Well, it's been a good run. 300+ posts in just over three years. I've enjoyed sharing my experiences, though of late, blogging has begun to feel like more of a chore than a healthy way to express myself. I thought I would migrate over to Facebook or Twitter, but I've found myself spending a lot of time on Quora lately, so that's probably how I'll be expressing myself, at least for a little while now. I will leave the blog up for a while, but I don't expect that I'll come back to posting. Hope you've enjoyed the ride.
-Daniel
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Local Animals
Monday, December 26, 2011
Infrequent
Seasons greetings, readers!
My apologies that I've written nothing about what's been going on in my life the last two months. This month, I fought off a couple of infections and I started sleeping incredibly erratic hours, so I haven't felt a lot like writing. And to be honest, there hasn't been a whole ton of excitement in my life. Still, I am hoping to get two more posts up here before the new year.
Stay tuned :)
My apologies that I've written nothing about what's been going on in my life the last two months. This month, I fought off a couple of infections and I started sleeping incredibly erratic hours, so I haven't felt a lot like writing. And to be honest, there hasn't been a whole ton of excitement in my life. Still, I am hoping to get two more posts up here before the new year.
Stay tuned :)
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Uganda Pedal Power Workshop Photos
Pedal-power workshop in Uganda
See previous posts: Travel to Uganda and Preparing for Workshop
The workshop was a three day event, but I could only stay for the first two since I had to grab a bus to Nairobi to catch a flight. We started off by demonstrating some bicycle repair and maintenance skills. My station was on repairing flat tires. The one time I tried to fix my own flat, I wound up destroying the whole tire (not just the tube, mind you). Fortunately, I was staying in a guest house with Bernard, so the night before, he showed me how to do it and I got to practice. For the demo, four different groups came through and we looked at different types of tires (regular, racing and mountain) and then I used my nail to make a puncture as we all took turns using the tire iron, applying the patch and then checking for additional leaks. The participants also learned how to pack a bearing, how to spoke a tire and how to work on a chain.
After that, there was a session on identifying challenges, but I had to miss that one. After lots of hassle, we got a box of GCS equipment that morning (phone chargers and corn shellers), so I spent my time setting the kit up. By the time I finished setting things up (with some help from Bernard, since I was having an embarrassingly difficult time and for some reason couldn't apply basic problem solving skills), they were just finishing up the discussion.
Then, we demonstrated a few technologies that we had set up for the occasion. There was a charcoal crusher* that Bernard designed and built based off a project that he had worked on at IDDS in 2008. There was a peanut grinder using spare bicycle parts (everyone loved this one since we got to eat a sesame-peanut butter concoction that we prepared to show the machine). There was a blender that ran off the back wheel of a bicycle (people also enjoyed the smoothies that came out of this demo).
In the afternoon, we broke off into teams to work on the design challenges that they had chosen. I was working with a team of Caritas staff members who were looking at designing a sorghum thresher. All of the other participants had previously done a workshop with Amy, so they were familiar with the design process, but the Caritas staff had been a last minute addition. It was really interesting to see what it's like trying to design something with people as they try to decide the order of steps themselves (imagine watching someone build a house starting with the roof). I worked with them to try to guide them down the right path (identifying constraints before selecting design elements) and though it was a bit slower than usual, by the end of the day, we had an idea that we were happy with.
The second day was mostly building and testing ideas. It was a bit difficult with the sorghum threshing team since we didn't have dried sorghum that was ready for threshing, but they still produced a pretty nifty machine. Mid-morning we took a break and Bernard and I demonstrated the GCS technologies for everyone. People were really amazed to see the corn sheller work and were also very excited by the bicycle phone charger. Everyone kept passing up their phone to see if it could be charged by the bicycle (they all could). It was really unfortunate that shipping is such an expense, because it definitely drives the price beyond the means of the communities.
All of the sessions were translated from English into Acholi, the local language, by the Caritas staff. I had to leave after the second day, which was really sad. At dinner that night, the participants gave me an Acholi name. They called me Otam, which means the thinker. I think they just saw me constantly staring at bicycles and could hear the wheels turning in my head. I was really touched by everyone there. I was a little disappointing that the only words that I learned in Acholi were "hello" "thank you" and "good". Still, I managed to get pretty far with those as well as lots of wild gesturing.
I also really enjoyed the food in the community. Every morning, we ate a very hearty cassava stew with very sugary tea. Then lunch and dinner were a mixture of greens (but not kale like I usually eat in Kenya and Tanzania) with posho (the Ugandan term for what we call ugali in Kiswahili), rice with beans, peanut stew (really delicious) and roasted goat. We were definitely full at the end of every meal.
* It was fun that this was included, since it meant that Amy and I got to run a charcoal burn the night before to provide the material for the demonstration.
The workshop was a three day event, but I could only stay for the first two since I had to grab a bus to Nairobi to catch a flight. We started off by demonstrating some bicycle repair and maintenance skills. My station was on repairing flat tires. The one time I tried to fix my own flat, I wound up destroying the whole tire (not just the tube, mind you). Fortunately, I was staying in a guest house with Bernard, so the night before, he showed me how to do it and I got to practice. For the demo, four different groups came through and we looked at different types of tires (regular, racing and mountain) and then I used my nail to make a puncture as we all took turns using the tire iron, applying the patch and then checking for additional leaks. The participants also learned how to pack a bearing, how to spoke a tire and how to work on a chain.
After that, there was a session on identifying challenges, but I had to miss that one. After lots of hassle, we got a box of GCS equipment that morning (phone chargers and corn shellers), so I spent my time setting the kit up. By the time I finished setting things up (with some help from Bernard, since I was having an embarrassingly difficult time and for some reason couldn't apply basic problem solving skills), they were just finishing up the discussion.
Then, we demonstrated a few technologies that we had set up for the occasion. There was a charcoal crusher* that Bernard designed and built based off a project that he had worked on at IDDS in 2008. There was a peanut grinder using spare bicycle parts (everyone loved this one since we got to eat a sesame-peanut butter concoction that we prepared to show the machine). There was a blender that ran off the back wheel of a bicycle (people also enjoyed the smoothies that came out of this demo).
In the afternoon, we broke off into teams to work on the design challenges that they had chosen. I was working with a team of Caritas staff members who were looking at designing a sorghum thresher. All of the other participants had previously done a workshop with Amy, so they were familiar with the design process, but the Caritas staff had been a last minute addition. It was really interesting to see what it's like trying to design something with people as they try to decide the order of steps themselves (imagine watching someone build a house starting with the roof). I worked with them to try to guide them down the right path (identifying constraints before selecting design elements) and though it was a bit slower than usual, by the end of the day, we had an idea that we were happy with.
The second day was mostly building and testing ideas. It was a bit difficult with the sorghum threshing team since we didn't have dried sorghum that was ready for threshing, but they still produced a pretty nifty machine. Mid-morning we took a break and Bernard and I demonstrated the GCS technologies for everyone. People were really amazed to see the corn sheller work and were also very excited by the bicycle phone charger. Everyone kept passing up their phone to see if it could be charged by the bicycle (they all could). It was really unfortunate that shipping is such an expense, because it definitely drives the price beyond the means of the communities.
All of the sessions were translated from English into Acholi, the local language, by the Caritas staff. I had to leave after the second day, which was really sad. At dinner that night, the participants gave me an Acholi name. They called me Otam, which means the thinker. I think they just saw me constantly staring at bicycles and could hear the wheels turning in my head. I was really touched by everyone there. I was a little disappointing that the only words that I learned in Acholi were "hello" "thank you" and "good". Still, I managed to get pretty far with those as well as lots of wild gesturing.
I also really enjoyed the food in the community. Every morning, we ate a very hearty cassava stew with very sugary tea. Then lunch and dinner were a mixture of greens (but not kale like I usually eat in Kenya and Tanzania) with posho (the Ugandan term for what we call ugali in Kiswahili), rice with beans, peanut stew (really delicious) and roasted goat. We were definitely full at the end of every meal.
* It was fun that this was included, since it meant that Amy and I got to run a charcoal burn the night before to provide the material for the demonstration.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Preparing for the Pedal Power Workshop
Amy Smith has made several trips to northern Uganda and run workshops there on Creative Capacity Building and the design process. Her partner on the ground is Caritas, a Catholic organization that runs relief programs across the country. We (Amy, Bernard and I) were traveling north in a Caritas vehicle, which was a welcome change after some long bus rides.
As we traveled, we admired the scenery, and Michael (the driver) talked about the landscape and the history. He reminded us that some people did well during Idi Amin's reign who have now seen their standard of living drop during the presidency of Yoweri Museveni. Amy and I both noted that much of the scenery was much greener than what we're used to seeing (she used to live in Botswana in the Kalahari desert, while my experiences in Kenya saw lots of sparse landscapes). Michael mentioned the dangers of it as we drove through a pine forest and he explained that when the needles fall to the ground and dry out, the fires can be devastating. Then we started talking about pine needle gasification and inevitably to other simple technologies.
We arrived in Gulu and met David from Bikes not Bombs (BNB) who was also running the workshop. He had gone shopping and grabbed a few bikes as well as tons of spare parts for the sessions that we were going to run. David was collecting footage of a health project that BNB is running in another nearby community, so he left us with the supplies and returned to the village. We visited the Caritas office in Gulu and picked up a few more supplies at the market before heading to Pader.
When we reached Pader and were greeted by my friend Denis who was on my team at IDDS in Ghana. He showed us the community technology center that Amy had established there and I recognized several of the machines there from other programs that I've done with Amy. We set to work organizing the space so that it would be ready for the event. We were still missing one box (as stated in the last post, Kampala Coach had left our luggage behind), so we couldn't set up the GCS equipment. Instead, I set to work cleaning out a peanut butter maker which had not been cleaned in several months. After that, I designed a table and took inventory of all the supplies in the workshop. Meanwhile, Bernard set about creating a bicycle powered charcoal crusher to serve as an example.
We had 1.5 days in Pader before the participants arrived, so it was also a good opportunity to learn our way around the town a bit. Wokorach, the other staff member at the workshop, helped me buy some tools at the market and talked about the difficulties of life in the area. We also spent an evening at Denis's house where his wife cooked a delicious supper, and spent the whole time complaining that the large spread wasn't nearly enough food and she didn't like that we were rushing back to the workshop. I also took full advantage of MTN Mobile Money (another phone banking system similar to Safaricom's Mpesa), which has taken the bulk of the mobile banking market in Uganda (although when I was in Kampala, I noticed that there were several agents for Kenya's and Tanzania's mobile money systems in spite of the fact that they don't work with Ugandan sim cards).
I also had the opportunity to meet the local Caritas staff. It was most remarkable to talk with Jennifer, who is a social worker and helped us with the translation during the event. Her stories were terrifying and she told them with such non-chalance that it was difficult to contemplate the horrors that many of these people had lived through. Rather than letting the stories depress us, though, we saw it as a testament to the resilience of the community and saw it as a great motivator for running this workshop.
As we traveled, we admired the scenery, and Michael (the driver) talked about the landscape and the history. He reminded us that some people did well during Idi Amin's reign who have now seen their standard of living drop during the presidency of Yoweri Museveni. Amy and I both noted that much of the scenery was much greener than what we're used to seeing (she used to live in Botswana in the Kalahari desert, while my experiences in Kenya saw lots of sparse landscapes). Michael mentioned the dangers of it as we drove through a pine forest and he explained that when the needles fall to the ground and dry out, the fires can be devastating. Then we started talking about pine needle gasification and inevitably to other simple technologies.
We arrived in Gulu and met David from Bikes not Bombs (BNB) who was also running the workshop. He had gone shopping and grabbed a few bikes as well as tons of spare parts for the sessions that we were going to run. David was collecting footage of a health project that BNB is running in another nearby community, so he left us with the supplies and returned to the village. We visited the Caritas office in Gulu and picked up a few more supplies at the market before heading to Pader.
When we reached Pader and were greeted by my friend Denis who was on my team at IDDS in Ghana. He showed us the community technology center that Amy had established there and I recognized several of the machines there from other programs that I've done with Amy. We set to work organizing the space so that it would be ready for the event. We were still missing one box (as stated in the last post, Kampala Coach had left our luggage behind), so we couldn't set up the GCS equipment. Instead, I set to work cleaning out a peanut butter maker which had not been cleaned in several months. After that, I designed a table and took inventory of all the supplies in the workshop. Meanwhile, Bernard set about creating a bicycle powered charcoal crusher to serve as an example.
We had 1.5 days in Pader before the participants arrived, so it was also a good opportunity to learn our way around the town a bit. Wokorach, the other staff member at the workshop, helped me buy some tools at the market and talked about the difficulties of life in the area. We also spent an evening at Denis's house where his wife cooked a delicious supper, and spent the whole time complaining that the large spread wasn't nearly enough food and she didn't like that we were rushing back to the workshop. I also took full advantage of MTN Mobile Money (another phone banking system similar to Safaricom's Mpesa), which has taken the bulk of the mobile banking market in Uganda (although when I was in Kampala, I noticed that there were several agents for Kenya's and Tanzania's mobile money systems in spite of the fact that they don't work with Ugandan sim cards).
I also had the opportunity to meet the local Caritas staff. It was most remarkable to talk with Jennifer, who is a social worker and helped us with the translation during the event. Her stories were terrifying and she told them with such non-chalance that it was difficult to contemplate the horrors that many of these people had lived through. Rather than letting the stories depress us, though, we saw it as a testament to the resilience of the community and saw it as a great motivator for running this workshop.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Traveling to Uganda
Last month, my friend Bernard and I were working on a pedal-power seminar in Uganda, so we took the bus from Arusha. There are buses that go directly to Uganda, but we needed to run a couple of errands in Nairobi, so we stopped off there for a few hours. I went to a phone store and they were able to program a sim card so that I could have my old phone number (when my sim card was stolen, I lost lots of valuable contacts), and I just have to say that Safaricom really has their act together with that sort of thing*.
We had bought tickets and dropped off our bags with Kampala Coach for the 9:30 PM bus. It's nice, since the seats are comfortable, so it's easy to sleep on the way. Unfortunately, our bus didn't show up until 11 PM, so we were pretty tired by that point and fell asleep as soon as we were in our seats. We made it to the border at 9 AM and it was a pretty easy crossing. The bigger hassle was about 2 hours up the road at a checkpoint for the Ugandan Revenue Authority, where they held our bus and made sure that everyone had paid the necessary taxes on what they had brought into the country (one man had 3 of some kind of electronic device, so they figured he was some kind of smuggler). We were glad when they finally let us keep moving.
We admired the view of the Nile as we passed through Jinja and a fellow passenger told us all about the hydro-power station there. We arrived in Kampala at 3 PM (the bus was supposed to arrive at 10 AM) and we discovered that our bags never made it onto the bus. Always make sure that your bags make it onto the bus! After a lot of arguing with the staff, they said that they would make some phone calls and that it would be there the next morning. We went and found a small guest house nearby and grabbed a room and then found some supper before crashing.
Saturday morning, I went back to the Kampala Coach station to ask about the bags and they hadn't arrived. The man made some more phone calls and said that they would be there the next morning. I had to accept that, since I had to go to a meeting. The city was pretty crazy the whole day (and the night before) in preparation for the big Uganda-Kenya soccer match. If Uganda won, they would receive a spot in the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations. The way that people were blaring their vuvuzelas and running around town hollering and waving flags, you would be forgiven for assuming that they had already won. The match came out as a 0-0 draw, which meant that Uganda will have to try again for the next Africa Cup of Nations in two years. A friend explained that it was because they started their international players who hadn't practiced with the rest of the team, and that they had won the rest of their matches until the last two when those players came back.
I also met with a colleague who attended the Unreasonable Institute in Colorado in 2011 (I attended in 2010) and we talked a lot about his project in Uganda and it was great to sit down with him and talk. He also took me to a small restaurant and introduced me to the rolex, which is a Ugandan food consisting of a scrambled egg rolled up into a chapati (get it? rolled eggs / rolex) and eaten with ketchup and chili sauce. It is delicious.
On Sunday morning, we went back to the Kampala Coach station and waited for the bus to arrive. It was supposed to be there at 10, so we arrived at 9:45. It rained most of the morning, so I got soaked searching the luggage compartment of one of the buses before someone told me that the bus hadn't come from Nairobi. I managed to take my mind off of the situation by watching an episode of a South African soap opera that seemed pretty compelling. We were ready to give up hope on the bus at 2 PM, when it finally rolled up and we managed to grab our bags (well, after waiting another hour for them to process all of the parcels on the bus). We were so excited to have fresh clothes after about 84 hours without a change of clothes.
* Safaricom is owned by the same company as Vodacom, which is my phone provider in Tanzania. However, in spite of how wonderful I've found Safaricom, I'm equally frustrated by the service of Vodacom Tanzania.
We had bought tickets and dropped off our bags with Kampala Coach for the 9:30 PM bus. It's nice, since the seats are comfortable, so it's easy to sleep on the way. Unfortunately, our bus didn't show up until 11 PM, so we were pretty tired by that point and fell asleep as soon as we were in our seats. We made it to the border at 9 AM and it was a pretty easy crossing. The bigger hassle was about 2 hours up the road at a checkpoint for the Ugandan Revenue Authority, where they held our bus and made sure that everyone had paid the necessary taxes on what they had brought into the country (one man had 3 of some kind of electronic device, so they figured he was some kind of smuggler). We were glad when they finally let us keep moving.
We admired the view of the Nile as we passed through Jinja and a fellow passenger told us all about the hydro-power station there. We arrived in Kampala at 3 PM (the bus was supposed to arrive at 10 AM) and we discovered that our bags never made it onto the bus. Always make sure that your bags make it onto the bus! After a lot of arguing with the staff, they said that they would make some phone calls and that it would be there the next morning. We went and found a small guest house nearby and grabbed a room and then found some supper before crashing.
Saturday morning, I went back to the Kampala Coach station to ask about the bags and they hadn't arrived. The man made some more phone calls and said that they would be there the next morning. I had to accept that, since I had to go to a meeting. The city was pretty crazy the whole day (and the night before) in preparation for the big Uganda-Kenya soccer match. If Uganda won, they would receive a spot in the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations. The way that people were blaring their vuvuzelas and running around town hollering and waving flags, you would be forgiven for assuming that they had already won. The match came out as a 0-0 draw, which meant that Uganda will have to try again for the next Africa Cup of Nations in two years. A friend explained that it was because they started their international players who hadn't practiced with the rest of the team, and that they had won the rest of their matches until the last two when those players came back.
I also met with a colleague who attended the Unreasonable Institute in Colorado in 2011 (I attended in 2010) and we talked a lot about his project in Uganda and it was great to sit down with him and talk. He also took me to a small restaurant and introduced me to the rolex, which is a Ugandan food consisting of a scrambled egg rolled up into a chapati (get it? rolled eggs / rolex) and eaten with ketchup and chili sauce. It is delicious.
On Sunday morning, we went back to the Kampala Coach station and waited for the bus to arrive. It was supposed to be there at 10, so we arrived at 9:45. It rained most of the morning, so I got soaked searching the luggage compartment of one of the buses before someone told me that the bus hadn't come from Nairobi. I managed to take my mind off of the situation by watching an episode of a South African soap opera that seemed pretty compelling. We were ready to give up hope on the bus at 2 PM, when it finally rolled up and we managed to grab our bags (well, after waiting another hour for them to process all of the parcels on the bus). We were so excited to have fresh clothes after about 84 hours without a change of clothes.
* Safaricom is owned by the same company as Vodacom, which is my phone provider in Tanzania. However, in spite of how wonderful I've found Safaricom, I'm equally frustrated by the service of Vodacom Tanzania.
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