Want to learn more about child malnutrition in Uganda?
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
News from Uganda... Marriage and HIV bills
The "Marriage and Divorce Bill"
This bill is currently in hot debate all over the country - though the part of the bill most condemned by the international community, the bit criminalizing homosexuality, is the part most widely agreed upon by Ugandans.
For a detailed explanation of the anti-homosexual sections of the bill:
For the latest on Museveni's apparent reluctance to pass the bill after international condemnation and threats to cut aid to Uganda (based on the anti-homosexual parts):
On provisions of the bill affecting women (e.g. cohabitation recognised with regard to distribution of property at separation, widow inheritance abolished, impotent men to be divorced, bride price not to be compulsory):
While I am unable to find a link to any news about it, I believe that another section of this bill proposes short-term marriage contracts between men and women, where a reduced bride price could be paid to a woman's family in order to attain, say, a year's marriage contract. The contract could then be renewed if both parties were interested. This leaves interesting questions about the provision for children produced during such a short-term marriage
The "Prevention and Control of HIV/AIDS Bill"
A bill that critics say amounts to criminalizing HIV-positive status, might eliminate confidentiality of test results, could discourage individuals from getting tested or from disclosing their status, and will likely increase the level of HIV-transmission...
Human Rights Watch critique of bill:
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Are UVP gifts on your holiday wish list yet?
For anyone interested in giving charitable gifts this holiday season... we recommend you stop by our new Universal Giving site. This is a fantastic clearinghouse for gift packages and charitable projects, including volunteer opportunities.
In the meantime, we've also been listed on Grain Edit's holiday wish list, a design blog based in San Francisco. Thanks for the shout out, Grain Edit!
Friday, December 11, 2009
Uganda Facts
Just a few statistics on Uganda...
- Life expectancy: 49
- Probability at birth of not surviving until age 40: 31.4%
- Under-5 mortality rate: 130 in 1,000 live births
- Percentage of HIV-positive adults: 5.4%
- Children underweight for their age: 20%
- In East Africa, underweight prevalence is predicted to be 25% higher in 2015 than it was in 1990.
- Uganda has the 3rd highest rate of malaria deaths in the world.
- In 2007, there were 47,000 reported deaths from Malaria (with likely double that or more unreported)
- Percentage of adults with "low educational attainment" (as defined by the Human Development Index): 93.5%
- Adult illiteracy rate: 26.4%
- Population living under $1.25 a day: 51.5%
- Population living under $2 a day: 75.6%
- Government expenditure on health care per capita: $39
- Urban share of Uganda's population: 11 - 13%
- Total fertility rate: 6.4
Fun facts about Uganda:
- When a Ugandan is explaining a direction or location, instead of pointing with their hand they often purse their lips out towards the direction.
- Many Lusoga words repeat themselves. For instance, "wala wala" means "far away," "mpola mpola means "slowly," and "kumpi kumpi" means "close by."
- Mangos currently cost 5 cents each
- Women are not meant to eat eggs, in Basoga culture, lest the forefathers curse us.
- There are at least half a dozen types of banana commonly grown, likely more, each with their own name and purpose: bagoya, ndizi, gonja, matoke, etc.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Give To The World
Try stopping by Uganda Village Project's Give To The World catalog, where you can find gifts from mosquito nets to vegetable gardens that will benefit small village communities in Uganda.
Not only are these gifts meaningful and life-saving, they are effective: 100% of the money you donate will go straight to Uganda to support your designated program, none of it will be spent on publicity or fundraising.
Our Etsy shop features cloth bags and jewelry made by Ugandan orphans who are trying to find a way to earn money for their schools and their families. They're beautiful and unique!
Friday, December 4, 2009
Red Dust
One of the things that I hate and love about Uganda is the dust. Ugandan earth is a dark red-brown, and so rust-colored dust lays over the villages in like a thin, almost-invisible cloak, billows up behind motorcycles and mini-buses on long dirt roads that run through the countryside like red rivers, sticks to your face and your arms and your clothes, gets in your food and your nose and your bed-sheets and your hair. It’s incessant, softly permanent, like the heat or the poverty of the place, patiently waiting for you to accept it, to resign yourself to it, and eventually to love it.
And you do – you learn to enjoy washing your hands and watching the water run off red, clear as you become clean. You learn to wear dark colors when your ride motorcycles, and to laugh at yourself and your clothes when you forget and come back dyed dark reddy-brown. You learn to sweep the floors during phone conversation, when you’re frustrated or thinking, while your water is boiling for tea, and to enjoy the satisfaction of that smooth, clean, tidy look that will last for approximately 3 hours before the next layer of dust rolls in. You learn to shower only at the very end of the day, when it's grown cool outside and you’re done with all your outdoor activities for the day, when you can sit afterwards inside your home feeling deliciously smooth and cool and clean all over.
You learn to live with the dust in Uganda, and you learn to love it, to understand it like a language or a lifestyle or a people. And when you return home to the United States, or to England, or to Canada, you’ll find that you miss the dust, and through that you’ll miss the country and the lifestyle and the language and the people. You’ll remember Uganda, and when you do, you’ll envision a long red road, twisting across a scrubby green landscape of bushes and trees and occasional thatch-roofed huts of red-brown mud, and the blue sky above like an expansive bubble, and the dust rising from little dirt paths and the long red road, rising like a breath, hovering, waiting, rising from the earth like a spirit, like the future, like the stained-red soul of the country, Uganda.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
improving health & sustaining local livelihoods
Meet Godfrey Mulumba, a 30-year-old rural artisan representing a nine member pottery cooperative in nearby Kamuli District. UVP speaks with Godfrey about his background and profession, his previous experience with the pottery business, and the impact of a partnership with UVP's Modified Clay Pot (Mod-Pot) Project on his income and livelihood.
Godfrey: My great grandfather started producing traditional clay pots in the 1930s. Knowledge was passed down to my father and he taught me how to make clay pots. I started making clay pots at 12 years of age and I am now teaching my son, Ronald, who is 10 years old.
UVP: Has the pottery business changed since when your father started making pots?
Godfrey: When I started making clay pots with my father, we made enough money through sales in surrounding rural areas. Since then, things like firewood costs have increased and there is no longer consistent demand for clay pots from nearby rural villages and towns. With more people moving to cities, we started to sell in cities but high transport costs, competition from other potters, and the difficulty working with middlemen limit what we can sell. Our group resorted to moving our products into towns on bicycles but, whenever we cannot find buyers, we are forced sell our pots at a loss or transport them back to our village.
UVP: Why did you enroll in UVP's Modified Clay Pot Project and how has it impacted your business?
Godfrey: I was approached with the idea of making clay pots with taps for safer drinking water and discussed it with the members of my local pottery cooperative. After making samples for UVP, my group produced 100 modified clay pots as our first order for UVP. The Mod-Pots I make for UVP are guaranteed to be sold because I get paid in advance, and I don't need to worry about finding customers or transporting the products to where they are wanted. This gives me more time to focus on producing pots. For every modified clay pot I make, I get 50% more money than from molding a traditional clay pot. I have appreciated the new sense of security and income; producing Mod-Pots for UVP will help pay for my three children's' school costs and help expand my business.
UVP's Mod-Pot project targets elimination of common hand contamination of household stored drinking water through hygiene education and sale of subsidized modified clay pots to rural communities. The demand for ceramic products, however, also sustains the livelihoods of local artisans who supply the Mod-Pots to UVP. Over the next 12 months, UVP will connect over 20 artisans and their products to new markets thereby opening up opportunities for higher income generation.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Eye Health Program Receives Funding!
Through our partnership with ChooseANeed, we have received funding from a generous donor to support our eye health program based in our target Healthy Villages. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank our friends at ChooseANeed who have helped us in so many ways since we started working together. This funding will allow us to train individuals in each village to identify community members with eye health issues that can be repaired, such as trachoma and cataracts. We then provide counseling and transport for these community members to undergo surgical repair of their condition and have their eyesight restored.
UVP has trained over 60 eye health educators in the Iganga District, and facilitated more than 67 surgeries such as lid rotations, foreign body removals, and cataract removals.
To learn more:
- Visit our eye health program website and donate to help us bring the gift of sight to more and more villages in eastern Uganda
- Visit the ChooseaNeed website to see UVP's featured Needs and Success Stories
- Read an article just published about ChooseANeed's work worldwide
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Thanksgiving, the Incubator, and the Radio Station
From David Dinh in Uganda, UVP Board Member:
I have been working with a District Water Office engineering intern named Emma to carry out water sample collection and filtering/incubating the samples back at the water office. Water Quality testing turns out to be a tedious and time consuming exercise; on average, field testing starts between 11-12AM because of delays in procuring either transport or staff and ends at 5-6PM or within the recommended 6 hours after the collection of the first water sample. The membrane filtration consumes 10-15 minutes per sample. For a set of 10-12 samples and controls, it takes a total of 2 hours. After filtration, you have to sterilize new Petri plates and water sample collection bottles for the following day. On the days Emma could stay to help, I could leave shortly after 8PM.
On Wednesday, in eager anticipation of Thanksgiving in Uganda, I toiled to complete the necessary water quality preparations, recorded testing data from the previous field test, and organized logistics for field work on Thanksgiving Day. I was optimistic Emma and I would finish before 7PM the next day thus enabling me to bike back to the office with ample time to make dinner and, with high certainty, play Thanksgiving Scrabble with Mariam and Marcela!
Field work on Thursday consisted of traveling to Lambala, a well site boardering with Kamuli distict, and back to villages we missed the previous day in central and eastern Iganga district. “It’s only 6:00PM!” I said thinking I had a cornucopia of time (cornucopia being a great Scrabble word) to filter the 10 samples plus bottle water controls. Emma and I set off prepping and filtering our samples but, at the 8th sample, the power cut off. “Not a problem, there is a backup battery inside the incubator,” Emma told me but only to find that someone had switch off the outlet in the morning. The incubator switched on but the green power LED died, along with any hopes of leaving early.
More or less, I thought I had lost my right arm. Six hours of irretrievable field work, 43 liters of fuel, and all our testing reagents would go to waste if we could not find a power source for the incubator. The district was not going to allow me to go back to these sites to repeat testing. I dreaded the idea of repeating the task.
I waited 45 minutes before deciding on trying to charge the incubator at locations with a running generator. We had several generator options but they all necessitated me sleeping near the incubator to make sure the glorified $300 oven was not stolen. The initial plan was simple; rent a room at Mwana Highway Hotel and charge the incubator over night. We entered Mwana and inquired when they turn off their generators and whether we can get a room to charge the incubator to run our tests. I expected the cashier to say, “Ok, that will be 20,000 UGX and have a great night!”; instead he quoted 40,000 UGX and suspected we were carrying a biohazard cased in a blue metal box and called the manager. Before we could re-explain that we were working for the DWO and the incubator is as dangerous as a VCR, the cashier said to the manager, “Look at the box. They are trying to heat up chemicals.” After an unproductive discussion that involved blaming foreigners for causing generator outages during the summer by plugging in their laptops, we found ourselves walking to nearby gas stations with running generators. After two gas stations, however, it became embarrassingly obvious we were being rejected because no one knew what was inside the mystery container. It was better to show what was inside before explaining what was actually inside.
At this point, 2 hours elapsed since we put our filtered samples inside the incubator. I was exhausted. On our way to inquire about the hospital's generator, our last resort, I noticed the bright radio tower for Eye FM Radio, a local radio station across from Our supermarket. It never occurred to me that radio stations made more money and established a better reputations if they ran generators during power outages to continue broadcasting Ads and programs.
First line of action, we opened the case and showed the manager our Petri plates. Second, we explained the testing and emphasizing the large loss of time and effort if we did not find a power source for the incubator. I expected to get thrown out again, but the manager agreed to charging the incubator and even letting me sleeping on the floor next to it.
We plugged in the incubator and nothing happened. We tried a different extension cord and, still, nothing happened. Apocalyptic thoughts bombarded my exhausted brain. What if this glorified Easy-Bake oven is broken? How am I going to finish testing the remaining water sources? What if the DWO thinks I broke the incubator? Emma and I fiddled with different permutations of pressing buttons, trying different cords and extension cords, and different outlets until an electrician walked into the room to ask us what we were doing. Let me describe what happened again: an electrician walked into the office of an obscure radio station and offer to help two strangers bewildered to why their Easy-Bake oven was not turning on. It turned out the electrician was there before to fix a problem with the station’s radio transmitter. He inserted two prongs connected to a voltage meter into the incubator outlet and repeated with the wall outlet. Then, he explained the voltage was too low for the incubator and it is likely there is feedback mechanism inside the machine that switches off power after sensing fluctuations outside of a specific voltage range. It turned out my Easy-Bake oven is more sophisticated than what I had given it credit for.
Ran back to the office to grab the voltage stabilizer, a blanket, and a mosquito net I hung over my desk, and I set up camp on the floor of the radio station. The generator switched off at 3:30AM but the backup battery inside the incubator kicked in. Between 5:30AM and 6:30AM, the battery died but the casing that housed the Petri dishes remained hot until I took it back to the DWO in the morning. Power came back at 11AM today and I turned on the incubator to finish. While waiting for the remaining 4 hours (I thought since I switched off I would give it the maximum incubation time of 16 hours), I wrote this report, slept, and sterilized equipment and collection bottles for the last day of testing tomorrow.
I have been working with a District Water Office engineering intern named Emma to carry out water sample collection and filtering/incubating the samples back at the water office. Water Quality testing turns out to be a tedious and time consuming exercise; on average, field testing starts between 11-12AM because of delays in procuring either transport or staff and ends at 5-6PM or within the recommended 6 hours after the collection of the first water sample. The membrane filtration consumes 10-15 minutes per sample. For a set of 10-12 samples and controls, it takes a total of 2 hours. After filtration, you have to sterilize new Petri plates and water sample collection bottles for the following day. On the days Emma could stay to help, I could leave shortly after 8PM.
On Wednesday, in eager anticipation of Thanksgiving in Uganda, I toiled to complete the necessary water quality preparations, recorded testing data from the previous field test, and organized logistics for field work on Thanksgiving Day. I was optimistic Emma and I would finish before 7PM the next day thus enabling me to bike back to the office with ample time to make dinner and, with high certainty, play Thanksgiving Scrabble with Mariam and Marcela!
Field work on Thursday consisted of traveling to Lambala, a well site boardering with Kamuli distict, and back to villages we missed the previous day in central and eastern Iganga district. “It’s only 6:00PM!” I said thinking I had a cornucopia of time (cornucopia being a great Scrabble word) to filter the 10 samples plus bottle water controls. Emma and I set off prepping and filtering our samples but, at the 8th sample, the power cut off. “Not a problem, there is a backup battery inside the incubator,” Emma told me but only to find that someone had switch off the outlet in the morning. The incubator switched on but the green power LED died, along with any hopes of leaving early.
More or less, I thought I had lost my right arm. Six hours of irretrievable field work, 43 liters of fuel, and all our testing reagents would go to waste if we could not find a power source for the incubator. The district was not going to allow me to go back to these sites to repeat testing. I dreaded the idea of repeating the task.
I waited 45 minutes before deciding on trying to charge the incubator at locations with a running generator. We had several generator options but they all necessitated me sleeping near the incubator to make sure the glorified $300 oven was not stolen. The initial plan was simple; rent a room at Mwana Highway Hotel and charge the incubator over night. We entered Mwana and inquired when they turn off their generators and whether we can get a room to charge the incubator to run our tests. I expected the cashier to say, “Ok, that will be 20,000 UGX and have a great night!”; instead he quoted 40,000 UGX and suspected we were carrying a biohazard cased in a blue metal box and called the manager. Before we could re-explain that we were working for the DWO and the incubator is as dangerous as a VCR, the cashier said to the manager, “Look at the box. They are trying to heat up chemicals.” After an unproductive discussion that involved blaming foreigners for causing generator outages during the summer by plugging in their laptops, we found ourselves walking to nearby gas stations with running generators. After two gas stations, however, it became embarrassingly obvious we were being rejected because no one knew what was inside the mystery container. It was better to show what was inside before explaining what was actually inside.
At this point, 2 hours elapsed since we put our filtered samples inside the incubator. I was exhausted. On our way to inquire about the hospital's generator, our last resort, I noticed the bright radio tower for Eye FM Radio, a local radio station across from Our supermarket. It never occurred to me that radio stations made more money and established a better reputations if they ran generators during power outages to continue broadcasting Ads and programs.
First line of action, we opened the case and showed the manager our Petri plates. Second, we explained the testing and emphasizing the large loss of time and effort if we did not find a power source for the incubator. I expected to get thrown out again, but the manager agreed to charging the incubator and even letting me sleeping on the floor next to it.
We plugged in the incubator and nothing happened. We tried a different extension cord and, still, nothing happened. Apocalyptic thoughts bombarded my exhausted brain. What if this glorified Easy-Bake oven is broken? How am I going to finish testing the remaining water sources? What if the DWO thinks I broke the incubator? Emma and I fiddled with different permutations of pressing buttons, trying different cords and extension cords, and different outlets until an electrician walked into the room to ask us what we were doing. Let me describe what happened again: an electrician walked into the office of an obscure radio station and offer to help two strangers bewildered to why their Easy-Bake oven was not turning on. It turned out the electrician was there before to fix a problem with the station’s radio transmitter. He inserted two prongs connected to a voltage meter into the incubator outlet and repeated with the wall outlet. Then, he explained the voltage was too low for the incubator and it is likely there is feedback mechanism inside the machine that switches off power after sensing fluctuations outside of a specific voltage range. It turned out my Easy-Bake oven is more sophisticated than what I had given it credit for.
Ran back to the office to grab the voltage stabilizer, a blanket, and a mosquito net I hung over my desk, and I set up camp on the floor of the radio station. The generator switched off at 3:30AM but the backup battery inside the incubator kicked in. Between 5:30AM and 6:30AM, the battery died but the casing that housed the Petri dishes remained hot until I took it back to the DWO in the morning. Power came back at 11AM today and I turned on the incubator to finish. While waiting for the remaining 4 hours (I thought since I switched off I would give it the maximum incubation time of 16 hours), I wrote this report, slept, and sterilized equipment and collection bottles for the last day of testing tomorrow.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Opportunities to Support UVP Online!
This season there are a number of opportunities to help support us without it costing any money. After our wonderful success in the Giving Challenge, we are very excited about these new opportunities.
Chase Community Giving is a new program that will be giving out millions of dollars to charities. In order to win, we just have to obtain as many votes as possible. Each person has 20 votes in round 1 (until December 11th), you can only use one vote per charity. Please vote for us in this contest and help us reach round 2! It's easy and free.
If you're a Facebook member, the second contest we're working on with with our fantastic partners at ChooseANeed. They've raised $550 dollars which they will give to the charity with the highest number of votes. To vote, just become a Fan of ChooseANeed on Facebook and you can leave a note on their wall. We're trying to promote our sanitation/latrine construction project for the prize.
Visit the ChooseANeed website to see all the good work they are doing - all Uganda Village Project programs are highlighted with our logo.
Chase Community Giving is a new program that will be giving out millions of dollars to charities. In order to win, we just have to obtain as many votes as possible. Each person has 20 votes in round 1 (until December 11th), you can only use one vote per charity. Please vote for us in this contest and help us reach round 2! It's easy and free.
If you're a Facebook member, the second contest we're working on with with our fantastic partners at ChooseANeed. They've raised $550 dollars which they will give to the charity with the highest number of votes. To vote, just become a Fan of ChooseANeed on Facebook and you can leave a note on their wall. We're trying to promote our sanitation/latrine construction project for the prize.
Visit the ChooseANeed website to see all the good work they are doing - all Uganda Village Project programs are highlighted with our logo.
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