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Mvule Project Director Abraham Mulongo and Water Source Manager Ronald Bwana recently sat on a panel at a workshop in Tulsa, OK. The event was reported by the Christian Chronicle, a Christian newspaper. The Tulsa Workshop was a wonderful event for Abraham and Ronald to catch up with old friends who had previously visited them in Uganda.
An interesting opinion piece appeared in Uganda’s national newspaper last week. The author talks about a day last month when staff members of an NGO decided to close all the building’s toilets, except one. The move was intended to cause reflection on the hardships of rural village life where latrines are less common. Apparently the office didn’t exactly appreciate the gesture, but I’m sure it raised some interesting conversations!
Further in the piece, Egunyu bemoans a problem we have experienced in our own CLTS programs:
The challenge of sanitation is a political one. Politicians do not want to help us enforce policies because of fear of losing votes.
As strange as this may sound, politicians don’t like the approach. We bring little resources. We offer no outside financing. We only sit and learn together about how to address a particular issue in a particular place. It is hard for a politician to see the good in what is done. In fact, if a politician were to enforce the practices agreed upon by the community, said politician may even lose votes! Doing the unpopular thing is never easy.
But Engunyu offers an interesting solution (one that we have kicked around in our own office conversations):
May be it is time to step up the name and shame from merely naming the households involved to publicising district statistics on sanitation coverage and linking it to the leaders who come from these constituencies. I believe no leader wants to be known for not having latrines in their constituency.
Another alternative could be knowledge networking. At SNV we believe in promoting education through learning from each other. If a community has achieved success in something that we are trying to promote, then all we need to do is expose others who are still struggling to the possibilities. After all, seeing is believing.
Thanks to the first grade class at W.A. Porter Elementary School in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Area, the library at The Source Cafe is growing! The students raised over $470 during their book drive earlier this month! We’d also like to give special thank Mrs. Leroy, Mrs. Fielder, and Mrs. Krier. To the students, teachers, friends, and families that contributed, we appreciate your support so much and love partnering with you to promote literacy in Jinja, Uganda.
Nashville’s Artisan Chocolatiers, Olive & Sinclair, make a wonderful Cinnamon Chili Chocolate. The package had a recipe for using it in Mexican Hot Chocolate, so the Source Cafe in Jinja, Uganda gave it a shot.
Kawere Mohammed and Maximillah Matini demonstrate the process just a few blocks from the Source of the River Nile.
Last minute shopping? Below is Malo Ga Kujilana’s Gift Catalogue. . . just in the nick of time!
Join us at Midnight Oil in Searcy on October 18 at 5 PM to hear Bobby Garner, Kibo’s Uganda Country Director, talk about creative development and partnership in East Africa. Sign up for the event on Facebook.
This summer a group from Eastern Oklahoma visited Uganda. The trip provided an opportunity to experience Uganda and meet new people. Several visitors had extra luggage room, so members of the Garnett Church in Tulsa donated books to the library. A special thanks to Dominick, who saved his money with the plan of reaching out to kids in Africa. When combined with a generous donation from the Davis family in Michigan the library was able to add several needed volumes, making the collection even more valuable to the Jinja community.
A well outside of Bulanga trading centre dried up recently. It was a hand dug well about 31 feet deep. We partnered with the village in order to break up the concrete and dig the well to a new depth of 43 feet. After sealing the well, we removed all the water with a motorized pump and allowed it to slowly refill overnight. Upon measuring the next morning, we found the well to have about 7 feet of water–not bad for the dry season.
The cylinder can’t touch the bottom as it would stir up sediment and risk damage to the moving parts, so it is suspended about 2 feet above the bottom of the well. The well itself is 6 feet in diameter.
With so many families in this community hoping to use the well, we wanted to calculate the number of jerrycans that could be drawn from the well in a day. As you may remember from your high school geometry class:
Thanks to my Crayola Markers and a scanner, you now get to see how professionals take field notes.
An average family consumes approximately 5 jerrycans each day. This particular well could provide water for about 40 families.
A special thanks to my 10th grade geometry teacher, Mrs. Polsgrove.
I used to make a big deal about the difference between time in the U.S. and Uganda.
I would ask American audiences, “Time is . . . what?” Of course they would answer as you are in your mind: money. Time is money.
Then I would say that in Uganda, if you asked, people would say “Time is . . . for friendship.” People love to host others in their homes and time seems plentiful to enjoy relationships.
But this is not the case in an ever-changing Ugandan culture where cell phones abound. I remember in 1999 a South African company had a slogan, “A Cell for every Ugandan” or something like that. It didn’t seem possible, and why would someone without clean water need a cell phone?
Well little more than a decade later, it’s really true. MTN was right. Cell phone networks grew and other companies came and it’s hard to find a Ugandan without a cell phone per family at least. And it’s funny how the long greetings have changed based on economic and social and technological factors. Now, air time is literally money. Money is exchanged on the air from person to person, phone to phone to pay for school fees, pay someone for a bag of corn, or to buy a coffin.
And now that air time costs and people buy “pay-as-you-go” cards, greetings over the phone have gotten shorter. Long greetings about family and goats and crops have been clipped and drastically shortened, so now Ugandans have become adept at quick calls and greetings and have, for economic reasons, learned to “cut to the chase.”
Part of the culture of visiting someone is that you often don’t ask why they have come. It would be rude, for example, to say, “What can I do for you?” when someone drops by your house. Isn’t it good enough just to see and visit with me? the visitor might think. So often there’s a lot of serving drinks and food and conversation, but for American sensibilities, we would often want the person to come out with it earlier in the visit. But when using cell phones, a person calling is using air time and quickly comes out with the request, the reason for calling.
Maybe time is still largely for friendship in Uganda but increasingly time is money. In many ways this is helpful to Ugandans. I mentioned above the bad assumption that a person must somehow go up the hierarchy of needs to get water before a cell phone. This is incorrect and presumptuous. Yes, at the same time a village may be struggling to get clean water, a cell phone still saves time from sending messengers by bus with news about sickness or death or business deals. Money is exchanged by cell rather than making trips to the bank. Even staying in touch rather than frequent expensive visits can be done by phone or text. So even though time is money, phones are saving people money — probably saving them more than the cost of having the phone.
This article was originally posted on Greg’s blog.
Kibo Uganda has needed some help in our public health curriculum. We knew what we wanted and posted the opening: Public Health Internship 2011
Megan Bush fit the bill. She spent the last two months cataloging resources, documenting progress, assessing programs, and creating schedules. It’s hard to know how she managed to put all the pieces together, but she did. In the Spring, we knew we needed some help. Our files were in disarray. But it went beyond some simple organization. We needed to arrange things for future assessment.
Megan spent time with program managers, directors, and field workers, creating categories and standardizing workflow. Every staff member feels better equipped to do their job and evaluate work.
Most internships are valuable experiences for students, but this one was particularly valuable for Kibo. We got wonderful data and a streamlined system for training, field work, and future audits. Thanks, Megan!