Updates from Kasese.

We’ve had a busy few weeks since Jan 7^th 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.