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Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - On to Nkondo
By Chuck DuVivier
Today we left Kampala around ten o'clock on our way to Nkondo. We piled our luggage in one spot outside the reception area at the guest house and it was a pretty impressive pile. Even though it is a dry season, the clouds threatened us with rain and we wanted the luggage protected with a tarp. If we didn't get any rain, we could be sure that the tarp would be needed to keep off all the red dust from the road before we made it to Nkondo. Two double cab pickups had room for 5 in each with some packs on our laps. Shelly, Amanda, Johanna and Geoff rode with William who provided a travel narration all along the route. Philippe and I rode with Herbert (Kampala North RC). The road becomes less and less congested as you leave Kampala, passing towns with markets, weedy banana and cassava plots, eventually a large, manicured tea plantation, sugarcane fields of the Lugazi Sugar Company. We passed the Mabira Forest Preserve where one gets a feel for what most of the area would be like before being modified for agriculture, charcoal and timber cutting or other uses. Just before Jinja, we crossed the Nile, impounded and looking very industrial above the hydroelectric dam that produces most of the electrical power for the country. At the third round-about in Jinja, the signs offered the choice of "Kenya" on which most of the truck traffic was moving. Our route to the north, "Kamuli" had light traffic, was well paved and straight. Eventually, pot-holes appeared and became more and more intense. The driving style switched from using the left side of the road (where you are supposed to be), to swerving right, left, onto or off any dirt shoulder looking for the smoothest passage. Oncoming or passed vans, bicycles and pedestrians get some respect, but the amount of that respect goes down pretty much with your size. Just a short of Kamuli we took the dirt road heading straight north. There was almost no traffic now but since there had still been no rain, the dust was thick. After forty kilometers, we arrived Iringa, a village with brick stores and lots of activity. We turned right onto an even smaller road, left at a fork, past a large school, several boreholes, a brick store, another school with a thatched roof and waddle and daub walls, at last arriving at Patrick and France's comfortable house. I had been here last March after returning from three weeks in South Sudan and many changes had been made to accommodate our large group. The improvements are solar power (limited output), a well and tank to supply water for showers and flush toilets, five bedrooms with plenty of beds for everyone. We are all impressed and so glad to be here.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - Nkondo
By Chuck DuVivier
We have been asking for a map of the area to help us get oriented and had been assured that the District officials must have one, Maybe they do, but in the meantime we were determined to created something. After consultation with Patrick, Philippe drew a working map of the area.
(by Philippe Lamoise) We are in the Buyende District, which has 6 sub-counties. We are in the Nkondo sub-county, divided into 4 parishes: Iranga, Immeri, Ndulya, and Kigingi. Our parish, Immeri, is divided into 2 sub-parishes: Kyabazala, and Nsekaseka. Iringa and Kigingi have a Health Center 2 (HC2). Nkondo has a Health Center 3 (HC3). The Health Center 2 indicated in Iranga is the one we are trying to get started for the Immeri parish. I also tried to indicate on the map the bore holes we saw along the way. We will be updating this map as we move along.
 Click here to see the map.
The concept of "village" isn't what we had been expecting. Iringa, located at a crossroads, with several small private schools, maybe 60 two room shops, numerous market stands and lots of people, is not a "village," it is considered a "trading center" split between two villages, Imeri and Iringa. These are technically called "parishes." The parish of Iringa runs from the north-south road all the way to the Nile in the west. A new "trading center" can pop up wherever a land owner decides to invest in a building, but the amount of commercial activity that would take place there is dependent on the local demand and it may fail to attract any tenants or use. The lines between a village may not be accurately depicted on any maps but the people all know in which village they reside.
After lunch, at 1:30 we piled into the pickup and headed to visit the old and new Level 2 clinics at Iringa Trading Center. Some dark stormy clouds with a little thunder and lightning, produced a brief, local shower but it was so small that at Iringa, there was no sign that any rain had fallen.
The district government is mandated to provide a Level 2 clinic to each parish but there had never been one in the Immeri parish. The Kampala North RC provided support to start the clinic at Iringa and for a while the government had supplied a health worker stationed there but the clinic has been closed for some time. The new empty shell is being cleaned up in preparation for a re-opening and consists of a small porch, a room in front and a smaller room in the back. A high ceiling with exposed rafters shows the signs of many old spider webs, wasp nests and general dustiness. We expressed interest in having us paint the inside walls to really get the place sparkling.
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A meeting was scheduled for us at 2:00 at the school with the District Chairman to announce our presence and projects. When he hadn't arrive by 3:00, Patrick went ahead and facilitated a meeting with about 40 in attendance talk about ways to create wealth or generate income. The main occupations are agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, trading and brick making and we heard about the various pros and cons of each, and their ideas for improvement. The meeting was very enlightening and went on for two and one-half hours, and I will have to ask a lot more questions in order to help determine which suggestions have real support and are also viable options. There was often a simplistic focus on obtaining some tool that would solve every problem. For instance, those with dairy cattle believe that if they just had refrigerated milk storage, things would be so much better. But of course the business of milk production is far more complex, requiring marketing, transport, strict hygiene for clean milk, better bred cows, better feeding and milking management and much more. Just finding a special tool doesn't ensure that anything will improve, there has to be a better managed plan. The diversity of enterprises makes it harder to provide that better managed plan because everyone expects results with all the enterprises. There needs to be a willingness to recognize that these business are all complex and focus on which one they will try to do well with. Also, many of the enterprises which they are involved in are not viable income generators in the first place. They may serve a need of providing garden food for the family with a little surplus to sell, but every one tends to sell at the same time because of regional surpluses and prices will always be low at those times. Our job here is to sift through these issues and give advice so that the community can adopt plans that really will have a long term chance of being adopted and having success.
After the meeting we headed east to visit the Level 3 Health clinic at the Nkondo trading center. We snooped around for a bit but the health workers weren't there that late in the evening nor were there any patients, so we arranged to come back the next day. We drove home to another tasty meal and to get some rest after a busy day.
In the evening, Philippe worked on his laptop to setup the blog and view the photos and video of the day. This attracted quite a crowd!
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The concept of "village" isn't what we had been expecting. Iringa, located at a crossroads, with several small private schools, maybe 60 two room shops, numerous market stands and lots of people, is not a "village," it is considered a "trading center" split between two villages, Imeri and Iringa. These are technically called "parishes." The parish of Iringa runs from the north-south road all the way to the Nile in the west. A new "trading center" can pop up wherever a land owner decides to invest in a building, but the amount of commercial activity that would take place there is dependent on the local demand and it may fail to attract any tenants or use. The lines between a village may not be accurately depicted on any maps but the people all know in which village they reside.)
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After the meeting we headed east to visit the Level 3 Health clinic at the Nkondo trading center. We snooped around for a bit but the health workers weren't there that late in the evening nor were there any patients, so we arranged to come back the next day. We drove home to another tasty meal and to get some rest after a busy day.