Advertisement
I (Gerry) read an inspiring story in the 'New Vision' (my favourite newspaper) about a Ugandan guy who has set up the 'Rwenzori Finest Coffee Company' in the mystical Mountains of the Moon which borders Rwanda. The small coffee farmers (they're not pygmies - they just own small amounts of land each!) used to sell their coffee beans for a pittance partly because the quality wasn't great and they had no choice of buyer. So this guy comes along and helps them form cooperatives and trains them to produce top quality beans which he buys from them for a fair sum of money. Now the farmers can afford to send their children to school and improve their living environment. The company has now secured a contract to supply Waitrose supermarkets in the UK!
The new-found optimism of the farmers has led to more creative ideas, the founder tells this story of one of the farmers: "His pride and joy, however, are his beehives. He takes me round the back of his hut to show me. The hives are homemade - cleverly constructed in a variety of styles. The bees produce wonderful honey, he says, and help to pollinate the coffee
Little girl and panga
Photo taken by Lisa (ex-staff) crop. He wants to try to have beekeeping incorporated into the Rwenzori project; he imagines the whole mountain buzzing. Charles based the design of his hives on a book about beekeeping, the only book he owns. Because the book is so special to him, he named his son Macmillan, in honour of its publisher!"
If Africa were able to increase its trade with the world by just 2%, it would produce $150billion of wealth. Better trade than aid.
For those of you who read my last entry you will know that I came to a peaceful truce with the mouse (christened 'Denise') that was inhabiting my room, however, she eventually came to a sticky end following a violent onslaught from Robert (who also lives in the house), normally a placid, friendly kind of guy, but now turned deadly mouse killer. He ingeniously designed the perfect organic mouse trap, coating a small sheet of cardboard with sticky glue upon which he craftily scattered some tempting peanuts. Sure enough not only Denise but about 10 other greedy mice succumbed that afternoon. There was a most bizarre scenario when a large pregnant mouse got stuck in the glue and gave birth
World Cup Guesthouse
Photo taken by Lisa (ex-staff) to her babies! Sad, but such is life (or should I say, death?).
There was carnage that day, not just mice copped it, but my helpful spiders were also brushed away to their doom. I had 4 spiders immediately above my bed with 3 webs on the ceiling of the room. All the pesky malaria-carrying mosquitoes would fly high above my head in readiness to dive bomb me with their deadly cargo on board when they would get the shock of their lives as they flew headlong into the spiders' webs, instantaneously the spiders would shoot across the web and and inject the mossies with paralysing poison and then wrap them up in a cocoon and cart them off to be stored for eating at a more convenient time! (It's amazing what you watch when there's no telly!). But Robert brushed them all away! It was the end of a beautiful symbiotic relationship.
My work is going quite well with the managers of the different departments at the Bushfire Project and we are progressing with their project plans and also evaluations of last year's work. Sam (the Project Director) is as mad (I mean visionary) as ever and
Baby drinking
Photo taken by Lisa (ex-staff) now wants to build a 3500 seater cathedral! His church (which I was at today) is certainly filling up with about 200-300 people attending. The new school will be completed shortly and will hopefully be ready to open for the new term on Feb 6th! The 2 new homes for children will also soon be ready and the total number of children will be around 90 I think. After that work will commence on new staff houses, a kitchen and dining area, a workshop and guesthouses! Never a dull moment on Bushfire! How is all this going to be sustained? Obviously a large part of it will be funded by generous donors but there is a lot of work going into self sustainability such as the planting of crops (we now have about 25 acres), construction of 2 fishponds, a farm with pigs, cows, goats and chickens and soon we'll be doing bee keeping. We have a target of using 100% sustainable fuel for cooking, using solar cookers which we can make ourselves and solar ovens for baking bread. Where we have to burn fuel we can build our own rocket stoves using homemade bricks of clay and sawdust which
gives 80% more efficiency than the normal charcoal fires.
The big challenge is the lack of electricty. In Uganda only 1% of the population has electricity (mainly hydro-electric), another 1% uses solar energy, so the vast majority are burning fossil fuels and now only 3% of the natural forests in Uganda are left. On Bushfire there is no electricity, except a very small generator. We're currently looking into how we can provide electricity in the future.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.085s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 21; dbt: 0.0634s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Felicia
non-member comment
Hi
I was trying to find the Bushfire website (I finally did) but I ran across your blog in the process. My bestfriend Megan is there right now as well and it is nice to see pictures of everything there & in town that I keep hearing about. Except the spiders & mice of course. If you are still there, give her a hug for me and take care and keep doing all the wonderfull work you guys are doing there.