3 Flights 8 Hours in a Car and 1 Full Night Later

Hello Everyone,

I have finally made it to my home for the next 2 months; Liratown, Uganda. We left Monday night and got here late Thursday night and I am starting to acclimate to my new surroundings fairly well. It certainly is a world away from what I am comfortable with though. As we were flying into Uganda from one of our connecting flights from Amsterdam the most noticeable difference between Entebbe airport and any other airport I have been to is how dark it was. I had no idea we were about to land apart from eventually seeing the ground from the flash of the airplane’s lights. There was no surrounding towns or cities and the entire ground just seemed pitch dark. Starting out of the window of the plane at the floodlights that lit the tarmac it looked like it was raining upwards and it was difficult for me to stomach the realization that it was actually the amount of bugs attracted to the light. After going thru customs we headed to our hotel for Wednesday night prepared to embark to Lira the next day. Thursday we headed for the capital Kampala and spent a few hours there packing the truck and meeting with a former Oregon student who we will be staying with while we are in Lira. The drive was only a few hundred kilometers but ended up taking us nearly 7 hours or so as the “highway” is not very developed. Ugandan logic is that when a road is under-construction (which from what I have seen, 90% are but no one is working on them) they build make-shift speed-bumps from gravel for the entire length of the construction zone. This is absolute hell as the construction zones can vary in length to the point where you have non-stop speed-bumps every 40 feet or so for nearly 25-30 minutes. After finally making it through all the bumps and pot-hole filled roads we finally made it to the north. Lira is the 3^rd largest city in Uganda and has a bit of an urban sprawl with the town as the center of trade and there being a large number of outlaying villages. Today (Friday) we were able to start out work observing the International Lifeline Fund’s stove project and look for areas where our microloans will be effective. We traveled to a factory/distribution center for their basic rocket stoves which are a circle of bricks that are bound by metal wire. Today was the first demonstration for the women from a near-by village on how effective these stoves can be and at the end they were given one to take home. There were nearly 300 women that showed up, exceeding the ILF’s estimates by over 100, proving the massive demand for these stoves. The demonstration showed how to use these pieces in combination with a few clay pieces and some mud to create a stove that significantly decreases the amount of wood needed to cook (it works like an oven where much of the heat is kept within the stove by the mud; here in Africa this is a technological breakthrough). This is very important to many of the Ugandan woman because with rising food prices they have had to decrease consumption and a saving on the money spent on wood would be massive for these families. It is also safer because what many Ugandan woman use to cook now is a simple open fire that is dangerous for children and has a great impact on the amount of carbon that is put into the atmosphere through its ineffectiveness with burning wood. The next few days we are going to be asking a lot of questions to the main people in this stove project to find ways where Ugandans can find employment while increasing the size of the distribution network for these important stoves. From what I hear it is very tough to find a win-win situation around here that doesn’t involve killing someone (I guess it’s a win-win depending on who you ask) but we are hoping that these loans can decrease the massive unemployment rates and increase the number of stoves in use. The next few days we should get a better idea of how feasible this is.