Homecoming

I arrived back in Colorado on the night of December 16th, about 40 hours after I left Jinja. I was suprised at how comfortable I felt being back in the U.S. That comfort made me realize I hadn't really been gone all that long. Taking a hot shower and filling my water bottle from an airport drinking fountain were luxuries I'd always taken for granted before.

It's been over a month since I've updated this blog now, and eventhough I am already back at home, I thought I'd complete the story of my last few weeks in Uganda with the posts below just in case anyone out there is still reading and is still interested.

In about two weeks I'll return to class at CU for my 11th and final semester. I'm also going to start building a recumbent tricycle which I've got grand plans to ride from Colorado to the Pacific, over to the Atlantic and then back next summer. Stay tuned...

Murchison Falls National Park

Murchison Falls

My internship with Busoga Trust formally ended at the the of the first week of December. After that I took a few days to travel up to Murchison Falls National Park, the largest national park in Uganda. During my stay in the park, I went on a game drive through African tropical grasslands and saw several large mammals as pictured below. At the end of the game drive we spotted a leopard regally resting high up in the shade of tree. I wasn't able to get any good photos of this big cat, however. In the afternoon I went on a boat trip up the Nile to the base of Murchison Falls. The falls are formed by a narrow cleft in the Rift Valley through which nearly the entire flow of the river is squeezed as it cascades 35 meters down. I hiked around the top of the falls the next day which was truly impressive.

Water Buffalo and Birds

Crocodiles

Murchison Falls from above

Ugandan Thanksgiving

My fellow FSD interns and I, with the help of our Ugandan and Western friends, managed to have a delicious Thanksgiving feast with all the fixings. It was a bit of a challenge to work out all of the logistics of preparing the meal, and the entire time we were cooking we were never sure the whole meal wouldn't be a disaster since not one of us had ever been in charge of preparing an entire turkey dinner before. We had a lot of fun guessing the answers to such questions as "which turkey organ is this, and should we use it to make the broth?", "which hole in this bird do we stuff?", and "how the hell do we carve this thing?"

At one point during the day the power went out which commonly occurs, and for hours at a time, in this corner of the world. Luckily, since our turkey was roasting in an electric oven, the power was gone for only about 15 minutes.

My plate

In the end everything came out spectacularly. Well, maybe all the food wasn't perfect, but we were certainly suprised at how well we did.

Everyone enjoying the meal

MTN Kampala International Marathon

What do red traffic lights mean in Uganda?
Answer: It's time for the marathon!

That was the conversation between my friends and our taxi driver on our way to the start of the MTN Kampala International Marathon the weekend before Thanksgiving as the driver wasted no time even hesitating at red lights.

There were approximately 10,000 people registered for the race, and nearly all of them were running the 10 km distance, including myself. At the start, about 50 people left for the full marathon, followed by about 100 for the half, and then the remaining 9,000 plus participants swarmed the starting line in anticipation for the start of the 10 km race.


Me in a sea of MTN yellow waiting for the race to start

It took some time for this crowd to funnel across the starting line, but after a little while the pack thinned out to a point where one could actually run and I ended up finishing the race in 53 minutes. Not a fast time by any means, but I was pretty happy with my just faster than 9 minutes per mile pace.

Strikes and Gutters

My entire experience here in Uganda has been quite the rollercoaster ride of great days and weeks immediately followed by pretty miserable ones. These highs and lows are common in everyday life of course, but going through it on a different continent has made these emotional swings seem much more extreme. Over time I've been levelling out, and the good days and bad days have become almost as normal as they are at home. In the past few weeks, I've been through a pretty humorous, depending on how you look at it, ride through these good and bad times.

About two weeks ago I succeeded in purchasing a bicycle to cruise around on for the remainder of my time here. Getting back into the saddle of a bicycle, even if it is a rattly, squeaky, really heavy one with only one gearing ratio to choose from and crooked pedals, has made me realize just how much I've been missing that two-wheeled freedom in my life for the last two months. The type of bicycle I bought is known as a boda-boda bicycle here. Boda-boda refers to the bicycles and motorcycles which have an extra seat on the back for carrying passengers. The bodas are a sort of staple mode of short distance transport in this part of Africa. I bought a boda because they're cheaper and I'm able to strap my backpack onto the extra seat to carry it to work when the bags heavily loaded with my brick of a computer and two liters of water.

The above combination ended up leading to what is probably the biggest bummer of my time here. Last Thursday, I had my backpack strapped onto my bike with my computer and two liters of boiled water in my Nalgenes inside. Somehow, as I was riding, one of the water bottles worked its way open dumping an entire liter inside my bag. I didn't realize this until I arrived at my host organization's office and saw my bag dripping. A few expletives came to mind as I thought of how my water bottles were situated right above my computer. The computer was off, but unfortunately the battery was in and fully charged. I've yet to get any sign of life back from the computer, but my camera and papers did dry out nicely. I'm hoping I'll be able to at least salvage data from the hard drive once I get home.

Then, this past Tuesay, I found out the grant I requested to fund the construction of a few BioSand Water filters has been, well, granted! A great success, but with slightly less than three weeks left in my internship now I may not see any filters put into use before I leave. Luckily that's just a small personal sastifaction which may not be granted while the important task of providing the residents of Makooma Community with a way to treat their own drinking water will be accomplished by my host organization even after I'm gone.


Strikes and gutters, dude.

The Biosand Filter

The Biosand filter in action

The sand filters I’m working with here are known as Biosand filters. They could more specifically be described as intermittently operated slow sand filters. The idea behind this technology was developed at the University of Calgary in the early 1990’s as a way of adapting continuous slow sand filtration (used somewhat extensively to treat municipal drinking water in Europe) to be used on a household level. The filters were developed particularly to meet the needs of people living in the rural areas of developing countries. In these areas, centralized water treatment and distribution systems are obviously highly impractical, and will probably remain as such for many years to come. Another fact, which is maybe equally obvious, is that these people living without access to treated water must still be drinking something every day. People die every day from drinking this untreated water. Nearly one in five children in Uganda will die before the age of five from diarrhea caused by drinking unsafe water. Even in the United States, dysentery was a leading cause of death as recently as 100 years ago. For close to 1 billion people, this is still the case.

That’s the depressing information, but here’s something to smile about: the Biosand filter removes 97% of bacteria, over 99.9% of viruses and effectively 100% of parasites from raw waters. In developing communities, the primary water treatment concern is removing these three types of waterborne pathogens. Not only are these filters effective, they are easy to build, use, and maintain. The filters can be constructed and maintained by the local people using only locally available materials. The only cost of the filters is the upfront cost of materials and labor. There are no operation or maintenance costs, and the filters can last for years. Biosand filters introduced in Nicaragua were found to still be functioning in excellent conditions after eight years. For the people drinking dirty water everyday, the ability for them to treat their own water in their own homes would invaluable, and the potential for the Biosand filter to provide to this ability is enormous.

The goal of my project is to introduce at least four Biosand filters in Makooma Community. Hopefully, this introduction will stimulate much interest in the filters. I’m applying for a grant to fund the construction of these four filters including the manufacture of the steel formwork needed to cast the concrete filter cases. Once this formwork is obtained, many filters may be constructed with the only expense being a small amount of concrete, sand, and gravel.

I now have only five weeks left with Busoga Trust, so the remainder of my time is going to be quite busy with the construction of these four filters after my grant proposal is accepted for funding. I’ll probably be spending much time in the field, in Makooma, which I’m very excited about. During my previous two visits to this community, I got to spend a little time with some of the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. They shared jyak fruit with me and we chewed on sugar cane, ruminating on possible solutions to their water quality problems.

On a side note: during my most recent visit to Makooma, I saw a fisherman carting the biggest fish I’ve ever off to the market on the back of his bicycle. It was a Nile Perch, fresh from Lake Victoria, and must have been close to 5 feet long!

Internship Project - The Beginning

The project that I’m working on during my internship with Busoga Trust has really started rolling in the last two weeks. On the 13th, I visited, Makooma Community, the village which will hopefully be the first of many to benefit from the sand filters with which I’m working. The objective of this visit was to collect water samples from the community source to be filtered in order to measure how well the filter would treat this water. We needed to gather about eight jerry cans of water, each with a capacity of 20 liters. A jerry can is a plastic container very similar to the spare fuel cans you might see on Jeeps, Land Rovers, and the like.

Makooma Community Water Source

It was very hard for me to imagine living off the water source we saw in this village. It was basically just a swampy area near the community resident’s homes. The water there was stagnant, muddy, and I could only imagine how sick I would become if I drank even a cup of it. The local children were incredibly excited to see us, and were very eager to fill the jerry cans for us. They were practically fighting over them. To fill the jerry cans, the children waded out into the water, which was maybe just over knee deep on them, to an area where the water was supposedly somewhat cleaner. Once the jerry cans were full, the children were equally excited to carry them the approximately 200 meters back to our truck. Considering that 20 liters of water weighs 20 kg (44 lbs), and that these kids were probably no more than 8 years old, I was impressed. They weren’t able to lift the full jerry cans high enough to put them on their heads, but once we helped them get the cans onto their heads, they walked on back to our truck without seeming to struggle too much. After seeing the water which these people live with everyday, I appreciated the water which was in my trusty Nalgene, and the water with which I showered that evening like never before.

The enthusiastic volunteer water samplers