Notes from Uganda: Week 4

Site clearing continues. Our most useful contribution is uprooting cassava plants, which also prove quite tasty! Progress on site is slow because the community can only spend a couple of hours a day working, as they are subsistence farmers with their own gardens to tend.

Our blueprints are with the local architect, and he was meant to visit the site before signing them off, but “he failed”. In Uganda, the industry has not been fully privatised, and so it is up to the local district councils to provide major plant and equipment. Building Tomorrow has visited the council on a number of occasions and still not met with the relevant official to organise the grading of our site. Scheduling appointments in advance is not possible. This has been very frustrating.

The big excitement was the arrival of our ISSB brick-making machine from Nairobi! It was ordered in November and has taken a tortuous route to get here. The Good Earth Trust delivered the machine to site, and with their engineers, we analysed the local soil. We visited a nearby murram (local red soil) pit where we concluded that we can use the soil there, but in different ratios to achieve the required brick properties.

We have finalised the layout for the head teacher’s office / library building at the school. There will be seven classrooms for each of the primary years, and an additional building to monitor visitors and store books securely.

We also travelled to Pallisa to see John Nisbet. Pallisa is a flat, sleepy town, more rural than Mukono – 15km down an empty murram road. The bugs here are ginormous! Hayley is not happy about the size of the spiders, but we were rather impressed by discovering flying beetles the size of our hands and multicoloured preying mantis. We had our most unstable and nerve racking experience of public transport, riding on the back of bicycles side saddle.

John is out here for six months, overseeing the building of a vocational community centre. It is a £400,000 development including teaching and IT facilities, library and catering resources, and dormitories to sleep almost 100 people.

We learnt how to cut and lay tiles, as well as mixing cement using a kitchen spatula and whisk! It was good to review the local construction techniques available on bigger budgets, though we are now envious of luxuries such as a concrete ceiling to keep the building cool and paint to brighten it up.

We were invited to take a primary school class for years P6 and P7, where we encouraged the children (especially the girls) to continue their studies and strive for good jobs. We also tried somewhat unsuccessfully to play FizzBuzz with them. Explaining a mathematical game proved a little beyond us!

We glimpsed the scale of the development required at Pallisa. Locals told us of new schools, water storage and boreholes urgently needed. People were supportive of the work we are doing in Mukono.

There has been no rain this week, and whilst we have been grateful to see so much sunshine, we are beginning to wilt!

Hayley Maxwell and Jessica Robinson