Our Midweek Weekend

It’s Friday afternoon and we are headed back to Kampala after being away since Tuesday.  It feels a bit like Sunday afternoon after a long weekend, but we’re a little off on our days...

Its been an amazing few days which started with a great visit with World Vision and Busoga Trust America in Nakitoma, and included a water well in progress and some amazing animals.

On Tuesday we met with Emmanuel Erayu, who leads World Vision’s development effort in Nakitoma (Wasswa’s birth village) and Nabiswera about 2 1/2 hours north of Kampala.  This area is very challenged with very hard soil (not much farming), little rainfall (and a low water table) and very poor access to clean water.  There is a health center, but it was closed until earlier this year for over 6 months due to concerns over witchcraft.  As we learned from an earlier meeting in Kampala, World Vision recently came into the village to develop a child sponsorship program, improve healthcare and develop a WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) program.  As it turns out this is one of only three areas world-wide where WV is piloting a new business model that focuses on partnerships!  Let us take a step back for a minute and highlight what we have both observed is something that seems to be sorely lacking - that is, the coordination of investment and development efforts of multiple existing aid organizations in a specific area.  So many organizations seem to be doing wonderful things, but few are working together to leverage each other’s strengths and resources.  Maybe it’s that donor lists are highly protected, or missions are necessarily focused in order to make an impact, but it is all done at the expense of rifle-shot improvements that could be so much more impactful if combined with other efforts.  In the end, when funds run out or organizations change focus, the improvements are not sustained and the village not properly supported for long-term progress.

Beyond the fact that the whole is typically greater than the sum of its parts, no one organization can do all things well.  But, with 4 people on the ground in these two villages, World Vision is in a unique position to facilitate accountability and true village  ownership of the investments and improvements that these partner organizations make, thus allowing focused aid to be more impactful than it would otherwise be.  Full village sponsorship, including vocational training (as Tukutana does), infrastructure development (water wells, schools, medical facilities), and other direct investment, is what World Vision is after and is something that has been particularly heavy on our hearts.  Clean water is necessary and should be a right not a privilege, but what about healthcare and education?  Or the creation of opportunities for people to support their families and improve the future for the next generation?  It is exciting to think about what this new model could lead to and, while we don’t exactly know what our role in all this is, we are sure that God is orchestrating these connections and our steps for a reason.  

Wednesday we met up with Busoga Trust and headed to a well site that has been hand dug for the past week.  It was 20 feet deep, probably more than half the ultimate depth.  I’m not sure if the pictures will do it justice, but you have no idea how impressive it is that these wells are HAND dug.  Picks, axes, shovels.  Its an unbelievable feat to accomplish this.  And, its not by accident.  When we arrived at the site, there were already 30 men from the village that were taking turns being lowered into the floor of the well.  

Busoga intentionally focuses on areas where wells can be hand dug to encourage village involvement, which is a brilliant way to foster skin in the game and ownership of this new asset for the village.  It might be more timely and, depending on volume, even cost effective to use a drill rig, but you lose this critical opportunity to involve the village.  It was awesome to see.  It was equally awesome (but in a different way) seeing each of our boys at the bottom of this well. 

Thanks to Wilburforce, a member of the Busoga Trust team, we now understand that the ride down is free, but the ride up is $10!!  (its refreshing to see some opportunism in a country that could use so much help!!).  In an ironic twist, our digging experience was limited to the boys’ trips to the bottom of the well because there was so much rainfall the prior night that they spent most of the morning lowering men down to bring up the water that had collected at the bottom of the well, preventing further digging and compromising the well walls.

Our trip hasn’t been all work....after our well experience, we drove to Murchison Falls National Park, about 90 km north of Masindi to a lodge on the Nile River.  This part of the trip is much better told in pictures, so we’ll let the photos tell the story.  Suffice it to say, seeing lions mate and then shortly after walk within 5 feet of our car was absolutely indescribable.  We will put the video on youtube, but we’ll have to figure out how to rate it PG-13...

Coffee break at the Albert Nile Delta - the island in back are hippos!

 

This cat wasn't so pleased to see us...

The kids with the Nile in the background

Murchison Falls, the narrowest point of the Nile River

It has been an incredible few days.  We feel there are exciting things ahead that can grow out of World Vision’s new strategy, and potentially even create opportunities for many of our friends at home to support the struggling people of Uganda.  We have some more work to do on this, so stay tuned.

On our way back to Kampala we stopped at Wasswa’s Jjaja’s (grandmother), who lives in Nakitoma.  After our World Vision meeting on Tuesday we stopped to check in on her (she’s in her 60‘s, which is very old for a country with a life expectancy of just over 50) and the village chairman was trying to take her land, which we understand is common practice with widows who cannot defend their property.  Can you imagine?  She has lived in the same place for over 10 years, saved money to build a brick hut that is probably 15 x 15 and partitioned into 4 squares, only one of which she lives in.  She has a small area outside the structure, and in total is probably 20% of the size of the average Larchmont lot (which are small by american standards).  We just learned that she has taken the issue to a higher council in the village, and is hopeful she can defend her land.  It is all she has in this world, but its not all she has.  Despite her circumstances, she is a joyful woman - and an inspiration - who finds her peace not in her circumstance but in the Love of the Lord.