Hello again from
Northern Uganda,
All the snow driving in NE
Washington, has been a great help during this
rainy season in navigating the slippery red clay to the villages on
pathways often wide enough for just one person or bicycle.
In the town of Lira, every day, there are roads which have not been
paved since the Obote regime over 30 years ago, being widened, graded
and many are being paved. One thing they use here extensively to
get drivers to slow down is “humps”. They are in the “speed bump”
family we have in the US, but these are often mammoth in size, speed
bumps on steroids, and launch a vehicle Evil Kenival style if one isn’t
paying attention.
The first interviews of the original graduates of the
Hands Across Nations Tailoring School have taken place with both good
news and difficulties coming to light. All of the women were using
their skills learned at the school and still owned their machines rather
than selling them for quick cash. All felt that they had been well
trained in cutting out and sewing women’s and girls’ dresses, skirts and
blouses, but lacked confidence in sewing men’s and boy’s clothing.
The training was extended an extra 3 months for the most recent class to
give more time for all clothing styles. All of the original group
interviewed, though they had been provided free sewing machines thanks
to generous US donors, were caught in the cycle of not having enough
money to buy the first pieces of fabric to make clothes to take to the
market to sell themselves at a fair price. The graduates were most
often contracted by market sellers who brought them fabric and had them
make girl’s dresses for the seller to then market at a good profit.
The pay for their labor…..25 cents! Strategies for this challenge
are in the works. As we examined their quality of work, all
were quite passable and several were very good. Each
graduate expressed happiness in having learned their tailoring skills,
and felt that their lives were improved significantly as they can now
purchase many of the necessities they had previously gone without.
Their pride in their work was heart warming.
Lango College, a boys high school where Hands Across
Nations facilitated student planting of fruit and pine trees last year,
showed they could keep most of them alive and earned the opportunity to
plant over 250 trees and 100 coffee plants this year, provided by Hands
Across Nations. Our friend and fellow Rotarian Levi Abongo who is
an English teacher at the school has enlisted the student arm of Rotary
Club called Interact, in an “adopt-2-trees” program with a competition
for the healthiest trees at the end of the year. The hope is for
future fruit provided by the orchard for a better student diet, and the
pines to provide timber to use for carpentry class and to sell when
funds are needed.
This week was the start of the Colville Rotary Club
project in a village in the middle of nowhere. The government is
asking the people to leave their refugee camps and return to their home
village land after 30 years in the camp. There’s nothing on the
land though some have planted some crops, and their fears of being
attacked by cattle rustlers remains. Soldiers are out at night to
shoot at any neighboring Karamajong tribes men who are trying to steal
cows. Most cows are chained at night to large trees cut into
pieces and laid on the ground. Our project was to complete a bank
of 5 latrines with local “volunteer” help. In our American minds
we thought that people getting a really nice set of toilets for the
school would be appreciated and the town would turn out. The
actual scenario was quite different. First of all, in Uganda, the
term “volunteer” does not mean a person doing work for free. It
means a person who isn’t on salary, but who does temporary work at a
lesser pay and is also expecting to be given a lunch!
Secondly, there have been so many charities and organizations who have
made huge donations to the people in these camps for the past 3 decades,
bringing trucks with food, blankets, cooking utensils and pots that it’s
difficult for them to return to the “work for food” mentality that was
there before camp life. Our latrine project and promise of a
deep well once the rainy season is over next month was accepted with
some appreciation, but any suggestion of their work or putting in even a
few coins to join together for a greater cause than themselves, was met
with a fair amount of resistance, and in the end, only 4 people in the
whole area were consistently working with us on the project.
The school’s other bank of 5 latrines which we had
seen 2 weeks earlier had become unsafe and collapsed into the pit below
it!
The rains had weakened the ground around the
structure and poor construction led to the sudden destruction. In
4 days, the latrine crew completed 75% of the reconstruction and will
return to finish it in the next couple of weeks.
It was a good experience for me to live with a family
for those 4 days, using a pit latrine and having to walk a fair distance
to the one bore hole well in the entire area for reasonably clean
water, eating the twice a day posho (corn flour, water and salt) and
beans, sleeping on the floor of a hut with several families (I’m sure)
of rats keeping us “company” at night and even the thrill of defeating a
young puff adder poisonous snake which was attempting to join us in our
cozy home. This was an adventure for me, but is daily life, year in,
year out for them. I could leave and come back to the safety of a
friend’s home. They are living with rotted crops in the ground
from the heavy rains, and soggy floors in their huts. Maybe I
wouldn’t want to “volunteer” for latrine construction duty if I was
walking in their shoes.
Sharing the love of Christ with the men, women and
children of Adacar and Acuru was a challenge in knowing how to turn them
toward God in their struggles. Truly it is not our words but
what we do and how we treat people that speaks of His love for all of
us. So we continue to let them know that truth through practical
means as well as words.
Sharing the Love of Christ in practical ways,
Carolyn
Carolyn's Journal November 9, 2010
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