Uganda Update from DJ--western Uganda trip continued

Saturday, June 16, 2007
As we arrived back at the Source Café in Jinja on Thursday afternoon, I told M, S&L that one of my main goals for the trip had just been reached—to get everyone safely back from our road trip across Uganda. The roads are, in many places, full of potholes, and a driver has to be aware of animals and people on and very near the road much of the time, as well as the significant volume of bicycle and motorcycle traffic. Also, getting from inner Kampala to Jinja was a bit less direct than I had expected. Mark Long gave me some direction to the Jinja Road, but something was lost in the transmission and we wandered a bit, thankfully in the right general direction, and made it to Jinja in a little over two hours.

It was good to be back at Irene’s and not in a hotel and the feeling seemed to be shared by everyone. On Friday we slept in and went into town close to 10 am. The road is under “improvement” all the time, it seems, and so detours through some back roads from Iganga Rd to Kimuli Rd where Irene lives. It seems to be a real treat for the families living on those roads to have so much more traffic and to see so many more strange people like us in their neighborhoods, despite the heavy coat of red dust left on their houses, children and laundry drying on the bushes.

I’ve jumped over about five full days, our last day in Ft. Portal on Saturday, June 9 to our return to Jinja on Thursday, June 14. In that span of time we visited with several business owners, including Teddy who runs a bicycle parts business in a local market, and Faith, who buys whole grain and mills corn, rice, and barley into flour. They are friends of Ronald who he thinks are good loan prospects. In discussing Teddy’s business, we noted that her profit margins are lower than we’d expected. She might buy a bicycle for 90,000UGS and sell for only 100,000UGS, or 110,000 on a good day, and on average sells one every two weeks. We asked about why she chose that business (because her husband runs another bicycle shop elsewhere in town) and if there are more profits selling clothing or general merchandise (she doesn’t think so). She says there is more money in motorcycles and parts but the required investment is great. Faith is interested in a loan for a machine that will grind peanuts, or g-nuts as they’re known here (for “ground nuts” since they grow underground). G-nuts, always in the small “Spanish peanut” variety, are very common and usually eaten with milk tea as a snack or at “tea time” and also to make a sauce or gravy commonly used with matooke or potatoes. There is a significant market for ground peanuts. She also noted that a vehicle would enable her to buy directly from the farmers in the villages and so earn higher margins. With regard to transport costs, fuel is much more expensive than in the States, with gasoline selling for about 2,200UGS per liter, or roughly $5 per gallon.

We visited another woman who makes baskets to videotape the weaving process, and bought several of her baskets. Then Ronald took us to a crater lake about an hour’s drive up mostly dirt roads, through some beautiful countryside. There are a number of volcanic craters here, and the soil is much darker than in other areas we’ve visited. Ronald remarked that the soil here is very rich and that much more could be done with it than is being done. (Actually, he said people in this region are lazy and don’t take manage their property as well as they should.)

Sunday morning we attended church at the Ft. Portal Church of Christ. Jeff Cash spoke, and it was encouraging to see a large group of young men involved. Jeff explained that their discipling had focused on men and boys because the small group and one-on-one methods had proven more effective and that it was not socially appropriate to mix the genders in those settings. We had lunch at a restaurant with the Cash family and Ronald, then Sunday afternoon we returned to visit Elizabeth, taking her a gift of rice, sugar, salt, tea, etc. We purchased the seed necklaces she had made since our visit a few days earlier. She gave us each nicknames—I don’t remember the local language version, but the translations were, roughly: Marlea, Treasure; Lexie, Kitten; Seth: Junior (we had the most laughs about that one); me, Thunder (that one got laughs, too). About the time we thought we ready to say our farewells we realized she was making tea for us, so we stayed for another hour.

Ronald had another appointment for us, buy the man couldn’t be reached and we returned to the hotel to rest. A bit later Ronald called and said he was bringing the man to the hotel to see me. He was an uncle of Ronald who was working in an AIDS education/support organization in Kyenjojo, just east of Ft. Portal. There is a high incidence of AIDS there, which I thought unusual since it’s a rural area. He explained that there are tea plantations there and that many of the pickers are men who come for the work but leave their wives back home and have relations with local women. His program was funded by a program called Uphold, which was in turn funded by the USAID. The Uphold program was expiring this very month (June) and the gentleman was seeking funding to continue. I asked him to send me information in writing on the program and that, if it was appropriate to our purposes, I’d post the appeal on our website.

Somewhat in passing, Ronald explained that he works some with a local moneylender who specializes in “emergency loans.” In the U.S. we’d call the fellow a “loan shark” and Ronald might be his “strongarm,” but in the more objective terms of economics they’re both part of the “informal credit market.” Emergency loans require collateral that is taken in possession pending the loan repayment. The rates, according to Ronald, are 10% for a month; if the borrower only wants to buy a week’s time, the rate is 5% for that week,. Obviously, those rates would be regarded as usurious in the U.S., and some would cry for government regulations to stop it. If successful in making it unlawful, it would probably result in driving the business out of public view (underground) or resulting in some means of circumventing the regulations through clever structuring of the loan arrangements, as in the case of the many check-cashing businesses in the U.S. Maybe there’s an opportunity for someone to come in and undercut the loan sharks and still generate returns that are attractive even given the high risk of this clientele.

On Sunday night we had dinner with a group on a medical mission trip from Lubbock, TX, led by Dr. Mark Hall, former missionary in Jinja. Since Ronald would be working with this group starting early Monday morning, we saw him off at our hotel that night, but invited him to come to Jinja in the last two weeks of our stay to wrap up some things and talk about the future of our work together.

The next morning we left the hotel about 10 am. The drive would take us west then south, about 3 hours from Ft. Portal to Queen Elizabeth Nat’l Park, through beautiful hilly country with the Rwenzori Mountains (aka Mountains of the Moon) to our right most of the way. About 20 km outside Ft. Portal Marlea spotted the “showroom” or “outlet store” for Rubona Baskets, the group whose three members we had met a few days earlier. We stopped for photos, visited with Marcellicus the store manager and bought more baskets. We were apparently quite an attraction for the locals, as more women and children gathered to look in the store window as we visited.

South of Kasese is the main entrance to QENP. We had already seen a couple of Ugandan Kob, a large antelope that is fairly common in the park. The 24 km from the highway to the main gate is full of potholes and ruts, enough to make you wonder if you’re on the right road. We were in Mark Long’s 4WD truck, which is a pretty stiff ride but proved necessary to getting around the roads and trails, especially after a heavy rain. Our development work didn’t require a safari, but it’s a shame not to see some wildlife when you’ve come this far. Besides, we want the trip to be memorable for the students and hopefully give them the “Africa bug” so they’ll return.

We stayed two nights at Mweya Lodge with full board, and the food turned out to be better than we expected. We had lunch about 2:30 pm and settled into our rooms before going out to look for animals around 5:00 pm. We didn’t really see much that afternoon, a few warthogs, a waterbuck or two. I had checked into getting a guide for the early morning (6:30 – 930 am) drive the next day but they were booked up. The next morning we got up early to drive around on our own, but the man who appeared to be matching up people and guides told me to just follow the others, so we did. That morning we saw two lions (females) and three cubs from only about 30 yds, then a group of about 15 elephants at more like 50-100 yds. We followed the other vehicles for about an hour then decided we’d seen plenty and returned, afraid we might miss the breakfast buffet. That afternoon we took a launch cruise on the Kazinga Channel that connects Lakes George and Edward and there, at a distance of as little as twenty or thirty feet, we saw many hippos, cape buffaloes, a few elephants and crocodiles, and many birds. Our cruise also took us past a fishing village where the tourists and villagers seemed to enjoy viewing each other almost equally. When we retuned to the lodge there was a hippo grazing on the lawn of the lodge itself. An attendant was watching him to see that no one got too close, which he said was important because this hippo was aggressive.

The next morning we took a guided game drive with park guide named Vincent, and took a much longer drive than the day before, finishing around 9:40 am. It had rained heavily the night before, and we needed the 4WD to get us out of a ditch once. Again we saw lions, many waterbuck and Ugandan kob, a group of elephants, warthogs, hippos, crested cranes, and other birds. I had been up a lot the night before for bathroom visits and not sleeping well because of early wakeup time. Also, we were leaving that morning and I wasn’t looking forward to the drive to Mbarara.

To finsh this edition, I’ll just say that the trip to Mbarara, the night’s stay there at the Agip hotel, and the next day’s trip through Masaka and Kampala to Jinja went well. We’re back in Jinja with two weeks to finish a lot of work, and have enjoyed safety and great times so far.