This is Uganda...
I have not written in quite some time because I have simply been too busy. So much AMAZING stuff has been happening and it just kills me that I haven’t been updating my readers! This blog entry is going to be more of a small (or maybe not so small) novel. I am sorry, but I promise to make it as interesting as my left brain will allow! It is the left brain, isn’t it?
The last time I wrote I was in Gulu working diligently to set up as much as possible for the One Mango Tree grant project. I believe the last blog entry said something like, “tomorrow I am finally going to Lucy’s home”. I am so disappointed in myself for not promptly writing about that experience, for it was one of the best days of my life.
Shaina and I met Lucy at her market stall around 1:30 in the afternoon and grabbed bodas out to Lucy’s home in St. Mauritz’s Parish (about ten minutes outside of Gulu Town). We reached Lucy’s home (Lucy insisting that she pay for all of our bodas) and there were all of these kids around! We walked toward her compound consisting of five traditional round mud huts with thatched straw roofs; one for Lucy, one for her father, one for her mother and the kitchen and two for all of the kids.
The dirt walkways between the houses were meticulously swept with small grass patches kept equally as neat. Lucy invited us into her home where she had chairs and two small tables set up. She introduced Shaina and I to her father, Saverio, a tall, thin Acholi man who spoke little English and used crutches to support himself as he walked. We also sat with her orphaned nephew, Walter (who loves physics), and her brother, Marco Polo (seriously, that is his name), who is a very energetic school teacher. Lucy left us to these three generations of men and disappeared with a mischievous smile upon her face.
A while later, Lucy reappeared with a huge tray full of food: beef stew, boiled and spiced cabbage, posho, matooke and a bunch of fresh bananas from a tree in her yard. Until a few days ago I had thought that Lucy prepared this delicious meal, but she corrected me. Apparently three of the boys prepare the meals daily, which pleasantly defies the cultural norms (worldwide, I think). Lucy is the one who comes home from work every night and says, “where’s my dinner”?!
After our delicious meal, Lucy and Marco Polo (still love it) showed us around the property. We saw her garden where she grows maize, potatoes and greens, her mango and banana trees, the grave of her brother who was killed by the Lord’s Resistance Army on the compound, where the children had been playing with chalk on the cement tomb; and all of the houses. We also met the rest of this huge family, including her mother, Poline, who had clearly suffered a stroke or two and was suffering from dementia. Her mother, we were told, spent her days sitting outside her hut on a mat, kept company by an adorable cat which clearly only trusted her (or it was simply afraid of mzungus).
Shaina and I had everyone gather together (around Poline) for some family portraits (which I made prints of for the family in Kampala).
After a wonderful visit, Shaina, Lucy and I headed back to the market in Gulu Town (this time I insisted on paying for the bodas).
The next morning I packed my things and boarded the bus to Kampala, missing Gulu more and more with each passing kilometer.
I got to Kampala in the afternoon on Sunday July 13 and immediately started scheduling meetings and setting plans for getting a million things done before returning to Gulu on the 27th. I finished my master’s dissertation proposal, defended it and submitted the final copy; spent time with Roxanne, Katie, Ted and Lisa (all friends visiting separately); worked a waitressing shift at La Fontaine; visited a great friend (family really) at Luzira prison (loooooong story); bought almost 200 yards of wax print fabric, 10 bolts of liner fabric, 12 sewing machines with tables, 22 pair of scissors, 22 packets of machine needles and hand sewing needles, 22 rules, 22 measuring tapes, notebooks, pens, etc.; sold One Mango Tree products to US Embassy employees (and friends); met with a potential wholesale person; had my cats spayed and vaccinated and de-wormed; made a million excel sheets and visited the Ngenda International Academy of Art and Design (NIAAD) site to get updated photos for the website. OH! I also picked up Paul, an American who has lived in Japan for 12 years, at the airport. Paul found out about One Mango Tree through my friend Emily who has lived in Japan for the past two years. Paul was intrigued and was traveling so decided to come to Uganda and check out the project first hand!
Paul has experienced things which many Americans never do, even many who come to Uganda. My friend Meredith has been working for this seriously poor school for kids from one of the worst slums in Kampala, Kivulu, and Paul visited the school and the slum. That experience has had a profound effect on him. He has also traveled to Gulu with me, gone into the camps and is now in Arua (a town bordering Sudan and D.R. Congo) visiting a refugee camp. He is NEVER going to be the same after all of this.
After doing all of these things in Kampala, it was time to head to Gulu with all of the wonderful things I had purchased! Now, I have never taken a private vehicle to Gulu before because it is so expensive, but after doing a comprehensive cost assessment, it turned out that buying the materials in Kampala and hiring a van to drive them and me (and Paul) to Gulu would be significantly less expensive than buying everything in Gulu. Everything in Gulu comes from Kampala but the prices are higher due to transport costs.
So how do I even begin to talk about my trip to Gulu. Paul, the driver, picked me up, with Paul (the American from Japan, we’ll call him Paul #2) at 5am. I had slept for two hours the night before because I had SO many things to do. Obviously I remembered to bring my pillow along. I managed to stay awake for the first hour of the trip, mainly because Paul #2 kept talking to me. He realized I was about to die and let me go to sleep. So I slept and slept, periodically waking up for large speed bumps and the like. At one point I woke up because the van had stopped. At first I figured we were stopping to pee or get food and started to lay my head back down but then I smelled burning. I opened my groggy eyes and saw smoke. “OK”, I thought, “this is not good”. I was reassured that it was a simple problem, the battery was dry and needed distilled water so Paul #1 jumped in a matatu to the next trading center to get distilled water. He returned, poured water in and nothing. Then Paul #1 and the mechanic he brought back with him raised the driver’s and passenger’s seats (the engine was under) and more smoke came out. Ah, the engine overheated. This was all stuff I found out much later because any time I asked what was happening they ignored me. Obviously it is a waste of time to tell a Women, especially a white one, what is wrong with the car. So…I sat at the end of the van, bored, and Paul #2 approached me with a high-performance Frisbee. Excellent. We threw the Frisbee around for a while, catching the attention of all of the local passersby. Paul would throw the Frisbee to them, and they would throw it back, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. It was good!
All anyone would tell me about the van was that it was overheated and just needed to cool. Two hours later several men (we had gathered quite a crowd) started pushing the van back and then into a nearby driveway. “OK”, I thought again, “this is not good”.
I kept trying to ask questions and kept getting ignored, so finally I made my way in and looked at the engine which they were taking apart (this is obviously more than overheating) and said, “this does not look good. It looks like the head gasket is cracked”. Everyone stopped what they were doing and just looked at me like, “how in the hell does she know that?!” This is where I started gaining mad respect in the village just before Karuma Falls. Paul #2 had disappeared, not telling me where he was going. I was trying to organize a second ride for Paul #2 and I to Gulu town. Paul #1 had assured me that the van would be fixed by morning, he could drive the materials into Gulu Town, help us take them to the camps and then go back to Kampala, SO I wanted to find a car. We are working on the car, and find that there is one 30 minutes away that can take us to town when Paul #2 comes back with about 20 children and 4 men in tow. It seems Paul #2 went to find the Local Council (LC) chairman to get us a truck to move the machines and take us into town and to hire a guard to watch the van. This resulted in a mess. Paul #2 was trying to help, but was unfamiliar with the culture and this was all my responsibility and he had gone over my head. I hadn’t eaten all day, was sleep deprived and hot, so obviously I was less than pleased. Because no one would talk to me about anything the head gasket got blown (at first we were just overheating but the “mechanic” poured water in the engine and then started the engine which even I know is WRONG and will blow the gasket), then we end up with this huge truck to take Paul #2 and I into town which is much more expensive than a car when all we needed was a car (during my price negotiations I said, “why should I pay so much more because this truck uses more fuel when a) I never asked for the truck, I asked for a car, and b) you’re sitting here arguing over price because fuel is expensive and you’re engine is running?!). I got them to lower the price by 40,000 shillings. The only reason I agreed to this was because it was late and there weren’t any buses that seemed to be running by and I had to get out of there. We had been there for about 5 hours and I hadn’t eaten all day.
Paul #2 and I finally make it to Gulu Town, I shower and we meet for dinner at Maq Foods. I get a call from Paul #1 (who had assured me that the van would be fixed by morning) saying that the part they needed was only in Kampala so it would take time and that he had a truck (the same one who had brought us to Gulu Town a few hours before) to load the machines and drive in to Gulu Town. UGH! So now I got to pay this truck TWICE when I could have paid once and had this nightmare over. So, I waited and waited and it took them forever to get to Bora Bora (the place I am staying). They finally arrived at 11pm, we unloaded the merchandise into a spare room, I paid the men again and went to bed, finally.
Monday morning I woke up, went to the market to visit all of the tailors, and then went to Bomah to use their electricity to work on my computer and wait for Julie, the Woman who applied for the grant for us, to arrive.
Julie arrived around 2pm and I told her about the awful day before. We got her checked into her home stay and then we met up and went to greet Lucy and the tailors!
Tuesday was the first really, super productive day, and there has hardly been any downtime since. While I don’t want to bombard you all with too many details, things have been absolutely crazy. We’ve been writing contracts (or MOUs), trying to negotiate and secure a training space in Unyama camp, running around picking up random things and trying to put together some sort of schedule which most of the time seems impossible.
Unyama Camp has been a two-fold problem. We have had three spaces for training fall through, and finally found the perfect space but the landlord was saying that the space was actually 4 un-partitioned rooms which is crazy because there is only one access door. The space is smaller than the one we have in Bobi Camp and twice as much. Stella, the project director from GWED-G, talked the landlord in to letting us have the room for one month at half price which will give us time to find another space but still get the trainings started.
The second problem in Unyama is the ages of the participants. Now, I told GWED-G that the Women needed to be between the ages of 18 and 40. The age requirements were based on Lucy’s decision. Tailoring takes a toll on the body, requiring good eyesight, a strong back, etc. AND the average life expectancy in Uganda is 40. Our goal for this training is to have as many of the Women as possible excel in tailoring so that Lucy can hire them on as One Mango Tree tailors at the end of the three months. The training process will be brutal, for the first month these Women will be training three days a week for four hours and the second and third months they will be training five days a week for four hours each day. There is a strict attendance policy, and it is a lot of hard work. We do not want to waste our grant money and the time of people who may not make it. We also want to ensure that those who do “pass” training (passing will be determined by Lucy) will be with us for a long time so that a) money and time is not wasted and b) this project has a long-lasting impact. When we met with these Women, all of them insisted that they were capable and that they didn’t have daughters at home who could come for the training instead. We suggested the daughters because these Women have been selected as the “most vulnerable” in the camps, yet with their daughters coming, the family as a whole will still benefit economically.
I must say this has been one of the most emotionally draining things I’ve ever had to do. ALL of these Women are so excited to have this opportunity, and truly they are all wonderful, I’m just worried about the long-term.
On Monday the 4th we started moving the sewing machines and tables into Bobi Camp, taking George, Lucy’s machine technician, along for the ride to set up and service all of the machines. George is absolutely wonderful. When we went to find him in the market I realized that he was the tailor who made me some men’s ties to take home for Christmas!
George, Julie, Lucy, Stella and I headed out to Bobi where we started unpacking and assembling the machine tables. Several of the table stands (made of some sort of metal ceramic stuff) were broken as we took them out of the boxes. I had a bad feeling we would encounter similar problems with the tables in Unyama camp. We separated the broken tables and re-packed them while George assembled the two that were fine. George said we could have the tables welded in Gulu Town. Ugh!
Tuesday we headed to Unyama, along with George again, and low and behold, we had more broken tables which we also took back into town to have welded. We have had so many problems with these machines it’s insane. I had purchased two large sewing machines for Lucy with the intension of switching them out for two of her small machines (the large ones sew faster). When I took Lucy to see the machines I had gotten she was very excited, until we got to the wheel for the table (these are all foot treadle machines). The machine people had given us the small wheel for the large machines which will work, but doesn’t make the sewing any faster which was the point in the first place. So…I called Kampala and they said to bring in the parts. So, I had to meet the Post Office Bus at 6:45am and load these things on and send Julie’s sister who was in Kampala to pick up the tables and go to Old Kampala to “exchange” them. First the guy wanted 300,000 extra (Ugandan shillings, not dollars), and with the help of Paul (the driver whose van broke down) we got them down to 200,000. More grant money down the drain. Annie then arrives in Gulu with the machines, George puts the tables together, and they gave us one large wheel and one medium. Lucy said it was fine, but I think she said that because she saw that my head was about to explode.
To further my sewing machine headache, it turns out that the 10 small Singer machines we bought are all cheap Chinese knockoffs. The cord that hooks the wheel to the treadle keeps breaking on lots of them and there are just general problems across the board. I’m going to Old Kampala on the 11th to have a discussion with these guys. I hope they’re prepared for the wrath of Kate. It will likely not be pretty. Part of my anger is at myself. I really should have just had Lucy come to Kampala and go with me to pick out machines. But instead I’m angry with the sales people and the Chinese.
On a lighter note, there were so many things that have happened in the past couple weeks that were AMAZING!
On Monday—4 August we bought all of the existing tailors bicycles thanks to Clif’s birthday fund raiser in the States! It was amazing! Actually, on Sunday we bought Francis’ bike because he only works on the weekends and goes to school during the week. So, at the end of his workday on Sunday, I told him to go and find the bike he wanted and come back and tell me how much it was. I gave him the money and told him to come back with a receipt and a bike so I could see it! He was so happy I almost cried!!!
Monday, however, was even more exciting. The ladies had already found the bikes they wanted, got a price and so we put down a deposit and waited all day for the bikes to be serviced. Around 5pm the ladies went to pay the remainder of the bike costs and walked them across town to their Catholic Church to have the bikes blessed. I was in a meeting with GWED-G so missed most of the blessing, but arrived just at the end. It was soooooooo great! All the bikes are the same style. They are all silver (except for Lucy’s which is PINK!!), they all have baskets, a bell and a headlamp which is powered by pedaling, and they say “smart lady” on them! I asked them all to meet me at Bora Bora (the place I am staying) and that I would be there soon. I hopped on a boda, went across town to Maq Foods and picked up a cake I had ordered. The cake was beautiful! It had been iced in pink and white icing and said “Thank you with love OMT” and had a bicycle drawn on it!! I took it over to Bora and we had cake and juice in celebration of our bike purchase! Julie, Annie and I watched all the ladies literally ride their bikes off into the sunset! What a perfect day.
Another exciting thing we have done is install some much needed shelving in Lucy’s market stall. The stall is too small and has just been a mess, mostly due to all the OMT materials they are housing. Lucy hired one of the orphans she cares for who is a carpenter, Sam, and his friend to build the shelves, compliments of OMT (since 90% of the stuff cluttering her stall is ours) and these shelves have TOTALLY transformed the space. Once the shelves were complete we had an organization party! So much fun! I can’t wait to get before and after photos posted (the internet here is too slow)!!!
I left Gulu on Wednesday (the 6th) to head back to Kampala for some meetings, etc. Julie is still in Gulu taking care of things, and the frustrations continue. Apparently the landlord for the space in Unyama has rescinded his offer (we had talked him into letting us keep the room for 3 months at the reduced rate) and we have to be out immediately. Julie and Stella are working on finding a new space. The problem with the ages of the participants continues to be a problem. George, the machine technician, actually pulled Julie and Lucy aside and raised his concern about the Women’s ages as well. One of the participants in Unyama is his sister and he said he didn’t think she could handle the training. This is huge. We have some very big decisions to make if some of these Women don’t come forward with their daughters. It is so upsetting to me because I almost cried after George had put the first table and machine together at Unyama because the Women were beyond excited, all taking turns pedaling the treadle. They were jumping and hollering and giving high-fives. But it just doesn’t make sense to keep them in the program when there are others who this could actually have a positive long-term effect on. This breaks my heart. We will see how things turn out over the next week.
So back in Kampala I’ve been trying to get my head around things. I had a meeting with USADF on Friday morning to look into getting a grant for Lucy to build a Women’s center which would have space for training and tailoring, a possible guest house, etc. The meeting was good, though we’ll have to go about our application a bit differently than expected. Essentially, Lucy will need to partner with GWED-G if this is to work because the business or NGO has to have been in existence for at least two to three years (registered) and have meticulous accounting records, etc. They also don’t typically give grants to individual people. So I will be working on approaching GWED-G with this idea when I return to Gulu next week. I think it is totally possible because a few months ago I was talking with the director of GWED-G, Pamela, and they have a piece of land which they want to build a Women’s center on, they just don’t have the funds to build. We may have to re-organize plans on this a bit to fit the Ugandan side of OMT into the picture, but I am optimistic. If we got this grant it would be unbelievable. The people at USADF sounded optimistic, IF we can get GWED-G on board. The grants are up to $250,000USD and we may potentially have some support from The Ohio State’s engineering department to make the facility a green facility which would be absolutely wonderful.
So I took long in finishing this update, and I’m sorry, but you were spared about ten more pages of great detail, so you should be happy! This update has only taken 6 Microsoft Word pages!! Yay!
