My turn to write a blog…

Time for Patrick to finally write a blog post!  Aubrey has been the main author of our previous blog entries and although I have contributed a bit…I prefer to bottle all of my cross-cultural experiences inside and suppress the insanity.  That seems healthy, right?  But seriously…here are some thoughts from the field…

Aubrey has spent almost a month straight at sight and is starting to lose it.  She has gone “native” on us.  A month in Namokora is quite an achievement.  That means a month straight of no cold drinks, no running water, and constant dust/heat.  Impressive.  Fortunately, I traveled to the capitol for a week to do some work for Mercy Corps.  The capitol is a terribly congested mess of crazy motorcycle drivers, taxis, and intense smog.  But it also has cheese and running water and hot showers and meat that hasn’t been killed with a bow and arrow in your back yard.  During her time alone at sight she has perfected the art of daydreaming.  I have perfected this on our many long bus rides.  It is amazing the amount of things one can think about on a 12-hour bus ride/sauna ride.  Did I mention it is hot?  Aubrey yelled at me yesterday because she realized everything I touch is coated in a lovely layer of sweat. 

BUT….we are both excited about a new project we have been asked to participate in.  Each year Uganda Peace Corps holds a girls and boys camp.  The girls camp is called Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) and the boys camp is called Boys of Uganda in Leadership Development (BUILD).  Due to both our backgrounds in camps for kids we were asked to help co-direct these camps. I think it would be a stretch to say that I am an expert on camp activities…but I do bring a great knowledge of water balloons/water balloon catapult techniques/various ways to invent water balloon games in which counselors get to throw them at campers.  This is a talent I have perfected over the years.  We are very excited about the camps though.  There is one held nationally each year and we are hosting our very own specific to kids from Northern Uganda.  The age range will be from 15-21.  It should be a great opportunity to teach life skills, HIV/AIDS education, agriculture techniques, income generating activities, and all that other good development stuff!  The camp will be in late April, just before we come home in May for Samantha’s wedding.  Although we are enjoying our time here and working hard, we are definitely looking forward to seeing friends and family and America in general.  I miss air conditioning.  That is one hell of a machine.  

So a bit about our wonderful village.  Namokora is around 70 km from Kidepo national park and the border of South Sudan.  It is a small trading center that is a former sight of an Internally Displaced People camp from the war.  It is not very big at all…but we have grown to call it home.  Here are some photos so you can get an idea of the area we live in:

This is a photo of one of the water catchment systems I am working on.  The ground water table is very high in this area due to the hills.  The soil is amazing in this area and the group we are working with is able to continue growing in the dry season.  

We recently had a Northern volunteer conference to discuss everyone’s projects.  We still found time to drink warm beer and play some softball with a stick. AMERICA!

 

I feel like this photo should be an advertisement for Chaco’s.  This is what we like to call the African Chaco tan/dust line. 

 

  Watch out for goats.  They pretty much rule our town.  This is the road that heads towards Karamoja region…we aren’t allowed to go there.

 This is across the street from us.  We aren’t far from a large game park.  Too bad we aren’t allowed to go that far north.

Aubrey teaching under a mango tree.  The women love her…there are babies being named Aubrey left and right.  Still working on the getting a Patrick out there…

 

This is the famous Rat “Anyire” that they burn the fields to hunt for using bows and arrows.  They are a lot like a groundhog or prairie dog.  Haven’t tried them yet.

 
 

And now for an awesome photo of some water buffalo living near us…

We really do enjoy our village and feel very fortunate to be here as well as to be working with Mercy Corps.  Ugandan’s are an extremely welcoming people and they are even more so in the North.  We have been running a lot lately for exercise and we can’t go anywhere without children running after us yelling hello and our names.  We got them all to stop calling us “Munu” which means white person.  They all know our names now and we can’t go anywhere without hearing “Ayaa and Okeny!”  We feel lucky to have such friendly people because many other PC countries have different experiences. 

Aubrey has recently undertaken a new project of helping Mercy Corps monitor and evaluate the Mother Care Groups in order to make them sustainable.  Mercy Corps has done a very effective job of helping their beneficiaries here.  The Agriculture and Health field officers are very knowledgeable and have done an impressive job so both of us are focusing less on assisting them immediately in the field and more on the sustainability of their projects.  Mercy Corps project will be ending the same time that our Peace Corps duty is up, thus we are putting a huge focus on the longevity of our mutual impact.  Northern Uganda is effectively transitioning from a state of emergency to one of sustained economic development.  We hope that there will be a point when the NGO’s no longer need to operate in our community.   So from a sustainability standpoint much of our work is helping evaluate how effective certain programs are and how they may be improved and or supplemented.  I have recently started on an irrigation project.  The vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa still relies upon rain-fed irrigation, which has been detrimentally hindered by the changing/unpredictable climate.  This has led to traditional agriculture techniques no longer working as effectively.  I recently traveled to Kampala to talk with several agriculture groups that have been working with irrigation systems in East Africa.  Many of these groups have done impressive work with very simple technology.  Often, agriculture can be improved drastically with very simple mechanization.  Many of these groups were effectively doing so…but they were relying on NGO’s entirely to fund the projects.  Unfortunately this is a completely unsustainable technique.  I thoroughly believe that for development to work properly the private sector needs to be involved.  This has only happened in the past in a way that has resulted in years of NGO’s and government paying astronomical fees to private companies.  The problem lies within the public sector blindly funding programs that give away items and services for next to nothing yet pay lots of money for.  Without buy-in from the beneficiaries there is little chance of sustainability, which just contributes to a continuous cycle of funding development without actually developing anything.  I am hoping to create a local company that will initially be backed with funding to help supplement start-up cost that will supply simple irrigation technology to farmers utilizing local materials.  Wish me luck in this Endeavor!