Friday, June 4th
By: Christen Soden
Uganda is the same as it was last year when I was on this adventure. However, the experiences now are either dulled or accentuated. I no longer wake up every morning with the wonder of being in Africa. Instead, it is another work day, with a full itinerary planned and things to do. The excitement is still there, but not everything is a new experience. I have already tried posha and atapa, driven on the brutal country roads, seen the pelting rain– so severe it hurts your skin and blinds your vision–, and lived amongst and worked with the warmest people in the world. These things are the reasons why I came back in the first place.
But today it is the renewed vitality of the Teso region that makes me wonder. It is true that virtually all our close friends from last year are or have recently been sick. Edward has had a long-running case of malaria that is only now getting better. He is Pilgrim’s scientific researcher and the staff member tasked to work most directly with us. He is quite the jokester and political officianado, making for excellent conversation. Grace, the owner of Golden Arch Guesthouse– where we stay when we are in Soroti– has also had a string of consistent and severe bouts of malaria, which enduced her to cut off all her hair “like a schoolgirl.” Through that Grace was able to carry out her responsibilities, even while devouring books per normal, and filling the house with her sweet giggle. Finally, Rita, the director of Pilgrim’s Agricultural Development Program, has burst vericous veins in her legs and is walking with a limp and a bandage. Even then, Rita has come out to the field with us several times, gritting through the pain. Instead of a grimace, she wears her sweet smile, as warm as the Ugandan sunshine, while familiarizing us with Teso life.
Rita’s vericous veins act up when she gets caught in heavy rains. The malaria rate increases with the mosquito count when there is plenty of standing water. Despite these drawbacks, a season of heavy rain is also a blessing. Upon a second glance, the Teso landscape is radically different from last year.
This year there is a harvest. This year there are cattle. The rumors of famine from last year are gone. There will be two full harvests, instead of the measly one of last year. The crops have finally risen far above the ground, and I am surprised to have to struggle to see through fields of maze, millet, and sugarcane. I had no idea that Teso’s staple food– cassava– was supposed to be a middling-height tree instead of a low shrub.
The reappearance of cattle is especially significant. The Teso have a cattle culture. As wealth increases, they buy more cattle to store and express that wealth. Today, fat, healthy cows and bulls are grazed in herds along country roads by young boys and old men in areas where we had not seen them last year.
An American woman, Phyllis, who works as an assistant headmaster at the Pilgrim-run Soroti Secondary Municipal School (or Beacon of Hope College), has said that the return rate of the students to school after their vacation break has been unusually quick and high. An indirect benefit of the rain and a direct benefit of good crops. Every blessing is not without a drawback however. The students who have not returned to school are likely helping their parents recover from the floods caused by the heavy rains in some areas, which wiped out crops.
But overall, spirits were high as we began our work in the rural communities of Usuk and Orungo. We have many goals concerning the multi-functional platforms for this trip. Not only will we be installing micro-grids to provide power and battery-charging services to the coops, but we will also be carrying out quantitative and qualitative assessments of the performance of the currently installed MFPs over the past year. Although our project is mechanized, and may thereby seem disconnected from the natural element of rain, its success actually hinges directly on the prevalence of rainfall.
Pilgrim had previously notified us that the villagers had not been operating the MFP in Usuk. We were unsure as to what could be the reason for this. On Thursday, Talia and I did the first qualitative assessment at the Usuk MFP site by interviewing members of the coop using strategically-targeted survey questions that covered everything from the cultivation of jatropha, to the involvement of different social groups (like women and children), to their outlook on the future of the project. In these conversations we found out that the villagers stopped operation of the MFP because there were no crops to process due to the poor rains and harvests. Even the competitor millers in the area had no crops to process. Apparently, Katakwi, the district within which Usuk lies, was one of the worst hit by food shortages last year. As an American working with Pilgrim told me last year, “farming that depends on weather is not farming– it’s gambling.”
Although this situation brings up the question of food security as a factor in our project, it is encouraging to see that the MFP was succeeding of its own accord prior to these external factors. In addition, the villagers were incredibly excited for the harvest and the prospects for the engine this year because of the successful harvests. I’m excited as well! I feel the hope in the air in a way that is new in my experiences of Uganda.
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