January 12, 2007

Dear friends,
 
I have arrived in Uganda and will be in Jinga, just north of Kampala, for a couple of days before continuing on to our project in Gulu. The Rotary club here has a stove project in the  village outside Tororo and I will inspect it tomorrow. It will be exciting to see our stoves done entirely by an Ugandan team without Aid Africa lending and support. Rozette has been instrumental in getting this project going. Rozette is our administrative assistant here. She also runs an orphanage.
 
I had forgotten so many little things. Like how green everything is. How humid it is. the smells, the foods, the driving(!). I'm glad to have come again. If any of you feel the urge to volunteer, you are welcome to come work with us for whatever time you have.
 
Things have changed and things are the same. As many of you may know, Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army has turned in himself and his top leaders to a camp in Southern Sudan. Peace has broken out in the last six months!! No more worried about being ambushed as we drive along the roads. The president of Uganda has been reelected. We are not working in Lira any more -- Gulu instead.
 
Things are the same. Displaced people (refugees) are still in the camps and in dire straits. It will take more than a decade to get any kind of normalcy in the north. The rebels fought for twenty years and many people in the camps have never seen their land or even know where it is. The U.N. food program is encouraging people to move from the camps around  the cities to camps in the rural areas. That's where they serve the food. But not everyone is able to go to the new camps -- the elderly, pregnant women, young children and the infirm.
 
Our mission retains its importance and urgency. We have three employees in Gulu: Priscilla, Freida and Martin. In addition we have a nice flow of volunteers so far. Hugh graduated from Univ. of Oregon and enters medical school this summer. He has been here three weeks and has started our medicalefforts. But of course we have to register with both the national and regional centers and the bureaucracy moves slowly. Rhonda, an R.N., arrives Friday night and will help Hugh with the medical effort.And me. I will look for a brick maker and try to start our stove building program. Mostly, I will spend time with our folks here guiding them in how to do what Aid Africa hopes to achieve. The two women are from Lira and have moved north to Gulu. That means they have left the Lango tribe area and are in Acheoli land now. Although they understand each other, they know they are of different tribes. Freida and Priscilla are uncomfortable with how people react to them. So I will try to get them past that hurdle. Martin has been in Tororo with the stove project there and will return to Gulu next week.
 
Our mission is to work on getting malaria under control, getting clean water to curb the dysintary  and get information to mothers about good nutrition so that there is less anemia and starvation. Our Six Brick Rocket Stoves remain the cornerstone of our mission. As you may remember, they are highly efficient. that means that women don't have to go so far for fire wood or carry so much back. They will be less vulverable to attack. The stoves burn fule more efficiently so food cooks faster and with less smoke. Cooking fire smoke is the leading cause of blindness in the world. And of course there are lung diseases. Since the stoves burn the wood more completely, there are fewer sparkes to catch the thatch rooves on fire. One spark can cause a chain reaction and but hundreds of huts. You can learn more about the stoves at aiduganda.com.
 
Rozette is a member of the Roarty Club and she's taking me to her meeting tonight to introduce me to the members. We leave tomorrow morning about 7 for Tororo which is a 3 to 4 hour drive one way. So we will return late tomorrow and stop by the Entebbe airport to pick up Rhonda.
 
I'm about out of time. so I'll sign off.
 
Peter