America

Yesterday, I drank tap water, and that can only mean one thing - I'm back in the US.

Right now I'm just trying to catch up with everything that piled up during our last busy week and trip to Murchison Falls, but I will be making at least two more posts about our trip and the people I've been with this summer, and I'll get my film developed soon, so there will be pictures (Yay!).

Life is good.

I love food.

It's a funny thing that we expect foreign countries to be very different and exotic, but when it comes down to it, I do a lot of the same things I did back home. I still sleep, I still do work, and (most importantly) I still eat. The difference, I suppose, lies in what I eat, although that isn't always different.

In the first week we were in Kampala, we went out to eat a lot. Kampala is a reasonably modern city, so they have the typical range of restaurants, from Italian, to lots of Indian, to Chinese (oddly considered high-class dining here), to basic Continental (burgers and fries). Once we arrived in Kamuli, we had a cook (actually 3 different cooks in a month - long story), who made more traditional African meals, generally consisting of a starchy base like rice, potatoes, matoke (mashed plantains), or casava, and then some sort of a saucy thing to go on top like soupy beans, beef stew, g-nut (basically peanuts) paste, or some other magical sauce. Fresh fruit, like avacados, pineapple, mango, or watermelon made an appearance at most meals.

Unfortunately, we lost our cook due to another long story, so we've been cooking for ourselves for the past month. This isn't a true hardship, but we can't do the awesome sauce thing as well as they can. We also don't always cook African - spaghetti makes pretty frequent appearances (yay for a multitude of fresh tomatoes), stirfry is popular, and I made pancakes two nights ago - that was awesome.

African street food, specifically chapatis deserve a mention. Chapatis are delicious, oily, fried bread discs, that are probably horribly for me, but definitely tasty. Even better, is when you get a Rollex - a chapati wrapped around egg, cabbage, and tomato, cooked in more oil. Yum.

On the road...

Before launching into exact traffic practices in Uganda, I think it would be illuminating to describe the various ways that people get around.

• Walking: Free and a great way to see things.
• Bicycles: Less popular in Kampala, but used both as human transporters and freight vehicles in the countryside. I've see people carrying bushels of corn, desks, and multiple mattresses on various bikes, in addition to the most common freight - 80 Liters of water.
• Boda Bodas: Pretty much motorcycle taxis. One of the more fun (and dangerous) ways to get around, they carry one or two passengers, plus the driver. The drivers are known to weave through heavy traffic and hop onto sidewalks occasionally.
• Special Hires: What Americans call a taxi. More expensive than Bodas, but cost competitive if you fit 5 passengers in. I guess you're paying for the beauty that is a steel roll cage.
• Minibuses: What Ugandas call a taxi. 14 passenger vans that drive predetermined routes, both inside of cities and between them. The cheapest way to travel, but also the least comfortable, especially outside of Kampala, where they squeeze 19 people in and there's a 50/50 chance that you'll be riding with a chicken that someone has brought along.
• Freight Trucks: There is almost no rail infrastructure in Uganda, so all freight travels over land. In addition to huge trucks carrying freight and oil around, there are also smaller trucks full of sand, bricks, bananas, chickens, and more.
• Private vehicles: As anywhere, some people in Uganda own cars, motorcycles, trucks, etc.

While I'm sure that there are the standard set of traffic laws in Uganda, they don't seem to be heavily enforced; instead, right of way seems to be determined by the size of your vehicle, although a group of small vehicles can occasionally win against a larger one (for instance, five of us walking together can probably intimidate a Boda Boda, but no promises).

The horn isn't used just to express frustration and hatred here. Instead, it's a way of announcing your presence to everyone in the area, and a notice to smaller vehicles that they should get out of your way.

Main roads between towns and a good part of city roads are paved, but everything else is dirt. Potholes, ruts, rocks, and bumps happen, but drivers compensate pretty well by using as much of the road as possible ("drive on the left" only applies when there's another vehicle using that part of the road).

Speed bumps are plentiful here, and they aren't the little bumps that I'm used to. Either they put 4 bumps next to each other, each about half the size of an American speed bump, or the bump is two or three times larger, and called a "Speed Hump."

My favorite Uganda trip was on top of a truck carrying a load of sand and firewood. As I was walking along the road toward home from our biogas site, a truck passed me, then stopped, and an arm out the window pointed to the top of truck, where two people were already sitting. I made the split second "why not?" decision, and climbed up. Aside from two low-hang branches, riding about 4 meters in the air is a bunch of fun - there's a great view, and being jostled around keeps it exciting. At one point, we stopped to unload the firewood, so I helped, and then we took pictures and exchanged contact information. I've promised to e-mail Eria (the driver) pictures after I get home. Ugandans are friendly.

Travel, itself, is an adventure.

Biogas

Or "What I'm Actually Doing With My Summer"

Biogas is an renewable fuel source (mostly methane) that comes from anaerobic decomposition of waste materials; in our case, this waste is cow manure, but most organic trash works too. If purified enough, it can be used just like natural gas, but this level of scrubbing is usually only done for large installations. For our project, we're just using the gas as it is produced.

Our project is the construction of a small biogas system for a single home in a rural village. This system consists of the digester (where the manure sits to decompose), and the usage system (piping and a stove). The digester itself is dome topped cylinder with a volume of 3 cubic meters with a mixing chamber/inlet on one side and the outlet on the other (once digested, the cow manure makes excellent fertilizer). Most of these structures are brick and mortar, sealed with more mortar and possibly lime. We purchased a bunsen burner and built a stove around it, in a local, fuel-saving style. Unfortunately, we have to wait another 4 weeks or so until we can test the stove as the digester has to vent out all of the air first, and then we have to let the pressure build up for a week or two.

Most of the design work on the digester component was done before I arrived by a student from Iowa State University and another from Makerere University (in Kampala). Megan and I have handled a lot of the piping and stove design and construction ourselves, though.

My great hope right now is that I get to see a biogas flame before I leave Uganda; we'll see.

Feel free to ask any questions through comments or e-mail; I'll try to answer them here.

More about biogas:

• Biogas on Wikipedia (of course)
• A complete guide to biogas

Kampala

After being out of the big city for a month, it's good to come back and visit for a few reasons. These reasons are:

• Meat
• Dairy
• Entertainment

Meat we took care of on Friday night with a visit to La Petit Bistro, reportedly the home of the best steaks in Kampala. After eating that chunk of meat (along with some roast potatoes), I'm willing to agree.

Dairy we took care of last night by buying 5 chunks of cheese, totaling 1.25 kg, 3 loaves of bread, and 4 Liters of icecream, then eating most of it for dinner and finishing the rest for breakfast this morning.

Entertainment we tackled both nights by going to a nightclub on Friday and watching Love, Actually last night. The mayor of Atlanta happened to be at the same nightclub (and got up on stage and sung some Ray Charles very well), so we introduced ourselves. He managed to remember that Richmond recently hired Atlanta's chief of police, which I barely did, but I suppose it is more his business than mine. The funny part of this story is that after we introduced ourselves and sat back down, he went back up on stage, got the mic, asked us to come out for everyone to see, and complimented our work, while mentioning the US mayors' commitment to sustainable development. Oh well, what's a little more attention?

Mzungu!

Uganda, being in Eastern Africa, is populated mostly by people with very dark skin. Being as pasty white as myself and my fellow SEED volunteers makes one stand out. I've begun to feel that being white in Uganda is the same as being the star of a children's TV show in America. The reason for this comparison? Everywhere we go, children stop whatever they're doing as soon as they see us. At this point, some of them run or walk in our direction, others don't, but they all start talking to us, usually starting with a nice, hearty "Mzungu!" The English that most young Ugandan children know is limited to "Hi," "Hello," "How are you?" and "Fine", so our conversations are usually short, but it's nice to know that they really care how we're doing.

Alternately, Ryan jokingly points to these conversations as proof that African children aren't really as bad off as we expect. Everytime we ask them how they are, their only reply is "I'm fine."

Oh, Mzungu is Swahili for white person.

Excitment!

While our true purpose in Uganda is to save the world, we've been doing a good job of playing tourists on the weekends. Two weekends ago we went White Water Rafting on the Nile, and we visited Sipi Falls this past weekend.

Rafting was pretty awesome. While a reasonably safe activity (I promise, really), we managed to flip our raft twice and bounce five other people out at various points. Both of the other rafts flipped before us, which is especially funny considering the fact that they didn't really want to flip, and we were all for it. The 3 Class 5s and 4 or 5 Class 4s made for a wonderful day; I still can't get over how much water there is flowing down the Nile.

Also great was the Adrift campsite (Adrift being the rafting company). They have an open air bar/lounge about 100 feet above the Nile, overlooking the first rapid (a mere class 2). At night, I could see both the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper from the balcony - that's just cool.

As cool as that view was, our campsite at Sipi Falls probably beats it. The Crow's Nest overlooks the valley that the Sipi Falls run into. There are three main drops, with the largest being 90 meters (technically speaking, that's a long way down). We hired a guide who showed us around, taking us to two caves in addition to visiting the bottom of an 80m drop (quite misty).

It's easy to marvel at how much tourism potential there is for Uganda, especially when one realizes that my bill for staying in a dorm bed and eating dinner at the Crow's Nest came to about $10 US. Awesome.

Future tourist plans include backpacking, visiting a chimpaneze sancuary on an island in Lake Victoria, and possibly visiting Kenya to see the Buffalo migrations.

In related news, tourists get the best toilets and hot showers.

Kamuli and Power

Well, we made it to Kamuli Town (in the Kamuli District, oddly enough), on Monday. So far, most of our time has been spent working on a biogas digester, but I'll write more about that later. Right now, I want to talk about power.

The main source of power in Uganda is a hydro electric dam on the Nile River (which I have now touched) near Lake Victoria (which I have also touched). This dam was constructed a while ago (1954). And provided plenty of power back in the day. Lately, however, an increase in the wealth of the country has lead to more people utilizing electricity. While this is progress, they have exceeded the dam's capacity. This situation isn't helped by a reduction in the output of the dam due to falling water levels in the lake. Because of this, power rationing (aka load shedding) is in effect throughout the country, so power just goes off every now and then (an especially large problem as the World Cup is currently under way. Nope, not kidding; there was special power saving advice in the paper for use while games are on).

To make up for this, many houses and businesses have purchased emergency generators, which probably make up the second largest source of power in Uganda (and provide un-interupted World Cup viewing if you go to the Country Club (not really a CC, it's just the name) in Kamuli). There are a number of other power projects underway, including a biomass plant to run off sugar cane waste, more dams, and a biogas plan to run off of Kampala's sewage (quite efficient, really. Gross, but efficient). Once these happen (especially the dams) Uganda should be in much better shape, but until then, power rationing will only get worse.

The distribution system in Uganda is less of the 'grid' that is typically referred to in America and more of a spanning tree. There's often only one line running from Jinja to a given location (this is probably partly due to the centralized location of their generation). When we arrived in Kamuli, there hadn't been power for 2 days due to a downed line, and it didn't come back until they had it fixed, another 2 days later. Makes Dominion/NSTAR/Power company of your choice seem speedy. Even more fun, is that it's very possible that this entire 60 km run isn't high voltage (Just the standard 240V, 50Hz that most of the world knows and loves).

Most people in urbanized areas have good access to the electricity, but in rural areas things get hairy. It appears that people are basically responsible for getting the lines to their house, and as it costs ~$150 per power pole, not to mention wire and labor, this is completely out of reach of pretty much everyone who doesn't live in a city or town (aka, farmers). On the other had, even if these people could get the power to their house, they may not be able to afford the appliances that use it or the electricity itself. Those who do have power are billed by the kilowatt-hour, just like everywhere else, but I don't know the rate.

Overall, Uganda's power situation is reasonable if you live somewhere near a line and don't rely on power for your business. For those who do, though, they lose about 90 business days a year to power outages. In the future (5ish years), the generation problem may be overcome, but full access may take a while.

I may (definitely?) have some of my facts wrong, so feel free to post corrective comments and I'll try to make this truthful.

General, mostly boring, Stuff

So, let's try this again.

I am currently sitting in an internet cafe on the campus of Makerere University, which is in Kampala. I'm also staying at MU in an apartment with Ryan and Natasha (ESW SEED people), while Steven and Ed (Iowa State University ESW people) stay in an apartment above us. Caroline, a Canadian in the same building and working with the Ugandan AIDS Commission (or something like that), hangs out with us a decent amount. There are also 3 Makerere University students that we're working with on our projects, being Steven, Thomas, and Tony. They're fun.

So far, most of our working time has been spent meeting with Makerere Faculty and our students to refine project goals and figure out what we're going to do in the field (the Kamuli District), starting on Monday.

Food so far has been pretty simple stuff for breakfast and lunch, and eating out in the dinner. I would definitely go for more complicated cookery, but our stove burners don't seem to be capable of boiling water, which is very sad.

In the future, I hope to write exciting topical posts about things like Getting Around, Food, Infrastructure, Labor, Security, and Shopping, but we'll see.

Have fun all!

Uganda!

Arg, internet keeps eating posts, so I'll keep it short for now.

I am alive and well in Kampala. The city is decent and busy, and my fellow students are fun.

I hope that everyone else is well.
-Simon