Beautiful

Uganda is absolutely beautiful. I mean we could start a separate tourism industry out here to fund our projects. We were on a water source hike today and took a lot of breaks to take photos. It was just acres of untouched beauty, cornfields taller than me, tons of wildflowers, and hundreds of butterflys (and a couple eagles) darting around. This morning we headed over to the other side of Ddegeya (by St. Gertrude’s) to scope out the water situation over there. We ran into Eddie, who was on his way to get coffee to trade, and he pointed us to the boreholes in the area. I’m amazed at how many jobs people here juggle. The clinic cook is out in her field with her 2 year old in between meals etc.. The bore next to his house had a broken chain. We tried to find the other bores on our map, but to no avail. A couple of farmers along the way directed us to a bore down in the valley (the large one behind Engeye) where a lot of people in that region get water. We ran into a few women and kids (getting water for the school). The bore has a really good flow rate (1L/3.3 sec) but has to be primed a little. It’s also a 25-30 min walk from the school (the nearest building to the bore) to the bore. We went to St. Gertrude’s on the way back and talked to some of the teachers. Word had already spread about the project and water board. After watching a school performance, we talked more about water in the area. She said that tanks would be really helpful since that bore is the only source for a long way. One teacher brought up a good point that some people might be uncomfortable going to someone else’s house to get water. But she also said that the water board was well respected. We decided to enjoy a few sodas and passion fruit in the shade before heading back to the clinic for lunch.

Lunch was followed by a large storm and of course we seized the chance to get some rainfall data. The storm lasted about an hour-this produced about 1.5 inches of rain and filled about 3/5 of a 240L rainwater tank. During that hour, I talked to the Hope Academy, working with U Minnesota, and we’re planning to go meet them on Friday since they’re just a 2000 shilling taxi ride down the road. We were just about to head out again to check out water sources when water board members began showing up-so we met.

The discussion actually started with Eddie bring up boreholes-which many members thought was more valuable than rainwater. We let them discuss this for a while and pointed out that bores are very expensive and still will be pretty far away for most people. One member also realized that most bores break and it is so hard to fix them. The board automatically switched back to rainwater after he mentioned this-interesting. Daphne was doing a phenomenal job translating but then we needed John to help us reiterate the community ownership concept. They were like yeah we know and remember (in a good way) and went back to talking about brick donations. At that point, we brought up the point that there can be other options besides brick and that’s what we want to figure out with them. They were like, eh sure, ya’ll are the technical experts-come up with something durable. That’s when we start whipping out images-they were super interested in the images and diagrams. Many of them can English and started reading case studies-which happened to be in the same folder, which they just started digging through. They thought the ideas were cool and would like us to think about these options more. We thought it would be most useful to focus the rest of the discussion on the community ownership model since we couldn’t make a technical decision at that point. The board said they already had 5 clusters picked as sites based on level of respect in the community (important for mobilizing resources), distance to water, and quality of roof. Sweeettt! They mentioned that they would have the clusters discuss details such as amount of water needed for different purposes, how much water each household could use, maintenance of the tank, and based on the tank option-what materials and resources given by each. Eddie will be taking us around to the clusters to discuss the tank options with them on Thursday-which is why those images, water team, are important! We spent the rest of the day planning out the options, calculating needed materials etc. Michael’s genius friend talked online with us about cost cutting options-he’s about to start testing alternates to cement –maybe. Anyone know how the Romans made concrete? We also decided to make the community plans this week with already available tank options. The team should still be working on cost cutting options- we just don’t think it’s a good idea to make promises about that right now.

We’re headed to Masaka tomorrow. On the menu is grasshopper! Daphne has persuaded Michael and I to try them because “they’re delicious and a big part of the reason Daphne looks forward to coming home.” If she’s lying to us……..well, honestly, it can’t be worse than this d@mn doxy which is currently making me nauseous again :P