JAMBO! - By Bethan

This is a quick post (really?  I hear you cry!) to say that THE LOAN HAS BEEN APPROVED!  The ladies have been approved to borrow £1,000 (4 million shillings) and the co-operative and savings (bank) clerk is trying to rush it through so our money comes quickly.  Praise God!  Thanks also to a well-timed, and unexpected, donation from Livingstones Coffee Shop in Cambridge, we were able to pay the balance of our outstanding rent for the place and it has been decorated satisfactorily (after some stern words with the landlord about shabby workmanship) and it is now ours!  It has been a long day, meandering around the streets of Kasese in our aprons (home-made by me and paid for by my dad as a treat for the women) handing out free cakes and business cards for Valentine's day so I'll not write more now, but just to summarise, the word is 'out there' and soon 'Jambo!' will be on everyone's lips (see what I did there?  It is after all a cake business!)  Thanks everyone for your prayers.

Green Cooking - Part 2

We’ve established that producing and burning wood charcoal is unsustainable, terrible for the environment at a local, regional & global level; unhealthy, and increasingly expensive.  So what’s the alternative?

One alternative is to make charcoal briquettes from agricultural waste products.  By this I don’t mean burning up banana leaves, vegetable peel or animal waste, which should be composted to fertilise the next season’s crops. However, there are agricultural wastes which are of negligible compost value and so are often burnt in heaps just to dispose of them.  These include maize cobs, G-nut shells (aka peanuts!), sugar-cane bark, bean pods, excess dry grasses etc.  Wood-shavings from sawmills or carpentry shops also work well.  These can be made into charcoal briquettes which can then be used for cooking instead of wood-charcoal.

I can’t claim any originality for this project idea.  I read about it on the website for the 2011 “Ashden awards for sustainable development”, won by an industrial scale briquette maker in Kampala.  Briquette making can also be done on a low-tech domestic-scale, as proven with great success in Haiti, which has almost no forest left but many sugar-cane plantations.  Last Easter I visited a Christian Retreat Centre just outside Kampala where three women work full-time making charcoal briquettes for sale.  They let me watch and photograph the whole process.

Soon after our return to Uganda in October I completed putting together the equipment I needed and started a pilot charcoal project here in Kasese.  The women of Nyaksanga Baptist Church (in Acholi Quarter on the site of the Skills and Daycare projects) were excited about its potential and were keen to help experiment, along with their Pastor Alex and the indefatigable Isaiah, who kindly let us work in his compound and store everything in his house.   For three or four Saturdays in a row we gathered at Isaiah’s place and burnt stuff.  The women cooked tea on the very hot lid of the adapted oil-drum and sang and chatted while pounding burnt matter or binder ingredients.  These Saturdays reminded me of the joys of scout camps, but with more polite songs!

The process of turning agricultural waste into charcoal briquettes has four stages:  

1.       Gather dry waste and set fire to it in a big empty oil drum with some air holes.  Cover the drum with a lid & chimney so it gets less oxygen and burns to carbon instead of ash.

2.       Pound the burnt matter into a fine powder and mix with some water and a suitable binder, such as the red-clay soil from a termite mound.

3.       Make briquettes using a briquette maker.  We are using a hand meat-mincer adapted to have three pipes at the end instead of lots of small holes.

4.       Dry the briquettes in the sun for 2 days.

Our first attempts were difficult.  We broke the thread of our mincer trying to grind particles of carbonised maize-cob that were too big and our initial briquettes  were very difficult to ignite and didn’t burn well because we’d used too much termite-soil to bind them.  Persistence pays however, and we soon learnt how long to burn the waste for in the barrel, how fine to pound it and where to get the stickiest termite soil from.  A good innovation came from our ever wise and helpful BMS colleague Alex Vickers who suggested mixing in pounded eucalyptus leaves at the binding stage.  Eucalyptus leaves reduce the amount of soil needed for binding and the oil within them burns really well.  They also add a pleasant aroma when burning the briquettes which is much nicer (and healthier) than the choking fumes of wood charcoal!  As western Uganda is full of eucalyptus plantations which use the timber for poles and discard the leaves, they can be found easily here. 

Something else we’ve found in abundance around Acholi Quarter is sugar-cane waste.  It is estimated that 1 hectare of sugar-cane produces 10 tons of waste per year.  Behind Acholi Quarter sugar cane thrives along the banks of the Nyamwamba river and is a major source of calories (and probably dental problems…) in the local diet.  The bit you eat however is surrounded in layers and layers of leafy bark which are usually stripped off and discarded.  In half an hour one Saturday we were able to collect four massive maize sacks full of this waste which we turned into almost 10kg of charcoal briquettes.   We spent another Saturday morning with four siguris (metal stoves) and four pans of water doing an experiment on all the different types of briquettes we’ve made (maize cobs, bean-pods, sugar-cane bark and wood-shavings plus different combinations of binder) to see which lit best, boilt a pan of water most quickly and burnt hot for longest.  The winner is sugar-cane bark mixed with half eucalyptus and half termite-soil.  In a head to head with wood-charcoal it takes slightly longer to boil water but stays hot for longer and is almost smokeless.  When burning our briquettes in a clay “Ugastove” (an improved efficiency stove produced here in Uganda) rather than a metal siguri, the results were even better.  There was one final test however, of far greater cultural importance than boiling pans of water, and this was to cook Ubundu (local millet bread) entirely on home-made briquettes.  Once this had been achieved the women of Nyakasanga B.C were ululating in delight as only Ugandan women can.  They had made their own fuel out of entirely free ingredients and could use it cook the dish that every Bakhongo man wants to eat when he comes home at night!

The women of Nyakasanga Baptist Church are now supplying charcoal briquettes for the skills/Daycare project in Acholi Quarter which has, I have to confess, burnt hundreds of bundles of firewood in the past year whilst cooking maize porridge and lunch for our trainees and toddlers.  This is good news for Acholi Quarter, with two BMS funded projects mutually supporting each other, but the challenge is to move up in scale if we want to have a meaningful environmental impact.  A perfect opportunity presented itself in January with the Kasese District Baptist Association’s Women’s Conference.  Women from most of the district’s 35 churches would be gathered together in one place with their transport, food and accommodation already arranged (well, mostly).  We managed to book the whole of the Friday for a charcoal seminar. 

The women of Nyakasanga B.C don’t often attend such events because they can’t afford the £2.50 each for the transport.  In the social hierarchies of Bakhongo women, the women of Acholi Quarter seem to be fairly near the bottom. This year however, four of them went and had the opportunity to teach over one hundred of their sisters.  I kicked off the session explaining the purpose and benefits of the project using a big flipchart hanging from a tree.  We started with scripture using Psalm 24.1, Gen 1.26 & 28, Lev 25.23 and a more detailed look at Psalm 104.10-24, to look at the earth as God’s creation, mankind’s responsibilities towards it, and the fragile interdependence of all created things.  Then we moved onto the environmental importance of trees with some simple diagrams showing how trees are essential for rainfall, for ground-water storage and for preventing landslides and soil erosion – problems which are all too familiar to the mountain-dwelling Bakhongo.  Then we moved onto discussing the health impacts and economic benefits of alternative fuels.  Having suitably warmed up their audience to the benefits and importance of this project I then handed over to the women of Nyakasanga Baptist Church who ran a whole teaching and practical demonstration session.  Masika Sadress is a primary school teacher and proved adept at handling her class of over a hundred women, especially as they all crowded round trying to see what was happening.  She soon had one group of women pounding eucalyptus leaves and another pounding the carbonised matter while she responded to a hundred different questions and threw out her own questions to check that everyone was following.  It was great to see the women of Acholi Quarter taking centre stage, and owning it.  Although it was a Baptist Women’s Conference, they were also men there and members of local churches of different denominations, who were also excited about the potential for making their own fuel and were taking lots of notes so they can go and teach their own churches.

Although the equipment for this project can be bought and made locally at a relatively low cost (about £75 per set) this is still far beyond the means of many of the smaller rural churches who could be the ones to benefit the most from it.  However, we don’t intend to drive round the district handing out adapted oil-drums and meat-mincers to all and sundry, so we produced an application form in English and Lukhongo, and a step-by-step training booklet with colour-photos also in English and Lukhongo (thanks to the patient translation work of Pr Alex and Isaiah).  The plan is that the women will take the forms back to their churches, see what agricultural wastes they have which they could use, see where they could work & store their materials, talk to their Pastors and then agree to raise a contribution towards the costs of starting the projects as a church.  Once all the forms are in the Development Committee will meet in March and review them, discuss which churches would be most appropriate and apply to BMS’ Environmental Challenge Fund for the remaining money needed.  Hopefully we can then have groups of women at churches all over the District making their own charcoal, saving/earning money from it and protecting their own environment.

Prayer Requests:

1.       Give thanks to the clever people at MIT D-Lab and other such places who come with ideas like this, and publicise them freely.

2.       Give thanks for the hardwork and persistence of those at Nyakasanga B.C. who’ve made this pilot project a success, and pray that they will benefit as they start to sell their own charcoal.

3.       Pray that the enthusiasm generated at the conference will turn into action so that this project can take off across the District.

4.       Pray that we can all re-examine our own habits and routines which are environmentally destructive and/or unhealthy and have the courage to try and change them.

References:

http://www.ashden.org/winners/KJS09                                 

http://d-lab.mit.edu/resources

http://practicalaction.org/improved-cooking-stoves

 
Atkinson, D. (R. Rev). 2008. Renewing the Face of the Earth, a theological and pastoral response to climate change, Norwich: Canterbury Press.
Bookless, D. 2008. Planetwise, Dare to Care for God’s World, Nottingham:  Inter-Varsity Press.
Maathai, W. 2009. The Challenge for Africa. London: Arrow Books.

Green Cooking - Part 1.

Europeans working in Africa often focus on areas related to food.  Attention is paid to nutrition, ensuring that people are eating the right foods; to hygiene with regard to food preparation, cleanliness and sanitation; and to agriculture, helping people get the best yield of crops for domestic consumption and for sale.  These things are all of great importance, especially in a country like Uganda whose population has grown from 25 Million to 35 million in only 5 years.  What is perhaps just as important is finding a more sustainable way of cooking their food.  Uganda does not have coal mines or piped gas, its electricity is expensive and highly unreliable, and the initial purchase cost of a re-usable gas canister and gas stove (like we use) is beyond the means of most Ugandans.  Even in the capital city therefore, the vast majority of Ugandans cook with wood-charcoal on a metal “siguri”, sometimes made from an old car-wheel hub.  In rural areas where many people can’t even afford a siguri or a sack of charcoal, cooking is often done with firewood using a large pan over an open fire resting on three stones, as has been done for centuries.

This is simply not sustainable.  The production of wood charcoal (which is made by part-burning wood to carbonise it) and collection of firewood are now the primary causes of de-forestation in East Africa (especially as the construction/carpentry timber industry is increasingly using managed plantations of fast-growing eucalyptus & pine).  Wood-charcoal however, is usually made from cutting down whatever trees are available, with the largest, oldest trees from primary forest yielding the most charcoal.  Uganda’s tiny and densely populated neighbour Rwanda has banned the production of wood charcoal out of concern for their few remaining areas of forest.  However, having failed to effectively provide an alternative fuel, Rwandans are now importing truckloads of wood-charcoal from neighbouring countries.  Although this is not a common topic in the vocabulary of many Ugandans, it is also a fact that burning wood, wood-charcoal and kerosene also releases millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, further contributing to climate-change, – which Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly susceptible to with its reliance on rain-fed agriculture.

In addition to its responsibility for stripping a whole region of much of its forests, with all the consequences that entails for rainfall patterns, soil quality, habitat destruction etc; burning wood charcoal/firewood is also extremely unhealthy.  Recent World Health Organisation (WHO) research indicates that respiratory diseases now kill more Sub-Saharan Africans every year than malaria does.  Obviously people who smoke (which is very rare in Uganda), and people who live in congested cities, drive old vehicles, or work in poorly regulated factories are susceptible to a range of respiratory hazards.  However, in most rural areas these factors are not relevant.  What is present, in almost every household across the whole region, is the smoke from wood or wood-charcoal fires used for cooking, and at night-time the fumes from kerosene lamps.  In small and badly ventilated homes it is not only the housewife that suffers from these fumes but the whole household, especially children playing on the floor right next to where their mother is cooking.  Eye and skin irritations are also common side-effects of burning these fuels.   

Finally, as trees become ever scarcer, particularly on the edges of towns, the cost of these fuels is increasing.  WHO research now suggests that the average family in Sub-Saharan Africa spends up to a third of their monthly income on fuels: wood-charcoal or firewood for cooking, and kerosene for lighting.

In other words cooking on wood-charcoal is expensive, unhealthy and extremely destructive to the natural environment at a local, regional and global level.

The obvious antidote to the use of kerosene lighting is the wider use of solar lighting (see other articles and projects).  There is also an exciting alternative to wood-charcoal, which is already used in various parts of the world and which we’ve started to work with here in Kasese…

A day and a half - By Bethan

Today has been a day and a half already and it is only 1:10pm.  Incidentally, we are supposed to be having a development committee meeting at our house, with lunch (goat pilau cooked by Gareth) at 1pm, but that is another issue.  I have had to break out the UK dairy milk (gold dust) and the strongest beverage I have in my reach: earl grey tea.  Now you know how serious it is.

I can’t even begin to explain the complexities of starting the café business, but let me give you the highlights.

I went, together with a random and differing assortment of the six co-operative ladies (it seems frustratingly IMPOSSIBLE to get all six together at one time for anything, no matter how important the issue to be discussed), to a place we want to rent, that I heard about when I was on my walkabout looking for the brass band a few weeks ago.  We have decided to rent it but the landlord has been saying we need to pay 15 months rent up front.  This is 3 million shillings (£750) which is not money they have just lying around, considering that they are still awaiting to get their loan.  The savings co-operative place said that we should have a property before we apply for the loan (thus begins the chicken and egg phenomenom)  since they don’t do ‘start-up’ loans (since when?  He has known all along that we are looking for this type of loan!).  So since the ladies don’t have 3 million they paid the 2 million that we had (from donations) and asked the landlord to bear with them for the extra 1 million.  We told him the loan would be with us in a week, which is what the bank had led us to believe.  Now.  I handed in the business plan (that I had had many sleepless nights and working evenings struggling to complete with one or two ladies turning up here and there to do it with me) and asked if there was an application form to go with it to apply for the money.  “No.” I was told.  The next day, Gareth went to the bank to ask how the application was getting on.  Speaking with someone else, he was told that yes there was a form and that we should fill it in then they would look at it for two weeks then decide on whether we have the loan or not.  Uh-oh.  Since we already rented the place and are counting on the loan (the bank clerk we had been dealing with informed us that it is highly likely that we would get the loan and we should rent a place first…) now we have a dead line of 10 days to pay the extra 1 million (£250) and are not sure when the loan is coming!

I rallied the ladies, pleading that each should come asap to sign this form and hand it in otherwise we will default on the rental agreement and the place will be empty, effectively wasting money until the loan comes through.  One woman turned up.  My heart sank and I got on the phone to the others.  Now at this point I must admit that I had lost my cool and started getting a bit annoyed.  One had gone ‘to the village’ (they never say which one so it could be one mile away or several!), one had decided to stay home and cook lunch.  One had malaria, one is pregnant (so therefore, by local culture, is ‘weak’ and is excused any responsibility, as I was when I was pregnant here!) and one was at work as a teacher (fair enough).  So the poor one who did turn up filled in the form under Gareth’s supervision and suffered our bad moods with us.  I also admit that I burst into tears of frustration at one point, feeling the weight of the whole thing on me, feeling very alone and wondering if I should just get on a plane and come home.  The one that did turn up promised to rally the others, take the form to the local councillors to sign (that could take a week in itself!) and then hand it in personally to the bank clerk we have been dealing with.  God help her with that process.

So now it is 1.30pm and we are still waiting for the people to come for the meeting.  The goat pilau is drying out and our stomachs are gurgling with hunger.  The boys, thankfully, are asleep (together in Sam’s bed – so cute!) and we have just had a letter from a friend asking us to give him money for his sick children, of which he has eight and no way of supporting them.

AND BREATH……………………………………………………………………………