September 8th, 2007 at 21:13 pm by Brandon
Tags: video
Brandon's Posts
8
Sep
2007
Sep
2007
Video: House Tour
Hi everyone, just wanted to post a quick update that I made it home safe and sound last night, despite an unexpected diversion to Nairobi, Kenya on Thursday due to aircraft troubles. I am missing STAO, Uganda, the kids, and the team a great deal. Being home feels good in many ways, but unsettling in others. I think those latter feelings are even stronger knowing that the rest of the team is still there. Still, I’m rejoicing at the unbelievable news of 0 positive HIV results among the STAO kids. Seriously. Amazing.
Kate asked me not to write much here about my experience returning home until the rest of the team does, so I’ll do my best to honor that wish. I will be posting some pictures and videos soon, though!
Sorry about the lack of a blog post yesterday, that was entirely my fault. I had come to Jinja with Pastor Nelson and Pastor David to find the man who built the original STAO Uganda website (www.stao-uganda.org), and it took a lot longer than expected - eating up the time I’d allocated for blogging. Nelson wants me to make some changes to their site, but so far we’ve had some trouble getting the FTP access information, and the hosting service website isn’t terribly helpful. I’ll probably have to figure that out when I get home.
I also spent part of yesterday (as well as today) visiting homes in a village adjacent to Mafubira called Sakabusolo to fill out some of the STAO surveys (”participatory assessments”). I’m really glad I got time to do that (it’s mostly been the healthcare team). It was the best chance I’ve had to meet villagers and widows (some who currently benefit from STAO and some who do not) and hear their stories.
It’s truly sobering to see how so many of these people live. A widow, 6 children, and a mud hut in the middle of nowhere… no access to medicine, with no income or consistent access to food via farming… None speak English, and at least one that we met only spoke Swahili - creating yet another barrier to her ability to provide for her children in this place. The emotions I feel and intellectual reactions I have are all over the place. Sometimes I think, “there must be a way out of this.” But when you realize the sheer number of people living this way, and you consider the huge imbalance of young people versus old… it starts to feel very hopeless for many of them.
Helplessness is a feeling I’ve had in great abundance the last two days. Ironic, in some way - as our mere presence brings visible, palpable hope to nearly everyone here… even if I myself question what I could possibly do for them.
The notion of a STAO clinic (the driving purpose behind the surveys) is something I’ve really clinged to in response. It is one way in which I think most of the people I met on these visits can really be helped in a significant way. And perhaps with that burden eased, some will be able to lift themselves up, or at least lift up their children - for whom there is always hope.
This should give you an idea of what I was talking about in my last post. It shows the sty yesterday morning (after one day of work). It’s actually finished now (concrete on all the floors, concrete troph and “waste” drain, doors and locks), and Jamie has pictures of that which we’ll try to post soon.
Click for larger version.
Before I came to Uganda, many asked me “What will you be doing there?” Each time I struggled to come up with a succinct answer… instead I would rattle off details about the teams we’re split into, the way in which Tusubira was formed, or my own personal reasons or goals.
After today, I think the right answer was “building.” We’ve done a lot of it since we arrived. We’ve built relationships with orphans, widows, the STAO staff, and their partners. We’ve built friendships, trust, and understanding within the team itself. We’ve also built insect traps, security mechanisms made of coat hangars, and a collection of embarassing dance videos. Today we built in a more traditional sense: We built a pig sty.
A sty? But why?!?
To house STAO’s new pigs of course. You see, my team here is focused on sustainable income projects for STAO. One such project is a “pigery” - which was proposed / endorsed by Pastor David. David recently joined the STAO board of directors, although his main occupation is running a different organization called Father’s Divine Love Ministries. They have two orphanages and work in a very similar way to STAO, but they are larger and more established. FDLM has a pigery as one of their main sources of income, and so STAO is going to try and emulate their success. The pigs themselves are being donated by the STAO-Norway team (a group from Norway that functions similarly to Tusubira). They are buying them from FDLM, and giving them to STAO. However, before they can do that, they need a place to put them, and STAO-Norway didn’t want to donate the resources or labor to build a sty. So that’s where we came in.
Yesterday Sam, Jamie, and I headed into Jinja with Pastor Nelson and purchased all the supplies we would need. We would have started the work, but it began to rain and we barely got the cement inside one of the neighboring widow’s mud hut before it started coming down. It was also already around 4pm, as we spent most of the day haggling, buying, retrieving funds from the bank, arranging delivery, and loading/unloading supplies.
This morning, after a breakfast of fried Casava (much like large french fries) and Chipote (a fried bread tortilla sort of thing) with peanut butter which Shawna and I retrieved while the others got ready for the day, we headed to STAO to begin work. I’m really amazed at how the sty came together. When we arrived, the STAO volunteers and one professional builder had already laid poles in the ground with cement, and started hammering the wooden planks that would make up the walls in place. Very quickly we had most of the walls attached, and began tackling the poles that will support the roof. At one point we ran out of wood, so Sam and I headed into town to get more. But Jamie (the muzungu construction machine) and the others kept working and got some of the cement flooring done. It’s really impressive progress, and though we had to break from both exhaustion and the coming rain, we are confident it will be completed tomorrow in time for the Norway team to buy the pigs when they come back from their safari on Saturday.
Even so, I think we won’t stop building. The healthcare team is building relationships with villagers in Mafubira and two other villages. They’re also building a catalog of data about them, which Dale is using to plot various correlations and statistics using his wizardy (and nifty software program). The education team is building on the childrens’ existing English expertise, and helping out headmaster Festo. Meanwhile we’re all building experiences, images, and memories that will stay with us through the rest of our lives.
Here are some pictures that Jamie took today while we were at STAO handing out the clothes you donated to the orphans. Click for larger versions.
Danielle w/ STAO kids
Dale w/ more kids
Kids lined up to pick out donated clothes
Pastor Nelson (founder of STAO)
And here’s one from yesterday of me with Shemelia, who has been cooking us wonderful dinners, at Itanda Falls.
On Sunday night we packed most of the amazing donations we received into boxes for transport as our checked baggage.
Some items stood out a bit more than others… like the book on gynecology, or this:
Click here to read more about Jinja (the town about two miles from where we’ll be).
I can’t believe our trip is only three weeks away! I’ve been bouncing between all sorts of excitement and anxiety, but that’s changing. As of today the last two items on my checklist of major to-dos are finally done. First, this morning I received my VISA for the trip. Second, about 46 minutes ago I took the last of my four Typhoid immunization pills. I’m counting the minutes since you’re supposed to wait an hour before eating anything after taking it, and I’m getting pretty hungry 
I also got this blog’s infrastructure set up at last, and will be setting up the rest of the team to start posting in a day or two. So subscribe to our RSS feed or check back often!
