Ten Days in Ghana

Right now, I’m traveling back from Ghana.  Four students from my research group – Amanda, Diana, Valerie, and me – have spent the past ten days there.  One of the projects my advisor (Jeremy) is involved with focuses on something called the Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL), funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).  I can’t say that I know all the details (it’s a large project with many different parts), but, basically, it is geared toward promoting and improving soybean cultivation, since soybeans are a protein-rich crop that can help reduce hunger and malnutrition.  Some of the different pieces of the project focus on improving agricultural techniques, developing downstream processing operations, creating demand for soybean products, and ensuring gender equity.  Jeremy’s piece focuses on ensuring that aspects of this project are not going to be harmful to environmental and/or human health.  For me and the three other students involved, SIL isn’t directly related to any of our main projects, but we all have a general interest in this kind of work, so Jeremy brought us in.  The environmental piece of the project is relatively small, so we have somewhat limited resources and can’t do everything that Jeremy had wanted to do initially.  But, for the past several months, we’ve been trying to come up with a relatively simple way to at least partially investigate some relevant issues, and this trip was designed to get the ball rolling on that front.

Going into this trip, we had essentially two goals.  First (and probably most important), we wanted to provide some training for two partner organizations working on the ground in northern Ghana, within and near Tamale (the third-largest city in the country).  Second, we wanted to collect some initial data (using surveys and lab analyses) from multiple villages in two nearby districts, trying to see if we could begin to assess relative health risks from exposure to waterborne pathogens, nitrate and/or nitrite (from fertilizers), and pesticides.  Basically, we’re hoping to estimate whether increased use of fertilizers and/or pesticides, or exposure to pathogens (typically through fecal contamination), might undercut any health improvements from the better nutrition that might be a result of greater access to soybean products.  Getting some clear results could allow us to make some recommendations regarding how the greatest risks might be lowered.

Our two partner organizations are Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute (SARI).  CRS, which has an office in Tamale, helps with much of the on-the-ground implementation and deployment of SIL’s work, interacting with local village leaders, distributing seed kits to farmers, and conducting surveys.  SARI is in Tolon District, about 20-30 minutes from the center of Tamale, has a number of agricultural test plots that have been used to demonstrate improved growing practices to local farmers, and also includes a soil chemistry lab.

Now that the stage is set with a little background information, I can start talking about the actual trip.  But first, I’ll include a little poem I finished just before leaving:

To Wander in Wonder

What right to go roaming

Has the wanderer got?

To run far afield from this fair, friendly spot,

To wade through the long grass she's ne'er before seen,

Or the whispering waters that still flow pristine?

Perhaps, in the foaming

Of the waves against rock,

She sees, in that moment, a white-crested flock

Lift off toward the glittering sunbeams above,

Transform to a cloud with the air of a dove.

And now, as her journey

Circles back to the start,

She maintains all the wonders she's seen in her heart:

The living and giving immersed in the loam

Wherever her wandering footsteps could roam,

And so, she returns with new eyes to her home.

As it turned out, the day before we left, we found out that Jeremy wouldn’t be able to go with us, at least for the first several days of the trip.  He had a very good reason for not being able to go, but it definitely increased our level of uncertainty about the trip.  Jeremy had been to Ghana before and had interacted with staff from CRS and SARI, so he had all the connections.  None of us had been there before or knew anyone.  But, we went ahead with it, and I think things turned out okay, although the added responsibilities that the four of us needed to share did make it a bit more daunting.  And unfortunately, I made a few mistakes during the first couple of days that ended up costing us some money.  No one else thought it was a big deal, but I felt terrible about it.  I definitely think I better understand the pressure that trip leaders must feel to get everything right and to create a good experience for everyone.  Beyond that, I noticed that needing to “lead” from time to time can make it more difficult to allow the experience to happen, to remember how fortunate I am to have this opportunity to see a new place, meet new people, and broaden the boundaries of my life.

Anyway, our first flight left from Chicago on Saturday evening, January 7^th.  We spent a few hours in London before the second leg to Accra, the capital city in Ghana, which lies on the southern coast of West Africa.  We only spent one night there, arriving late Sunday evening and leaving early the next morning, so I did not get a good feel for the city.  Although, it seemed fairly typical of major cities in sub-Saharan Africa – at least relatively similar to the few where I’ve spent time.  Monday morning, we returned to the airport for a short flight to Tamale.  Apparently, the drive from the southern coast to the north takes eight to ten hours, so, while it would have been nice to spend a day driving and seeing more of the country, I think a quick one-hour flight was much preferred.

It was a hazy morning, and I couldn’t see the ground until we were well into our descent toward the Tamale airport.  As a little aside, I find it very interesting how clouds look so solid from above.  They look like a very distinct layer in the atmosphere, but as you start to move through them, they become much less well-defined – the interface becomes much fuzzier, with the areas above, within, and below seeming to bleed into one another.  I feel like there’s a lesson here, perhaps about the boundaries we put up, and how they are less definite than we might think.

In any case, as we moved down through the clouds, I began to make out a very flat landscape – maybe not quite on the level of Illinois, but close.  The ground was painted with varying shades of pale yellow, gold, and green, with dark green patches of one or two trees spaced across the plain.  At that point, I could see only thin dirt roads and paths snaking through the fields, and every so often a cluster of houses and/or farmland would come into view.  As we approached the airport, I caught a glimpse of one very turbid, gray-green pond, and I saw a single paved road.  Within a few minutes, we landed.

Arriving in Tamale with all our luggage and equipment, Joe, a wonderful driver from CRS, met us at the airport.  He drove us to a pretty nice hotel in town, got us checked in, and then drove us to the CRS office.  After a brief initial discussion, Joe took us to a nice local restaurant where we had lunch together, and then we moved on to SARI.  We dropped off our lab equipment, had an obligatory meeting with the highest-ranking person there (the deputy director, I believe), and met the staff in the soil chemistry lab where we would be working.  Going back to CRS, we had what I would probably call our first “real” planning meeting with some of their agriculture program staff – Mawuli (the director of the agriculture program), Philip (a senior program officer), and Emmanuel (a monitoring and evaluation officer who helped put the household surveys together).  These three guys are great, and we all loved working with them, but this was a tough meeting.  At this point, we had had very little sleep over the past two or three days, and it was a struggle to keep out eyes open.  But, we made it through, went back to the hotel, had a small dinner, and went to bed.

Tuesday and Wednesday were training days.  The four of us split into two groups, with two people spending each day at the hotel with CRS and the ten enumerators who would be conducting the household surveys we had designed, and two people spending each day at the SARI lab, training the staff there.  Diana and Valerie, stayed with CRS to do the enumerator training, while Joe drove Amanda and I to SARI.  Over the course of those two days, we showed the SARI lab technicians one method for determining the level of bacterial contamination in water samples (Amanda took the lead for most of this part) and how to use a field meter we brought along, which can be taken into the field to measure pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen levels, and conductivity in water (I handled most of this section).  On top of that, we went through some of the procedures that Jeremy’s lab typically uses to measure nitrogen and phosphorus levels, comparing SARI’s procedures to ours, and Prosper (who runs the soil chemistry lab) had one of the technicians (Asanti) run through the procedure they use to measure total ammonia.  At the end, Amanda and I offered some minor suggestions for improving efficiency and accuracy, but overall we thought that they did a great job.  The staff picked up on everything very quickly, and Amanda and I enjoyed our time there very much.  I think both of us agree that anything we can do to improve what they do and how they do it would be a worthwhile outcome of this trip.

Once we moved into this phase of the trip, when we got into the work itself and away from all the logistics, I think it became much easier to be in the moment, to reflect and be grateful for this opportunity.  The car rides to and from SARI were especially good for this purpose, as the fields, trees, and shops passed by.  It was very peaceful, watching the landscape rush past.  On almost every car ride, there was a moment when I marveled at the beauty surrounding us.  It is early in the dry season now, and the dry season is very long in this part of the country, so flourishing vegetation is relatively limited.  But, the earth is covered in a rainbow of yellow, gold, green, red, and brown, and the colors seem to leap out at my eyes.  Maybe I’ve just grown used to the white, sterile dormancy of winter in Illinois.

I didn’t really go in expecting to have any deep revelations, but I couldn’t help thinking, “This is real.”  Of course, so is my life and work in Illinois, and I enjoy that very much.  But there’s something about feeling the heat on your back and the dust on your face, interacting with people all day – it feels more whole.  I may not always be the best at it, and it certainly has its difficulties, but there’s something about it that’s extremely life-filling.  Obviously, though, how I feel is not the most important thing. Perhaps appropriately, at this point in the trip, we transitioned from training to field work in some local villages.

Before coming to Ghana, we had identified two nearby districts we wanted to look at (using a previous survey conducted for another part of SIL).  Each district had a fairly distinctive makeup of drinking water sources, with people in Tolon District collecting water predominantly from surface water sources (lakes, ponds, etc.) and most people in Karaga District using groundwater pumped from boreholes.  Our thought was that, by comparing data from water sources and household drinking water in these two districts, we might be able to see how these different sources are affected by people’s agricultural practices.  In each district, we and the enumerators went to three villages.  The enumerators performed the household surveys, while two of us collected samples of drinking water kept in some of those households, soil from outside the house, and samples collected by rinsing one of the resident’s hands with water.  The idea here was to see if and where bacterial contamination is occurring in these households.

Actually, “house” doesn’t quite describe the typical residence in these villages.  I was not one of the two collecting samples in the households, but I did go into the places where several village chiefs lived, so I got some idea.  In many cases, I think that one complete residential unit is referred to as a compound, which contains multiple small, circular huts, close together and arranged in a circular pattern.  The typical household size (including all the huts in a compound) is somewhere around ten people, and this number might include more than one family.  Like I said, though, I didn’t go into many residences, so my conception of them may not be completely accurate.

The remaining two of us would be guided around each village, either by someone living there or an enumerator who knew the area well, finding different water sources, collecting samples, and using our field meter to measure pH and other parameters.  Amanda and I played this role every day during the four days we were in the field, Amanda typically collecting the sample while I worked with the meter.  In Tolon, we were usually sampling from ponds created by earthen dams and shallow wells, while deeper boreholes were more common in Karaga.  On the last day, Amanda also trained Emmanuel (from CRS), showing him how to collect one of these water samples, so that CRS could continue taking samples after we’ve left.

On each day, after collecting our samples, Valerie and Diana would give us the household samples they had collected so far, and Joe would take the two of us to the SARI lab, so that we could start the bacterial analyses with the staff there.  With the earlier training and the practice they were getting, it didn’t take the technicians long to get quite good at the procedure, and with lots of help we were able to move through the process fairly quickly.  Valerie and Diana would get there a bit later, usually when we were pretty well into the procedure for the samples we had brought first, and then we would all work on the new batch.  Just to really drive the point home, the SARI staff were great, and we really appreciated their help.  They were all very excited about the new equipment and techniques they were learning.  Now that we’ve finished collecting samples, they will also be conducting analyses to measure the nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in our samples from water sources, so that we can try to see if fertilizers applied to crops are making their way into the villages’ water supplies.

On Saturday, Jeremy finally made it.  While we were out collecting data in the field, he went to SARI and spent time talking to Prosper, and we saw him once we got to the lab.  While I think we had gotten into a pretty good groove by this point and were doing a pretty good job on our own, it was certainly very nice to see him and let him take care of some things.

Sunday fell between our third and fourth days in the field.  Because CRS does not work on Sunday, it was a fairly relaxing day.  Up until this point, we had been going pretty hard, but we could sleep in a bit on Sunday morning and spend some time just hanging out at the hotel and in town.  Two of us (Valerie and I) did go to SARI in the afternoon for about half an hour, to finish up the analysis from the day before.  Prosper was kind enough to come along and open the lab for us.  On the way back, we met Jeremy, Diana, and Amanda at a craft market in Tamale.  I ended up buying a small painting from a friend of the driver we had hired for the day (Daniel). 

On Monday, we finished our work in the field, visiting the last village in Karaga.  We moved even a little faster this time, because we needed to get back to CRS by 4:00 PM for a final meeting.  So, we got all our samples, moved through the lab analyses very quickly (with a lot of help from the SARI staff), and drove back to CRS.  The meeting went well – we talked mostly about the plan for the next several months.  Once a month, Philip and/or Emmanuel would be going to the villages we visited, along with a few others, to collect samples from two different sources – in Tolon, one surface water source and one shallow well from each village, and in Karaga, one borehole and one surface water source from each village, if possible.  They will be taking these samples to SARI for analysis.  The idea here is that we’ll be able to get data from a series of time points throughout the year, which will hopefully show us how things change in different seasons.  Because it is the dry season right now, little agricultural activity is going on (besides harvesting the previous growing season’s crops), and it is possible that the levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the water could be very different when agricultural production is in full swing.

Tuesday was our last day in Ghana.  Joe drove us for the last time, taking us to the airport in the morning, where we flew from Tamale to Accra.  We then had almost a full day in the city – we spent most of our time at a hotel near the airport, and walked to a shopping center for lunch.  In the evening, we headed back to the airport for a late-night flight that brought us to London, where we are now, waiting for the final leg of our journey.

So, overall, did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish during this trip?  For the most part, I think we did.  Sure, we could have done some things better.  Things weren’t always quite what we expected, and, personally, I was confused about how the field visits would work before we went to the villages.  But, I think that was mostly because I had spent most of my time in the first few days with the SARI staff, and not with the CRS staff, who were helping to plan the field work.  In general, I think the field work ended up going well, due in large part to the obvious fact that CRS has spent quite a bit of time interacting with these communities and forming good relationships.  We collected a pretty good amount of data, although we don’t have the complete results yet, and what we collected on the trip will only constitute an initial dataset.  Hopefully, the monthly data CRS and SARI will send us can help to fill out the picture over almost an entire year.

I think all of us feel that the most immediately useful and meaningful thing we did during this trip was the training we provided.  Having spent so much of my time with the staff at SARI, I saw how excited the technicians were to be learning some new techniques and to possibly improve some techniques they already knew.  I think it would be great if we could keep working with them, perhaps providing more training further on down the road.  And personally, as I’ve mentioned in previous trip summaries, I’ve really come to enjoy the teaching aspects of what we’ve been doing.  It’s been a lot of fun interacting with the SARI staff and teaching them some new things.  I hope I am able to continue along this teaching path in some capacity.

More holistically, I have a very high opinion of Ghana after this brief trip – our time there was great.  We worked with very capable and passionate people, and the overall atmosphere felt very peaceful and laid back to me.  It’s possible I just didn’t notice it in this short amount of time, but I didn’t feel so much like the center of attention – certainly not in the same way I often did when I was in Uganda – and I liked that about the experience.  Generally, the people were very polite and friendly, and we definitely liked all of the people we worked with closely very much.

But, at the same time, I am sure that this initial impression does not provide a complete picture, with all its intricacies and complexities, and I certainly cannot now claim to be an expert on life in Ghana.  We spent about ten days in the country, but we really only spent seven or eight in Tamale.  That is not nearly enough time to truly begin to understand people’s lives.  I find myself hoping to return at some point, perhaps to do some more training at SARI, but I also find that I would like to simply spend more time in the place – to be able to move more slowly, to have more time to soak in the experience, and to feel a bit more grounded there.  The still somewhat common model of “fly in, take data or do a project for a week, and leave” is not what I consider to be the best kind of work in these settings, unless it’s connected to something longer term and sustained.  This trip was just a piece of a larger framework that is more holistic and, hopefully, sustainable in the long run.  But, for myself, one week is not enough – I just need more time to connect.  Is it possible to feel like I’m at home somewhere without spending years in that place?  I’m not sure, but, regardless, there’s something to be said for finding a good place and remaining connected to it for a long time.  Personally, I find myself hoping that this work, the partnerships that support it, and the relationships we have created will continue and grow.

Seven Days to Learn a Life

Lifting off from fields of harvest,

Climbing through the dusty haze,

Leaving one new land behind me,

Chasing after western rays,

No more seeing earthy rainbows

Ranging ‘cross an endless plain,

Noticing a searching feeling

Growing like a fertile grain.

What a life I have been given,

Seeing others’ lives anew.

Leaving now, though, makes we wonder

Whether what I think is true.

Seven days to learn a life –

Not enough; no, not enough.

Someday, maybe, I’ll return

To smooth the sketch that’s now too rough.

A Week in Rwanda

One of the main reasons I was interested in coming to the University of Illinois involved the work that some of the professors there were starting in Uganda.  They have been planning some projects with a Ugandan man named Peter, who runs an NGO in Uganda that focuses on supporting and training farmers, and which has begun to work on recovering resources from agricultural and human waste.  Peter already has a model farm, not all that far from where I had been living in Uganda, and the eventual goal is to set up something similar on a piece of land near Oruchinga, a refugee settlement in the southwestern part of the country, where we could work on a number of projects that would connect with the refugee community and the surrounding host communities.

Now, every year, a senior-level civil engineering class sends a team of students, along with at least one professor and several graduate students who act as teaching assistants (TAs), to another country.  Last year, the destination was Uganda, and the original idea was that Uganda would become a recurring destination, given this great connection with Peter.  Unfortunately, a trip to Uganda would not work this year, because the country’s presidential elections were being held during this past week, when the trip was scheduled to take place.  In Uganda (as in some other places), there is often a greater possibility of protests, riots, or something unsafe happening on days surrounding elections.  So, as an alternative, this past week, that class went to Rwanda, to visit Gihembe, a refugee camp in the norther part of that country, which is fairly close to the Ugandan border and Oruchinga.

Although I’ve not been directly involved with the class (I’m not one of the official TAs), I was given the opportunity to go along on this trip, because part of my research will involve working with Peter to design some of the sanitation and resource recovery systems that we think will be beneficial in these types of settings.

Although I was certainly looking forward to this opportunity to return to East Africa, I admit that, apart from a few meetings with my adviser, I was not thinking too deeply about this trip before going.  I had not talked about it with very many people.  Maybe it was because I wasn’t involved in planning the class and hadn’t really known or interacted with any of the twelve students going on the trip before we drove to Chicago a little over a week ago.  But, once we started our two-day travel marathon, I started to feel some anticipation.

After our flights, we arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, on a Saturday evening, and met the four drivers (Moses, Moses, Ali, and Emma) who would be taking us everywhere in the coming week.  These guys were actually from Uganda, but they do safaris throughout East Africa, so some of them knew Rwanda fairly well.  They took us to a very nice hotel in Kigali, where we would be spending the night.

Sunday morning, we met Peter, had lunch in the city, and then drove north for about two hours to Gicumbi District, where Gihembe is located.  I spent the whole drive looking out the window and watching the countryside breeze past.  As we left Kigali, we passed by a network of wetlands, where rice was being grown, and we soon began snaking through the large green hills that characterize much of the country.  The look of rural Rwanda is very similar to that of Uganda – lush, green vegetation; dusty, reddish-brown soil; some houses made of bricks and mortar with metal roofs, and others made of dried mud and sticks; many people engaged in small-scale, rainfed agriculture; crops that include bananas, potatoes, maize, sorghum, beans, assorted vegetables, and tea.  I saw lots of terraces cut into the hillsides for farming, which was one difference with Uganda – I typically didn’t see terraces, even when people were farming on steep hillsides.  We ended up at a hotel in Gicumbi, several kilometers from the refugee camp.  The students and TAs spent the evening preparing the lab equipment that they had brought to test local water sources, while I grabbed a bunch of mosquito nets and hung them up for myself and the five male students on the trip – we were all sharing a place, and the ceilings were too high to reach, even for a tall guy like me standing on a bed, so hanging these things took a little creativity.

Over the next two and a half days, we visited a number of different locations – communities surrounding the camp, a school, a health center, and various water sources used by people in the camp and the surrounding communities (springs, a lake, a water treatment plant, and a set of storage tanks in a nearby valley where large tanker trucks are filled before driving up to the camp).  At these sites, the students would split up into groups, with some people using the equipment we brought to conduct field tests and collect samples of the water, which were taken back to the hotel where the students could do some more complex and time-consuming tests. Other groups of students interviewed people about issues surrounding water, sanitation, agriculture, and food security.  Obviously, there was a pretty significant language barrier.  The local language throughout the country is called Kinyarwanda, which is a Bantu language and does have some similarities with Luganda (but not enough for me to understand much of anything).  We typically had two to three people with us who could act as translators, so we could only do a couple of interviews at a time.

Given my interests in sanitation and agriculture, I typically shadowed the students doing the interviews, and occasionally added a few questions of my own into the mix.  I also did some very basic soil classification tests at one location, the results of which suggested that latrines in the area might be prone to collapse.  I quickly moved over to where two students were interviewing a group of men and women and asked if anyone had issues with their latrines collapsing.  Many people responded in the affirmative.  This is obviously a serious issue, but it was also a nice example of two different types of data agreeing with each other and showing me that the work we want to do could have quite a bit of value here.

The one place we didn’t visit was the refugee camp itself.  This may seem odd, given that the camp was our primary reason for coming to this place.  Indeed, we had planned to spend quite a bit of time in the camp, doing the same things we had been doing in those other locations.  The problem was that we needed a permission letter from a government ministry in Kigali, and we had not yet met with this ministry.  So, we couldn’t enter the camp.  Although this was disappointing for the group, it is also understandable – you probably wouldn’t want any random person or group to just walk into a refugee camp, where there are a number of complexities and social dynamics that may not be fully understood.

Personally, the major purpose for my tagging along on this trip was to see the camp and come away with a better understanding of that context.  So, the fact that we couldn’t enter did disappoint me quite a bit.  At the same time, though, I enjoyed the work that we were able to do.  It felt very good to be out in the field again, talking to people about their lives, experiencing a small portion of this reality.  I also had a few really interesting brainstorming sessions with Peter while we were riding in the cars.  It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the nuts and bolts of the more globally-focused research I often do in my office in the civil engineering building at the university, and I do enjoy that work.  I find it very interesting, and potentially very impactful.  But the work that I can contribute to in East Africa – now with the added focus on refugee communities, which are full of extremely vulnerable populations – I think that is where my heart truly lies.  I can get excited about either type of work, but I am more emotionally tied to one, even though it is not as broad in scope.

After our time in the northern part of the country, we returned to Kigali on Wednesday afternoon, back to the same hotel we stayed at the first night.  After arriving and eating dinner, the students did a few more tests on the water they had collected, while I worked on some other work not related to this trip.

Thursday was our safari day.  We woke up very early and left the hotel around 4:30 AM, so that we could reach a national park near the country’s eastern border with Tanzania when it was still relatively early in the morning.  Our drive through the park started very slowly, seeing the occasional antelope, warthog, buffalo, or zebra once in a while.  Right before stopping for lunch, however, we came across a single, extremely large elephant by a lake.  We ate lunch a little further along the lakeshore, near where a group of hippos was hanging out in the water.  After lunch, we hit the jackpot.  Our drivers did not expect to find any big cats, but we came across two lions, one female and one male, resting under a bush near a mound of soil.  This was the first time I had seen a male lion in the wild.  Very soon after that, we got pretty close to a group of about eight giraffes, some of which were obviously paired up in couples.  For the rest of the afternoon, we saw fairly large groups of zebras and antelopes.  I always love seeing wildlife in the wild, and this was a great experience.  But, it was a very long day.  We got back to the hotel around 6:00 PM, meaning that we had basically spent about thirteen and a half hours in the cars, and most of that driving was pretty bumpy and very dusty.  Everyone got out of the cars and immediately headed for the showers.

Friday was our last full day in Rwanda.  All of the students and some of the TAs visited the genocide memorial and then went to a craft market, while Peter, Benito (the professor teaching the class), Lauren, Aimee (two TAs), and I went to several meetings in the city.  We met with a few people working at USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) at the U.S. embassy, with the Rwandan government ministry that handles refugee populations in the country (and the ministry from which we would need to get permission to enter the camp), and with UNHCR (the UN refugee agency, which runs the camps and registers refugees when they enter the country).  I think all of the meetings went really well, and future groups shouldn’t have a problem getting access to the camp, now that our leaders know the process that needs to be followed.  We were all especially happy with the UNHCR meetings.  We actually had two meetings with this agency, one in the morning with technical program staff, and one in the afternoon with a few people who hold leadership positions.  All of these people seemed to be very interested in the projects we have planned in Uganda, and they definitely saw potential connections with the camps in Rwanda as well.  For example, one of the program staff mentioned that latrines were a significant issue in the camps (due to soil conditions that can increase the chance of collapse, which, again, agreed with the data we had been collecting), and that firewood for cooking is another major issue.  We were told that the UNHCR spends about $1 million per year just to provide firewood for all of the refugees in the country.  One of the technologies we will be researching can provide an alternative source of cooking fuel using energy generated from human and/or animal waste.  So, we could potentially help the UNHCR to save some money, a prospect in which they were particularly interested.  The less money they spend on firewood, the more they can spend on other critical needs.  I think we all came away from these meetings very encouraged and excited.

Friday evening at dinner, Benito and the TAs spent some time talking to the students about possible design projects that they might do for the class, based on the data that had been collected.  Benito also thanked Peter, two members of Peter’s staff who had accompanied us, and our four drivers.  I had been feeling a need to say some words of thanks for a while at this point, so I spoke up after Benito finished.  I also thanked our Ugandan colleagues – fortunately, I had been remembering more and more Luganda throughout the week, as I listened to the Ugandans converse with one another.  So, I expressed my thanks in Luganda.  I also thanked Benito and the TAs for their work putting the trip together, and for letting me tag along.  And finally, I thanked the students.  Over the past week, it’s been wonderful getting to know these people – it was actually my favorite part of the trip.  And, maybe, I was able to provide them with some small insight once in a while.  I thanked them for letting me share this experience with them, and I suggested that, either before we left the country or during our flights back to Illinois, they each take some time to reflect on the experience, to think about what they saw and heard, to try to understand in some small way the lives of the people they met – how those lives are different from ours, but also how they are similar and connected to ours.

Saturday morning was a relaxed day, as we slowly checked out of the hotel, got all of the luggage together and went to the airport.  The airport was not a relaxed experience, unfortunately – there were many questions about the equipment we were carrying, and checking in took much longer than it should have.  But, everyone made it (except for my water bottle, which I accidentally left behind in the chaos), and we had a safe flight to Kenya, and then on to Amsterdam.  We are now sitting in the Amsterdam airport, waiting for our last flight.  Our long layover here has given me plenty of time to write this extended summary of our trip.

Overall, this trip was not exactly what I expected, but it was certainly an enjoyable, enlightening, and enriching experience.  Besides the research ideas that have come out of my time here, and besides a slightly greater understanding of the lives of people in Rwanda, two key messages have come out of this trip for me:

First, as I’ve already said, East Africa needs to remain a part of my life.  This was my first time back to this area of the world since leaving Uganda at the end of my Peace Corps service, and it cannot be the last.  This place holds too much of my heart behind whenever I leave.  I find a piece of myself when I return.  Fortunately, I think my research will bring me back in the coming years.

Second, I love interacting with students.  Like I said, my favorite part of this trip has been getting to know these young people.  Hopefully, I provided something useful, and I would like to do that for more people.  A career path that involves teaching is becoming more and more attractive, even though I still have little actual experience with it.  I need to get more…

Can these two pieces work together as I move forward in my life?

I hope so.  I think it’s possible…

Strangers on a Train

Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with my Peace Corps service in Uganda.  I just found this to be a very interesting and enlightening experience.


Waiting to board the train from Champaign to Chicago yesterday morning, I couldn’t help but notice that several of the passengers getting off were carrying their belongings in cardboard boxes or white mesh bags slung over their shoulders.  They were walking toward a group of people standing by the stairs, waiting to greet them.  It was obvious, watching these simple meetings, that these people had spent a fairly long time apart.  I gradually began to realize that the people getting off the train were coming home after having just been released from prison.

Boarding the relatively full train, I found an open aisle seat next to a young man in a sweatshirt and sweatpants with his hand on a large, stuffed yellow envelope resting on the tray table in front of him.  After putting my backpack in the luggage rack above, pulling out my book, and taking off my coat, I sat down.  After a normal greeting, the next words out of my seat partner’s mouth were, “I just got out of prison today.”  As I began talking with him, I looked around and realized that I was sitting in the middle of a group of people in the same situation as this man.  Around me were six young men, all about my age or a few years younger, all making their way to Chicago after having been released from prison today.

The man beside me quickly launched into descriptions of the family he would soon be seeing, the video games he was looking forward to playing, and some details regarding Chicago sports that I hadn't known.  He also talked about those people he would not be seeing.  He told me that his grandmother had passed away just a few days ago, and that her funeral would be held soon.  He had been released on parole just in time to make it back for that.

The two guys sitting in the seat across from us were interested in the book resting on my lap, Walking with the Wind, a memoir about the civil rights movement written by John Lewis.  One of the men said that he had heard about the book before.  They asked me if they could take a look at it, and I happily obliged.

In front of the two guys interested in my book, someone asked if he could use my phone.  None of these men had cell phones, and, again, I was happy to lend it to him.  I didn’t need it for anything at the time.  As it turned out, I didn’t get it back until the end of the nearly three-hour ride.  Noticing this about halfway through the trip, one of the guys next to me leaned over, touched my arm, and said, “You have to excuse him.  He hasn’t talked to his family in a long time.”  I didn’t mind, and the phone became very useful later on.  Near Chicago, we began frantically passing it around to everyone, calling mothers, brothers, and other family members, making sure that each person had someone coming to the train station to pick him up.  No one had enough (or any) money for bus or taxi fare.

Just before we pulled into the station, two of the guys spent some time making sure that a third understood his paperwork explaining how to get in touch with his parole officer.  “You don’t want to end up right back where you were,” they said.  As the train came to a stop, everyone grabbed their boxes of belongings and their envelopes containing parole instructions.  My phone made its way back to me, along with expressions of gratitude from all of the men.

I expected the train ride to be a few hours full of reading and dozing.  I ended up doing neither.  Instead, in this totally unexpected scenario, I was reminded of some important things.  In an era full of data, debates, posturing, and dehumanization, what struck me most about these men was their humanness.  They are people just like anyone else, not prison statistics or points to be used to support a position.  I don’t know what brought them to prison.  I didn’t ask, and, honestly, I don’t much care.  My personal experience with these men was characterized by laughter, shared interest, and mutual respect, and I believe that a few others around us on the train had a similar experience.  I am thankful for it.

Those of us living on the outside are not so different from those in prison.  All are deserving of respect at all times.  And, regardless of what has happened in the past, each moment in anyone’s life can be the start of something new, something better.

The Center of the Universal Sphere

This is not a normal blog entry - it's basically just a poem that I decided not to post on Facebook, mostly because it's a bit longer than the ones I've written in the past.  Just as a very quick introduction, this poem summarizes some ideas (not necessarily completely original or unique) that I've been formulating and tossing around in my head for probably about a year now.  I'm not sure how well it's all explained in this format, but I thought it might be important to start providing some order to all of these ideas.  Since I've gotten into writing some small poems during my time in Uganda, it just ended up coming out this way.  If something strikes you as interesting, or if I need to explain something in more detail, feel free to send me a message, and I'd be happy to talk about it!

The Center of the Universal Sphere

Somewhere clear of the confines of time,

Outside the gaze of the stars,

None hears the sound of the midnight chime,

Or sees the face full of scars.

Space and time as we know them to be,

At that point, they pass away,

While the triumphs and trials of life are set free,

To be perceived in a different way.

Is it true, what I hear, that none sheds a tear

In the center of the universal sphere?

On the surface of the sphere, full of spirit and thought,

Lies the realm of our waking eyes,

Where something like love can be sold or bought

Or sunk in a lake of lies.

One cannot dismiss this plane’s imperfection,

Yet good could still be supplied,

For the surface offers space for expression, through action,

Of spirit-touched love from inside.

Each soul, it seems clear, as a cross could appear,

At which matter and spirit cohere.

Surface points on the sphere, irrespective of kind,

Can exhibit each component quality.

In the material plane, specific form one will find,

Along the radius, spiritual beauty.

But greatest value will come from the two vectors’ sum,

And connecting one’s own to others’,

For no fortunes or doctrines or dogmas should come

Before love for life’s sisters and brothers.

Touching points there and here, inner lines will draw near

To the center of the universal sphere.

The shortest distance to steer between two points on an arc

Is a line that cuts inside the curve.

Tensile force then pulls points toward the central mark

And fires a spiritual nerve.

These lines show relationships of peace and equality

Among people and all of existence,

A collectively-formed filter to reduce the turbidity

That clouds the spiritual substance.

And in a soul’s final year, when matter’s ties disappear,

Perhaps connections propel it into the sphere.

But what of the tear about which there was query

Whether ever it falls in the core?

Now I cannot be sure, but I present here a theory

Based on that which has come before.

There are those who do not form connections of peace,

Or of love, or equality, or kindness.

Instead they pursue, seeming never to cease,

The means to power, to wealth, and to blindness.

Some prey on those who they see as below them,

Or those who seem not quite the same,

While some, solely fixed on a goal or a gem,

Are indifferent to those losing the game.

But although they may gain all the things they have sought,

Time fades power and fine, precious stone.

The permanent value of love they have not,

Without connection, souls drift off alone.

So perhaps, a soft tear, for these souls will appear,

And for those whose connections they shear.

But let us be clear, yes, let us remember

That these sad souls are not simply “they”,

For in each of us fidgets a flickering ember,

Burning to keep connections away.

Yet in all of us also is a stream from the center

That supports and joins one to another.

All we need do is allow it to enter,

To flow, and the flames it will smother.

So join hands without fear, and together draw near

To the center of the universal sphere.

Easter in Kajaguzo

A couple of weeks ago, Max (my counterpart) and Teddy (his wife) invited me to spend Easter with them at their house in Kajaguzo, a (very) rural village a few kilometers away from Kalisizo.  In Uganda, Good Friday and Easter Monday are considered public holidays, so businesses and organizations, like ours, get a four-day weekend.  However, I only spent Sunday and Monday in Kajaguzo.  On Friday and Saturday, I had our office to myself, allowing me to really focus on some work that I needed to do individually.  Electricity in Kalisizo had been pretty terrible all week (I think I might do a post about electricity, to try and give you an idea of what it’s like), but power was on in the afternoon on Friday and all day on Saturday, so I was taking full advantage of it while I could…

On Sunday, I woke up to a cool, steady rain.  I would say that this kind of rain is pretty common here, and it’s incredibly relaxing.  The cool temperature, the gentle, steady tapping of raindrops on the roof, and the general lack of other noise (because most people don’t go outside when it’s raining) all helped to keep me in bed for a while.  Eventually, Max called and told me that he would be coming to pick me up in a couple of hours.  So, I climbed out of bed, got myself ready, quickly packed a few things in my backpack, and waited for Max.  As I was waiting, I had my front door open, and one of my landlady’s little kids started knocking on the door.  At first, I thought he was just doing it to play around, but he was pretty persistent, so I walked over to see what he wanted.  He handed me a plastic bag and quickly walked away, before I had a chance to see what was inside.  It was a collection of vegetables (carrots and eggplants, mostly).  I was a little unsure of what to do, and then I saw my landlady walk past.  I quickly assumed that it was a present for Easter (an Easter basket a bunny might actually enjoy), and thanked her for the veggies.  She cheerfully said, “Happy Easter,” and continued on.

Max showed up in the car a couple of minutes after I received this nice little gift, and I was ready to go.  We had to take an alternate route to Kajaguzo, up and over the big hill in town, because the more direct (but lower and flatter) dirt road was probably a muddy mess.  Needless to say, the drive took a while, and I’m pretty sure we were slipping a sliding a little bit as we crawled along at five miles an hour, but we made it.  Upon arriving, I sat down in the family’s sitting room, with the three kids who were home from school (Robinah, Gemma, and Emma), and Teddy served lunch almost immediately, although the word “lunch” sounds a bit too light to do this meal justice – definitely more of an Easter feast.  On one plate, I had a massive pile of matooke, rice, noodles, cabbage, green beans, and chicken.  I don’t think anything else could have fit.  In addition to this plate, I had two big bowls, one with a beef stew/soup, and another with a vegetable stew/soup.  I got through just about everything, except for some of the beef.  I feel like I have very weak teeth whenever I eat meat here – it’s generally more than a little tough.  But it all tasted good, even after I had been engaged in this eating marathon for what must have been over an hour.

All during lunch, and then for the rest of the afternoon, the TV was on.  Wait a minute, TV?  Yes, they have a TV.  Kajaguzo is certainly not connected to the electrical grid, but Max installed a solar panel a couple of years ago, and it works really well.  In his words, if he wants, he can watch TV “full time,” which was more or less the case on Sunday.  During our lunch, there was this cartoon on that went through Holy Week from the perspective of a kid living in Jerusalem.  Unfortunately, it had some not very good songs (lyrics didn’t rhyme, trying to fit too many syllables into one beat, etc.).  After that, a Filipino soap opera came on (and stayed on for like 2 hours…).  If I haven’t said it before, I will now.  Soap operas are big here.  Some are in English, some (like the one we endured) are in another language and then overdubbed in English by some absolutely terrible voice actors, and others go through this translation procedure and then add on yet another layer of overdubbing, in which one Ugandan guy (it sounds like one guy does all of the different shows) translates into Luganda and provides what I assume is some pretty lively commentary on the action.  Sometimes he yells, sometimes he laughs, and sometimes I’m pretty sure that the translation is a little off, but he’s probably making it better, so I can’t complain.  Anyway, I paid attention for a bit, in case some family members couldn’t quite keep up with the English.  At one point, Max, half-dozing after our feast, asked me which character was which.  “The girl in the green dress,” I said, “is Miguel’s new girlfriend, and the girl in the blue dress is his ex-fiancée,” as blue dress girl throws a glass of wine at green dress girl.  Finally, I pulled out my Kindle and started reading.

After a while, a commercial came on about the World Cup (which is being held in Brazil this year, if you weren’t aware).  Max, fully awake now, asks, “Why aren’t people from Brazil called Americans?”

Without thinking, I replied, “Well, it’s not a state in the US.  It’s a completely different country.”  Then I realized that it’s actually a pretty valid point, seeing as Brazil is in fact in South America, and this is of course what Max meant.  Amending my original statement, I said, “I guess only people from the US are called Americans, even though many other countries are also in the Americas.”  Thinking about it a bit more: “Maybe it has to do with the name of the country…What else could you call someone from the US?”

“Ah, you can’t,” Max replied.  “For other countries, it’s okay, because people from Canada are Canadians, and people from Brazil are Brazilians.”

“So, I guess the US was just named without thinking about these repercussions,” I concluded.  “Now ‘Americans’ is only used for people from the US.”  I certainly don’t claim to be an authority on the history of the Americas, but we reached an interesting little conclusion there.

Around 7 PM (what I would consider supper time), Teddy served us a “snack”, which consisted of half a plate of beef, with a few carrots and onions, and half a plate of cabbage.  Again, it tasted good, but my teeth hurt…

At some point just before or during this snack, a very short, and somewhat odd, news program came on called “News Beat”.  It basically consisted of two anchors, one woman and one man, both sporting dreadlocks, saying news headlines.  There was music playing in the background, and both of them, during the whole thing, stared intensely into the camera, heads bobbing to the beat, as they went through the headlines, which were sort of rapped, or at least rhythmically spoken on the beat.

Also around this time, a commercial came on showing some women doing the traditional dance of the Buganda tribe.  “Do you like our traditional dance?” Teddy asked me.

“Oh, yes, it’s very impressive,” I responded.  “I can’t move my hips like that…”

“John’s brother and mom are coming next month,” Max joined in.  “Maybe they would like to see the dance?  Teddy, we can organize a demonstration.”

“Does St. Tereza (the village’s primary school) have a dance troupe?”  I asked.

“Oh, of course,” Max answered.  I didn’t really need to ask that question.  Pretty much every school has a dance group.  So, Luke and Mom may be getting a personal dance show in about a month…

As it got dark, a few kids from the village came into the house and plopped themselves in front of the TV.  This is obviously the thing to do when it gets dark, and we have one of the only TVs in Kajaguzo.  It made me think of my mom talking about how, when she was a kid in Highspire, everybody would go over to one family’s house to watch their TV.

Sometime after 10 PM, we ate supper, which consisted of matooke, rice, noodles, beef, and avocadoes.  Oh, and I forgot to mention that, every year, Max gives up beer for Lent.  So, since Lent was over, we had been drinking beers for quite a while (thankfully, very slowly), and we can’t forget about those calories…  Oh, I also forgot to mention that the family has a cat, which is called, quite simply, “Puss”.  I’m not sure if it’s a boy or a girl, but I made friends with it during dinner.  It walked over to me, looking longingly up at the meat on my plate.  I knew that Max and Teddy wouldn’t have wanted me to feed Puss using my own food, but I was pretty successful in getting Puss to forget about eating with some well-placed petting behind the ears.

As a little aside, I think that part of the reason many Ugandan families eat so late is because cooking takes so long, and it’s quite a lot of work.  In just about all of the cases I have seen, it is the women that do this work (in addition to a bunch of other household tasks).  I’m not going to go into a big thing in this post about this issue, but I will say that if you spend any time at all with a Ugandan family, especially one in a rural setting, you will develop a profound respect for the work ethic of most Ugandan women.  And you might also notice that the work these women do is sometimes (perhaps often) underappreciated.

Anyway, by supper time, Gemma and Emma were falling asleep. Robinah shook them awake to eat, and then they dazedly walked off to bed.  Eventually, Max and I were the only ones left in the room.

“Thank you, John,” Max says as we start to get up.

“Well, I didn’t really do anything,” I replied, thinking of all of the work that Teddy put into our meals.

“Thank you for spending Easter with us.”

“Well, thank you for inviting me to spend it with your family.”

“Oh, we could never forget you,” Max says.  “You are part of the family.  We are just praying that God will keep us close in the future.”

I’ll tell you, this gig can be difficult and frustrating sometimes.  Then, other times, Max will go and say something like this, and I can only utter the Ugandan grunt of agreement (“Mmm”) as I feel a little tear starting to form in my eye…

Monday was more of the same – big meals and relaxing.  I won’t get into it now, because this is a nice place to end, and it’s pretty late.  I’m back at my house now, still feeling extremely full.  I took a few minutes tonight to run back and forth between my two rooms, trying to use up a few calories and to persuade my still relatively fast metabolism to continue working its way through the recent influx of above average amounts of food.  In any case, it was a nice couple of days, and, now that it’s over, I’m glad to be back comfortably in my house.  Back to work tomorrow…