50 Years of Peace Corps in Uganda

Ambassador DeLisi speaking about Peace Corps' 50 years in Uganda

This week our Peace Corps post celebrated 50 years in country. That's right, Peace Corps has been working in Uganda since 1964, with a few hiccups. Volunteers were evacuated in 1971 due to an unstable political climate (this guy) and again in 1999 due to major security threats. We had a regional celebration down here in Kisoro, or what I like to call Uganda's back pocket. 

About 50 volunteers from the southwest and western regions came down for the event. Our volunteers organized an awesome event, including a visit from the US Ambassador to Uganda, Scott DeLisi, and other prominent community figures. A highlight of the day was going to Mutolere Secondary School with our friend Carl, who was a Peace Corps volunteer back in 1970-71. This was his first time returning to his school where he taught over 40 years ago. He encountered his old colleagues and students, and saw his old stomping grounds. Ambassador DeLisi read a story to some primary school students and planted some tree seedlings at the school.
Afterwards, we went to Virunga Engineering Works' workshop to see the expanded workshop and see how the improved cookstoves are manufactured. Jim and Bruce (VEW's new Peace Corps volunteer) talked about how many hectares of forest is saved a year using this technology in large-scale cooking operations, such as schools and refugee centers. Peace Corps Volunteers at Virunga Engineering have worked with over 20 schools in the last year, saving the schools, on average, 1.5 million shillings per term and preserving about 476 hectares of forest or the equivalent of an area 1.5 times the size of New York’s Central Park. Check out my post here for more information on VEW.
Next we headed to Kisoro's Tourist Hotel for speeches and entertainment. We had a performance by some local secondary school students who performed some songs and local Bufumbira dancing. We heard from the LC5 Chairman and Ambassador DeLisi, who spoke about Peace Corps 50 years in Uganda and the numerous projects that we've done as volunteers. He gave an awesome shout-out to Jim and Bruce working at Virunga Engineering Works, as well as projects like Bwindi's gorilla trekking and Bukhonzo joint coffee co-op and youth camp this August.
We also welcomed our new Volunteers for our ritual Welcome Weekend for newly sworn-in Volunteers in the region. We celebrated with a barbecue down at Lake Mutanda.

Max Gold talking about the VEW cookstove project

Audrey reading to a group of students at St. George primary school

David from Nyanz'ibiri (The Cave) with his new gorilla!

Touring the VEW workshop

Ambassador DeLisi and his wife picking out their gorillas!

Loucine, Audrey and PCV Carl at his old school Mutolere

Sheba

Leija and me!

Hikers climbing to the top of the crater

Mt. Mukaino in Congo at dusk (photos by Jim Tanton)

Ensenine Everywhere

Rainy season in Kisoro

Rainy season has come early this year. The locals tell me each year that the short rains come on August 15th, on the dot. This held true for last year when we finally got some much-needed rain in mid-August after months of drought, but nowadays with climate change, the weather is hard to predict. The heavy rains started in mid-July, and along with the rain comes grasshoppers! Some days it feels like a plague of locusts has descended on us, with grasshoppers spinning in the air and covering every inch of the ground. The local word for grasshopper is ensenine [en-SEN-ni-nay], and the local delicacy is to fry 'em up and eat them like chips. They're delicious, so long as you remember to break off the antennae. They taste a bit like crunchy fried potato chips.
In order to catch as many ensenine as possible, all the locals will set up giant flood lamps to attract as many grasshoppers as possible, and then catch them with their hands.
Rainy season has also brought flowering crops, including beans, sorghum and potatoes. Kisoro is so unbelievable green this time of year that it feels like everything is in Technicolor. In my village, everyone is out digging in their fields, preparing them for planting season.

Virunga volcano range

In other news, I'm a proper farm girl now! Last week, Justice called me down to the cow pen to see a newborn that had just been born that morning. An hour later, another female went into labor and I got to help deliver the calf! Now Justice has three newborns, which I've named Samson, Chester and Lola, who I helped deliver. I brought Jim down the following morning so he could practice milking one of the cows, which was highly entertaining.

Jim and I also went for a visit with Peace and Golden, a lovely family who live in Bukinda. We spent the afternoon drinking tea, eating ensenine, and talking about local and American politics.
My blog has been nominated for Peace Corps' Blog It Home competition. Please vote for my blog by clicking "Like" here. Top winners of the contest get a trip to Washington, D.C. Thanks for the support everyone!

Plague of the locusts

Flood-lamps are used to catch the grasshoppers

Ensenine

The whole town was out tonight!

Ensenine

Lake Mutanda

Looking at Mt. Muhuvura and Mgahinga from Mt. Sabinyo

Happy Birthday, America

Happy 4th of July from Bukinda!

It seems strange that a year has gone by since our Fourth of July party that we hosted last year, with our Ugandan neighbors at the PTC. This year I had vowed to have a proper celebration with the teachers at my school. My counterpart Bright suggested we make it a little more local by serving African milk tea (black tea in hot milk) rather than iced tea (minus the ice…). So we had homemade banana bread, cookies, milk tea and boiled sweet potatoes for our party. It was America's birthday in a Uganda-meets-USA style. 

I wrote the lyrics to the national anthem on the blackboard so the teachers could follow along, asking questions like "What does 'ramparts' mean?" to which I replied, "No idea!" My favorite part of the party though was when we got everyone up and dancing to American music like "Twist and Shout" and "Born in the USA." I showed the teachers how to "do the twist" and swing dance. We had fun mixing local Bakiga-style dancing with some rockin' moves to old 60s American music. After the party with the teachers, I hightailed it down to Kisoro, where we would celebrate Independence Day with a few fellow PCVs and Ugandan friends. We had a big barbecue at Lake Mutanda, hosted by Sheba. We had a proper grill (made out of an oil drum) to make burgers and franks, chopped up some local potatoes and celery to make potato salad, and pasta salad. We were joined by a few Ugandan friends, Max's guys in the workshop from Rwanda and a few PCVs visiting Kisoro for the first time. We had a dance party to American and Ugandan music, a drumming circle around a big bonfire and some local dancing.

All we were missing were the fireworks!

Showing Paul how to swing dancing

Do the Twist

We're all seeing how low we can go... Frank wins!

Moses and Bright showing their American patriotism

Davis and Constance trying out the banana bread!

Happy Fourth from Lake Mutanda

Burnin' the Midnight Oil

The stoves have arrived! 

After a year in the making, my school finally received two state-of-the-art cookstoves provided by Virunga Engineering Works and funded by PEPFAR. Virunga Engineering Works is a company based in Kisoro, run by our American friend Max Gold, who has designed these fuel-efficient cookstoves. Jim's been working on the project for a year now,  working on obtaining funding so that Peace Corps volunteers can have these stoves installed at their schools across Uganda.

Typical three-stone fire. The pot balances on these 3 stones.

For a little background on cookstoves: a typical Ugandan household will cook on a three-stone fire (a pot balancing on 3 stones) or will have massive 300-liter stoves with the fire beneath and the pot that sits in a cement basin. These systems don't last for very long, as I'm sure you can imagine, with the aluminum pots needing repairs or replacement every 6 months. At my PTC (Primary Teachers' College), the kitchen staff is cooking for 500 people three times a day. That's a lot of people. They cook on giant stoves, mingling (mixing) posho (a cakey substance made from maize flour) and beans for every meal. They used spoons the size of oars to mix the sticky substance in giant vats. The stoves however are in terrible shape; many of them are either in disrepair or are completely out of use, with corrosion on all sides. The metal pipes build on the outside of the building are so corroded that they no longer function, and thick smoke clogs the kitchen all day. It's a pretty grim place to work. Not to mention that many of the staff have their kids around, young children who are breathing in smoke all day. Talk about asthmatics in the making.

The crew outside the kitchen. You can see the walls blackened with soot, the corroded pipes no longer ventilate properly

That's where these new stoves come in. Max has designed them with one important feature: volcanic bricks. The inside of the stove is lined with volcanic bricks, mined around Kisoro and the volcanic Virunga range. The volcanic rock absorbs the heat, making the stove about 70% more efficient than your typical stove. This results in not only less firewood consumed, but no smoke. I learned this week that smoke is a sign of unused fuel, therefore inefficiency. No smoke means that the wood is being burned efficiently. Another advantage is that the school can now start savings millions of shillings every term by purchasing less firewood. The second phase of my project is to reinvest some of that money saved, and have the PTC host a number of workshops on HIV outreach.
My friend Amanda brought her headmaster from Kabale Primary School to see the process of installation since they are also interested in having some cookstoves installed at their school.

On Thursday, the whole VEW crew showed up in their jumpsuits and orange hardhats with the two giant stoves strapped down in the lorry. It took ten (ten!) grown men to carry both the base and the top of the stove off the truck and into the kitchen. They took a few days to do some tests and assessments. They did one interesting test where they compared the efficiency of the new stove to the old one. They weighed two bundles of wood, 25 kg each, and put 40L of water in each pot to see which one would boil faster. Not only did the VEW stove finish 7 minutes faster, but consumed only 11.8kg of wood. The old stove consumed over 30kg of firewood alone. 

Of course, every project has its surprise challenges that arise. Little did I realize that the hardest part would be to get the cooks to actually use the stoves. We can all relate and say that sometimes, we are reluctant to change. Why change what you're doing when it seems to be working, why fix what's not broken? It will be a long time before the cooks feel comfortable using the VEW stoves as their primary cooking source, as I'm starting to understand. The Principal is very supportive and wants to purchase a new round pot that makes it easier for posho mingling. He knows it all won't be effective immediately, that we have to go about it mpola mpola.

It takes this many men to carry just the top part!

The Virunga Engineering Works installation crew

Mingling the imaginary posho

Work hard, play hard 

VEW engineer Max Gold with our school administration, Constance and Javan