The Long Orientation

Welcome to my blog! This is officially my first blog. So if you have any real issues with this posting, please attribute my errors to my inexperience.

It's been a long week.

On monday I met up with six of my fellow ACTS team members at Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal. In a hopefully non-prescient act, one of our team members ended up taking the Tsawwassen ferry to Duke Point, (which is nominally in Nanaimo, but effectively the same as flying into Abbotsford when you think you're going to YVR). The van designated to pick us up arrived ~30 minutes late, thus preparing us, in a small way, for the speed of how things happen in Africa.

We arrived to our hostel where we met up with the remainder of the team members. A total of 13 us in total will be flying over. The group is broken down as follows:

- 4 engineers (four of the five guys in the group)
- 1 AIDS/HIV officer (mainly education facilitator)
- 2 water quality officers (water quality assessment/testing)
- 1 camp administrator/camp mom/making sure everything runs
- 1 program manager (Richard Roberts)
- 2 agri-forestry officers
- 2 leadership discipleship trainers (reverend and his wife)

The last two volunteers will be educating and training potential ministers in Uganda and are the only overt evidence that this is an inter-denominational faith-based organization. However, due to strict atheistic guidelines, ACTS can't have any religious on their CIDA-funded projects and so the reverend and his wife will be volunteering in another part of the country.

Tuesday and wednesday were spent with ACTS-centered orientation, with the returning interns from last year giving us their opinions and ACTS-management giving us their advice and the viewing lots and lots of slides. We also received a very thorough health briefing which freaked/grossed most of us out for example the Bot fly which lays its eggs under your skin - yum.

However, most importantly, I was finally given a proper briefing with charts, slide and most importantly spreadsheets. How I love a good spreadsheet! We also received handover reports from last year's staff who know exactly what kind of a situation we'll be going into because they had to go through it themselves.

My job is now almost too clearly defined to the point that is seems almost daunting. I'll initially be helping our civil engineer put together a detailed design for the pipeline that will be built this year. And then I'll be joining the roving team searching for new water sources and assessing whether they would be suitable for a future CIDA-funded, ACTS managed project, and then completing a preliminary design for these future projects. In essence, I'll be doing exactly what I was itching to do; using my existing environmental skills as well honing my water transmission design skills.

After that we all had a renewed sense of purpose and were starting to get psyched. Then we had two days of cultural sensitivity training. Good information, but by this time we were starting to go into information overload. One interesting fact I learned was that the area we're going into was formerly the Ankole Kingdom. The Ankole were (and still are) divided into two types of people, the Bahima and the Bairu; the Bahima were the pastorilists and led a nomadic life following their cattle. The Bairu were farmers and therefore led a more stationary existence. For those familiar with the Rwandan genocide, this is eerily similar to the Tutsis and Hutus. In fact apparently the relationship is similar but on far lower scale, the Bairu refer to the Bahimas as tall, beautiful and dumb and the Bahima consider themselves slightly superior to the Bairu. However, apparently the animosity apparently does not seem to extend beyond this simple level.

The orientation finished last night, at which point we had to pack up and load all of our stuff into a plane for an early morning flight. We'll be following our luggage today on the afternoon flight from Comox to Vancouver, and then waiting for 5 hrs in YVR for our BA flight tonight.

Now we're itching to get going and start work, but apparently we've got another week of orientation in Africa that we'll have to go through. But once we've done that, hopefully we'll start building something. It may be a latrine, but at least it'll be something.