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.