Archive for the ‘Income Generation’ Category
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.
