Winds of Change are a'blowin

About the time my prospects for people to partner with on projects in my area dried up like the dusty red soil in the dry season sun, the country director for the Peace Corps talked to an organization in need of a water/sanitation engineer and thought of me because she knew things weren't going anywhere at my site and I was invited to Uganda to work with water and sanitation projects anyway. The country director called me a week ago Friday when I was up on Network Hill and asked if I wanted her to persue this other assignment for me, but she didn't know much about it yet. By Wednesday it was decided that I would be moving. The organization had seen my resume and they wanted me to start ASAP.
Oil has recently been found at Lake Albert and now there are oil company shillings available for community support projects and this organization is partnered with the oil company. I talked to the head of the org on the phone, a South African chap, and he said there was a fishing village that was an imminent cholera or typhoid outbreak waiting to happen and he wanted me to go live there, design an appropriate latrine system, introduce it to the community, and get all the people to build and use them instead of the beach front they have been utilizing. After that he wants me to improve the water supply as the village currently has very poor water quality. He expressed urgency at getting the project going very quickly. I thought to myself, "Um, sure, I took care of situations like that all the time in the states, no problem." Actually, in the states, I just sat in a cubicle and played on the computer. It's easier said than done to do what he is proposing doing, as there are many factors involved and behavior change doesn't happen overnight. He described it to me as "a hell of a challenge" and there would be a lot of responsibility placed on me requiring flexibility, innovation, hard work, and in tough conditions. Sounds like a peace corps assignment to me, although this will be a somewhat atypical assignment.
He also said I would have the oil company's resources at my disposal. Also, an old peace corps volunteer from way back got on the phone, as he's been working for this organization short term, and he told me that he would love this assignment if he was younger; it's exciting and has lots of potential. I do think it has potential to be a good opportunity to make a real, visible difference and could be exciting and fulfilling; on the other hand I might get in over my head in crap, pun intended. Many PC assignments involve a lot of ambiguity, slow movement projects or ideas, and no way to see the long term difference you are making, but with this it may be easier to see improvement, if successful.

So, I will leave my mountains and farmers in Kabale district for a lake and fisherman in Hoima district; my life of leisurly drinking soda at the shop and working a few hours a week to hitting the ground running working hard on something I'm not quite sure how to go about accomplishing just yet. I will move across hemispheres; from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere (does that mean I will go from winter to summer?), and to an area that speaks a different, but somehow similar, language than I have been learning from the beginning of training.
The associate pc director who placed me at my site originally was planning on coming out to visit anyway because I have been complaining for a couple months about not having good prospects for people to work with, so when she came with a SUV, I loaded up all my stuff (took me about an hour to pack everything I have) for her to take to Kampala. I have said goodbye to the people I have met and the friends I have made and I will go to the PC office in Kampala Monday, then off to my new site, assuming the red tape is cut and the site can be evaluated by the PC in good time.

The other day I was walking with my friend Albert (who is a Ugandan about my age studying to become a doctor but lived just behind my house as he works at the health center for now), and we were talking about the recent developments with oil in Uganda. I told him that I thought oil would change things, but I didn't know how or if they would be changes for the better or worse. Little did I know that the changes would very soon impact me so directly.


You will have to bear with the posts on this blog, as I have limited internet time and don't usually proofread or fix mistakes. I'm in africa, work with me. :)

Life Continues

Judith and I continue to visit homes a little bit each week to try and educate people about health related topics such as sanitation, malaria, HIV, and family planning. In the States, I don't think this sort of approach would work, as people generally would not be open to other people coming into thier homes and telling them how to live thier lives. Of course we are respectful and appropriate when we tell them they should sleep under a mosquito net, they should build a rack to dry dishes on so the chickens don't run across them on the ground, or they shouldn't sleep with every girl in the subcounty. I think in America, people are too individualistic and independent and would probably be defensive or even angry, but here, in this community driven society where there is no such thing as trespassing and it's fine to graze goats and cows on anyone's property as long as they don't eat the crops, most people are generally appreciative that we are teaching them. On more than one occasion, I've even been given a little money and told to treat myself to a soda. It's customary to give a visitor something to drink or eat, but it's awkward being the rich muzungu being given money. I have passed it on to Judith, who isn't getting anything to go with me.

The sudden rain showers of the wet season have given way to dry sunny days. Each footfall on the path kicks up fine dust, which is problematic when the culture places importance on looking "smart"; dressing neatly and cleanly, especially the shoes. These days, the basin of wash water turns to mud as I scrub my clothes. We are finding fewer people at home, mostly just the small children or the elderly. Many people are harvesting thier sorghum on the hillsides. They cut it down with a panga, an all-purpose machete like knife, lay the stalks in rows, then cut the heads of grain off using a small knife. The heads are carried back to the home in large baskets on thier heads where they are spread out to dry in the sun. Then the grain is seperated from the chaff which is burned in a pile. At night a few of these fires can be seen on the hillsides across the valley. The days are usually a bit hazy with dust kicked up by the wind and the smoke from the fires in the air. Some of the sorghum is made into a local drink called obushera, which looks and tastes like grainy mud, but people seem to really like it, or it is made into a homebrewed beer called omuramba, which I have yet to partake.

One morning the local village chairman was guiding us through the network of paths through the banana forests in the valley and the rocky slopes on the hills to individual's homes and he took us to the primary school that lies within his village. I didn't know ahead of time that we would visit a school, but when the chairman introduced me to the school headmaster, he asked if I wanted to speak to the entire school or just the teachers. Since I didn't really want all 550 primary school students and thier teachers staring at me with nothing prepared to present to them, I chose the teacher only option; that is after my first choice of returning at a later date was shot down by the chairman. So as the headmaster gathered the 9 teachers from thier classrooms, I tried to get my brain to figure out something to talk to them about that would make it worth thier while to interrupt classes. My brain was working a little slow anyway because it was a Monday morning after just getting back the night before from a week of travelling across the country on public transport for a workshop, an exhausting full day of white water rafting on the longest branch of the Nile river, and socializing with friends. I ended up telling them where I was from, what I was doing in the area, explained that I had no funding to hand them, and asked them questions about the school. Somehow I ended up telling them that I would come back and meet with the students. What I would do with them I had no idea. Since I didn't know anything about working with kids, what they learned in school, or needed to learn, I climbed up what I have dubbed Network Hill to get cell phone reception and asked a couple friends in the education program for ideas. They were slightly helpful.

The headmaster had requested that the chairman inform him when I would be coming back, and through the process of me telling Judith, who interpreted to the chairman, who told the headmaster, the time he was told I would be coming was much sooner than I had intended. I had an afternoon to plan, so I looked through the manuels I had gotten from Peace Corps and came up with a couple ideas, not really even knowing how much time I would have with the kids. I had requested to only meet with the older students, P6 & P7, so it would hopefully be a manageable size group and they would be old enough so that I could cover more topics that I had been discussing on the home visits. I hoped that this request had been relayed correctly. It actually went fairly well, I thought, all things considered. I tried to let them get to know me and make it interactive so I wasn't just lecturing. I was told to expect mostly blank stares, but they opened up a bit after a while. Of course I had to modify my plan as we went, but the headmaster said I was welcome to come back. I'm not sure I can handle much of that, but if my efforts to find other projects to work on don't pan out soon, I might be adding working with children to my resume. Or I may end up shifting locations all together.

"...people in western civilization no longer have time for each other, they do not share the experience of time. This explains why Westerners are incapable of understanding the psychology of sitting. In villages all over the world, sitting is an important social activity. Sitting is not 'a waste of time' nor is it a manifestation of laziness. Sitting is having time together, time to cultivate social relations." -Andreas Fuglesang