Bakunzi, Anneti Group A Number 1

Anneti is tall and thin. Her hands are soft when she offers you a gentle handshake. She is older with a quiet, dignified presence. Anneti usually has a serious expression on her face, but is quick to smile when greeted. She cares for three of her children and one grandchild.

Anneti in her own words:

"When I was in P5 (fifth grade) my mother passed away, that’s when my problems began. When I reached P7 (seventh grade) my father told me to drop out of school to give chance for the others to study. I got married when I was 22. We stayed together for some time until my husband impregnated a girl who was under my care and whose family was friends with my husband. We became two wives but we were not getting enough love. We stayed until 2005 and then I moved to JInja. I moved to Jinja because I needed medical treatment (I have some complications with my head) and my husband was not taking enough care of me, so I decided to come to my sister who was supporting me well. Since I joined Suubi I can afford my medication, send some money to my child in Secondary school and even try to save some. Suubi has encouraged us to save in the bank which is very helpful to us."

andrea's birthday

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-OV16ZOkOg

watch the video here

it happens

looking at the last date of my blog and feeling a little ashamed. i'm immediately filled with excuses...the internet is so slow, i don't know what to say, no one reads this anyway. but that's not right.

i'm looking for a good metaphor of how i feel about blogging. i feel the same way about mediating disagreements between workers, about standing on line at the bank for an hour and my music player dies 5 minutes into it and the man behind me is touching me and i inch forward and the bag that the lady is holding is touching my leg and the man behind me moves forward again and now i'm touching both of them. i feel the same way about picking the nasties out of the drain on sunday because they haven't been picked since friday and they're full of fruit flies and ants. i feel the same way when i'm sleeping and wake up hearing someone outside the neighbor's gate calling someone's name for hours and hours.

what can i say about life in africa now?

its cool here and cloudy. its hot in the morning and the clouds build in the afternoon. it thunders and thunders and BOOM it rains. the wind blows and dust flies before it gets down to mud. then its over and its cool and the clouds are splattery (dotty? smeared?) like clouds in autumn in new jersey. like the clouds in pennsylvania when we camped out in the mountains in a small tent. it rained that night and we were cold. in the morning we were damp and our tent was covered in heavy red, yellow, orange, brown wet leaves. the car was warm. we drove back to jersey. the clouds were streaked, some dark and heavy, others light, feathered, airy. the air was cold and the wet leaves sparkled in the low-angled sunlight.

it looked just like that the other day. i was on a boda from here to there. it was cool. the breeze was even cool. the clouds were light and dark; fluffy and streaky and spotty. i looked up and went back to that weekend in pennsylvania. driving in a volkswagen. drinking coffee out of a wax-coated paper cup with a plastic lid. listening to cds around sharp curves and talking about the future, what we would do after and after and after.

then i looked down. we were behind a truck filled with sugar cane spewing diesel fumes and dust. we swerved around it, passed the posho factory, the bread factory, the muslim school. in the afternoon men walk with baskets on their heads filled with small plastic bags of nuts and seeds. they're selling afterschool snacks. every afternoon, i'm driving in, they're walking out. we pass, each on our way to work. we pass goats and chickens, small children holding machetes cut chunks of sugar cane. the boda men cleaning their motorcycles in the pools of water that collect next to the road between gardens. up over bumps and humps. slowing just enough to make it over then gun the engine to make it up the hill. children in school uniforms with only one or two functional buttons. all ugandans wear black sensible shoes to work. men dismount heavy black bicycles and walk the rest of the way up the hill. the pavement ends, the dirt road is marked by a smooth boda path.

when i arrive in danida at the suubi building i'm disoriented. what a long ride from pennsylvania. dust and diesel on my face. i've taken to listening to music while on the boda. drawn back to other places and times. do you remember when we sang that song in the fire pit dug out of the snow? we made snow benches that got softer and wetter as the fire grew. we sang that song and we were drumming on buckets. i was beating a metal shovel because it sounded like a steel drum. we sat in the snow. wet asses, dreaming of tropical places.

i pay the boda man. carry the bag of bananas and popcorn into the building. children call my name. it sounds like ambo or lambo. i sit on an orange bench. another orange bench is broken. at this rate we'll all be sitting on the floor by christmas. i greet them all.

"how are you?"

"how is the day?"

"irimaber?"

"ber"

"gang?"

"ber"

i sit again and think of what to do and think of what to say.

"it is cold."

"yes, we are cold"

"it is rainy season"

"yes it will rain"

"kot obicwe is how you say it, right?"

"aya, kot obicwe, it will rain."

yesterday i officially made water boil using the sun. i built a solar oven out of cardboard and aluminum foil. i put a dark wine bottle full of water in a clear plastic bag (that originally held 36 rolls of toilet paper) and set it on the solar cooker. Within an hour, the water boiled! So today I'm going to try rice. I want to build solar cookers with all of the suubi ladies and tailors so they can save money (and time and the atmosphere and their health) by sterilizing their water and cooking food without using charcoal or wood. there are a million reasons why solar cookers are great, but this is my number one. hopefully, we can get these going soon. I'm going to acquire some WAPIs so we know when the water has reached a high enough temperature to kill most of the bacteria and viruses.

We've had a bunch of visitors recently, more are coming today. I find it challenging to take people out for a day and give them the right amount of information. In a day, people want to hear what we do, details about the past, present and future regarding: who we work with, what products we make, how we sell them in america, what we hope to actually accomplish. I am working on summarizing and figuring out how to tailor my spiel to the audience. Its hard to not just start spewing about every detail of everything. I want to be intentional about telling the truth in a way that people can get a realistic picture of who we are, not just get stuck in the details of what we're doing right now. I guess I need to take my own advice and focus more on the big picture and not just get stuck in the details of right now.

Well, off to solar cooking, tours, breakfast club, english class, and fun!

i'm reading an article at cnn about "voluntourism," the idea that people want to do good works in a foreign place in addition to traditional holiday activities. they say that women take volunteer holidays more than men because they want cultural immersion in a safe place, camaraderie with fellow travelers, and want to reduce the "guilt" of vacationing. mom and dad and family are visiting in October for a little bit of voluntouring. mom and the aunties are going to do some sort of "clinic." (or at least look all the suubi ladies in the eye while they take their blood pressure and heart rate) We're going to install dad in the Suubi building with beading and macrame and tie-dye.

right now i'm drinking ugandan wine. its made here in jinja from hibiscus flowers and sold commercially from the winery where it is made across the river in njeru. the bottle says it has an "elegant taste" which my untrained palate finds as intensely sweet at the first followed by astringent then ending on something like old, leather boat shoes. i've almost finished my first glass.

its 7:30 pm and its officially dark. i have to get up and turn ... never mind, the power is out. Good night.

mama rachel

a beautiful day

another week. another suubi meeting. another 5 million paid.

yesterday i completed our first "direct deposit." within the past month, we have doubled the suubi ladies' salaries. this is a very, very good thing that can lead to very, very bad choices. you know what i'm talking about if you've ever had your salary doubled. suddenly, things that you struggled for are accessible. anyway... i want to promote banking among the suubi ladies. i found my suubi lady banking obsession when i first began to visit the suubi ladies and noticed that when they wanted to buy me a soda they reached under their couch cushion and grabbed some coins. money management is not high on the priority list when you don't have that much money. but now we're giving our ladies some money and its my priority to make sure they don't lose it under the chair.

now, more than one year later, more than 45 of our 93 ladies have bank accounts. during the last two weeks of April, we paid each of the 93 women 50,000 each. we told them that they could choose the amount of "direct deposit" in 10,000 increments. so the ladies brought us their bank account numbers and i made a neat excel table. during the suubi buying meetings we asked each lady how much she wanted to deposit. some ladies chose 10,000 or 20,000. some chose more. some even put all 50,000 in the bank.

on friday afternoon i went to the PRIDE bank. i stood on line for a long time. i brought a bag of 20,000 notes and printed out my neat list. i gave it to the teller and he nearly fainted. for the next three hours he alternated between doing a suubi lady deposit and taking a customer from the line. it wasn't fun, but it was worth it. i deposited a total of 1.8 million shillings into 45 bank accounts.