Noise!

So my last blog post was in April, and now it’s October, and I’m gonna move right past the issue of not having updated my blog since then into the topic I’ve chosen to talk about today, which is how loud Uganda is.
I am day-dreaming of my upcoming trip home for the holidays, when I will spend a full month in Madison with good food, friends, family, and my fiancé. I will sit by a quietly crackling fire on a chilly night. I will stand outside in gently falling snow, undisturbed by any sound as the layers of snow filter out all background noise. I will quietly play Christmas music . I think part of the reason I so look forward to the sounds of the holidays – in particular the local ordinances against unreasonable loudness (ah, civilization ☺ ) – is that where I am now I am inundated with noises that are generally unpleasant and almost always uncontrolled.
For example, just now an airplane flew overhead. Now this is a little unusual – we’re not generally underneath a well-travelled flight path in this part of Uganda, so you don’t see or hear airplanes every day – but not really that strange. But what made the experience distinctly unpleasant was the three 10-year-olds in the courtyard that decided to attempt to communicate with said aircraft by screaming at the top of their lungs. I rushed outside from my room to see what was wrong, thinking perhaps that they were being tortured with all manner of inhuman implements but no: they were communicating with an airplane.
Another example: the chief means of broadcasting any kind of message (“Concert next Saturday”, “Vote for such and such a candidate”, or “Check out our reduced cell phone rates”) is to load up a flatbed truck with a generator and as many speakers as you can possibly fit (I am not exaggerating – these things are packed), and drive around town all day harassing your audience. It is profoundly deafening – it’s a roaming rock concert that lasts all day. Usually they just play the top 40 of Ugandan music, which is by no means pleasant to listen to, and punctuate it by interrupting every few seconds on the public address system with a flurry of words that I imagine must be entirely incoherent even if I did speak the language, which I do not. Of course, loud music isn’t limited only to roaming trucks with advertisements: any decent shop plays music as loud as they care to. In fact, as I walk home at the end of the day that’s how I judge whether the power is on: if it’s a quiet walk, power must be out.
A third example: livestock. It is altogether a myth that roosters crow at sunrise. They crow late into the night, and begin crowing long before dawn. There is no pattern that I can discern, save that it always seems to be loudest and most frequent precisely when you need to sleep the most. And roosters are everywhere - and I believe they communicate, because no sooner does one let loose than all the others answer and it is no small annoyance. Another frequent pest: pigs! Behind my house the neighbors keep a pig, and on many mornings it lets loose a cry that sounds like it is slowly being slaughtered.
Fourth: celebrations! Everything is a cause for a party that goes all night long. Weddings, national holidays, and even burials are all sufficient cause to cease caring whatsoever for the comfort of your neighbors, take the sound system off the aforementioned flatbed truck, crank up the volume and play the same music all night. Just the other week was the Ugandan Independence day, which happened to coincide with a wedding that took place inside my very compound. I spent many an hour on my bed attempting to sleep, a vain effort that not even earplugs could assist. I have decided that come July 4th, I am renting a flatbed truck and keeping my entire town awake with John Philip Sousa blasting all night long.
Fifth: Church! When I am in church in the U.S., I usually judge my church music by quality of the lyrics, beauty of the composition, and excellence of the musicians. (As a side note, I’d like to extend my thanks to Kathy Otterson, John Rafoth, and the CPC choir for surpassing excellence in all these measures. I never knew how awesome you all were until I came here.) In Uganda, loudness is all that matters. I attended one service during training when the power was out, so the keyboardist and guitars were silenced. I was overjoyed that we were left with simple drums and African harmonies – the rest of the churchgoers were depressed that they were unable to be loud. Most Sunday mornings at my site, I sit at a usually quiet spot outdoors, and I can hear church services going on from 2 blocks away in 3 directions. One Sunday while my dad was visiting, we stayed at a decent hotel in downtown Kampala. It was quiet enough – until Sunday morning when the church across the street convened their services. They began at 7am, and continued for a solid 12 hours. Ironically enough, they only played 4 or 5 songs, one of which is a fairly popular worship anthem in the U.S. : “Praise Him, Praise Him. Praise Him in the morning, praise Him in the noontime. Praise Him, Praise Him, Praise Him when the sun goes down”. Now I’ve sung this song at church in the morning at church. I’ve sung this song in the evenings at college ministry meetings. But I’d never heard someone sing it all day long! They quite literally fulfilled the exhortation in the song. It was, to say the least, unpleasant.
Some nights, long after most people have gone to bed, I stand outside in the courtyard around midnight. Silent clouds pass in front of the glorious full moon, a quiet wind whispers through the banana trees, and only the crickets dare speak. One moment of peace before I head to bed – a welcome respite from the aural onslaught of the day. I can’t wait to return to America, the land of noise ordinances ☺

The Way Things Ought to Be

Have you ever tasted the fresh cool air driven just in front of a storm? It’s so refreshing, so out of the ordinary. I don’t know what it tastes like, but it seems it must stimulate my taste buds – the feeling of coolness doesn’t’ do the sensation justice. I’m driving now into an African countryside with beautifully dark grey clouds on the horizon that would be menacing if they didn’t carry God’s sweet gift of rain. I think one of the reasons I’ve become so passionate about rainwater tanks is that I’ve been inspired to think about the topic of abundance. I think that we Americans don’t notice it much, because we’ve so polluted and abused the earth, but God made this place for us! He made it for us to live on, to thrive on. He has provided us with a bounty of resources; a beautiful, perfect home. (Happy belated Earth Day everyone, by the way) I am reminded of God shepherding the Israelites through the desert, and how thankful they were (or rather, remembering my biblical history, how thankful they should have been) at God’s wonderful gift of all the food they needed, miraculously appearing fresh each morning. Here in Uganda the parallel seems obvious to me: God gives us all the water we need, as a gift from heaven. It falls in abundance, a true spiritual lesson. I think that God desires abundance for us all, to shower us with blessings, to drench us with His goodness until we are inundated with all He has to offer. Just as with the rain from above, in order to have all we need we need only accept it (and perhaps make some preparations: what is a spiritual rainwater tank? I’ll keep working on that one). This is no prosperity gospel, and indeed in a land filled with poverty and thirst it strikes even me as perhaps a bit idealistic. But it is not nonsense. We who proudly call ourselves Christians have the duty, and indeed the privilege to consistently call our world to the vision of the kingdom presented in the prophets and most of all by Christ, and I’ve been learning it looks a lot like the rains down in Africa.

Of course life is more complicated than that, so I’m going contrast the reality of the kingdom coming with a little about the world as it is at present. I think most of you will readily grant that the history of humanity is frequently a dark and disturbing story full of evil, one of the manifestations of which has been the profoundly sinful way that men and society in general have treated women. I won’t elaborate here – this is a blog of my travels after all – but if you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about I highly recommend a serious romantic relationship with an intelligent, enlightened, insightful, profound, Christian feminist (my thanks to Elsy for a much-needed education on this front).

I don’t think it amiss to say that lots of countries and societies have made great strides on this front. After all, women were allowed to vote in the US only a half-century after we stopped having slaves (insert [sarcasm] at “only”: this was obviously a good step, but note the “less than impressed” tone as far as the rate at which “progress” progresses). Also, you’re not allowed to beat your wife anymore. Yet, some pockets of some form of the “old school” remain, especially within religious communities. With different shades of meaning, we use the words “submission”, “complementarianism”, and “roles” to indicate that men should teach, lead, and be in authority and women should learn, listen, and follow. I have found in general that this is widely held in theory, but in practice expresses itself much as egalitarianism would. I think that the harmful edge of women’s oppression (and much of it remains very harmful, even in the U.S.) has in many ways been worn down in the kind of life most of us are familiar with. Not necessarily the case in Uganda.

To illustrate, take an exercise we recently carried out during training. A group of Ugandan men and women and 20 Peace Corps volunteers were given a card with a trait or task, and with one second of thought asked to categorize it as being done by men, women, or both in Uganda. They included such things as “driving cars”, “enjoying sex”, “slaughtering animals”, “cooking”, and “working outside the home”. As expected, all present had a fairly good understanding life as it is in Uganda, which has fairly universally agreed upon roles: men drive cars, enjoy sex (more than a few Ugandan women were unaware that sex can/should be enjoyable), work outside the home, and drink beer, while women stay at home, cook, raise children and so on. We then repeated the exercise, this time with the prompt to put the cards not in the category of who does them now, but who is able to do them. The vast majority of cards wound up in the “both” category – both Ugandans and Americans for the most part agreed that both men and women were capable of most of these tasks. There were 3 outliers: one of the cards was “get pregnant”, which obviously wound up in the “women” category; another card was “drive cars”, which one of the Peace Corps guys put in the “men” category as a joke.

The third outlier was that “slaughter animals” wound up in the men-only category. One of the Ugandan men put it there, and upon being asked about it he defended the proposition: only men are able to slaughter animals – woman are incapable of doing so. He was gently challenged, and informed by a number of people that they had personally witnessed women killing chickens to prepare them for dinner. Rather than reconsider his original proposition, he decided to vigorously defend this proposition instead: chickens are not animals. Seriously! So set in his perspective of women and what they are capable of, he chose to defend this ludicrous departure from reality rather than reconsider what he believed.

Now that’s the kind-of-funny part. The un-funny part is how deeply this man’s prejudice and ignorance went. We proceeded to have an hour-long discussion about gender roles in the US and in Uganda, examining how they affect life, with a vigorous and productive give and take from both Ugandan and American men and women. This man sat in his chair, laughing uproariously every time anybody mentioned the capacity for women to earn an income, make decisions, or enjoy sex (or life, for that matter). He laughed at this prospect – so ridiculous were these ideas that he wouldn’t consider them, merely dismissed them. The real consequence of his deeply ingrained prejudice is that far from considering women equal to men, he barely considers them to be human.
There are 2 worlds in Uganda: the development world (consisting of volunteers, NGO’s, and most government agencies and employees) and the real world. The devlopment world can be quite advanced as far as women are concerned: each district has a seat in parliament reserved for a woman, woman are prominently placed cabinet ministers and are a group frequently reached out to in development efforts. But in the real world, out in the villages of Uganda, women are second-class citizens at best.

This pattern is offensive, and it is pervasive. I stand proudly in the tradition and wisdom of such dedicated Christian leaders and heroes as Jimmy Carter and Cecil Sherman when I say: the clear message and intent of God and scripture is that women are equal in status in every way; that constructions of hierarchy and role based solely on sex are un-Christlike; that as Christians we should follow the precedent of Christ in welcoming women as equal partners and heirs in every aspect of life and ministry; and that no person should be denied any position, privilege, or power in professional, social, or family life simply because she is a woman. The continuing trend that believes otherwise is a refusal of the great gift of women to society, is unworthy of our humanity, and is unworthy of the gospel. Moreover, it is a contributing factor to holding potentially great societies like Uganda, in the grip of poverty.

That’s all for now, but I’ve been accumulating stories and anecdotes and will try to continue to share them at regular intervals. Love to you all.

He is Risen Indeed.

Written Sunday, April 4

Prayer is hard for me – always has been. The discipline of silence, of talking to someone who doesn’t talk back, the work of stopping my mind's constant working – it all goes against the grain of who I am and what I like and how I operate. And so there are lots of times, stretches of time, when I simply can’t bring myself to make the effort to maintain that particular discipline. But there are times when I wake up in the mood to simply step back from life and whatever that entails at the moment and simply be (as a wise friend recently commented, to observe what it is to be a human being, not a human doing as most of us are accustomed to). In those times, prayer is easier and it expresses itself most basically as gratitude. Here I am, 8000 miles from my friends, my family, the woman I love and miss and will spend the rest of my life with. My days are usually lonely, my work is often futile, and my patience with Ugandan culture is tried and exhausted again and again – yet, I am grateful. Many of the things I am grateful for may seem small blessings to most of you, but to me they are the markers that make my days bearable: cold beverages, sporadic electricity, very slow internet, skype ☺. A sermon from a familiar voice that took 3 hours to download with said slow internet. A good hymn on my itunes playlist. The process of development, whereby God brings people He loves out of poverty that crushes them, impossibly slow as that process is. The blessing to be a part of that process (and the grace to see that as a blessing). The beauty of creation, the maddeningly slow redemption thereof. Most of all, this day, the remembrance of a God who saw all that we suffer and would not let us suffer alone. Having suffered the worst pains of humanity and taken it upon Himself, He died for us. But He would not stay that way: He is Risen! He is Risen indeed! The hope of resurrection, the renewal of the world, the Kingdom of God and the work that lies before us to build for it, the spirit of God who lives in us and has raised us also to new life: these are the gifts of God to all those who would accept it. Thanks be to God.

Writing is also hard for me. It is often the same mood that leads me to prayerful gratitude that allows me the patience to put thoughts and memories to words. I simply can’t type as fast as I think, and the process to pass on these memories to all of you is usually a painful one accordingly, thus the rarity of these blog posts. I do apologize for that, but since today I’m in a writing mood, I’ll share just a few things from the recent past. I’ve also created an outline of other thoughts and cultural observations, to make it easier for me to post again soon.

So I’ve spent the weekend at this really nice hotel in Kampala. I wouldn’t have gone on my own, but last Wednesday I had a fantastic meeting with the guy who runs a partner organization in the US called Egg Module. He’s about 30, from a family that runs a large poultry corporation in the Midwest, but his passion right now is for ramping up poultry production in the developing world. Egg Module’s pilot project is in Masaka, right next to where I live, so I met with him and there’s a lot of potential for partnership. Ugandan’s dislike taking risk (understandable: in the US if your business fails, you can declare bankruptcy or go on welfare. If you fail here, you don’t eat), so Egg Module is investing in operating capital for a fairly large scale poultry producer here, paying the woman in charge an operating fee (which amounts to a fairly large salary), and then donating the profits to an organization trying to improve schools in my area. It’s a very revolutionary idea involved cutting edge ideas very much in line with the thinking of Mohammed Yunus – Nobel Peace Prize winner from Bangladesh a few years ago – and his concepts of a social business: an enterprise whose purpose is not necessarily to turn a profit and make money for investors, but to reinvest profits into expanding the service and improving people’s lives. In any case, Paul from Egg Module wanted to talk further about business ideas for the improved bricks I’ve been wanting to work with and the possibility of building a rainwater tank for their pilot project, and so he’s generously treated me to this weekend in Kampala.

I’ve been investigating, slowly by slowly as they say here, a new method of constructing rainwater tanks. In my last post I posted lots of pictures of the process of building a ferrocement tank. That kind of tank is durable, if somewhat expensive, and we’ve built quite a number. However, the cost has become prohibitive, and in addition they use a lot of cement (those environmentally conscious among you will probably be aware that cement production emits a lot of carbon.) The new method is called ISSB: interlocking stabilized soil blocks. Using a manually operated press, a mixture of soil and 5% cement can be made into blocks which interlock vertically and horizontally. It appears to be a better technology in just about every way: you don’t have to damage the wetlands by digging for clay, you don’t have to cut down tons of trees to burn the bricks (not to mention cause soil erosion and landslides – some of you may have read about the landslide in Bududa last month), and you don’t have to emit carbon through combustion. Moreover, these new bricks are more consistent, cheaper to build with due to decreased cement costs at the wall/tank level (to compensate for poor bricks, mortar joints for typical clay bricks in Uganda are nearly as thick as the bricks themselves), and easier to work with and more stable due to the interlocking feature. I’m very excited about working more with this technology – I’ll spare more details for those of you not technically minded, but email me if you’d like more details and I’ll send you some documents.

It’s looking like this will be my major project for the rest of my time here. I’m working with a couple of organizations to design a local business arranged around the concept, and I think there’s a lot of potential. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you a copy of my quarterly report as soon as its finished, as well as documentation on the brick technology. Thanks for reading, and I promise more updates soon with some cultural observations of Uganda.

First 2 months at work.

It is December 7, 2009, about 4 pm. It is bright and sunny out, a comfortable 80-ish degrees Fahrenheit, and I am listening to Christmas music, which is the only reminder of where I am in my yearly calendar. There is no falling of the leaves, no crisp cool air, no apple picking, no first frost, no snow here, and apart from my friends and family (that means you, if you’re reading this), that’s what I miss most. There will be no surprisingly warm February mid-afternoons where I can venture outside in just a sweater. There will be no fires in the living room stove. There will be no emerging green-ness in March. There will be no unseasonable heat come summer. It is always the same, and I’m bored of it.

I’ve been at my site for nearly 2 months now, and life is…slow. Slow is the best word to describe it. It is also good, and I’m largely content (with the absence of the 3 things above), but slowness is the theme of my life for now, and I’m learning from it. My first three weeks were a very slow introduction to my organization-daily introductions, reading documents, visiting projects, but not doing any real work. The next three weeks were spent away from site building a rainwater tank 50km away (more about that later). Only this week am I starting to really integrate into the organization, and take on a role.

Life simply moves at a different pace. When it rains-which is now-nothing happens. Nobody goes to work, no shops are open, no one is moving around. It’s basically like a snooze button-when I wake up in the morning and its raining, I simply go back to sleep. Sometimes it rains all morning and into the mid-afternoon, sometimes it just rains for a few minutes. There are other days when the weather may cooperate, but there is simply nothing for me to do. I’ll go into the office, and my boss is away on a business meeting in the next town over. My counterparts may like to show me a project, but there are no funds for transport. The administrative staff is in the office, but not working because the power is out. And so they may teach me some Luganda or play cards or just chat, and I stop by the market (food is dirt cheap; a week’s worth of rice and vegetables, virtually my entire diet, is maybe 4 dollars) and I’m home by 1 or 2 pm. And that’s ok! At least, I’m learning that its ok. I’m told that frequently Peace Corps volunteers do absolutely nothing for the first 3 months at site-so I’m grateful that I’ve been involved with some work that interests me and is relevant to my education. I know that’s all fairly vague, but its an important window into my life right now. More details a little later, but first I want to bring you all up to speed on the last 2-ish months of my life.

This is the US ambassador to Uganda on the left, and our new country director on the right, at our swearing in ceremony.



Also at swearing in, my fellow volunteer Caleb had a very classy tie.
4 of the Masters International volunteers in our training group: Me, Steve Wright from Michigan Tech, Stever Worrell from USF, and Colin Casey of Michigan Tech.
My good friend Zach Bagley and I at swearing in. He's wearing a kanzu, the formal mens garment of Uganda.
My home stay family: from left to right, Gerald, Frank, Gideon and Margaret.Colin found this great shirt in a market. He's also from Madison, WI.

So, I’ve replaced a Peace Corps volunteer who left in May, which is nice because my organization is already familiar with working with a Peace Corps Volunteer, so a lot of the preliminary feeling out of my role is a lot easier. That is to say, I don't need to convince them that I don't have money to simply give them, which is a fairly frequent issue with organizations no matter how hard Peace Corps works to vet them beforehand. I work for Open Palm/COWESER (COWESER stands for Community Welfare Service), which is a fairly well established in Kalisizo, about 30 mins south on the main road from the large town of Masaka. It’s a fairly large village, and I have electricity, running water, a flush toilet, and internet: pretty posh, as far as Peace Corps experiences go, but still very different from home. It makes me thankful for little things, like an entire day without a power outage, a fully charged batteries on all my electronics, and when my internet speed hits 20 kilobytes per second.

Kalisizo is much like any other town in Uganda. The shops are an array of supermarkets all selling the same bread, detergent, and rice; video stores selling pirated DVD’s; hardware stores selling the same equipment and plastic buckets. I guarantee there are only 5 different kinds of stores, and of each variety there are 5 or 10 identical shops in Kalisizo.

I’ve befriended a lady at the market named Eudaya, so that’s a near daily opportunity to practice my Luganda. She always slips me an extra tomato too, J I live in the compound owned by my supervisor, Joseph Mubiru. There’s an extra set of quarters in the back, separated from his house by a small courtyard where laundry and dishes are done, but enclosed by the same exterior wall. I have two rooms-my bedroom and a kitchen, two decent sized rooms with a toilet and a shower that doesn’t work (which is fine-the water would be cold, so I prefer bucket baths). None of the rooms are connected, so I have to go out into the hall to go from room to room.

Joseph and his wife Regina both work full time, so there’s a young woman named Angela who lives with them who cooks and cleans and helps watch the kids. Lynn and Fiona (fee-on-a) are the 2 youngest, both sons, and the only kids living at home. Their 4 daughters aged 8-17ish are all at boarding school, but are currently home on holiday. Besides Lynn and Fiona, neighbor kids Diana, and twins Wasswa and Nakato (boy and girl respectively) are over all the time. They all call me “Uncle Jon”. Fiona is the whiniest 2-ish year old kid I’ve ever seen (I’ve heard him wail and throw a tantrum 10 times in 2 hours), and he rarely wears pants. He knows enough not to defecate inside the house, so he just walks outside and squats-on the patio, in the courtyard, wherever-but apparently hasn’t yet been taught to go to the latrine, which is a little gross, but Angela’s quick to clean up usually and its not in my living area. The kids love when I swing them around by their arms or let them climb all over me. Wasswa is particularly cuddly, and enjoys climbing into my lap-even when I’m trying to do dishes or laundry.

My first few weeks at site were spent being familiarized with my org's past work. Here's a rope pump that the previous volunteer helped build.
The view from the front of our office.
Here's the majority of the space in our office. Also the reason we're moving to a newly constructed office soon-there's very little space.
The new office also has housing for me, so I'll move in to the adjacent apartment. This is my new spacious bathroom-prior to the toilet being installed.

This next set of pictures deals with a visit by President Museveni to my town.

We had a number of Zaccheus's who decided the view from the trees was best.

50% of the population of Uganda is under the age of 14. We got there several hours before Museveni was scheduled to arrive, and it was fun to watch thousands of school children jostle for position. There was a kind of amphitheater set up - people performing dances and drumming in the middle, with a small stage behind. On one side was a tent for VIPS (I was in the second row of the tent with representatives from my organization). The other two sides were slowly being enclosed by masses of kids, all in their uniforms of their respective schools.
As you can see, 3000+ kids are quite a lot. All of them wanted to be as close as possible, so they packed close together to get to the front. Security had a hard time keeping them static, as the lines kept creeping closer and closer to the point where we supposed the President would speak.
Once thousands of kids had lined up, a parade started with hundreds more, including this marching band. The line stretched to the end of the street, and all the way back. I don't think I've ever seen so many kids in one place.
The president was late, as usual, so we just watched for 2 hours as the kids jostled for position, pushing to get just a little closer, to have a good vantage point.



And then it started to rain. Slowly at first-slow enough for this group to produce a tarp to cover themselves with. But it started to downpour, and there was pandemonium as thousands of people ran for cover. It was mildly amusing, watching from my shelter, to watch all the careful positioning ruined by the rain as everyone abandoned their precious positions and took cover.The rain only lasted a few mins, but lots of people were pretty soaked.

So after the rain, someone grabbed the mic and informed us that the President was getting closer and he would arrive soon. Then another guy informed us that actually the President wasn't really going to stop, but just pass through, so we needed to move the entire event over to the road. So we moved. This is my counterpart, Max Sennyonga, guiding me to the front of the crowd to see better. But the sad hilarity of the event struck me: we had been waiting for hours, taking careful positions. The VIP's had been seated, the children had paraded, the rain had ruined all efforts and then positions were re-established, and at the last minute some person decided to move the entire event. It was by far the worst organized political event I've ever been to- and I've been to events of America's Democratic Party, so that's saying a lot.Here's another part of the large crowd now on both sides of the main road waiting for the President to arrive.

This picture has a story behind it. So I'm the only white person in a crowd of 6000+, waiting to see the President, and I have my camera out - obviously. I'm taking the pictures you've seen already, and I plan to take several of the President. Well a man walks up to me- dressed as every other man in the crowd is, somewhat professional in a collared shirt - and says "Give me your camera!" in a fairly authoritative tone. Taken aback, I replied simply "No. It is mine", and he repeated his demand. At this point, my counterpart steps in and recognizes that the man is presidential security. The man asks if I've been invited (which is a joke: as if all 6000 ppl here were personally invited to this "event". Also, I'm standing by the side of the road, not like I snuck on to private property). Anyway, Max cools things down and assures the guy that I work and live here. The man wants my camera to be examined-presumably to make sure its not a gun-so I'm sent to a vehicle with soldiers in it down the road. They're not in the least interested in examining my camera, and send me back. We get back to the man, and he asks me to take a picture to prove its a camera. So I took one of him and showed it to him, which wasn't enough, so I gave him the camera to take a picture for himself, and he took this one of me.

And eventually, President Museveni showed up, in all of his funny-looking hat glory. He wears this hat all the time-rarely is there a public appearance where he isn't wearing it. It's highly comical.
Students going back to school after the President's visit. I thought the uniforms were colorful.


My organization has a fairly broad focus and a decently large staff- 12 people, I think. Some do HIV sensitizations, some are community mobilizers, some accounting and office staff. One of the projects they are in the final phase of is a rainwater harvesting project, building 250 tanks in two sub-counties of Rakai District. This is the kind of water source we're hoping to replace.
And this is the kind of tank we build. We build 6000 liter tanks for houses, and 10,000 liter tanks for institutions like schools. I'm hoping to find ways to bring the costs down, produce them with more local materials, and expand the program to other areas. But thats just an idea at this point.
In order to learn more about the tanks, my org sent me to help build one of them for 3 weeks. This is the place where we were going to build it.


You start by tying wire mesh together until its big enough to roll into a cylinder. We're building a 10,000ish liter tank, about 2 meters tall.

Then you roll it up and tie the ends together.
Next, dig yourself a hole. We just needed to clear away the topsoil until we reached the harder layer underneath-only a foot or so down.
It's hard work. We were slowing them down more than helping, so we let them do most of it.
Next, fill with large rocks, or "hard core" as its called here.
Lay wire mesh circle on top, and site your pipes.
Mix sand, cement, and small stones and start pouring the foundation.

Almost done with the foundation. Here's david, one of the masons, making it level.


You make this circle a little smaller than your wire mesh cage, because the next thing you do is place it around this foundation...
Like so.
Next, place your concrete mix around the perimeter, making sure the mesh is tied to the mesh floor and well embedded in the concrete.
Wrap with cloth or a tarp and wrap ropes around that. Make sure the walls are perfectly vertical with wires and stakes.
Push mortar into the wire mesh, filling the space between it and the cloth backing. This is a good inch thick layer.
Proceed in strips, balancing them on opposite sides of the tank so the weight doesn't cause the tank to bend in one direction.
When you've got one layer complete, add another. Total of 3 on the inside.
Inside complete.

Add 2 layers to the outside and you're almost done.
All you need is the waterproof coating on the inside, above, and the roof, which we didn't get to observe. And thats a rainwater tank! Install a rudimentary filter (sand and gravel) and gutters and you're ready for a rainy season.

While in Rakai to build the tank, we saw a big hill...
So naturally we had to go to the top.
Here's a solitary fisherman far below.
Wider view of the lake.
And now a few more random pictures from my travels/life.


Looking south toward Tanzania, which is only about 5 km away.
Cattle on the road. Happens all the time.
We drove by a guy with a pregnant goat, so my supervisor decided to buy it. We drove home (which took 2 hours) with it in the trunk. The goat was not happy, and frequently informed us of that fact at high volume.
I love the contrast between the deep red roads, the lush green vegetation, and the blue/gray skies. Lots of gorgeous views out in the field.
Clouds and their shadows across the valley below.
This is Christie, our accountant, accompanying us on a trip into the field.
This goat had an exceptionally long beard, so i took a picture.

Remember how 50% of the population is under the age of 14? Well, that means that the cute kid index is off the scale, so here's a sampling of some of them.


This kid must like this position. I took this from the window of our office. The next day he was sitting in the exact same position in the same chair.
Friendly girl at the school we were building the tank at.
Boys enjoying watching us build from across the fence.
I made a cuddly friend while we were having lunch one day.
Adorable!
Not so happy, this one.
This is my little friend Maria. Sometimes the ladies at my org watch her when her mom is sick or is busy or something, so I enjoy those days. She's young enough not to be afraid of me cuz I'm white (which is pretty frequent. I'd say 1 in 5 kids just runs away from me and won't let me near them). Maria's 6 months old, and loves my beard and my glasses.
Another cute kid next door from my office. I took Maria over to say hi, and they started chewing on each others fingers. It was hilarious.
Everywhere I go I have a crowd following me. I kind of feel like a rock star. Its not always pleasant.
This one's a little shy, but I managed to snag a picture.
Saw this kids shirt and knew I had to take a picture. Funniest thing I'd seen in a while.
This is my friend Marvin. He hangs around the office, and we play all the time. Took me a while to befriend him, but I won him over. He's a lot of fun.
Little girl at Museveni's visit.
This is Fiona (fee-on-a), wearing his dad's tie.
Well thats about it for now. Hope you enjoy the pictures-it was a long and tedious process to upload them. I love you all and hope to hear from you. Please say something in the comments! It is a simple joy that lights up my day to hear from you. Oh, and please sign with your first and last name so I know who you are.