We’ve had a busy few weeks since Jan 7th when
we returned to Kasese, to find it very hot, dry and dusty. You may remember that we were excited that
the Mayor of Kasese Municipality officiated at the graduation ceremony for the
third and final course of BMS funded carpentry and tailoring trainees in Acholi
Quarter. The Mayor had publicly promised
to help us apply for government funding to re-open the skills training project
in 2014, so Alfonse and I went to see him on the first Thursday back. The Mayor was very helpful and explained that
the President’s 265Bn Shilling Youth Livelihood Programme which was announced
with much fanfare last year is in fact a system of loans rather than grants and
therefore of no help to us. However, he
encouraged us to apply to the Rwenzori-Luwero Triangle Development Fund, a less
publicised branch of the Office of the Prime Minister, which funds projects for
youth in these two regions of Uganda which were beset by conflict in the late
1990s. The only catch was that the application deadline for this financial year
was the following Monday morning!
Inevitably that lead to a busy weekend, but with a good team effort we
got everything in on time, including all the stamped and signed letters from
various other local officials which are integral to Ugandan governance. If this grant is awarded then we would get 60%
funding in Jul/Aug which, combined with student contributions would enable us
to re-open the skills training centre in Aug/Sep and run another year of
carpentry and tailoring courses.
In the meantime the Daycare re-opened this month, now
funded by a combination of increased parental fees (from 10p per day to 20p per
day), a couple of donations from our Home Church’s Sunday-school, and money
that had been saved in the bank over the last two years from parental fees,
selling furniture and clothes made by our trainees etc. Provided that at least sixteen children turn
up, and pay, every day, then we’ll have enough money to keep Daycare open
throughout 2014.
The next challenge awaiting my return was that the women
at Kiburara Bible College had decided that they no longer wanted to continue
with the project to make charcoal briquettes from agricultural waste. There’s no denying that the process is
physically hard work and involves heat, smoke and getting dirty hands, but this
was a big disappointment to us, as what happens at the bible college often
determines what happens in Baptist Churches across the district. We visited the college with Alfonse and
Isaiah’s Mum, who is now the expert in both making briquettes and cooking with
them, from her tireless efforts in Acholi Quarter. We were able to demonstrate to the women
there how to improve their process to make it less labour intensive and helped
them make some good briquettes, but they remained unconvinced. If truth be told, the bible college is well
supported from the US and so doesn’t suffer the same issues of fuel poverty as
some of the mountain villages, and some of the wives of senior Pastors there
are perhaps not the most inclined to get their hands dirty. They told us of two churches which are still
very keen and implied that the remaining churches who had applied for the
project are sitting on the fence waiting to see if it succeeds or fails
elsewhere before they commit themselves any further.
Therefore we felt some pressure as we drove up to Kalehe
BC a week later with a car full of charcoal equipment. As part of the final year plan to delegate
more responsibility, we left Isaiah and Natalie (our BMS Development intern) at
Kalehe to conduct charcoal training while Alfonse and I drove on up to Muhindi
BC, a few kilometres higher up the same steep and rocky road to monitor their solar
project and update their phone –charging system to the new USB Multi-charging
hubs now sold in Kasese by “bboxx”, a UK based company. This visit was encouraging. Muhindi is inaccessible during rainy season so
we’d not been there since the installation in August. It’s a small church in a small and isolated
community but since we set up the solar project their church membership has
doubled as people who come to use the lights for homework or to charge their
phones are drawn to hear the Gospel and join the church.
On safely returning back down to Kalehe it was wonderful
to see a grinning Isaiah and four hardworking women from Kalehe BC churning out
their first charcoal briquettes. Isaiah
has always been a dedicated hard worker but he has also become a confident and
thorough trainer. Whilst in Kalehe we
also continued with our on-going trial of “Gravity Light”, an ingenious British
invention for a low-cost, no maintenance lighting product, which we’re
trialling on behalf of Deciwatt (www.deciwatt.org). I’ll
be able to write more about it once the trials are completed.
Two days later we were off into the mountains again (dry
season is the time to visit remote places on poor roads) to install a solar
project at Kyabayenze Baptist Church, and to continue Gravity Light trials at
two neighbouring villages. We went with
Eliza (who works at Jambo! café) and comes from Kyabayenze so we stayed at her
father’s place and met some of her twelve brothers and sisters. It was interesting to see such a town girl
back in her mountain village with her family and to hear her perspective on the
pros and cons of living somewhere which is so beautiful, but where life for a
woman is a steady grind of collecting water and firewood and tending children,
all of which have to be carried over a dangerously swaying and increasingly
bent wooden bridge. We’ve now completed
seven solar projects and have just one remaining, which Amisi and Isaiah will
do next month.
A week later we had to return to Kalehe for the Gravity
Light trials and we visited the women we’d taught to make charcoal. They were cooking with their own home-made
charcoal briquettes, a delicious meal of rice and chicken stew, which we were very
happy to eat (not all project monitoring involves pouring over dull record
books..!) When we thanked one of the
women she said “If I had cooked that meal on firewood I’d be crying from all
the smoke, but these briquettes are smokeless”.
To eat such delicious food that had been cooked on a free fuel by a
happy and tear-free cook, was a great endorsement for this project after the
discouragement from the Bible college.
We are now re-motivated to keep on trying this project at other churches.
I’ve had to work a few weekends recently, so when I’m not
working at a weekend we like to do something special as a family. Three weeks ago our new thermometer was
recording daytime temperatures of 35 or 36c every day with a peak at 37c. I love the sun, but this is really quite hot,
so we escaped on a Saturday by driving up to Ruboni community camp, which is
only about 20km from Kasese but is 700m higher, just outside the gate for
Rwenzori Mountains National Park.
Despite the name we were unable to pitch our tent there so stayed in a
cheap room instead and enjoyed the views of the mountains and playing with the
boys by the Mubuku river. Paddling their
feet and throwing stones in a river can keep our boys amused for hours. Sadly we didn’t have hours as the rain clouds
loomed overhead and we legged it back to the camp just in time to avoid a
phenomenal hailstorm with balls of ice bouncing through the windows and over
the floor. Snuggled up in cosy jumpers and
coats shouting over the drumming of hail on the roof was a bizarre sensation
when hours before we’d been sweltering in our house in bone-dry Kasese! Even more bizarrely the following day a local
man showed us the hot spring beside the river where a thin wall of pebbles
separate the cool and fast flowing Mubuku river from a still pool of almost
boiling hot water!
Last week we swapped the mountains and rivers of Kasese
District for the hot dusty plains and iron-red soil of Acholi-land, in northern
Uganda, where Bethan first came during the civil war back in 2004 and again in
2008. I was there with BMS colleague
Alex Vickers, who has done excellent work with farmers who have recently returned
to their lands in post-war Gulu, to continue the programme of training and
development discussions with the three BMS Development interns currently in
Uganda (1 in Kasese, 2 in Gulu). These discussion sessions are always balanced
with relevant project visits and it was wonderful to see farmers now prospering
as a result of BMS’ projects in Gulu. With a bit of juggling of childcare between us
and some late evenings, Bethan also managed to do some good work following up
the Music Therapy CBO “Music for Peaceful Minds” (MPM), which she set up in
2008 and which has recently appointed a new music counsellor, who needed some
training. For more information about this
work you can see MPM’s blog http://musicforpeacefulminds.blogspot.com
The Gulu-Kampala road however, seems to
have got even worse in the 2 years since we last drove it, so we were very
thankful when we arrived safely back in Kasese after 2 consecutive days in the
car.
Prayer Requests:
·
That we will get the government funding we’ve
applied for to re-open the skills centre in 2014, and enough fee-paying
children to keep daycare running.
·
For the continued progress of the charcoal making
project.
·
For our intern Natalie Fabian who has
temporarily returned to the UK for some tough interviews and selection tests to
study midwifery next year.
·
Give thanks for the real progress so many
people are experiencing in so many ways in northern Uganda since the war ended
in 2006.
·
For all those affected, in whatever way, by
the severe anti-homosexuality bill signed by the Ugandan President this week
and the ensuing media frenzy, “witch-hunts” and bitter arguments it’s
engendered, both within Uganda and world-wide.
Whatever one’s opinion on these matters, they are issues of morality,
not criminality, and this bill has unleashed hatred and malice on both sides.
