Reflections from Northern Uganda

Team Uganda apologies for the lack of posts. We have been up in Northern Uganda with no access to internet. We have had an amazing couple of days with a lot of moving and impactful moments, hope, and a strong desire to find a sustainable solution to the water situation we have seen first hand here. But as a team, we believe this opportunity is bigger than water.

Since our last post where we visited our first SILC group we have had the opportunity to travel to four more villages in Northern Uganda. Most of these villages are people who were in the in the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camps for the last 20 years and have now returned back to their villages with in the last 2 years. These people are starting over with a threat looming of the rebel army coming back.

We had incredible meetings with all the villages. Each village we visited we would further perfect our method for running the meetings. In the end we began the meeting with the whole group – our team, CRS, and the men and the women of the village attending the meetings. From there we would break out into small groups, each with a translator – a women’s group, a men’s group, and a mixed group. We felt that we got the best insights from these breakout sessions where the groups were smaller and the people, particularly the women, felt more comfortable opening up to us.

We have so many stories from these visits that we thought we would just share a few insights and stories in this post:

• As mentioned earlier, many of the people in the villages we met with had been living in IDP camps up until about 2 years ago. Within these villages, we met some incredible powerful people that were orphaned or abducted from their villages by the rebels. Their stories impacted every member of our team. We are still processing these interactions
• We all felt the frustration of the opportunity within the villages. So much of their focus is on obtaining basic needs (getting water, food, etc) that planning for the future is not taken into account. In fact, the word future doesn’t exist in some of the local languages.
  
• There is so much potential and hope of the people in the communities we met with this week.
• One amazing aspect of all the villages we met with was the strength of the communities and their interest in working together to become better and help each other out
• We’ve been eating a lot of local food such as ground hogs (edible rats), goat (including goat intestines), chicken, beef… Greg wins the prize for the most adventurous eater.
• Oscar was the first to test out the sanitation practices of the village and the first ever to receive a standing ovation from the entire community upon exiting the latrine.
  

We are now headed out for Indian food in Kampala to decompress from our intense week!

Conversions in Northern Uganda

We have successfully converted James, our peace studies student to the “dark side” and we have evidence by the following comments:

-In discussion about how we want to create a PVC (plastic piping) business in Uganda, James offered to be an exporter and most importantly wanted a really cool name for our business.

-Then in a discussion about how our business would run James asked how would we get the capital for that. To which he followed up his capital comment with, “I can’t believe I just used the word capital. I didn’t know what that meant 7 weeks ago!”

James, you can now share this with your father-in-law so he can see all you have learned in grad school!

Team Uganda Reporting in for a few minutes

We have five minutes of internet access so we wanted to share a few photos!

A couple shots from our day in Kampala...

Part of Team Uganda has arrived!

3 continents, 4 countries, 2 long car drives, 4 security checks, and over 27 hours later Kirsten, Greg, Joe and I have arrived in Kampala. We are waiting on the arrival of Oscar and James tonight. After being in cold South Bend for the last couple months we could not be happier about the 70 degree weather here!

We are going to have lunch today with a Peace Corps volunteer living in Kampala thanks to Greg's PC connections, dinner tonight with Kirsten's contact who works for the One campaign, and get our bearings in Kampala. Should be a good day!

Team Uganda!

Oscar, Kirsten, Greg, James, Joe, and I (Kristin) are off to Uganda tomorrow. We were actually originally slated to go to Lebanon but due to the situation over there, it was decided to send us to another location. We quickly got up to speed on Uganda and could not be more excited about the trip. We are going to be working on a water enterprise project in northern Uganda where we will be assessing and making a recommendation on how to create a sustainable method for the collection and management of fees at community water points.

In our research, we came across some astonishing statistics:

• In Uganda, the National Water and Sewage Corporation serves less than 5% of the population. All others use springs, boreholes, wells, gravity flows, rivers, lakes, and/or unprotected wells.
• 40% of the Uganda’s population has no access to “improved” water sources.
• An estimated 50% of the wells built in Africa fail after two years.
• In small towns in Uganda, the local government and private water associations/operators regulate the water supply.
• 1 out of every 4 deaths under the age of 5 worldwide is due to water-related disease.
• In developing countries, around 80% of illnesses are linked to poor water and sanitation conditions.

We have tried to learn everything we can about water prior to departing but we all feel we will have a better grasp on current water situation once we are there in person. We look forward to sharing our findings and journey along way!