Ddegeya's First Community Meeting

Our morning started at 3am with Pauravi and Becca waking up (or getting up...) to take some Benadryl. The music was still blasting across the street. Allergies here are affecting us both, and it's especially bad at night. Note: do not chew Benadryl. It makes your mouth go numb and has a horrible after taste- but it does nothing else (besides knock you out, and distract you from your allergies instead of curing them).

Breakfast was at 9 or so, and was the same as yesterday. Tomorrow we are going to show Susan (the cook) how to make scrambled eggs.

We played with the zip level this morning, which has many hidden functions that aren't mentioned on the packaging, so after a 4 MB download, we thought we knew how to use one of its hidden functions: the carry function, basically meaning that you can take the measuring unit and the base unit, and as you move up the hill (in roughly 200 foot increments), it will add the elevation. But the unit was being finicky and decided not to cooperate, so we were left to do the math. We took elevations from the main water source up to the village road, an elevation change of almost 20 meters. We suspect that the elevation change that some people are making up to the top of the hill in Ddegeya is closer to 50 meters, quite a way to carry 3-40lb jerry cans, even on a bicycle. We see grown men struggling to push bikes up the hill, while it takes 3 or 4 children to do the same. We also took the elevations along the village road, to the end of the village, and down to another (much worse functioning) borehole. This elevation change was 16.5 meters. This borehole fills really slowly though, and it takes almost half an hour to fill a 20L jerry can. But it is much closer to some people's homes, so they wait rather than carry their jerry cans an additional mile, and up and down the hill.

We took samples from this borehole, and Pauravi and Helen helped the kids pump the water. It was a good upper body workout, according to Pauravi. On the way to the borehole, Helen was ambushed by a group of children, who were curious about the contents of her pockets and proceeded to empty them. We must be a curious sight walking around Ddegeya with all of our strange equipment, and a couple people have asked us what we are doing. There are varying levels of English among the children and adults, and some seem to understand our answers. We are working on our Lugandan though.

When we got back to Engeye, we had lunch, and even had spaghetti today. We also discovered the hot sauce in the kitchen, which did wonders for the flavor in the otherwise kind of bland food.

We quickly did the strip tests before the appointed time for the community meeting. John told us this morning that it would be at 3pm, and had spent the morning going around the village letting people know. Uganda operates on Africa time though so the meeting got started at like 3:30, much earlier than we had expected, though people did keep coming until about 4:30 or so. The meeting lasted almost two hours, and was very successful.

Basically, it was amazing. Everyone was very attentive, very supportive, really eager, and asked very good, poignant questions. They were also willing to discuss the problems and concerns that they had. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the meeting, the men and women segregated themselves, which seems to be common in many eastern cultures. Though as more people started to come, they intermixed because the newcomers sat in the back. We counted at one point 70 attendants. You could definitely tell that by people's attire it brought Ddegeya's middle and upper class. Many people also had cell phones (we don't know how they charge them though).

Access to water is definitely the biggest concern for residents, as is quality of the water and the safety of their children. People asked about whether it was possible to bring the water closer to their homes and not just in the valleys, where very few people live. They were also asking about the possibility of protecting the open ponds, and bringing water to the other side of Ddegeya, across the Masaka-Mbarara Road, which the government is planning on expanding.

We also showed them the Petrifilm test results that we had collected earlier in the day. A picture is worth a thousand words. The water from the borehole is much cleaner than the water from the pond, which is to be expected, but showing the results was a great way for people to actually see the difference.

Other things we mentioned in the meeting were that this is definitely a long term project, and that eventually we hope to tackle other areas, such as agriculture, cooking fuels or education. We asked them to think about other projects that might be possible.

Tom and Monica are interested in starting regular community meetings, but they had been thinking maybe once a month. The villagers however suggested having a meeting every Sunday. It seems like we may have started a trend.

Afterwards we talked with a couple of the skilled laborers (mostly builders), who taught us some Lugandan, such as wasuze otya (good morning), amayinja (stones), and amabati (the tin roofs on most of the houses).

Overall it was a very successful day. We developed a much more efficient way to do the Petrifilm tests, we learned how to use our surveying equipment and we had a very productive community meeting. Hopefully tomorrow will be even better. We are going to start doing household surveys.

Sula bulungi