No really, we actually do work

So we started to notice that most of our blog entries are about our holidays, thought we’d try to remedy that. We may live on an island with a tourist camp, but most of the time we actually work here. Usually we think we even freak the tourists out a little, greeting the staff in Rukiga, walking past the ‘staff only’ sign into the kitchen, carrying paddles, flutterboards, picnic baskets of bananas and thermoses, wearing rashguards and board shorts, skirts and leg warmers…tonight was a new one, walking up to the restaurant with our pot of half-cooked dinner after we ran out of gas.

There’s no such thing as a typical work day, but we’ll try to give you an idea of some of the things we’ve been up to. Between running our second month of swim camps, January kept us busy with a number of different projects.

Bryony organized a second visit to the lake by TASO, an organization in town that offers free HIV/AIDS testing and counselling. This time, they went to a trading centre on the far side of the lake – close to Rwanda – giving her the opportunity to meet the pygmies, who make regular visits to the trading centre to sell bamboo, buy banana liquor, and dance up a storm. Some visits were made to communities with volunteer swim instructors who were trained last year to assess how their programs were going in their schools. Unfortunately, volunteerism isn’t valued here the same way it is at home and people are reluctant to offer their time without monetary gain. Therefore, the swim programs at the various schools are not running as intended by Stacy. Plan B. LBDC is going to hire a second instructor to teach consistent swimming lessons at schools on the opposite side of the lake from Norman. Interviews will be held in the upcoming weeks. There are similar issues with the HIV/AIDS education volunteers in communities, so LBDC is looking to hire a staff member to work in this area of their programming as well. Bryony is currently working at creating an assistance program for people living with HIV on the lake. One of the biggest challenges these people face is the cost of transport to receive care and counselling services in town. The assistance program would help people get into town for CD4 count tests and access anti-retroviral medications. The HIV/AIDS staff member would be a trained counsellor who could help people access funding confidentially as there is still a lot of stigma towards HIV.

Emily met with the community agroforestry groups that were started by Amanda last year to assess the program in each community. They did a seed multiplication program to introduce new varieties of beans and sweet potatoes, which went well. LBDC is hoping to expand the program into more communities. Organizing farmers into groups is an effective way to work with them and helps them to access support from outside organizations. LBDC has now helped one of the communities that participated in the program last year to join a government program that will allow them to access more resources than LBDC could provide. Ben, the agroforestry manager, has shown a lot of interest in learning how to write proposals, so we’ve been putting together a resource on writing funding proposals and Emily will work with Ben to write his first. The LBDC demonstration site for reverse slope terracing (RST), a technology whose terraces slope into the hill to conserve top soil and water, has had its first harvest, and results from the experiment to compare RST to the terraces more commonly used around the lake, are pending. The results look like they will be favourable, so Emily has been visiting other organizations working in the region to gauge interest in partnering with LBDC to try to get RST into communities. The terraces are very labour intensive to build, and thus prohibitively expensive for most people. But, as the results appear to be promising here, and Rwanda reports a 20% increase in production with RST, the results seem worth the effort.

What does a community visit involve? Well. First, there’s a paddle of varying length. This is followed by a trek up steep dirt paths to the road. If we’re lucky, it hasn’t rained, but it rains most days this time of year, and the paths are slick. Fun on the way up; even more fun on the way down. We’ve both ended up on our butts at least once, much to the amusement of our Ugandan counterparts. And then, there are the children, who follow you yelling, “How are you?” “Give me my money.” You can’t visit more than one community in a day, partly because it takes awhile to get most places, but also, once there, you can spend considerable amounts of time trying to find the people you’re meeting with, visiting people, stopping for obushera – the local fermented millet drink, which usually involves chatting with men from the village comparing Canada and Uganda…or even a haircut for your Ugandan counterpart. Community visit days are some of the days we enjoy most, exploring new places and usually getting an awesome view of the lake.

Other days we spend on the island, doing paperwork, computer work, and making phone calls. This involves bundling up, as both our house and the office are quite chilly, and a fair amount of raging, as the solar power cuts out at least once an hour on a rainy day…and we haven’t seen much sun since the end of November.

At least one day a week, we’re in Kabale town to do our shopping, but also to visit organizations. Up until this past week, we took in an ACTS truck, a beat up white Toyota Hilux, with a squeaking clutch, clanking gear box and just enough power to make it up the mountain. It was great having access to a truck, as many of the people we visit have offices on the edges of town…until you get a flat. The Ugandans insist on changing it for you, despite having very little experience with cars. And how many people does it take to change a tire in Uganda? One driver to make sure the jack isn’t on the suspension, two Ugandans to actually use the tools, and about 15 onlookers to supervise…But now we have no truck so we won’t need to worry about that anymore….

All in all, we’re enjoying what we’re doing here. Funny how ACTS said we would hit our stride just before we left…and how true that’s proving to be. Things are really getting busy and we’re finally figuring out how things work – just in time to be wrapping things up. Currently, we’re trying to fit a few more days into the month of February…we’ll let you know how that goes.