are not concerned about being convinced. They just want what other communities have received from NGOs, expensive projects. Thus our approach is beginning to evolve and we are putting a heavier emphasis on dialogue with the communities.

The focus of our outreach is now more centered on finding out what the communities want for their people and what they know about clean water and sanitation. If projects have been implemented in the past and failed, why? One community that we have been working with has three giant school latrines (provided by NGOs) lined up in a row and only one of the latrines is operational. The other two are collapsing and crumbling. Maybe this is a case of poor workmanship or maybe it is the case of a community accepting a project without being involved enough to insure that the work gets done properly.

Our team has been trying to tease out what constitutes “buying in” for each community. One way I am starting to look at this is what kind of contribution from the community is a great enough sacrifice that they will feel a sense of obligation for sustaining the projects. We are trying to find that balance between pushing a community to its limit in terms of contribution without overwhelming them to the point where the projects never get off the ground. That limit is different for every community.

For example the Batwa don’t seem to value the blood sweat and tears of manual labor as much as their Bakiga neighbors. So while working with them even the hardest labor I can think of, namely digging the pits for pit latrines still does not necessarily constitute buying into the projects. So we are looking for something more, some other way that they can contribute. Whether that be cooking the meals for the workers of the projects or utilizing some resource available to the community we are still feeling it out and fine tuning the process. The dialogues have been getting more in depth and I feel like we are starting to gain a lot of knowledge on why projects in the past have failed.

Mutwa Fergans demonstrating how to climb down into the pit of a future pit latrine to dig. These pits are commonly dug in excess of 20 feet deep leading to concerns about groundwater contamination.

Recently we protected our first spring!! It was a spring in the village of Iraaro just 20 minutes east of our location near the hospital. It was a spring that I had visited in 2006 when I visited the area for the first time. Water had escaped from the original protected spring delivery pipe and was flowing underneath the catch basin leaving only a trickle issuing from the delivery pipe.

With the assistance of the district water officer and about 15 community members we opened the spring up to diagnose the problem. After 2 hours of digging we uncovered a cement box that the spring water passed through. The box was between the eye of the spring (the location where the water originates) and the delivery pipe and was full of gravel. On top of the gravels was a thick mat of very fine dark purple roots. Although a surprising development, nothing prepared me for the 3 foot long root wad that was pulled from the pipe above the cement box as water gushed out of the delivery pipe. The root wad filled the entire diameter of the pipe and was completely blocking the flow of water. With my mouth hanging open I could only marvel with wonder and disgust at how one root wad had blocked this community from having clean water for 10 years.

Community contribution of labor. These women are carrying stones to be placed in the uncovered spring to protect the water channel from collapsing.

We continued to dig up the spring and found more and more purple root mats. We followed them up to a stand of ten banana trees sitting above the spring. Who owned the banana trees was my immediate question which was answered by silent looks over at the spring committee chairman! How ironic! The chairman was even bold enough to ask the community to compensate him for removing the trees though I don’t think the community were having any of it (and neither should they in my mind). The spring is now filling a 20 liter jerry can in 2 minutes versus 15 minutes before the roots were removed.

I have now worked with the Iraaro community to protect their water sources for a total of around 20 hours including education, training, and spring protection. It is now my goal to take the momentum of this successful project to restore clean water to a community and involve those people in neighboring projects. Having this exchange of information makes my life much easier and allows local knowledge of spring protection to be passed on without a middle man. Even misinformation exchanged in this manner allows me to better understand what people know and where knowledge gaps exist not to mention where my own knowledge gaps exist. I’ve always said you never truly know something until you can teach it.

Well I’m beat. It’s a late Saturday afternoon in Bwindi and I am ready for some exercise and maybe a nap. This evening folks from the guesthouse will be grilling up fajitas with chapattis in place of tortillas. Weekend here I come! Take care.

Photos
A muhzee (name for a respected elder) resting after clearing vegetation from his spring to maintain the community drinking water source.

A three way encounter that nature never intended. Monkeys, turkeys, and humans.

Young man preparing aggregate that is used in concrete. This is a simple procedure of smacking rocks with a hammer until you have the right aggregate size.

Tor plastering a sample latrine wall using ferrocement. Ferrocement is a labor intensive procedure whereby cement and sand is plastered onto a framework of wire and reeds. The resulting wall is lightweight and uses a fraction of the cement costs.

A boy demonstrating a toy created by capturing a large wood boring insect and hooking a stiff piece of grass under the exoskeleton. The child is blowing on the insect to get it to beat its wings.

Bwindi in the New Year

2009-01-12T23:38:00.000-08:00

Primary School children dancing at a lodge on Lake Mutanda near Kisoro in Southwestern Uganda.

Preparation to begin building latrines are now in full swing. Tor and I have mapped out about 40 latrines to be built at 4 Batwa villages. Often I drive the motorcycle down to the guesthouse in the morning for breakfast and find Tor cranking away on some new latrine design modification or looking for ways to cut costs on existing designs. Tor and I have come up with four main criteria for the construction of the latrines:

1. We want to maximize the involvement of the community in every step of the projects. This includes participating in every step of the planning and building process.

2. We want to provide the strongest most versatile latrine for the least cost and we want to use building techniques that use existing masonry an carpentry skills within the communities.

3. We want the materials to be light as transportation costs are the highest they have ever been in Uganda and these materials must be carried long distances often on steep and treacherous terrain.

4. Lastly, if at all possible, we want to provide a latrine that can be sustainably used for over 50 years. This means that the structure will outlast the life of the pit and can be disassembled and reassembled with minimum skill and effort (aside from digging a 15 to 20 foot hole in the ground).

One method that we have come across is the use of thin layers of sand and cement applied to a light structural framework such as chicken wire. This process used to make walls and possibly slabs is known as ferrocement. This is cement that is not poured into forms but applied as a plaster and has proven its strength and usefulness many times over in projects such as boat hulls and water storage tanks. The ferrocement walls are lighter than brick walls and utilize traditional mud and waddle techniques of applying plaster to a structural framework. Test walls are going up as we speak and we hope to have built our first latrine in early February. I guess this is all a lot of excitement about storing well…crap! But it has been extremely rewarding working with the Batwa communities on their concerns about sanitation and coming up with a design that they can be proud of and that they will take responsibility for long after we have left.

Members of the Batwa community with the tools and food that will be used for digging the pits for the latrines.

To increase community buy in and involvement we are setting up water, sanitation, and nutrition committees. These groups of people are the current and future managers of these Rotary projects. In some cases the committee members overlap and in others they are completely separate. These committees are what Rotary calls the Rotary Community Corps. The RCC are groups of volunteers that manage the financial, logistical, and enforcement aspects of the projects. By-laws are written for the proper management of the projects and include schedules for maintenance and in some cases fines for misconduct. One such fine I found particularly interesting in the Batwa community of Bikuto was for 10,000 shillings for cleaning pig intestines at the protected spring source. Apparently a prized delicacy among the Batwa they also realize it is one of the more unsanitary and disgusting preparations of food known to mankind.

Batwa children grouped together at a community meeting to talk about water and sanitation. Meetings are often populated by all ages from the youngest suckling babies to the oldest crotchety Muhzees (respected elders).

As for living in Bwindi, I continue to enjoy the near perfect weather on a daily basis. When the sun comes out in midday it can really cook here especially with the humidity but without fail the clouds will roll in in the afternoon to cool things off and provide short bursts of rainfall that will give way to beautiful sunsets against white pillowy thunderheads. I am settling into my new Banda (another name for cabin) quite nicely which has a 180 degree view of primary rainforest. The forest sits there as one of the last remnants of truly unspoiled wilderness. The majestic quality of the forest seems infinite and is a great source of mystery and curiosity in my daily routine.

For the Christmas holiday Tor and I traveled south to the volcanoes on the border of Uganda and Rwanda (and Congo for that matter). We walked through the forest on a footpath used by the locals to reach various trading post to the North and South of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. On our way we found a family of screeching Chimpanzees sitting on the massive limbs of a 20 ft in diameter fig tree. The trees canopy must have stretched nearly 50 feet in every direction and the Chimpanzees could have cared less about us. It seemed they were in the middle of a family squabble and refused to be interrupted by visitors.

From there our travels took us through the town of Kisoro (apparently the Switzerland of Africa) and up the dormant volcano of Mt Gahinga. From which we had stellar views of surrounding volcanoes and could stand in both Rwanda and Uganda at the same time. A crater swamp at the summit of the volcano was vegetated by the alien like Scenicia plants that are found on all the mountains in East Africa extending above 12000 feet in elevation. Coming down the mountain I ran into my first poisonous snake in East Africa, a Bush Viper. Extraordinarily camouflaged our guide nearly stepped on the black and green coils.

Ranger guide against the backdrop of Mt Sabyinio seen from the top of Mt Gahinga. The guides carry rifles to scare off wild animals such as buffalo and elephant though I'm not sure a fully automatic AK-47 is totally warranted.

It’s hard to believe that already 4 months have passed here. It has been such a blur of new experiences it’s impossible to describe effectively all of the daily nuances of being here. Hopefully, in time, you will all have a chance to experience East Africa for yourselves and pick up on the cultural and natural phenomena that make this place so unique. I hope the New Year is treating you all well. Please send me any thoughts or questions.

Photos

Three Bakiga men hold a banana tree sluice up to an unprotected spring in order to determine the water volume produced by the spring. This volume is then compared to the number of families that will collect the water to determine if the volume of the spring is adequate.

A man collects papaya by dislodging the fruit with a long wooden pole.

A photo of a taxi park in Kigali from a short three day trip that Tor and I took to Rwanda during the holidays.

A sign outside of a church near Kigali Rwanda. This is one of the many genocide memorials in Kigali, Rwanda. Over 1200 Tutsis who took shelter in this church were killed. Over 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutu sympathisers were brutally murdered in 1994. The sign is self-explanatory. Suprisingly enough it is sponsored by Rotaract a club of young Rotarians from the area.

Me hanging out with a couple boda boda drivers at Lake Mutanda where I spent Christmas.A girl peeling beans while her younger sister looks on.

Tor befriending the Batwa community of Kyabuyorwa.

Photo of Lake Mutanda at dusk with the outlines of volcanoes Mahavura, Gahinga, and Sabyinio in the back ground.

Experiences from a Refugee Camp

2008-12-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Children at the Mutanda refugee camp just north of Bwindi Inpenetrable Forest.

One morning about two weeks ago Scott Kellermann walked into the guesthouse dining room and flipped my whole day upside down (as he so often does). He asked me if I was ready to visit the Congolese refugee camp about an hour and a half from here and test their water.

A little background on the refugees here: The war that has been raging in the Congo for the last ten years has seen some recent flare-ups. General Laurent Nkunda and his rebel group continue to attack the Congolese army and the Hutu militias that are holdouts from the Rwandan genocide. As is always the case war takes it’s greatest toll on the civilian population indigenous to the country. Both Nkunda’s forces as well as the Congolese army have been implicated in mass killings of civilians, raping, and looting in Eastern Congo. It is estimated that around 5 million people have died since 1998. For more information on the current crisis check out this link. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/16/congo)

At present, fighting from Goma all along the Uganda border up to Rutshuru has sent eight hundred thousand refugees into Uganda. Uganda probably has the most advanced and efficient system for accepting refugees as they have sheltered refugees from Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, and even Kenya during the recent election violence. Most of the refugees are being taken to well prepared camps at locations inside the borders of Uganda however some remain nearby to the south of us in Kisoro and to the north near the small town of Kihihi.

My answer to Scott was ‘let’s go check it out.’ Scott, Richard Magezi, Dan Skeen, and I piled into the truck and headed out. After driving for about an hour to the small bustling town of Kihihi we veered off the main road down a rugged dirt track. We knew that we were on the right track because of the steady stream of land cruisers with UN emblems rolled by us. The steep hills characteristic of Southwestern Uganda quickly gave way to the Savanna Forest and warm temperatures of the Great Rift Valley. Suddenly there it was, 3000 dome shaped huts sitting about five hundred yards away from us in a massive field. The huts looked strangely like igloos because of their white coloring and I only later realized that these were white tarps wrapped around wood structures to keep out rain and reflect the suns rays. A line of people extended from the huts towards the water taps that had been set up. It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing so many displaced people removed from their homes not by choice but by necessity to protect their children and loved ones.

Refugees collecting water with a backdrop of huts made from collected wood covered by standard issue tarps.

As we came closer to the camps one sight that struck me was the huge presence of the UN and NGO’s at the camp. Brand new Land Cruisers and off-road Toyota SUV’s crawled all over the perimeter roads of the camp. Workers wore shirts with their various NGO names printed on their shirts and hats. Names like UNICEF, OXFAM, Save the Children, Medicins Sans Frontiers and others all advertising for attention while providing services to the refugees. Trumping all others was a massive red banner with Save the Children Printed across it in white 8ft tall letters. It gave the camp an almost amusement park feel, that is until you looked deeper. Sitting nearby was a mountain of jerry cans wrapped in plastic and waiting to be handed out. Several hundred women with children on their arm or wrapped against their backs waited to receive their jerry can, blanket, and tarp. This was standard issue for every family at the camp. Also on site were 55 gallon drums welded together in order to support latrine holes. The sandy soil in the area was susceptible to collapse.

A mountain of jerry cans passed out to families to collect water at the refugee camp.

We linked up with MSF (Medicins Sans Frontiers) and found them to be very receptive to us… after we explained ourselves. MSF is a group of medical volunteers in charge of running the medical clinic for the camp. Scott was able to find out what medicines that the clinic was lacking and we took off to check out water sources with a Congolese volunteer named Matau. Because of a lack of coordination among the NGO’s MSF was stuck in a position to provide the water to the camp as well as medical attention to the refugees. We actually found the OXFAM guys still writing their budget for pipes for delivering water to the camp. With the help of local villagers Matau had located the largest spring that I have seen yet in all of my assessments (6 liters per second) in the region. It was just dumb luck that the camp turned out to be located so close to this spring source as there had been no previous knowledge of the spring beforehand. The water was being pumped about 300 yards to two 15,000 liter bladders which looked like giant waterbeds. I had the inappropriate urge to get up and jump on the bladders and was surprised that more children from the camps had not been trying themselves.

Each time a bladder was filled it was treated with a single spoonful of chlorine powder. I was skeptical of this amount but my test results revealed that the water in the bladders had no evidence of fecal coliforms even though the source water had elevated levels. The source that the district had recommended was a cattle watering reservoir that was extremely contaminated (I later found out that this was the source of water for 300 local villagers). It was really impressive what Matau had put into place to provide water to the refugee camp and with what the MSF volunteers had accomplished in general. I think it says a lot that the volunteers getting paid a lowly stipend of several hundred dollars a month appeared to be getting more accomplished on the ground than any of the other paid NGO workers combined.

MSF volunteer Matau looks on as a Unicef worker checks the chlorine levels int the water. If the chlorine is too low it can be contaminated by bacteria and if too high people won't drink it because of the taste.

After testing the water we went out to the water taps to take photos and hang out with the children and women collecting water. When we approached, the refugees were reserved at first but soon the children were laughing and smiling and demanding to see the digital images on our camera view screens. At one point Dan Skeen was absolutely mobbed with children and I was concerned that they were going to pull the tattoos off his shoulders. Even at refugee camps kids are still kids. I have found no better example of people experiencing joy and happiness under difficult and transient living conditions.

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December has brought many interesting developments. Our recent focus has been on coordinating the building of latrines in four Batwa settlements. In previous meetings the Batwa have agreed that the latrines are necessary in their communities. In order to make the projects cost effective and to involve the community we asked the Batwa to provide the labor for digging the pits and for providing roofing thatch (speargrass or banana leaves). One thing that you quickly notice walking around the communities here are brick making operations utilizing the high clay content of the soils here. In cases where households want more permanent latrines the people are going to make bricks for building the walls of the latrines. Labor intensive but requiring only a moderate level of skill, making bricks is a great opportunity to get the community involved in providing sanitation for their families. Where households do not know how to make bricks we are providing that instruction with the assistance from local brick-makers.

During the initial meetings with the four Batwa settlements we had no takers for permanent latrines due to the increased level of commitment that those latrines required. Slowly by slowly over the last two weeks households are deciding to commit to the longer lasting latrines and as of last week nearly a third of households have upgraded to permanent latrines. However, the Batwa are still vehemently against the idea of composting latrines. The composting latrine is the most sustainable choice because wastes are removed from them every 6 months and then they are refilled. The pit latrines deposit wastes deep in the ground and have the potential to contaminate local springs as well as the shallow aquifer. If maintained properly, pathogens are eliminated by allowing the feces to biologically breakdown over a 6 month period before they are removed.

I can’t necessarily blame them for not wanting to remove their own feces from the chamber because I myself would bock if I was asked to do the same thing. Despite this roadblock I am greatly encouraged by the community support in these latrines and feel like we are making solid headway.

Coordinating perfectly with the latrine projects has been the arrival of my lifelong friend and contractor extraordinaire Tor Erickson. His skills as a builder and manager of construction projects have had an immediate impact on the projects. Together we have begun to come up with the designs for latrines that are cost feasible and built to last. Being able to consult Tor with his experience with concrete and his skill at estimating costs are providing a key consultant where without him I would be inquiring from local contractors who may or may not be trustworthy. Local contractors will be a necessary element in these projects as we are slated to build over 100 latrines and protect 40 springs but determining initial costs and designs will set the stage for this future work.

Tor with some new Bakiga friends in the field testing water sources.

I want to wish everyone a merry Christmas and to let my friends and family know that I miss you all very much. It feels so strange here that Christmas is just around the corner and I’m still getting sunburned on a daily basis. The celebration for Christmas here is a goat roast that is held on Christmas eve followed by a 4 to 5 hour church service on Christmas day. Not exactly the usual turkey dinner with present opening and conversation with my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Well, wish you all a happy holiday and will be posting more adventures in the new year! Dan and I standing with Congolese children chased out of the Congo two weeks prior.A Chameleon hanging out on a fencepost. Bizarre creatures!A waterfall seen from a stroll through Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.Goat roasting party at my new Banda. I've got so much going on I didn't even describe the big move. It was rather uneventful but I did get to slaughter the goat. Which was...pretty disgusting.

Visiting the Batwa (and Murchison Falls)

2008-12-01T08:51:00.000-08:00

I want to apologize first off for not writing for so long. In the past month since the last blog post Kristen and I have been incredibly busy testing water sources and beginning sensitization of communities for the water, sanitation, and nutrition projects for the Rotary International 3H Grant. When we have not been busy we have been seeing some of the incredible wildlife and landscapes that Uganda has to offer. Many interesting and exciting plot twists have occurred since the last blog post, foremost among these are our new vehicles purchased through the Rotary 3H Grant! Rotary member Stephen (Blackie) Gonsalves went through great pains to purchase one gray double cab 1990 Toyota pickup truck and two brand spanking new Suzuki 125 cc motorcycles in Kampala. Purchasing vehicles in

Uganda

as a Mzungu is just asking for a tooth and nail battle to come to a price that even approaches market value. Blackie did an admirable job and increased our mobility by orders of magnitude overnight. Our original plan was to buy a new Toyota Land Rover but soon realized the reality of our situation here which is that the dollar has been shrinking and fuel prices have skyrocketed to $6.50 per gallon. Thus we decided a used pickup and two boda bodas (motorcycles) was the cost effective way to go and to use the leftover funds for transportation costs. This suits me fine because I've come to love Toyota pickups from learning to drive in my father's 1994 Toyota pickup. As for the motorcycles, though deathly frightened of having an accident on one, I have to admit I can now better understand how people become so fanatical about riding them after my first couple training sessions. It is such a relief to have transportation now so that we can widen our assessment to areas outside of the Mukono Parish (primarily to Batwa settlements).

Our first line of action with our new wheels was to visit Byumba, a Batwa settlement about 15 kilometers away. Behind the wheel for the first time in over two months I greatly enjoyed driving the rutted and stony road leading up to Byumba. Battered by the road we arrived on a high hilltop that looked down onto the Batwa settlement that extended from the top of the hill down into a verdant green valley so commonly found Southwestern Uganda. Moving down into the settlement we passed houses and cook stations built with mud and waddle or in some cases the built using banana fibers supported by eucalyptus logs. Our water team of Paul Mawhezi, Kristin Whitcomb, and I as well as members from the newly formed NGO, the Batwa Development Projects, greeted the Batwa and were graciously welcomed. The Batwa are the indigenous forest people of Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo. In 1994 the Batwa were removed from the Bwindi Impenetrable forest National Park in order to protect the gorilla populations in the forest. The people were given no compensation by the governmnet and have been suffering ever since. They are the primary reason Scott Kellermann began the hospital here in the first place. Batwa women tend to wear extremely colorful cloth wrapped around their bodies and head and more often than not with a child strapped to their backs. The men were wearing beat up second hand clothes often with rips and tears and no shoes. Some shirts you could see more skin than shirt and begs the question why wear a shirt at all.

Paul, Kristen, and I were led to the two water sources that provide water to the 15 home settlement. The first was a gravity fed water system that originates from a spring further up on the hillside and is piped down to a concrete box that collects the water and delivers it through a six inch length of pipe. Lifting the top off the spring box to examine the source I found that the water was cloudy suggesting that it was full of fine particulate matter. This is often a bad sign suggesting that the water is contaminated because bacteria are often associated with fine particulate matter. Indeed our test results of 36 cfu/100mL indicated that the source was contaminated. Now we will need to do a follow up investigation to determine where the water is becoming contaminated. Is it at the waters source further up the hillside, is it picking up bacteria in the pipe on the way down, or is it getting contaminated in the spring box. All information that will have to be gathered before a decision can be made on remediation. The other spring was an unprotected source that emerged from the hillside then flowed through an old hollowed out log. Results for fecal coliforms were 120 cfu/100ml also indicating contamination. Photos of Batwa women weaving baskets and men at a water and sanitation meeting.

Unlike the spread out communities of the Bakiga people that we have tested the Batwa have fewer people and live in tight knit communal settlements. Because of this we were able to gather together almost the entire Byumba settlement for a meeting to describe the projects and services that the Rotary 3H grant can provide. This was a much more effective means for communicating our message to everyone and was also an opportunity for individuals to have their questions answered and their concerns addressed in a group setting so that no one would be left out. One woman asked if one of the goats provided by the grant could be killed and eaten in celebration of Christmas as is customary for most major holidays. This question addressed previous incidences where NGO's havd provided goats to the Batwa for rearing for economic development and to the donors dismay finding out shortly thereafter that all of the goats had been eaten. Our answer was that the goats could not be eaten in the first couple years until they were established and had increased their goat populations through effective animal husbandry. Another woman asked about the sanitation projects and wanted to know if, since she didn't have a home could she possibly live in her latrine. And her follow up question when we told her that that was probably not a possibility was why do I need a latrine if I don't even have a house. That was a very difficult question to answer and reminded me that the Batwa are truly the poorest of the poor here. My answer was that without a latrine, with or without a home, you can still contaminate your water sources and spread water borne illnesses through fly dispersal. I think that one fell on deaf ears. Photos of Batwa children below.

Shortly after our visit to Byumba Kristen and I set off on the ten hour bus journey back to Kampala to pick up Dan Skeen, our second intrepid Rotaract volunteer! We found Dan at backpackers making himself at home in the chaos of Kampala. The day after he arrived he had already walked several miles to downtown checked out some of the local eateries and had been granted a personal tour by the Mu-azhin (the man who calls everyone to prayer five times a day) at the great mosque that overlooks downtown Kampala. Dan’s curiosity about his surroundings and his willingness to jump into a new culture with both feet immediately made him a welcome companion and an asset to our small water and sanitation team. Both Kristen and Dan had never traveled outside Canada and Mexico before this trip to Uganda kind, which is the exact same situation I was in when I first arrived in East Africa in 2006. Together we hoped on a bus and made our way up to the heart of Uganda to visit Murchison Falls National Park. Below is a photo of Kristen, Dan, and me at the top of Murchison falls. A spot where the Nile is constricted into a 7 meter channel and then drops 145 ft. Talk about power!

The trip to Murchison was absolutely incredible. We really rode this trip on a shoestring and luckily the trip just fell into place. Our need to be frugal was fully expressed when we decided to hire our taxi driver to take us on a game drive in his Toyota Corolla. We picked up a guide for around 20 bucks and we were off. We kept bottoming the car out on the rough game drive routes but managed to see quite a bit of the wildlife without scaring too much of it away. We saw tons of antelope primarily African Kob but also the slender Oribi, the Hartebeast, and the majestic long haired Waterbuck. It's always interesting to me that all of the wildlife you see here in the national parks seem to be as interested in you as you are in them. At one point we drove into a group of about 60 Cape Buffalo all rolling in the mud to cool off. Immediately they stood up and began making a semi circle around the vehicle. Apparently they don't see well so they just kept lifting their heads to catch our scent and angling their ears to hear what we were up to. They continued to get closer until I really started to feel uncomfortable. Could a buffalo really hurt us in the vehicle especially in a Corolla? What about 60 of them? The Buffalo kill more people on land than any other animal in Africa with their counterpart the hippo in the water. At one point early during the game drive our guide stopped the driver so that we could get out and view a Bushbuck which is a nondescript but rare species of antelope. Just about to open the door our guide exclaims “wait!” On the other side of the car was standing a mud-caked buffalo. The muddy visage made the hulking beast seem murderous. So we happily stayed in the car, and I clicked the following photo and we moved on.

By far the highlight of our trip was taking a boat ride down the Nile to the delta formed with Lake Albert. The 1km wide Nile gives way to a maze of papyrus lined channels that weave and interconnect. The banks where the papyrus was absent teemed with wildlife. The bird life was incredible with several types of heron and egret, huge quantities of shorebirds, fish eagles, and massive storks including the Saddle Bill and even the almost extinct Shoe Bill. On the shore we watched lions lethargically chase warthogs with antelope carefully looking on and large populations of Buffalo feeding and rolling in the mud. In the water hippos could be counted in the hundreds making their low guttural calls and blowing water out of their nostrils. Although the hippo kills more people that any other African animal they are extremely shy creatures that appear deathly afraid of being caught out of the water. When we surprised them on the banks the 2500 kg behemoths will run full tilt parting a massive wake with its chest before torpedoing into deeper water. It’s almost as if they are embarrassed by their naked bulbous pink-purple flesh.

For me the wildlife wasn’t the most wonderful aspect of the boat trip but just the overall pristine quality of the delta. Sitting out on the boat it felt as if it was a system un-fouled by human presence and a place that could have been the 20^th century or the 1^st century without the clues to tell the difference. It made me sorry for our poor San Joaquin/Sacramento Bay Delta back home on the verge of an ecosystem collapse. Although, no natural system can truly be without some human influence, I could not ignore the patches of invasive water hyacinth growing among the papyrus.

Well I suppose that’s all for now. The assessment is moving along very strongly and I’m looking forward to getting the projects off the ground here in December. As I’ve said earlier we are struggling to meet our transportation cost needs and I predict that it will continue to be a struggle throughout the 4 year grant period. I estimate that by the time all is said and done we will need another $7000 to $10,000. If you are feeling generous please donate to the Kellermann Foundation and write in the memo ‘Water Projects.’ Thanks everyone for your continued interest and support in these projects.

Kellermann Foundation
PO BOX 1901
Penn Valley, CA 95946

Photo of Murchison Falls from the side view. This is one of two massive water falls that the Nile flows over. The other one is out of the picture to the left.

Photo of Kristen hanging out with her new warthog buddy at Red Chili Rest Camp. Persistent little guys that don't take no for an answer if you've got food on you.
Hippos hanging out in the Nile.
An elephant seen from our boat journey down the Nile.

Moving forward

2008-10-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

A photo of me holding Bright, the healthiest child in Uganda. Bright rarely smiles but chooses to show his affection in hugs and high 5's.

It’s been a couple weeks since my last posting and it is difficult to find where to begin. I guess I will start with our new volunteer Rotaract member Kristen Whitcomb who is assisting me in the assessment phase of the Rotary 3H grant! I picked her up at the airport in Entebbe on October 14^th at 7:30 am and took her on a whirlwind journey to begin her month and a half long stay here in Uganda. I began by taking her through the streets of Kampala to get some last minute items before heading back down to Bwindi (the dreaded 10 hour bus ride). Being with Kristen I began seeing Uganda and Kampala again for the first time to understand what she was experiencing so that I could explain this place that I am calling home for the next year. Just crossing the street in Uganda is a cultural experience. One can wait for 15 minutes without finding a break in the traffic or be forced to weave between a maze of matatu busses and jostle with motorcycles to find your way to the other side of the street. Walking down in the market area of Kampala I was stunned by the sheer volume of stuff being hawked. Small 10ft X 10ft cubby hole stores line the streets for as far as the eye could see. Second hand clothes, blankets, “rolex” watches, candies, jerry cans etc etc etc. Looking up I could see the market reached four stories high with trinkets and clothes of all shapes, sizes, and colors hanging from the exterior of the buildings swinging in the wind. It was just a solid wall of junk with nothing solid or stationary to focus on. Eventually we found all of the supplies we needed and headed back to the Backpackers hostel for a much needed rest.

Kristen and I woke early the next morning and caught the 6 am bus to Bwindi. Two breakdowns and 14 hours later we eventually arrived back at the guesthouse to BBQed steaks and peanut butter cookies prepared by the Danish med students Nadia and Karin and the IT expert Der (I guess its not all roughing it out here). I think Kristen was absolutely wiped out but I shall let her explain in her own words.

Kristen has quickly taken to the role of field/lab technician processing the bacteria samples and generating data that will drive project implementation. Her quiet and supportive demeanor has been a very welcome change from juggling the finances, testing, and project planning for the Rotary 3H grant (the 3 H’s stand for Hunger, Health, and Humanity all directly related to clean water). She has even begun setting up her own experiments for UV treatment of contaminated waters as a possible at home measure to ensure clean drinking water (see photo on right). Kristen has also wasted no time in getting acquainted with the multitudes of children here that sing at the top of their lungs "hello, how are you!" over and over again when they see a Mzungu. At this point I am thinking that a month and a half may not be long enough to have Kristen, I may have to keep her for the rest of the year!

To date we have collected fecal coliform data on 34 community drinking water sources including springs (protected and unprotected), surface water sources, gravity scheme sources (water piped from protected springs), and rainwater harvest sources. Thirteen of these sources were found to be under 10 cfu/100 ml. Sources greater than 10 cfu/100 ml is the contamination standard used by Life Water International. Our primary focus will be on those springs greater than 10 cfu/100ml. Obviously the most difficult situations are where there are no springs to protect and surface water is the only alternative.

Once again the major issue appears to be available land. Driving back from a weekend away at Lake Bunyonyi we spent 5 hours driving through the valleys and up over mountainous passes which characterize the region. During the entire drive there was not one strip of primary rainforest to see, not one native plant. The hillsides are all cultivated and the most common tree found is eucalyptus, which is an Australian native, used for building houses and other structures. The houses of the Mukiga (plural: Rukiga is singular) people here are spread out over every square foot of the land to be near to their crops. Unfortunately this often sets families and in some cases whole communities long distances from protected drinking water sources. The women and children in charge of fetching the water often resort to the nearest available sources that are often surface water sources that are always contaminated. The photo above is a child collecting 20 liters of water, equal to 40lbs!

Just one anecdote before I leave you for another couple weeks. As I stated earlier I visited Lake Bunyonyi this last weekend with the Danish med students Nadia and Karin for canoeing and relaxing (see photo below Karin to the left and Nadia to the right). The lake is a ten thousand year old lake and is the deepest lake in Uganda. It was created when a lava flow dammed a river and the river valley filled with water. On our return trip we hired, Patrick, a taxi driver to take us on the five hour journey back to Bwindi. The day was beautiful and there were no storms threatening to turn the roads into the muddy mess that can delay travel for days. Although a bit bumpy I thoroughly enjoyed driving through the lush green valleys and up over the mountain passes with stellar views.

Just 30 minutes outside of Bwindi I was confident that we would arrive at our destination without delay despite darkening clouds overhead… Just after we crossed the river we found that a ten ton truck had lost its brakes and drove up onto the embankment and turned over on its side blocking the entire road. Our driver, insistent on delivering us to our destination and heading back to his home that night decided he would drive across the nearby meadow, bypass the accident and get us back onto the road. The crux of our short detour was a steep ascent on slick muddy ground right before getting back onto the main road. The nearby onlookers viewing the accident were more than happy to assist us. As our driver approached the slope no less than 40 men and boys threw themselves against the back of our vehicle, rocking it up the incline and finally pushing the car up onto the road. It makes my heart ache to think that I didn’t have my camera with me to capture the moment. When we were back on the road it was time to settle up and I had a sinking feeling that the situation could get nasty. How do you pay a group of 40 people, I didn’t have any small bills on me better yet 40 of them? Is there any recourse if they ask for too much money? The group crowded around our driver arguing what the price should be. Thankfully the price that was demanded was 15,000 shillings which is about $10 however if they had demanded $100 I probably would have had to pay it. We left the scene of 40 men and boys cheering their good fortune at having landed such a prize. Nadia, Karin, and I could only smile in amazement at our good fortune and at the strength of Uganda which lies in its numbers.

Water water everywhere

2008-10-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

Boda Boda driver riding through a flooded road

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10-14-08

I was caught in an incredible storm today. It was the first time that a hard rain persisted for several hours turning the roads into rivers of red brown water. Three med students and I were on our way to a local garden to get strawberries, basil, and some other hard to find fruit and veggies. Powerful gusts of wind began blowing and soon after drenching rainstorms accompanied by lightning strikes followed almost instantly by thunder. We took cover under a broad leafed tree but it was soon saturated with water and poured down through the leaves and drenched us. We held banana leaves over our heads in a feeble attempt to prevent the inevitable soaking. Finally we were as wet as we could possibly be and decided to make a run for it amid the lightning and rolling thunder to find a drier location. In the back of my mind was the local Batwa pygmie three weeks ago that was struck and killed by lighting and the newspaper article about how a strike killed 50 cattle in a neighboring district.

We finally found cover under an awning and waited for the worst of the rain to stop. When we returned to the guest house Der (the computer tech) told me that Dr Scott Kellerman was stuck across the Manyaga River at a fundraiser auction at the local church because of high water. I’ve never been one to miss high volumes of water so I quickly dried off and picked up my camera and ran down the road to see the flood waters. What I found was that the river had undercut one side of the bridge that linked the village of Mukono (where Scott’s fundraiser was) to the hospital and it had collapsed. People returning from the auction were trying to pick their way across the collapsed bridge with their families dressed in their nicest Sunday church-service clothes (see photos to the right). Boda Boda drivers were pushing their motorcycles up over the stones that were piled onto the collapsed bridge to assist crossing. I took turns taking photos and helping folks across the stones. Children descended upon the floodplain as the waters receded to catch mud fish (something like catfish) that were trapped in the grass and rocks. Just think, all of that clean water raining down every single day. So much potential! Quite a day!

One Thursday Paul and I visited Mukongoro, a settlement consisting of both Batwa Pygmies and local Mukiga people. This site was highlighted during my first visit in 2006 as having poor sanitation and no access to protected drinking water sources. Mukongoro resides in a narrow valley perched above the hospital just a couple kilometers from the Congo border. Villagers grow their crops in the wetland at the base of the valley and raise livestock of goats and pigs. Being that we are well into the rainy season here (September through December) there is water spilling every where over the footpaths and through the wetland though unfortunately non is potable and most is just a seasonal source of water. A local leader explained that during the dry season up to 150 families come down into the valley to collect water from a small fissure at the base of a bedrock outcropping. The water source during the rainy season was a muddy pool of water at the base of the wetland draining the area where the all of the houses are located.

We tested this source as well as the spring at the base of the bedrock. The testing kit determines the concentration of fecal bacteria in colony forming units (cfu) per 100 milliliters. A result of 20 to 100 cfu/100ml is considered high risk for fecal contamination. The rainy season source could only be estimated there were so many colonies. Estimates suggested that there were over 20,000 cfu/100ml in the source (the highest source recorded yet!). The dry season source was considerably cleaner (14 cfu/100ml) but lacks the necessary volume to provide for the number of families in the region. It seemed apparent to village members that contamination of their drinking water is an issue but the only alternative option for clean water is a 2 km walk up a steep grade of about 800 vertical feet. We realized that it would be highly unlikely to convince the village members that this is even an option at all. Currently we are looking into the potential for a large rainwater harvesting system. More later on this. In the meantime we will continue to test local water sources.

1st Outreach!

2008-10-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

Strangler fig towering over a tea plantation

Our first outreach for the water and sanitation assessment began this week on a very positive note. The outreach coordinators at the BCHC, Rev Sam and Godfrey Abaganya invited the village health promoters to the hospital for a meeting on clean drinking water and sanitation. The village health promoters are village members assigned to track the health and well being of designated families in their community. Many traveled up to 4 miles on foot to attend the meeting. Our region of focus for the projects is the Mukono Parish, an area designated by the Anglican Church. This area includes approximately 12 villages although some are quite spread out. Villages are generally centered on trading centers but in some cases they are centered on churches or schools. Those attending the meeting were 22 health promoters that represent most of the villages in the parish as well as three members of the local sub-county government. As always prayer and introductions were the first items on the agenda. Reverend Sam facilitated the meeting introducing the topic of water and sanitation in the local Rukiga language. He translated for me intermittently and allowed me time for me to ask questions to the health promoters.

Rev. Sam effectively used story to make his point about the importance of community participation in the projects. His story was about a stork building a nest in a tree and refusing to ask for assistance from the ant people below. When the stork became caught in a storm shortly thereafter the nest was blown to pieces. The message of the story was that anyone from outside a community can build a project but without the local knowledge about where those projects should go and how they should be built the projects will fail. The story was very well received. Rev Sam used an effective mix of humor and serious discussion that held the attendees attention throughout the meeting that ended up lasting for 6 hours. After introductions the health promoters were asked to create a map of the parish describing protected and unprotected spring sources, villages, roads, and other key landmarks (churches, schools, crops…etc). To accomplish this they used plant stems to designate the roads and leaves for the rivers (see photo on the left). Sticks were bound together in the form of a cross to show churches and sticks planted in the ground marked protected springs, broken sticks were failed springs and so on. At that point the debate was on. Arguments broke out left and right about the placement of key landmarks and at one point I thought two traditional bath attendants were going to start wrestling to decide the placement of a spring. After an hour the maps were complete and we analyzed them and critiqued them together. Not only did the exercise give Paul and me a better idea of where the springs were located in the region and the layout of the villages but it promoted awareness about water sources and the importance of clean water. One goal of this project is to create a persistent voice in the region reinforcing the importance of clean water and hygiene to protect families from water borne illness.

On Saturday we went out for our first outreach to the village of Iraaro. Paul, Godfrey, Rev. Sam, Christine (one of the Ugandan outreach nurses), the driver, and I all packed into a Toyota pickup with an extra cab and navigated 10 km of incredibly rutted and rocky road. Noticing that I kept smacking my elbow against the window Christine stated “you are dancing” to which I replied “we are all dancing together” as we jounced and jostled our way to our destination. When I visited Iraaro two and a half years ago it was a village site with 98 homes and no protected water. This put it at the top of our list of sites needing protected water. To our great surprise we found that the local government, the district of Kanungu, had recently protected a new spring near the trading center that delivered an adequate supply of water (up to 20L/min). The average water usage for drinking and cooking is 5 liters per person per day and for bathing and washing clothes 20 liters per person per day. (How many liters do you use during a single shower?)

The new spring basin now provides clean water for up to 40 families. This means that 58 families are still without protected water. Most of these homes cling to steep slopes so that they can grow matoke (a type of banana), millet, cassava, beans, potatoes, and tea. Unfortunately this puts them in a position where they must collect surface water for drinking and cooking. In this area we tested the protected and unprotected springs as well as the surface water sources in the streams at the base of the slopes. The surface water sources were hundreds of times higher than the protected sources as we would expect. Protecting a spring source nearer to the other 58 homes will be a primary goal for the project.

As for the weekend I got a chance to get out and go to church on Sunday with a group of about 15 American students visiting from a program through the Uganda Christian University. We took great hike up two steep miles of beat up road past wide eyed children and their stunned parents. We climbed to a spot where we could look out over the lush green beauty of Southwestern Uganda. About halfway to our destination we stopped in the shade to catch our breath and realized that about 40 children had followed us up the path. They ranged from 3 to about 10 years old and stood in an amorphous group staring at the rare site of 20 Mzungus in their back yard. For some reason the UCU students decided it was time to perform a choreographed version of the Christian song “River of Life.” (see left) Cringing slightly at the exuberance at which the song was performed I gladly took snapshots of the children’s reactions. When the song finished the children stood there open mouthed and silent for about 5 seconds as if waiting to see if something else was going to happen and then all at once burst into raucous cheers and clapping (See photo on the right). The UCU students could only blush and smile and laugh. The children returned the favor belting out several songs and shaking their hips and hopping in the trademark Rukiga dance. It was a true delight. I'll leave with you a couple images of the future of Uganda.

Settling In

2008-09-28T23:57:00.000-07:00

Red Tailed Monkey hanging out near the guesthouse

It has been a long week of settling in here at the guest house as well as working out the first details for the assessment of water sources. My banda hut is still being constructed up near the park so I spent my first couple of nights here in the guest house. It’s a pretty sweet deal with meals prepared daily, a solar shower (that I have yet to catch a warm shower in), and toilet- all of the 1^st world amenities are accounted for. Scott realizing that I was pretty cramped for space with my testing kit, supplies for 800 tests, pressure cooker sterilizer, as well as my personal belongings offered to let me stay in the “mud hut” that is down below the guest house (see photo above). Walking through the guest house garden of pineapple plants and Matoke banana trees the mud hut is secluded from the hospital and nearby road by a wall of tropical vegetation. A nice big lawn with an outside gazebo for working makes it a great living area. The building itself is a spacious two room structure, kind of reminiscent of my cabin back home though when the sun hits the corrugated metal roof it really starts cooking inside (which I guess is also a little reminiscent of my cabin back in Nevada City). Of course Scott failed to mention the minor rat infestation until after I had moved in. I guess some of my down time will be dedicated to designing primitive rat traps. If anyone has a prototype for a trap, let me know please! The photo to the right is my gazeebo office and bird watching vantage point.

On the water project side of things Scott Kellermann has assembled a solid team that will be managing the Rotary 3H grant (among many many other projects) to reduce malnutrition and to improve water sources in the region. The malnutrition portion of the grant involves providing sustainable goat herds to several villages in the area. My focus will be primarily on providing sustainable water sources as well as sanitation to villages with the greatest need (I will do my best to stay away from the goats). My first task is to determine where the greatest need is. To get started Paul Mahwezi and I visited Godfrey Abaganya and Reverend Sam who are the outreach health officers for the BCHC. They have been coordinating community health projects and providing vaccines to the villages in the Mukono Parish (encompasses about 14-15 villages) for the last 4 years. Among other things they have been collecting specific information on the number of households with access to sanitation and to protected water. Using this data to guide our assessment Paul and I will begin at those villages with the poorest sanitation and access to clean water.

Godfrey and Reverend Sam have also designated “village health promoters” in the villages in the region. These are community members in charge of visiting designated households to follow up on if individuals are taking their medication and knowing the status of sick individuals. This type of community follow through will be absolutely necessary for sustaining the water and sanitation projects when they have been implemented. Boreholes, protected springs, and rain-water catchments that are built by the government or NGO’s for communities very often fail because the community is not involved in the projects and not educated on how to maintain their water sources. If people are asked why they have not maintained their clean water supply their answer is often that the ones who implemented the project are responsible for maintaining it. To avoid this situation we want to involve the community as much as possible in the implementation of the projects. The village health promoters should be a great way to facilitate this community involvement.

The first step of the grant is to complete an assessment of drinking water sources in the villages to determine where the projects should be implemented. To practice I just went out into the neighborhood with Paul to find some drinking water to test. My trusted bacterial testing kit gives a measure of fecal coliforms in water in a measure of colony forming units/100 milliliters. To get a result you filter water through a 45um membrane that collects fecal bacterial cells then the membrane is placed on a nutrient medium and incubated at 44oC for 18 hours. Each bacterial cell is then able to grow into a visible colony that can be counted. Of which the yellow colonies are fecal coliforms. The photo on the right is the result of a contaminated test from a local spring contaminated by a pit latrine. Each yellow glob is a colony of fecal coliforms.

Many of the people around the hospital are lucky enough to have access to a piped gravity fed water system that originates from large springs within the Bwindi National Park for a small monthly fee. One would expect this local area to be pretty well-off when it comes to access to clean water. Unfortunately the preliminary information we gathered and the data we collected this week paint a far more disturbing picture. The gravity water system and selected protected springs had the lowest counts of fecal bacteria and the surface water (streams) displayed heavy contamination. One protected spring, suspected of being contaminated by a pit latrine up gradient from the spring was heavily contaminated.

Talking with the local villagers Paul and I discovered that many families refuse to pay the 500 Ugandan Shillings per month (about 33 cents) for the gravity fed water and drink this contaminated water instead! Even more disturbing was the conversation we had with several girls from 5 to 9 years old that admitted to collecting water from the river for drinking. During the conversation I watched a herder guide his cattle into the river for watering. Not only is surface water contaminated by poor sanitation in the villages but cattle, goats, and pigs are another major source of fecal coliforms. This trip once again hammered home the point that education is the key here. No amount of money or implementation of clean water systems or new technologies mean a thing without the basic education that clean water is life. Children live and die by the choices that are made regarding water everyday. In many cases it is not the lack of access to clean water but the choice to not walk that extra distance to collect clean water or the choice to refuse to pay a fee for clean water. I’m going to look into outreach to the local schools and churches here to talk about these choices. The photo above is of children collecting water at a protected spring. Each jerry can weighs over 30 lbs!

Although some of these issues are pretty hard to stomach my spirits remain high. I’m really looking forward to heading out to the communities in the Mukono Parish to start figuring out where the projects should go. The rain forest here continues to amaze. Every time of day and night has a different collection of bird and insect calls. There is even a set of calls during the heavy downpours that occur daily. Red tailed monkeys are always looking into the guest house most certainly contemplating a mad dash into the house to raid the banana dish. It is such a rich and beautiful place to be and every day there is something new to see or hear or taste. I gave Jack Fruit a try just this weekend. A giant oblong fruit that weights about 30lbs with a rubbery flesh that I can best describe as a bubble gum flavored. I’ve heard rumor that it is related to the Durian Fruit of Southeast Asia but smells about a thousand times better! I look forward to sharing more experiences with you all as they occur. Hope you are all doing well. This photo to the right is me with my prize. Stay away from my Jack Fruit!

Beginnings

2008-09-21T02:34:00.000-07:00

I have finally arrived at the Bwindi Community Health Center (BCHC) guest house in Southwestern Uganda after hours of flying and navigating my way through the chaos of

Uganda

’s capitol, Kampala. I arrived last Tuesday night at 8 pm after 18 hours of flying, with layovers in St Paul and Amsterdam. My first impression as I walked off the plane, onto the runway, was a blast of humid 70 degree air that washed over me. Kampala is just a 45 minute drive north of Lake Victoria which is the second largest freshwater lake in the world (can you name the first, think Siberia) as well as the source of the Nile River! The lake is so large it creates its own climate of dense humid warm air. I spent three days in Kampala gathering the last minute supplies necessary to carry out a water quality assessment of drinking water sources as well as personal items that I could not carry with me.

The chaotic streets of Kampala

Kampala is a sprawling city of nearly one and a half million people with 40 story skyscrapers intermixed with the poorest of the poor shanty towns. It is the fastest growing economy of any city in Africa were you have women and men walking around in fine business attire walking by beggars sitting on the street with deformed limbs. Gridlocked traffic at all hours of the day and a maze of unmarked roads make traveling by Boda Boda (motorcycle) the only feasible way to navigate the city and forces one to reorganize their imprinted rules of “1^st world” personal safety. I found navigating the markets and government offices of the capitol city to be an even greater challenge. Fortunately I was assisted by Paul Mahezi, a Ugandan, who was sent on the ten hour bus ride up from the BCHC. Dr. Scott Kellermann (see www.pygmies.net to learn more about this doctor) hired Paul to assist in the Batwa Community Projects (BCP) which is an off-shoot organization of the BCHC to improve the lives of the oft struggling Batwa Pygmies.

Paul will play the critical role of translator, procurement officer, and accountant for the water projects (not to mention keeping the Mzungu ‘aka white person’ out of trouble). I realized immediately how invaluable our partnership was going to be for the rest of the projects after the first couple of hours traveling around Kampala with him. Mzungu prices are always at least 5 times the cost that it would be for Ugandans and even by accompanying Paul to buy certain items he could not get the prices he would normally have found on his own. We spent Thursday day alone trying to figure out all of the necessary documents needed to obtain a year long work permit for myself. This entailed bus or boda boda rides as well as several miles of walking on foot to visit the internal affairs office for the application, Interpol to get a criminal report, the police academy to get the fingerprints for the criminal report, the Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau to get a cover letter…and so on. By 5 pm I was absolutely spent due to traveling in the heat and humidity, jet lag, and just the outright tedium of obtaining all of the necessary information to avoid costly return trips to Kampala.

Finally by Friday I was resigned to the fact that I would need a return trip to Kampala to complete the work permit and buy the rest of my supplies, so Paul and I decided to leave for Bwindi early Saturday morning. At 5 am we loaded all of my supplies onto the bus which was a large traveling pack, a large duffel bag, a bacterial water test kit, two large cardboard boxes, and my daypack. Among the items purchased in Kampala I had a two burner gas stove, gravity fed water filter, teapot, cooking pot, pressure cooker (for sterilizing the testing kit equiptment), a baby scale for the hospital, a heavy marble plaque for the hospital with the Bishops name on it, batteries, coffee not to mention all of the gear I brought from the states. It reminds me of the second chapter in the Barbara Kingsolver book the Poisonwood Bible, “The Things We Carried.” I felt like the family in that book bringing all of my stuff to a place where it may or may not have use. Over time I will most assuredly find out! The bus ride is an exhausting ten hour trip from smooth tarmac, to bone jarring potholed pavement, to a less punishing but incredibly dusty dirt road. Road weary and crusted in dust Paul and I reached the BCHC guest house under a tropical afternoon downpour. The guest house was just as I remembered when I first visited in April of 2006 (see the below photo). I received a warm welcome by Dr. Kellermann, Stephen “Blackie” Gonsolvez who works on the BCP, two med student from Denmark Karen and Nadia, Dir the hospital IT manager, as well as hospital administrators Richard and Levi. We had a traditional Batwa pygmie dinner of pasta with Bolognese sauce and soon after I was ready for bed.

I woke this morning to 15 different bird calls (I lost count at that point) and red-tailed monkeys racing along the roof of the guest house. Today is Sunday which is the slowest day of the week because everyone is at church. This is generally the day off for the staff of the hospital as well as everyone working at the guesthouse. This will most likely be my blog day. It feels great to be here and great to finally be on the ground working out the beginnings of the water projects. Next post I’m sure I will have more news on the assessment and preliminary phases of the project. I would just like to thank everyone who has supported me in this venture I hopefully I can interact with you through the blog. Special thanks to the Nevada City Rotary for writing the grant and to Rotact of Nevada County for the amazing support and fundraising for the projects. I look forward to hearing from you all. Until next time…Cheers!