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.