Comox to Mbrarara

The fight from Comox to YVR was uneventful, and the brief layover was quite pleasant. The flight from Vancouver to London was long, but at least I got to watch Kung Fu Panda and Ironman. I also read further a cultural sensitivity book called "African Friends and Money Matters", which I don't recommend. It seems to be completely based on anecdotes and written in a slightly patronising manner. Perhaps I'm missing the point. Either way, a far better book that has helped give me an african perspective is called Under the African Sun, written by a polish reporter who moved to Africa in the mid 1950s. Still anecdotes, but at least this time written from an obviously western point of view and with a historical context. London to Entebbe was equally uneventful except that we lost two crucial bags. They're still AWOL, but hopefully we'll see them soon enough.

Arrived in Kampala at around 10am monday morning and once we'd settled into our guest house, we set out for the city center. Wes and I will be on the roving team, and responsible for finding new sources and villages that need protected water. So we tried to find some maps of the areas we'll be going to. Absolutely useless. We found maps designed to teach kids about the district (similar to our provinces), that had more detail than our road maps, but nowhere near the detail we would like. It's starting to become apparent why previous roving teams used hand drawn maps.

Tuesday headed out to Mbrarara and for the second time in my life I've crossed the equator. Pretty cool, and fun little experiments showing the water going back and forth, but the highlight was playing soccer with the kids. I'm looking forward to more of that.

These last three days have been spent in language training in the morning and trying to get prepped for heading out into the field in the afternoon. We plan on heading out to the previously installed water project tomorrow morning and spending a week there to learn how it was installed, follow up on how well it's working and learn from the people it's serving what could have been done differently. The following week we're scheduled to head to the new camp and help the engineers to do a detailed design on the pipeline that's to be installed this year and help build the camp we'll be living in.

I'm anxious to actually start doing some work, but as I'm rapidly learning, things work slowly in Uganda.

I may be out of internet range for the month either in the camp or roving, so don't be alarmed if I don't have an update for a while.

All the best,

mike