August 22- Ddegeya

Hello everyone! Angela, Marisa and Tess are in Masaka looking for supplies and taking out money, while Shavi and Emmanuel are visiting the welder to try and fix the drill bit, which broke last week. This afternoon we will dig more. Fun, fun!

A lot has happened since I last wrote. We have decided to construct a brick 10,000 L rain water collection tank next to a house that has a lot of roof area to gutter. We are hoping that this rain water collection can help support at least 5 households during the rainy season, cutting down on the need to go to the borehole, and providing the families with cleaner water for drinking during that time. Of course, we only have one week left until we leave, so we are busy getting materials together for that. The Water Management Board has been incredibly helpful, and the whole community has been donating bricks and time to the project. The tank will take approximately 3 weeks to construct, including making the foundation and the physical tank. We are hoping that because a lot of the community will help in the construction, they will learn how to make brick tanks, and will be able to make their own smaller versions themselves. There are a lot of brick makers in town, so it is not very hard to find supplies. Hopefully we'll get the last materials today and will be able to start construction tomorrow!

In other news, the TIN that we finally managed to get apparently is useless. We got a TIN for John (the manager of the clinic) thinking that his TIN would be good enough. We chose to do this because it is much easier to get a TIN for an individual than it is for an organization, and we had some miscommunications with our customs agent. But once we got the TIN, we found out that we can't use it, and that we have to have a TIN for the organization as a whole. John has been working amazingly hard to get us these TINs, and has spent a lot of time in Kampala working with the Uganda Revenue Authority for us. We have applied for a TIN for Engeye, but it will probably take some time to get through all the bureaucracy here. Basically, we are not going to get either crate while we are here. We were hoping to get the crate that does not have the solar panels because it has the mounts, which are the hardest part to install. Now, as a substitute, we are going to create a kind of miniature version of the solar panel mounts so that John and Elliot (the manager and a fellowship student who is here for 9 months) can use the model as a reference when they put the mounts up. So we are also working hard on getting that model of the mounting system together.

We pretty much finished wiring yesterday, which is awesome. We were very excited. Maybe one more hour of that left in total. Very cool! We are also hoping to do more digging in the next week, but that has taken a smaller priority than the tank and the model mounts at this point.

In other news, Tess got a pretty bad stomach bug and was unable to work for about 2 days, but is now feeling very good. Hooray for medication! Angela has also been sick with a flu, but seems to be getting over it, although she still has a cough. The medical mission left this past weekend, so it is really quiet at the clinic now. It's odd at meal times- very empty and quiet. Besides that everything is good. We're all getting excited to go back, although we're also anxious to get all our work done first. I'll try and keep you posted. Only seven more work days left including today!