Info About "My" Village

My "home" is in a fishing village on Lake Albert. Here's some cold, factual information about it, in case you were interested.

It is 620 metres(2,030ft) above sea level on the shore of a low sandy plain located between the lake water and the Eastern escarpment of the Albertine Rift Valley. Lake Albert is about 160 km (100 mi) long and 30 km (19 mi) wide, with a maximum depth of 51 m (168 ft), and is part of the supply of the Nile River.

The dwellings in the village are almost all semi-permanent structures made of mud and stick, and the roofing material is predominately grass thatch, with some of them having iron sheets(tin roofs). Floors are predominately earthen. Cooking is mostly done outdoors on 3-stone fires, on semi-improved firewood cookstoves made of baked mud, or on metal charcoal stoves. Some outdoor kitchen structures are present but not many, so most cooking is just done on the ground in front of the house. The community is served by a primary school in the village, though many children don't attend. The only local medical care is local drug shops in the village run by people of varying education levels. There is no medical center or midwife serving the village. The community is accessed by boat or by a dirt road that was recently constructed coming into the area. The nearest source of reliable, safe drinking water is from a borehole (well with a hand pump) 5km(a little more than 3 miles) away in the next village. I estimate the nearest electric line to be 45km(28miles).

There are about 2650 people in the village, with an average of about 5 people per house. About 40% of the people are children. There are many more men than women, I think because the main source of income and subsistence is fishing, which is done mostly by men, and men from other areas come to live there for a while and fish to try and make some money. The lake straddles the border between Uganda and the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), and a large percentage of the village is Congolese. There are several main languages spoken, as people come from different areas. The vast majority of the households are supported by income from fishing(using large nets or very long hook lines) or selling fish(either fresh to iced trucks that come by the village, or dried and taken by boat to a large market at the end of the lake). Other people keep small shops, gather and sell firewood(women), run local bars(selling bottled beer, a local gin called waragi, or home brew, also usually offering prostitution services), keep cattle (men), work as a tailor with a treadle sewing machine(usually men, but some women), prepare and sell food at small local "restaurants" called hoteli (usually served in the front part of the hut where the woman preparing it sleeps, also where I usually get some lunch). There are a couple carpenters for making and repairing boats, some people (women or old men) cut reeds or poles or gather grass thatch for building, there is a police post at the village with a couple policemen, three teachers for the primary school, guys who repair bicycles or boat engines or radios, a couple guys who have transport boats(localy made wooden boats) to take people and goods back and forth to the weekly market at the end of the lake, and there is one witch doctor.
About a third of the households have a latrine (there is no running water and so no actual toilets), a third use another household's latrine, and a third never use a latrine (they use the bush, and when it rains, it all spreads everywhere and into the lake). Its about the same for the number of households that have bath shelters(small enclosures made of reeds near the house for bathing). The ones who don't have a bath shelter (and some who do) just bathe in the lake. About 40% of the people use raw lake water for drinking and cooking, the same lake water in which they bathe and faeces run into and the cattle drink from and the fish are cleaned in and is full of algae and mud. Other people boil lake water or bring water the 5km from the borehole in the next village. The lake water also contains bilharzia (Schistosomiasis) which is a parasitic worm disease, and infections are common.

Nutrition is generally poor, with the diet mostly comprised of starches and fish or beans. Much less than half of the homes have at least one mosquito net to help protect against malaria spreading mosquito bites. Malaria and worms are common ailments. Other common problems are diarrhea, and respiratory and skin diseases. There have been cholera outbreaks not infrequently, usually killing a few people each year. Witchcraft or a curse are sometimes cited as the cause for an illness or any bad thing that may happen, such as lack of rain or too much rain or too much wind causing fishing to be difficult. Not quite half of all deaths are reportedly caused by malaria, but malaria is sometimes used as a catch-all or assumed condition when its not actually the case. Regardless, many deaths are caused by malaria. About 3/5 of the deaths in the village are children under 5 years old. HIV/AIDS is a huge problem, but I have no idea what the infection rate is for my village because people report the opportunistic infections, and the people don't have good access to testing services or treatment, so not many people know their HIV/AIDS status. Prostitution and the migratory or mobile behaviour of some fishermen, social structures that are not as well formed due to influx and migration of people from different areas, along with little access to services, contribute to the problem. From other studies that I've seen on fishing villages in this part of the world, the prevalence rate could be around 20-30% and its possible that up to almost 60% of deaths can be attributed to AIDS.

Very very few people know how to swim. And lifejackets are almost non-existent. And the small wooden boats aren't stable when the wind picks up unpredictably. So there are many drownings. The organization that I work with is trying to address some of these water safety issues.

Recently oil exploration has picked up in the area, and things are changing rapidly. Many foreigners are coming, roads are being built, camps erected, test wells drilled, and lots of activity all over the place. They are in the exploration phase now and will soon begin production. Things will never be the same for the area with many things happening and many issues arising and many people involved with many interests. Whether that is more of a good thing or of a bad thing remains to be seen, but history doesn't look favorably on the local communities. The stakes are also raised when the oil being drilled sits on the rather unstable eastern border of the DRC.

*Much of the info here is from a household survey I helped conduct and belongs to the organization I'm working with.

Family visit

In recent general interest news, my mom, dad and sister came for a visit. You can see pictures on my flickr page.
It was very good to spend time with them. It had been about a year and a half since I had last seen them as I was boarding the plane on my journey here. It was also very good for them to be able to see my home here on the shore of Lake Albert, meet people that I work with and are friends with, and experience some of Uganda. I have shared with them a little of my life here, and thats important for both them and for me. It's more important to me that they understand a little more about the people, culture, issues, beauty, ugliness, and reality that is here. They saw a wee bit to help form those ideas. I know that they, nor I, will never see reality as it really is, but I think that the more we learn and see and experience, the closer we potentially get to understanding.


Take a minute from your busy day and read this good Washington Post article, Stop Trying to 'Save' Africa
Feel free to comment with your thoughts.