AUTHOR: Nancy TITLE: Aid Africa - stove project DATE: 3/18/2009 05:52:00 AM ----- BODY:
Ken Goyer's stove project here with Aid Africa is absolutely amazing. Without a great deal of fuss or publicity he has provided fuel-efficient mud-brick rocket stoves to five IDP camps in the Gulu area. Picture a frontier town without much of anything..our hotel had no electricity or water, so we moved to another new hotel…we have electricity sporadically and dribbles of water from the faucet so we can wash our faces in the morning, but that's it. Breakfast is included - a piece of bread, jam and margarine from a tin, hot water and hot milk with instant coffee, and a boiled egg. It's a lot for an area where most people eat only one meal per day.

Yesterday I visited the site where Larry Winiarski and the Aid Africa team was working. Larry had brought two pulleys from the US to help improvise a well drilling project made from PVC pipe and a few metal bits. It was a challenge even fiding a screw long enough to use for one part and there are now PVC connector parts to be found. Larry is making pieces from used bicycle inner tubes and wire.

While Larry and the boys were working on the drilling, I went to a resettlement area of round huts with thatched roofs. These are areas where people have left the IDP camps and are returning to their own land. You've seen the pictures in National Geographic, but this brought it all home to me.

We saw some of the six-brick stoves that had been installed and visited the families. They live in one dark round room divided on one side by a mud wall. That area behind the wall is for sleeping. Five or more sleep on one mattress in the dark and the cooking is done on the other side. The mud stove is against the wall, but there is occasionally an open fire as well. There is nothing in the homes other than the stoves and a few pots. Children with swollen bellies greated us with big smiles, but I noiced that mid-day the only thing to eat was a piece of palm fruit from the nearby tree. One woman with a paralyzed arm said her two children, 8 and 10, were now in charge of cutting long grass for thatch and selling it for 1,000 shillings per bundle, I think that amounts to about 5.00, and that's a huge amount of grass for thatch. I would imagine it takes more than a week to cut that much grass. The family of three lives on that amount.

Two years ago the Lord's Resistance Army departed from this area so the government now is trying to disburse the IDP camps and send people back to their own land. In the IDP camps World Food Aid provided beans for them, but now they want people to return home and start farming again. They give no assistance as they want the people to become self-reliant and the people want to return to their traditional Achole hoes. Good grief! Where does one start in a land of bush and heat.

Today I will be going to one of the camps that I have seen along the road. They are rondevals clustered close together and numbered. We can't go now because the Aid Africa truck\s water hose sprung a leak and after four hours we still don't have it repaired. I am assuming they are looking for a part.

I want you to picture this area so I'll describe what I saw this morning from my hotel. I made a list…a truck from Children's Foundation, white UN Vans looking totally out of place, butchered meat in a wooden crate being delivered by bicycle, school kids in uniforms, a man in business dress, a few women carrying groceries on their heads, NUREP, the Bed Ni Megi Cheap Store, pool tables covered with plastic lining the road, WARID Telecom WE CARE sig, people sweeping with grass brooms, men on bikes delivering grass mats and grass for thatch, round huts with grass roofs, only three trucks and one car, a man with a tshirt saying \'know your status. Get your HIV test today", women carrying babies on their backs, kids in ripped clothing, open sewers, bodabodas for transport *motorcycles(, faith based organizations, etc., etc. And after seeing all of this along the dirt street I returned to the hotel to see CNN where the pope was telling Africans that condoms were no help in reducing the incident of AIDS in Africa.

Nancy

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