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Friday, December 24, 2010 - Community Meetings

By Philippe Lamoise

Charging our computers, cameras, phones, has taken a strain on the current solar power system. We are draining the batteries too fast. So we worked with Patrick in the morning to be able to use a portable generator for some of our needs. The cable out of the generator had a male socket instead of female, so we had to re-wire everything to be able to hook it up to a power strip.

In the afternoon, the 4 health team members stayed at the house to brainstorm on what we had learned so far. Meanwhile, Chuck and I went to another community meeting at the primary school. The plan was to speak about Agriculture and Irrigation, but we spent so much time on agriculture that we will have to come back to irrigation later. They have 2 planting and harvesting seasons a year, corresponding to 2 raining seasons. They plant before the rain, and hope it will rain enough to give them a big harvest. We made a list of the crop grown in this area, and for each one, gave a ranking of 1 to 5 for easiness of growing it, yield, income, and risk. We added another column for "drought risk", because this would give us an indication on which crops would benefit the most from irrigation.

After the meeting, we made a few visits in the local community to learn more about their way of living and doing business. A local brick-maker showed us his business. He is part of a cooperative of 30 businessmen, 5 of which work on brick-making, the other 25 on farming. After deducting their business expenses, they invest some of the profit to buy some equipment they could not afford on their own, and they share the rest of the profit equally between themselves.

They are making bricks using the soil of a termite mound. The soil from it is better because the termites brought up some deeper soil. The technical difficulties are to be able to bring water to mix with the soil, and to find some firewood to fire the bricks. They carry the water from the local borehole, but the community does not like it because it takes a toll on their supply of drinking water. In three months, he paid about UGX 70,000 (Ugandan Shillings) for the right to cut enough wood, UGX 150,000 for the use of the land at this location, and produced 32,000 bricks that he can sell at UGX 80 each. That's a profit of UGX 2,340,000, which is about $1,000. Not much for 5 people for 3 months. But I assume they are making bricks on other locations at the same time.

We also visited the plot of a local farmer who is doing companion cropping of corn and soy beans together. The soy beans are producing some nitrogen that helps the corn. But there has not been enough rain in the last couple of months, and he would not get anything from the corn he planted. Chuck suggested that he removes the corn on some of his plot so that he would get a higher yield out of the soy beans. In the US, they would dry the corn stalks for a few days, and feed it to the cattle. But it looks like they are not interested in doing this in Uganda, since the cattle is "spoiled" with real grass. Most of the cattle we saw were very skinny though.

One of the little girl around us during the farm visit had a big scar on her right arm. Maybe from a burn but I am not sure. She showed it to me when there was nobody around to help communicate and translate. I will see if Joanna can stop by later to look at it.

(Note from December 30: Joanna did a search on the internet and found that this must be some fungus that she contracted after being scratched by an accacia tree. We drove her on Dec 30 to the Kamuli level 5 hospital to get treatment.)

Later on, Chuck and I went to visit an orange farm where they are using plastic bottles to do some drip irrigation.