A former Aussie soldier and now a commando for the green cause, Steve believes the only future for humankind is a sustainable one. So he’s throwing a group of Gen Y and Zs into his intensive survival boot camp to show them how to tune into nature, not just Twitter.
For more Steve Cran or Green Warrior Permaculture
Endless Aid is good business for NGO’s, the UN agencies and charities. It means there is always a job, “helping the poor”.
Once a country, province, community or even an individual starts to receive aid it creates a dependency pathway that is hard to return from. Each organization is a generic system “working on the problems”, but it is the individuals in those systems that can make changes on the ground or just roll out the usual suspects. The problem with the long-term aid is people get aid for being poor. Poor people get extra food and other benefits. People struggling out of poverty get little or no assistance.
Subconsciously people try and stay poor to get the free goodies. This endless supply of seemly poor people creates the endless aid food chain. Its been going for 40 years here. Although I have frustration working for organizations, this one I’m working for have finally decided to come up with an “exit strategy”. Its strategic planning time.
I visit many project sites in a week. The soil is the best, the rains are constant, there is labour galore and its so easy to grow just about anything. Why aren’t the people wealthy? If a bunch of Australian farmers had land this good they’d be pumping money out of it. People sell food here to buy food. In other words they don’t store their food well so they sell it as quickly as they can to avoid spoilage. My boss asks me to design silos to overcome the storage problem.
I check out materials available, some villages have stone, some make bricks, everybody had dirt. Timber is scarce and termites eat anything made of wood in weeks. If we use bricks they will need half the forests in Karamoja as firewood to bake them. Not very sustainable…everybody has dirt. Dirt? I remember making bunkers in the army, out of bags filled with dirt. Ah ha! Earth-bag construction is the answer. With all that labour we can build earth-bag silos with few inputs. The construction method is used now all over the world with great success.
I place some orders for hessian bags. No such thing in Uganda. Only potato sacks, which are 3 times too big. After lots of trial and error I end up with 25kg polyethylene rice bags as the material to start the job with. If the bags are too big they hold too much material and people can’t lift them. The trick now is to try them out and do some training at the same time.
I design a curved outdoor bench in our compound. If we are going to experiment we may as well make something permanent. The Green Warrior staff line up and listen while I tell them what we are going to do. They seem a bit bewildered because they have never heard of this type of construction before. Then again, I’ve introduced them to many things they’ve never seen before. I direct them to gather the different materials and tools we need.
“Hurry up, get your buts moving”, I yell. Green Warriors don’t muck around. There’s people scrambling everywhere grabbing shovels, hoes, getting cement bags from the store and shovelling sand into wheel barrows. I get my hoe and scrape out a shallow footing in the shape of the bench. Once everything we need is piled around the project site, I begin with showing them how to fill the sandbag only half full. The half full bag swells out with the earth inside, I put a thin layer of cement in the bottom of the footing and lay the first bag flat and pound it flat with the shovel, taking care not to break the bag. After 4 bags the team push me out of the way and begin laying bags like pros. We put a dry mix in between each layer to fill any air gaps. This prevents slippage and reduces problems with settling.
It’s a whole days work and we finish up with beautiful curved cement rendered bench. The team are proud of their achievement but something is wrong. We used 11 X 50kg bags of cement and one half bag of lime. On a larger scale this will blow out our budget entirely. I ask the team how we could have used so much. I do a forensic investigation on our methods. One problem area is the African cement mixing method. That is piling a bunch of sand and splitting a 50 kg bag of cement onto it. There is no precise mixing so they over use cement. Ok I can see this is exactly what the villagers are going to do. They will run out of cement unless we control the mixing.
Another area of waste is the cement inside the walls. We don’t really need to use cement there as filler, we can use clay. The team and I work out the innovations for the next mini project before we are ready for the real thing.
We’ve implemented a new breakfast system here at HQ. Everybody gets a free breakfast here from our kitchen each morning now. Even though we give our team allowances to buy food they don’t, they just starve and save their money. Each morning, the staff are like zombies, with no food in their bodies. It’s hard to motivate a starving person so the boss agreed to my proposal. Unfortunately for me the staff like Ugandan millet porridge. Its ground millet mixed with peanuts, some spices and sugar. It tastes to me like Satan’s armpit.
We are ready to go and I ask the driver if he got his free gruel. He nods and grins and pulls a japati out of his pocket wrapped in a plastic bag. A japati is some flour and water rolled flat and fried in genetically engineered soya oil from the US, shipped in as food-aid. Much of it ends up for sale at the markets. The driver has his emergency japati just in case we break down.
Ten minutes drive from Abim we swing onto a bumpy track and head through the long grass to the village where one of our two test silos will go. I have to pick villages that have over 60 hectares of arable land to support the silo. We need 20 hectares to make the silo viable. If the silo collective can pay on the spot for produce, a low fee, and then pay the balance on receiving the sale money then we have a way of stretching out the farmer’s income. These guys have a big drink-up if they get a lump sum of money with nothing left afterwards.
The chief meets us and takes us over to a shady tree and points out the area put aside for the silo. My brain calculates the amount of loose soil we’ll need to fill the earth bags for the construction. I ask the chief where he’s got some soil. The soil he shows us is a few small piles around the village, not enough by far. Hmmmm…What if we dig a cistern and use the soil from that? Alfred the engineer grins and gives me the thumbs up. He translated to the chief who also nods and grins. We can harvest the rainwater from the silo roof to fill the cistern.
The chief and my team jump in the pick-up truck and we drive through the savannah to a water source about 400 meters from the village. Lots of cattle have been through here. Alfred explains that the people get no products from the cattle. “Its just for the elders to look at”, he says with a shrug. The cattle have flattened most of the vegetation and its still the wet season. In the dry season this place will become a desert.
The water source is a spring leaking into a hand dug shallow dam. I tell the chief he has to find a balance between cattle and cropping if we help him. The interpreter explains and he understands. We check out several other sources to ensure there will be enough water for production of 60 hectares all year long.
On the way home we stop at another village to see Bruno, the 2IC of another silo project site. We check out his choice of sites. Its right next to the new power lines running through his village. I notice there are no wires going into the village, no power here yet.
Bruno agrees to the cistern idea and there are 2 other buildings nearby that can channel their roof water into the cistern, plus the rainwater from the silo roof. It’s got to be cheaper to dig and line a cistern than cart the soil by truck. A win-win for all involved.
The best aid is aid-to-trade. Helping people to create a permanent living from what they have on hand. After 40 years of food aid these guys are getting weaned off the aid-drug, as I call it, and its time for some serious rehab. The biggest threat to this kind of project is the aid-drug dealer. If they start dumping food aid into the middle of a volunteer project like this, the workers disappear pretty quickly. Despite the challenges, it feels right and we shake hands.
The chief knows this is their chance to climb out of the hole after being in it for 40 years. The team and I head home to organize the materials and tools. In my minds eye I see prosperous communities with flourmills and bakeries beside the silos in each village…. I am an eternal optimist.
Steve Cran, North Uganda
Water is the key to all self-sufficiency projects. How much water do we have? Where can we get more? What do we do with it? Do we have enough water in the dry season? For the next 3 weeks I’m dealing with “Where can we get more?”
The thousands of village bore pumps in Northern Uganda are installed under a government contract system. Some villages have many and some villages have only one that they share with several other villages. It’s not always a fair share system. It takes a lot of pumping to fill a watering can. To generate continuous food crops we need other sources. You can’t interfere with the village bore pump if it is overcrowded already.
We are tearing through the scrub at 110 kph in the Nissan Patrol. The crew are thirsty and they never carry water with them ( I’ve told em!). We pull up at a rural bore pump so they can get a drink. The usual suspects are at the pump, a bunch of children and a few thirsty cows and goats. Lucky it’s the wet season and there is much less demand from the animals on the only village hand pump for miles.
A young girl is crying loudly. The other young women in the line yell abuse at her. She cries even louder. Finally one of the larger girls grabs her and drags her away from the pump. Whack! She slaps the crying girl in the side of the head with an open palm. The girl begins to wail and the larger girl pushes her violently so she falls to the ground. She lies there in the dust crying like a sick cow. The driver explains it’s a common dispute at the line up to get water. The girl has been waiting hours and she’s been bullied out of her place in that line. Nobody pays attention to the wailing girl; they don’t want to lose their place.
About 15 kms from base we are looking for a certain project village. There it is, hidden in the long grass on the side of the road. What a mess. These guys must be the poorest of the poor. We exit the main road and drive inbetween the huts. I see a tumble down building with rock walls. The rocks have been glued together with mud but half the walls have caved in and the rocks have rolled out onto the track. Inside the ramshackle building are rows of log seats sticking out of the dirt floor. This is the school ,and on Sundays a church. I wouldn’t tie my goat up in there let alone educate my child!
We pass through the hovels and into the scrubby valley behind. We are off to the swamp…
The chief is young, only about 20 years old. He brings his work party down to the swamp. The engineer and I have wrestled 2 Honda pumps down to a black hole full of water at the bogs edge. I strip off and climb into the bog hole and position the suction hoses. As the village work party arrive, they chatter nosily and seem excited. The engineer explains the guys have never seen a white man covered in mud. I laugh and reply that soon I’ll no longer be white.
The pumps empty the bog hole enough so we can begin digging out the heavy mud. It’s tough work but I make sure I keep pace with the locals. Soon the mud we have shovelled out must be raked back because it’s starting to slide back in to the well we are digging. The deeper we go, the harder it is to throw the mud over the spoil. I call these water systems “swamp sump wells”. We will line the walls with stacked stone brought down by the villagers next week. They claim there is water here all year round, even in the dry season so it’s a good source for a community garden. They are building the garden near the well.
The young chief has a good following in this village. For some unexplained reason this village has been marginalized politically. The people are tough and hungry. They work well together. The chief and I plan out some more work together. I tell him “If your people are here working, I’ll help you. If they are slack, I’m working in another village”. We understand each other. In a land that has been over-aided, finding workers for the grunt work is rare. Food-aid makes them apathetic and lazy. I cringe when I’m called an aid worker.
It eventually gets too hot for all of us to work so we pack up and hump the equipment back to the vehicle. In the long grass I see the remnants of huts. The chief explains the people fled this place seven years ago because of the raiding and the LRA conflict. They now live on the road where there is electricity and security. It’s a shame, I think, this is a good spot. The chief reads my mind and assures me that one-day soon they will return. First the water…
It’s a few days later. I’m travelling to project garden number 24. This village garden had a problem a few weeks ago because tomato blight killed off their tomato crop. I came not long after with some Green Warriors and helped them pull up and burn the remains of the plants.
The old Mama is watching me as I enter the fenced 1-acre plot. She has a bucket of large eggplants on her head. Actually they are very large healthy organic eggplants! I imagine them cooked on my dinner plate so I offer to buy 20 of them at 15 cents each. Deal done. I got ripped off by local standards, but imagine what I’d pay for them in Australia!
I have some replacement seeds for the dead tomatoes. Out of my satchel, which contains a bottle of water, a can of emergency sardines, a paperback novel, a knife, a camera and some secateurs, I pull out some non-hybrid seeds. I have watermelon, green amaranth, Italian parsley and silver beet.
These are mainly new varieties of vegetables for these people. They usually only grow corn, sunflowers, and sesame seed. Little by little I am helping change their diet and their money situation. I get a bucket of sand and make a mix up of all the seeds. I get the women to sow the sandy mix and we all cut some long grass and mulch the curved raised beds.
There are 5 women from the village working plus a 10-year-old boy who works like a trooper. His mum is sick so he’s taking her place in the work party. I ask him to tell me 4 ways the mulch helps the plants. He gets them all right and smiles. Great! The knowledge is penetrating the kids as well.
The vehicle to pick us up is late so we trudge into town under the weight of our extra tools and a bucket of large eggplant. We find a shady tree and we wait. The emergency paperback comes in handy at times like these. After 2 hours the vehicle shows up and it’s already full. We must wait until it returns, if it returns! Bugger that, I think, lets see how many people fit into a Nissan Patrol.
With 2 people and Honda water pump on the roof rack and 12 people squashed into the patrol we proceed home. Nobody bats an eye as we pass people on the road. This is Uganda and if you can fit then it’s all go! Lucky for us most of the Green Warriors are skinny so it isn’t too painful.
It’s another community garden. The chief has ambushed me several times until I see his mob are dead serious. He leads me down a newly cut track into a 3 acre, freshly cleared farm plot. Wow, there are about 80 people already working tilling the land and removing the grass tufts.
He wants me to train his workers in the basics. The soil is a rich beautiful black colour. Some of the best I’ve ever laid eyes on. I line them up and tell them if they are organized with this many people they can work faster than a tractor. I give the “go” command and the line of villagers dig like crazy. They want to keep up with the Muzungu. We dig 4 raised garden beds in 15 minutes. I show them how to seed and mulch each bed.
An old woman grabs my arm trying to get my attention. She points to her foot. Somebody has slammed a hoe into the side of her foot cutting it open to the bone. Shit! The blood is pouring from the wound. That’s gotta hurt! Quickly, I tell the chief to get 2 blokes to help her to our vehicle. They don’t carry her and she leaves bloody footprints in the mud as she hobbles to the road. I try with the translator to get these guys to help her but she recons she can walk. I make arrangements to take her to local clinic. I have to pay but I cant bring myself to send her to the local hospital. I picture the filthy grey 2 story building…that place gives me the creeps.
I always hear kids screaming in terror when I pass by the hospital. The driver takes her away and I find out the clinic stitched her up then tried to stitch me up. They wanted her to have 4 types of antibiotics. The Muzungu is paying. That many different drugs could kill an old woman especially as she already has malnutrition. I sort her out with another clinic eventually.
There’s only 3 weeks of funding left for this project. My concerns now are to finish the projects we have started. The gardens we leave behind will be the trainers for the future. It’s a balance now between getting them finished and keeping up the quality. Somehow the Green Warriors are unconcerned about the project finishing. They tell me they have prayed to God and he will hear them.
I watch the squalid villages through the windows as we pass through the Abim valley and hope God has pulled out his earplugs…
I’m in Nuccups, Karamoja in northern Uganda, close the Kenyan border. This area has had the biggest impact from cattle raiding and illegal weapons.
Development here is retarded, even by Ugandan standards. It’s still seen as the badlands of Karamoja by outsiders. To me, its amazing mountain scenery and rich soils with the potential to turn this area into Uganda’s food-bowl. Before that happens there are some serious challenges here to address…
It’s 8am and I’m waiting in a vehicle with the driver for the military escort to arrive to escort us on a 40-minute drive to Namalu. I observe the villagers in the huts opposite our stationary vehicle. They are totally drunk. Two people are having a fistfight, one is a woman. She throws a punch and trips and the man she is fighting kicks her in the guts as she goes down. The driver tells me they begin drinking the local sorghum brew made in plastic jerry cans at dawn. I ask him where they get the sorghum if they are drunk all the time. They couldn’t farm it because they can barley walk by 10 am. He tells me it is the sorghum delivered as food-aid. Great, the world aid programs are helping these people stay drunk for the rest of their life? Do the donors know what they are paying for?
The pickup truck with 4 soldiers arrives and after a quick radio check we take off following the pickup belching black exhaust and dust. I tell the driver to keep well back so we don’t have to breathe their dust and if the lead vehicle is ambushed we have some measure of escape. It’s a beautiful day and the sun reflects off the shear rock faces on the side of the mountain range, wet from the nights rain. I can make out jungle canopies in the ravines sloping off the mountain ridges. I bet there is some cool wildlife up in there, I think to myself. We pass small villages of mud huts with their stick palisades and grass roofs. We could be travelling back in time for all I know. A few raggedy school kids are trying to flag us down for a lift as we roar past them. In the bigger settlements I see the same problem, more drinking. Men and women are staggering around and the driver sits on the horn to warn the drunks off the track.
In Namalu I scope out the training venue, a guesthouse-café under construction. I’m here for a week’s master training of the Green Warriors. I have checked out their village projects and worked out their weak points. During this week, we’ll sort out those problems. Integrated Pest Management, fencing, Inter-planting and seed saving are the subjects for this stage of the training.
The guesthouse is a concrete building, on an acre of land with a beautiful craggy mountain behind but no water supply. The mountain has caves and ledges and I can see a troop of baboons making their way across the ridgeline.
I spy a bore-pump in the clinic next door to the venue. It has about 3 acres of fenced land and I can see the local community use the bore-pump as their water supply. That’ll do nicely! I take my translator and we pay a visit to the manageress of the health clinic. In a short time we have worked out a mutually beneficial 1-week project. My Green Warriors will build the perfect bore-pump garden at the front of the clinic grounds with 14 types of vegetables, some passionfruit on the fence and a stack of trees around the outside. The health clinic staff will attend the training and maintain the garden. The staff get the produce and the community will watch and learn and hopefully copy this type of food production system. It’s the women mostly, visiting the community health centre.
We begin the digging, 25 Green Warriors and a few health staff. The wastewater from the hand pump will irrigate the garden. At the bore-pump there is a group of skinny children trying to pump the handle. I go over and take the handle and begin pumping for them. These little dudes don’t speak English but I gesture for them to fill their 5 litre containers. It’s hard to tell the boys from the girls as they all have baldy heads and are wearing dirty rags, the type you dig up out of a rubbish pit. I see sores un-healed all over their legs. Some sores are weeping puss. From the looks of their teeth they must be between 8-10 years old but their bodies are the size of Australian 4 year olds. These kids are starving to death slowly.
I ask the matron what’s the deal with all the sick looking children. She explains the parents are too drunk most times to care for their children. The parents feed their kids only the brew waste at the bottom of the Gerry can. She says that even the kids here are drunk and she has treated many 3 year olds for alcohol poisoning. The brewer’s waste is still quite potent in its alcohol content. She continues to tell me the other health problems in the local communities. Malaria is the biggest killer in the local people. For women the next one is pneumonia. The women do all the work here from early in the morning to late at night. In a day they must gather firewood, make the meals, plant and harvest crops, carry water from the borehole and sometimes work late into the night with never a days rest.
The rains come when the woman is in the field and she gets drenched when her body is run down. Where are the men? There are waiting at home sheltered in the hut waiting for the woman to come home with the water and firewood to cook dinner for them. The man is the head of the household and tells the woman to do all the work while he kicks back with some local brew. The men’s health problems are STD’s from raping enemy village women on cattle raids, the matron tells me. Not many smiles in this part of Karamoja. I reckon the women also drink to get out of working so hard.
The weeks’ training goes well. There are now over 80 trained Green Warriors across Karamoja. In the short time we’ve been doing this project we can prove this is the way forward after 40 years of food-aid. The sites where the Green Warriors have set up gardens are productive and many new vegetables and growing skills have been introduced. The next thing to happen here should be working in the schools with the kids. The kids can grow food and tree seedlings at their schools. The kids are capable and learn fast. The adults are too hard to deal with when they drink like this.
I’m walking back to the venue for lunch with a hoe over my shoulder with a few Green Warriors when a man sitting under a shady tree greets me in the Karamajong language,”ajoka!” he says. I say ,”ajok”. He says something else and the Green Warriors laugh. “He is saying God bless you Father, he thinks you are a priest”. Says one of my guys. “Tell him God blesses those who get off their asses and do something” I say. They laugh but don’t translate.
I stand on the hill next to the site, looking across a huge plain with one of the traditional land owners. From here to the horizon many small fires are burning. The landowner tells me the plain used to be a vast forest with elephants, giraffe and all the African animals. Now the charcoal makers are cutting it down for cooking fuel for the cities. It’s a lot of work for little money but poverty drives slavery. ”What’s the solution?” asks my mind automatically…
I imagine the kids of Karamoja growing a million trees at the local schools and replanting coppicing forests to supply charcoal sustainably. Yeah, fast growing trees that one third of the branches are harvested and fed into the charcoal ovens and the trees supply the same again each year. They could feed the leaves to animals. I ask myself how can I help make it happen? If nothing is done then all the vegetation on this plain will go in the next 5 years, then they will start on the mountains. I think about those skinny little sick kids. Maybe, just maybe, we can solve many problems at the one time…HMMM?
The second week of my 2-week community sustainability course starts off with a bang, literally!
A huge lightning storm is moving through our valley. I watch it coming from my hut window. I like seeing nature getting a recharge from the lightning strikes. Suddenly there’s a huge bright flash. A lightning strike hits maybe 40 meters from me on the other side of the road. The sound is so loud my skeleton just about jumps out of my meat suit! The light from the strike for an instant almost gives me a suntan. SHIT! I find out later the strike fried our Internet. Back to the stone age…
My filmmaker friend Zaff is back. We collaborate on making short, how-to-do-it films for the Green warriors. We work out a basic script and I line up the students as the actors. Its nerve wracking for some of these Karamajong. Zaff pushes them pretty hard to get a result but hey, they’re Green Warriors, they can take it. We do films on making a banana pit, building a trellis, constructing and planting a home garden and planting trees with mulch and tree guards made with African bamboo. The biggest problem for Zaff is background noise. People talking, constant hammering from our other projects and the annoying revving of vehicles, which local drivers like to do before driving off somewhere.
Our duck pond is complete. I watch the newly arrived ducks happily splashing around in the above ground brick tank. This system works as a fertilizer factory. Each week we use watering cans and fill them up in the pond. We water everything that is planted. The duck juice gives a real boost to the soils. We get eggs, meat, fertilizer and pest control and feed them only the scraps from the kitchen. The Ugandans love it!
On the second last night we hold a talent competition between the three groups of students. They act out plays and sing songs and end their show with traditional dances. It is a wild night supercharged with another lightning show from Mother Nature. I’m careful not to blaspheme!
One group sings a beautiful song about the environment. It touches my heart and I feel a lump growing in my throat.
These are the words to their song:
What will people say when the land is dry?
What will the animals do when the bush is burnt?
What will God alone say about the environment?Nature forgive us
Mother forgive us
Nature forgive us
Mother forgive usCheetahs are crying loud
Monkeys have done the same
Buffalos are running away
Birds have done the same
Where will they go will be the question mark.Chorus
Brothers will plant the trees
Sisters will plant the trees
Youth will plant this land
Fathers will protect our land
Their beautiful African voices beat any choir I’ve ever heard in Australia. The competition finishes with the usual grand finale every in for the big dance. The drummers are almost flogging the skins of their traditional drums as the feet slam into the ground. The energy of these dudes is fantastic and I have to call it to a halt because I have to announce the winner and the rain is almost upon us. At the very end I tell them what a wonderful crew of Green Warriors they are and we do our final African clap to close the night.
One, Two, Three! CLAP A huge lightning bolt slams into the mountain behind the warriors and lights up the surroundings like daylight just as the group clap. WOW!
I head back to my hut as the sky bursts open with another deluge.
I say goodbye to each of the groups of Green Warriors as they depart in various vehicles. I know this has been the best experience in their life for some of them. Their new hand tools are loaded into the vehicles and there are hugs and handshakes all round. They will miss each other. These people over the last 2 weeks have built many things together and solved many difficult problems to stretch their brains.
I watch them drive down the muddy track, hands still waving as the cars disappear around the bend. Go well Green Warriors!
Source: Steve Cran, Uganda
I’m alive and I’m back training the next batch of Community Sustainability Specialists (alias Green Warriors).
I’ve been back in Uganda for almost 2 weeks now after repairing my body in Australia form the ravages of malaria, typhoid and a lung infection. It’s amazing how fast your body caves in once your immune system is compromised. The trick is to give yourself enough time to repair before going back into the field. Maybe I should listen to my own advice more often!
Before the training starts, the staff and I conduct interviews to determine who’s suitable to become a Green Warrior. I sit the team down-wind of the interviewees. This is so I can smell alcohol coming from their body and clothes. In Karamoja, heavy drinking is a pastime for people in poverty. In fact a lot of their grog is home made from the food given to them by aid organizations. Sorghum and millet are brewed in plastic jerry cans which sell for $3-$7 a jerry. If a candidate reeks of alcohol at 3pm we have a good idea he or she is a heavy drinker and we bypass them for a more suitable person. Some dudes smell so strong I ask them one question, “what’s your name?” and that’s the end of the interview. The team and I have special signals with our eyes when we have a winner or a loser.
The training kicks off with the trainees getting issued a tent, bedding, a sleeping mat and a set of farm tools, quite a haul by local standards. Salome, one of our staff has to take the women to the toilets and teach them how to use it hygienically. Most of them have never seen a toilet or a flush system. They watch Salome push the lever and gasp in amazement as the water spirals down the pan. It takes them a few days and an irate cleaner to get it right. The men have to use a pit toilet we dug at the back of the field away from the camp. It has several luxury features like 2 squat holes with wooden covers and an ash bucket to smother any flies on the faeces. It also has a tap and soap outside for personal hygiene. We’ll fit a roof, next training.
There’s a brick kitchen now with a large 2 burner mud stove that the last course built. The cook ladies tell me it is very efficient and they want one at their homes. The builders are still building the bush kitchen around the cooks as they work.
We begin the training with 50 trainees but only have the resources for 44. I have to wean the numbers down over the first few days by watching them during the fieldwork. The lazy ones go home and don’t come back. Fieldwork sorts them out quickly. I give them the rules of the camp, which are quite simple. Get along with each other and no drinking in the camp unless it’s a special occasion authorized by staff.
Each day is the practical field work first and the theory second. This may seem upside down to conventional trainers but I find it gets a better result. After the trainees for example have constructed a home garden, they are much more interested in the theory and they comprehend it at a greater depth.
On day three Salome comes and sees me with an urgent problem. She tells me 2 trainees were drunk last night and almost caused a riot. One was riding his motorcycle between the packed rows of tents pissed out of his mind on local brew. I front the 2 idiots up out the back of the training hut. Unfortunately they are 2 guys from the same village and they show great aptitude for the training…I decide not to send them home but they must be punished. An hour later they are stripped to the waist, each digging a grey water pit 1.5 meters deep, out the back of the new kitchen. The other trainees have a laugh at them while they are eating breakfast. If these dudes weren’t seen to be punished the trainees would have done it themselves the next night.
Today is Election Day and half the students have walked off to their villages to cast their vote for federal and local leaders. The handful of trainees left, and I, construct a brick duck tank. The duck tank has a multifunction purpose. Our ducks get a swim and we get duck manure infused water to irrigate our gardens with. It’s a self-producing liquid manure factory.
The women mix the mortar and the men lay the bricks. I join in the digging and the students tell me they have never seen a white man dig before. I tell them I have never seen a black man on a computer before, we all laugh at each other. At lunchtime the team wont break for lunch as they only have one more course of bricks to lay.
They are a solid bunch of Green Warriors. They do what has to be done. In a few weeks they will be training their own people and setting up demonstration community gardens. Karamajong teaching Karamajong, creating the Green Warrior ripple effect., so far it’s working!
I’m late on my log this week, a lot has happened and really, I’m lucky to be alive.
The last master training of the Green Warriors is finished and to wrap up this phase of the project the boss wants me to travel through the 2 districts and see what the Green warriors have achieved on the ground.
Source: Steve Cran, Global Sustainability Corps. Content created by Steve Cran and Global Sustainability Corps is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
The old dual cab ute is packed with my Green Warrior staff and all our gear. It better not rain because there’s not enough room inside the vehicle so 2 are riding in the back no matter what the weather does. We travel the bone crunching rutted tracks to Nuccups, about 5 hours drive from Abim. I’ve just got over a second bout of malaria and feel a bit light headed and low on energy. Several of my staff have been through their own malaria nightmares. At Nuccups, we RV with the boss and his crew and plan out the weeks activities.
We’re going to the most remote Green Warrior first at Ding Dinga where the wild people live. We pick up the Green Warrior in town and head out to a bore pump garden his community has constructed.
As we arrive I can see curved raised beds covered in vegetation. We get out of the ute and negotiate the thorn stick fence. I see some mistakes already. These people have never gardened vegetables before so they lack the finer points.They’ve over planted the vege seeds and have a carpet of seedlings bunched together on the top of all the beds. I ask my crew what’s wrong with this picture. They get it and start explaining to the local Green Warrior how to fix it. There’s also soap coming into the garden from the wastewater from the actual pump and that’s going to cause problems with the soil.
Soldiers having been using the bore pump for washing. There are no people here because they’re all at the market several kilometres away in Kenya. I want to check Kenya out but the Green Warrior insists we have to come to his next project.
We drive through the scrub on an almost invisible track. I have to keep my arm in the ute because of the thorny shrubs we have to push through with the vehicle. They’re not just prickles, they are sharp spikes! I see it would be almost impossible to move through this type of vegetation in the wet season so there is little chance of cattle raiders.
Safe for now! We are driving and driving and I ask the Green Warrior how far to this village. “Not far, not far”, he says.
Finally after 90 minutes of hard driving a village emerges. Its dry and thorny and in the clearing ahead a crowded bore pump appears. I see the bore pump garden, an exact copy of the one at Ding Dinga, except this one has lots of women watering, hoeing and fencing with thorns. I get the Green Warrior to call all the women into a circle for a chat in the shade.About 50 people gather next to the bore-pump. It’s the same problems again, too many seeds and the seedlings should have been planted a week ago. Through an interpreter I outline all the steps they have to do to correct the mistakes they’ve made. I am careful to praise them for the work they’ve completed but stress they have to get it right if they want to eat.
The group, mostly women clap each time I give them a pointer on their garden. This place is so isolated and I cant but wonder how the Green Warrior gets to a community this far into the bush and actually gets something on the ground!
There’ no vehicles out this far so he must have walked. This dude deserves a medal. It’s time to go so we say goodbye and the group cheers and waves as we drive off leaving a dust cloud in our wake. I make a mental note to give some extra support to this community.
We duck into a village in Kenya, just over the border to get some diesel. There is no border post, not even a marker but the roads are better and there’s power lines. My crew tell me the power comes from Uganda and is sold to the Kenyan government. That wouldn’t be a bad thing except the Ugandans don’t get any electricity in their villages up here. It’s a bit unfair. We barter for a price and end up filling our tanks as the fuel is cheaper even with the foreigner tax than Uganda.
I’m back in Kenya again the next day in the boss’s Nissan Patrol. We have an escort vehicle with 4 armed soldiers as our security force and we are taking a shortcut to one of our projects using the Kenyan road to cut a few hours off the trip. I feel a bit weird about having Ugandan soldiers as an escort in Kenya but nobody else in our car seems to worry. Sure enough I spy a Kenyan police landrover on the side of the road. As we speed past I see it only has 3 wheels on and a jack holding up the rear axel. No hot pursuit possible today thank God!
A few more kilometres later and we cut back across the border and head for another set of projects our Green warriors have had a hand in. We see the same mistakes and I’m making a mental note to make up a checklist to help them cover all the bases when they set these projects up. At one site the community has set up a seedling bed garden next to a creek.
I ask them where the community garden is going to be and a group of people lead me into the scrub to see it. We walk for about 2 kilometres. I’m feeling weird and my mind seems disconnected from my body. At the garden site I see the community has cleared about 4 acres by hand and the ground is dug ready for planting. “Where’s the water source?” I ask.
“Back at the river”, they tell me. Bloody hell, people carrying a jerry can this far will be exhausted, especially if they are malnourished. I find out the chief and his wife have designed this set up. The boss and I agree this is one site that is set up for failure.
Overall the Green Warriors have mobilized their communities to build and fence many village gardens. They have proved the Karamajong can grow food. We see crops of maize, sunflowers, sesame and peanuts everywhere. The real problem here is food distribution, storage and marketing for a fair price. The land here is fertile and the farmers should be rich.
The boss and I discuss the next phase of this project where we will run some more Green Warrior training, but this time the first wave of Green Warriors will choose the students from their own project communities. The boss also tells me I look yellow. Must be liver damage from the malaria.
In Amudat we stop for the night. I eat beans and rice in a filthy café.
I don’t have much of an appetite but I eat anyway. Later the boss tells me the local doctors warned him the village currently has a cholera epidemic. Great!, I’ve already eaten!
A few days later I agree to go to Kampala with the boss to get a medical check-up. I have a bad cough and a distinct lack of energy around the middle of the day. A few blood tests and I’m told I have typhoid… Malaria twice, a bad chest infection and typhoid all in the same month… No wonder I’ve lost my sparkle! The boss tells me he’s sending me home to Australia a week early, I come back in 6 weeks. No argument from me (maybe a bit!). I have now become so sick I’m crawling to the toilet to vomit in my hotel room… I pack, get the right medicines and do the final admin to go home.
I’m so lucky to be able to go home to a wealthy country like Australia. It’s a long series of flights to get home. I exit the airport and jump on the train. My body’s here now in Australia but my mind is with my Green Warriors out in the bush of Karamoja. I hope it comes home soon! I’ll be back…
Source: Steve Cran, Global Sustainability Corps. Content created by Steve Cran and Global Sustainability Corps is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
It’s just me and my 5 trainee staff this week. We are building a huge pizza/bread oven from local materials.
These ovens can cook bread, cakes, meat and of course pizzas. One good oven can be a business for a family or women’s group. The Ugandans this far north haven’t discovered pizza yet but with the help of this first oven they will join the rest of the world with an African version of the pizza. Its going to take a bit of muscle and determination to make this beast so I tell my team if we finish it by friday, we are all going to Kadepo National Park for a weekend camping.
The first 2 days are taken up building the base or plinth that will support the oven up at waist height so the cooks don’t have to bend down when stoking the fire or cooking. I estimate 3 meters across by paces as there are no tape measures here at Abim. I calculate the final oven will end up 2 meters across at the base. My rule for an oven is it has to be big enough to crawl into if you are serious about making commercial quantities of bread. While the team are building the base I organize the other materials needed. Once the base is complete I get the team to fill it with waste bricks, stone and sand. It’s important to make sure the sand is packed down with no air pockets.
Next stage we build the inner mold as I call it. Using stacked bricks like a wedding cake we make a dome shape that can be disassembled through the oven door once the outside shell is complete. With a dome shaped stack of bricks as the inner core we use a mixture of composted dung and soil to cover the stack so it looks like a mud dome.
The outer shell is made of cob, a mixture of clay based soil mixed with chopped grass and a small amount of cement powder (yeah, I cheated!) The cement is to give the dome a bit more strength when its drying so we don’t have a collapse when we disassemble the mold that holds the cob up as the outer shell. I lay all the materials out on a clean piece of ground and show the trainees the right ratios of soil to grass. The scientific method is a barrow of soil mixed with 2 large hand fulls of chopped grass and 1 shovel full of cement. The mix forms a small pile on the ground and we add water as we go. Off with the shoes and into the cob mix pile. It’s stomping time. The Ugandans are reluctant to get dirty but with a bit of teasing I have some fellow stompers. It feels good, the cool mud squishing between the toes. Feet mix mud better than any hand tools.
As each mix is ready we apply it by building up a thick base and spiraling up the mold. I show them how to slap the mix into shape with no air pockets allowed. It takes several hours of hard work but finally the dome is complete. We decide to build a brick arched oven entrance because we have the materials left over. An hour later the whole oven is complete and we cover the wet-outter with sand to assist in the drying. We will now leave this for several days until its hard enough to start excavating out the mold materials.
Source: Steve Cran, Global Sustainability Corps. Content created by Steve Cran and Global Sustainability Corps is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
As promised its Saturday and we load the vehicle for our camping trip to Kadepo Park. Only one of the trainees has seen wild animals before. It’s the trip of a lifetime for us all. Ever since I read my first National Geographic magazine I’ve wanted to see the animals of Africa. So far I’ve seen bugger all in Karamoja. The ecology of this place has been seriously damaged by war, fire, drought and poaching. I hope Kadepo is different.
There are nine of us squeezed into a Hilux dual cab. The tray is full of tents, bags, food and people. Luckily the Ugandans are not very wide and we squash 3 women and a guy into the back seat for the 4 hour journey. I haven’t been north of Abim since the dry season in February. We drive out through the gauntlet of mountains looking down on Abim. My favorite is “the King”. Its a solid rock like a huge whale tooth sticking up out of the forest floor. It’s rumored to have magical powers. It sure looks impressive as we pass.
The hot and dusty drive there is uneventful other than seeing the countryside green for a change. We finally approach the front gate of the park which is a square arch made of rough stone and a boom-gate blocking our entry. Time to pay.
The ranger is friendly as he gets his visitors book out as well as a list of fees. There’s a special fee for Muzungus, a fee per person for park entry, a fee for the vehicle, and we haven’t even covered camping yet. That’s the next stop, the lodge. After shelling out $110 USD we make it into the park along a dirt road. We haven’t even got to the lodge when a giant wart hog charges out of the Savannah. Holy shit! The tusks are like cow horns coming from its jaws. It’s twice the size of the biggest pig I’ve ever seen! It emits a loud bass grunt and heads back into the long grass. Wow!
At the top of the ridge leading into a huge valley an amazing vista unfolds in front of our eyes. The valley is kilometers wide with little rock hills sticking out of the Savannah. These hills have stacks of huge boulders like giant building blocks. One little mountain has a ruin of an old hotel which I’m told was built by Idi Amin. It looks like the best place in the park to observe the valley from. I know where we’re camping tonight! At the lodge we again work out how much we have to pay. Heaps as usual. I ask the head ranger if we can camp at Idi’s lodge. He tells me nobody’s ever camped there before but go ahead. We are given our very own guide/ranger carrying an AK47 for protection. We have to pick him up at Idi’s place.
The packed Hilux takes us towards the abandoned lodge we can see a few kilometers away on the other side of the valley. The roads don’t exactly head in the right direction so we take a series of tracks in the general direction. Soon we spy some elephants about 300 meters away. They are all shiny with mud and are walking single file along a swampy track. We see buffalo and antelope. I wish I had a decent camera…
The lodge was trashed and burnt in the 1980′s when Idi Amin got the boot from power. It’s grey walls blend into the rocks behind. The main structure is still intact as its made from cut stone. Our vehicle grinds its way up the steep road to the entrance of a once grand set of buildings high over the valley below. Wow, the view is truly stunning. I can see all the way to the Sudan. This valley was once the traditional hunting grounds for many of the tribes of east Africa. I see the elephants in the distance, herds of buffalo, a few giraffe in the tree line. I imagine all of Uganda looking like this in the past. It’s better than I imagined!
We camp that night in the ruins. A fingernail moon illuminates the valley below. Nobody can sleep because a lion is roaring all night. Not the kind of sound that promotes deep sleep! At dawn we pile into the vehicle for our early morning safari and head off down the hill with our armed ranger. The first large animal we spot is a huge buffalo, like a brick of meat, not edible meat, but muscle meat! He has a set of horns on his forehead shaped like a mustache. We stop the vehicle to get a snap but it begins to move aggressively towards us. We move on.
Along the track a bit further we see a tour bus stopped and we turn down the track they are looking down to see a huge dark male lion trotting down the road. We follow at 20 meters behind. The lion glances back but doesn’t care we are his shadow. I marvel at his size. The ones I’ve seen in zoos are saggy and unfit. This one is pumped!
He has a mate not far away and we watch them set up for hunting out a buffalo from a herd of over 1000 spread across the valley floor. We never get to see the kill because we move off so not to disrupt the action. Our next animal icon is the giraffe, and I’d have to say my favorite besides the elephant. A herd of them are straddling the road. My God, they are so graceful. Even running they look like they are in slow motion. Their coloring and size make them so unique. We wave to them but they just calmly watch us while chewing branches on an acacia tree.
On the last day we are invited to a lodge by a Muzungu called Patrick. He’s building a new lodge on the border of the park to set up a new buffer zone around the park. He is totally interested in the Green Warrior concept and sustainability practices. He treats us to a meal of boervorst sausages and potato salad washed down with some cold beers. How good is that?
We thank Patrick and head back to base as its getting dark. I have to settle our bill at the lodge so I drop the men off at the bottom of out fortress like hill and proceed towards the parks main lodge.
Some ways down the track in the evening light we come across a troop of elephants crossing the road on a bend. I get the driver to stop and we watch a couple of mama elephants and a few teenagers with a bunch of babies cross the road in a tight group. When they’d all crossed and it was safe to proceed we inched forward around the bend. It was almost dark…Halfway round the bend I glanced out the window to see a giant grandfather elephant 20 meters from the vehicle. It was bloody huge with little squinty eyes glaring at me. Suddenly it flapped its huge ears forward and trumpeted. SHIIIT!!!
The massive beast charged forward at the vehicle. Go! Go! Go! I yelled at the same time the girls in the back screamed in unison. Maybe I was screaming too as the largest land mammal on earth came thundering towards us trumpeting his warning sound….The old vehicle found its legs and we shot off down the road with angry Jumbo close on our heels. He didnt give up for a hundred meters and he almost got us at one point. Up the track a bit we all started laughing to let the tension out. It’s not everyday you get a pissed off elephant want to squash you. When we got back to our camp the guys asked us if we heard that elephant close by…Did we ever!
We traveled home the next day, all of us tired form more strange night creatures keeping us awake. I wonder if Tarzan ever slept properly at night. I’m coming back to this place, this African paradise. The animals may be dangerous but its been the absolute highlight of my Ugandan adventure!
Source: Steve Cran, Global Sustainability Corps. Content created by Steve Cran and Global Sustainability Corps is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Hello again, it’s Green Warrior master training week in Karamoja, Uganda, and the 33 Green Warriors have battled flood, raiders, broken bridges and hellish roads to get back to Abim for their one week training.
After 2 weeks on the job in the field, they have returned for a weeks training in nursery construction and a debrief on their first field activities.
I’m worried about some of the Green Warriors getting here in time. I only have 6 days and I’m sure some of them aren’t going to get here for the first 3 days. I organize all the materials before the week starts. Poles, bamboo, cement, sand, bricks, tools and composted Kraal manure as well as a truck load of top soil. As predicted, the Green Warriors arrive in drips and drabs. I don’t let it worry me as we begin nursery construction with my 5 person training staff and the Green Warriors join in as they arrive. This is the best way to handle the start of any course in the 3rd world as punctuality is a white mans thing. I always joke with the Ugandans that a Ugandan watch should just have one hand and 2 times, Day and Night…
We work like maniacs during the morning hours because the rains come after lunch. One team is putting up the frame from bush poles another team is splitting bamboo, while the remaining team breaks up the lumpy ground and rakes it flat. Its a full moon and I feel the effect on the Green warriors. If you ever want to finish off a project, the full moon gives the right stimulis for the group to get it done. We grow our crops by moon phases and I use moon phases to grow infrastructure projects!
Steve Cran’s Green Warrior Challenge
Source: Steve Cran, Global Sustainability Corps. Content created by Steve Cran and Global Sustainability Corps is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
The nursery is near completion. I’m conducting classroom training on nursery theory. Its pretty standard stuff. Potting mix ratios, when to water, as well as daily, weekly and monthly maintenance. A nursery this size should produce 20,000 tree seedlings of planteable size 3 times a year (that’s trees that grow products or have a use for the community). This size is perfect for schools or community based organizations. If I’ve done it right I will see copy cat nurseries spring up around Uganda.
So far I’ve seen some pretty pathetic excuses for nurseries. This construction is made from 100% locally sourced materials. The shade is created by bamboo splits nailed horizontally onto bush pole beams.
I need seed and the budget is small to make this project happen. I buy 8 beers and 4 cokes. I divide the Green Warriors up into 3 groups. I give each groups 2 sacks and tell them they have 2 hours to go into the village and get useful tree seed. The group that gets the most seed and the most diverse range of seed wins the beer. They all rush off like madmen possessed to win that prize which cost me $11 USD.
A couple of hours later the first group arrives with 2 sacks full of bounty. I draw 3 circles on the concrete floor and each groups unloads their seed into the circle and sorts it out for counting. I see moringa, pomegranite, acacia, lemon, lime, mango, soursop, kei apple, shea nut and many others I’ve never seen before. The three teams between them brought in 38 different types of tree seed and enough seed to plant out 3 nurseries and all for $11. Good strategy. I announce the winner and hand out the beer prize. The team members each get half a beer and a few sips of coke. We spend the rest of the afternoon sorting the seeds and storing it in a huge plastic drum to protect them from vermin.
The nursery job is going well except for the lack of tools. All the tools I’ve obtained from local suppliers are dodgy quality and most of them have broken. This is one of the biggest problems here in Uganda. Money is spent on helping people become self sufficient but the tools only last a few days to a few months. Some examples are machetes, or pangas as they are called here. I buy 5 pangas at the local hardware. Within 4 hours the wooden handles have all come off. I tell the students these are the most expensive machettes in the world. They look puzzled. Yep, Chinese low-quality machetes cost $2 each. Because they are crap and there is no other machete available, the user has to buy a new one each day. Thats over a $1000 a year in pangas! I hold up a Brazillian machete I bought in Kampala. This one costs $10 usd, an unheard of price for a machete here. I tell them this one will last over a year if it used each day. Its heavy duty good quality and holds its sharp edge well. It is much cheaper at the end of the year to buy the $10 machette. They finally get it.
The wheel barrows have no bearings and use only an axle inside a piece of pipe which quickly fills with sand. The barrows squeak and as the axle becomes bound with sand, the barrows become harder to push. The trays are made of light pressed metal, very light metal. The best barrow I could source from Kampala lasted 3 months.
The list goes on. A hand saw costs $3. It cuts about as well as a kids play saw in Australia. I found a $7 saw in Kampala that eats wood for breakfast. The carpenters are amazed. The hammers cost $3 and fly apart on the second day.
When it comes to watering cans, there is two kinds of shit. Plastic shit that lasts a few months and then splits, then there is locally made tin watering cans which leak so badly you dont have to tip the water out, just hold the leaking can over the garden.
It’s so frustrating trying to make any projects work with crap tools. It’s even worse to deliver tools to communities that are of the same quality. I have made sure that most of the tools delivered on this project are of proper quality and design.
I sourced a steel handled shovel for the community tool banks. It’ll last a year no worries. The feedback from the people is the shovels are a big hit. I sourced hoes, hoe/forks, and african axe heads made from high quality steel. They are also a hit. The wheelbarrows are definatley shit.I dont even bother with machettes.
Imagine being a farmer and having to dig your field with nothing but a sharp stick. It happens here. Imagine when you do have tools you have to spend a third of your time fixing those tools. It happens here. A much needed project here is setting up a tool buisness to make local pangas, hoes, forks, etc with light steel handles and good quality heads. A blacksmith could be employed to make a range of local machettes/pangas as well as knives and sickles. Imagine the amount of aid money spent on crappy low grade tools and low grade food. On the books it looks like theyy are helping the farmers and communities, but in reality they just delivered junk. It proves nobody really cares at the higher levels. All this common sense is an alien language to many NGO’s and the UN.
We finish the week with a session in the training hut on the future of Green Warriors in Karamoja. I tell them other people in other countries will soon begin to start up their own Green Warriors. I also tell them in the future, the next thing they’ll need will be a Green Warrior Field Academy to train Karamajong trainers and showcase their working models of sustainable agriculture and appropriate technology. They all agree. They tell me the villagers are picking up the skills. Gardens are happening everywhere. The villagers want more seed, more tools, more Green Warriors. They tell me it’s working!
Its almost time to leave. The cook has baked me a cake with Steve written across the top in icing. I slice it up into 34 pieces and we each get a slice. We have our cake and eat it too! We do one final big African clap. I release the Green Warriors back into the villages and communities that need them to lead the way to self reliance. The Green Warriors are coming. I love these guys! I’ll miss them until next time..
Source: Steve Cran, Global Sustainability Corps. Content created by Steve Cran and Global Sustainability Corps is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
My spell in Kampala has come to an end. Time to travel back to the field.
basket of fried grasshoppers
A quick stop in the market to grab some fruit for the trip and I spy something interesting. Is that what I think it is? Yep! It’s a basket full of fried grasshoppers, minus the legs. Smells good. I think of all the grasshoppers living in my garden back at Abim. “
Hey mate, can I try one”, I say to the grinning merchant. He’s never seen a Muzungu eat a grasshopper before so he scoops up a handful and offers them to me. I toss a few into my mouth and start chewing. Mmm! Not bad, like roasted peanuts, kind of! Next time I get an infestation of grasshoppers, I’m going to look at it as a blessing. These would be nice in a stir-fry!
I’m on the road to Nuccappyrt, up near the Kenyan border. Huge trucks loaded with quartz rock are heading out of “Nuccas” as we call it, churning up the muddy road. The churned up mud has begun to dry into hard ruts, which make driving painful. Smash, smash crunch, crunch as the vehicle bottoms out on the huge holes and ruts. My spine is only saved by me hanging onto the roof handle and suspending my body.
Source: Steve Cran, Green Warrior Permaculture. Content is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
police quarters at Nuccas
I see out the window acres of lush corn crops, rice paddies, sesame seed, vegetables and cassava. The soil is black and beautiful. I see trucks laden with fresh produce heading out of Nuccas district. What’s going on here? How can they grow this much food and still be receiving aid? I hadn’t realized the potential of this land as I’d only been here in the dry season. For 8 months of the year this place is a food bowl. Something is fishy here!
guard escort
We pick up a military escort in Namalu. I have to strap on a bulletproof vest. It weighs a ton and restricts my breathing. The clouds are dark and I can hear the rumble of thunder. The soldiers climb onto the back of the pick-up truck and squat with their belt fed, general purpose, machine guns facing out. The have water proof ponchos on and they’re going to need it. We take off in convoy the soldiers leading. Small villages appear every few kilometers made of corrugated iron and mud. There is a market set up in each one. The people are ragged but healthy looking. Many of them wave and grin.
UN driver
We pass through a game reserve. Its open savannah with small mountains poking out of the plain. One mountain has huge caves in it, so big I could drive a ship through them. I visualize a safari lodge built into the caves. Wow, what a place. I make a mental note to come back and visit that place. My driver tells me I may need a gun as lions live near there.
It starts to rain, then pour. The soldiers are drenched but still remain vigilant. This is the most dangerous place in Uganda with the most amount of shootings and raids in the country. The pouring rain doubles in intensity. We can’t even see the bullbar. The radio crackles and the escort has stopped, so have we. I’ve only seen rain this bad once before in Aceh. We wait until the rain slows down enough for us to see. We begin to move again slowly. An instant flood has appeared on the sides of the road. We come to a section of flooded road where a virtual waterfall is eating away at the road. The escort radios that it’s too dangerous to cross. Maxi and I discuss the risk, we agree to cross anyway. We radio the escort and tell them we are crossing and to get out of the way.
They radio back and say they will cross if we are going to. We both ford the raging flood, as the road is slowly getting narrower from the erosion by the torrent of chocolate brown water. The water comes up to the door handle but we make it and begin the climb up the mountain into Nuccas. The rain has flattened the crops on both sides of the road and where the ground is freshly tilled the soil is washing away with the flood. We make it into Nuccas an hour later as the afternoon sun peeks through the clouds. A huge mountain range with strange shaped peaks looks down upon us as we enter the town.
mountains on the border of Kenya
I check into a filthy cement box room with a toilet with no water except a full gerry can for my shower. At least it’s got a mozzy net! The single bed looks dodgy but its better than a lot of people have in this place.
I drive to the office in the morning. A drunken woman is lying in a pothole at the hotels entrance. Another woman helps her up and out of the vehicles path. It’s 7 o’clock and the woman can’t walk. I wonder what she’s going to do for the rest of the day. Drunkenness is the only release for extremely poor people. Men and women alike drink a local brew they made from the sorghum that is given out as aid food.
A visitor is waiting for me, two visitors in fact. Major Benson and Lieutenant Edward from the military base across the road from the office. They are keen to help the local people grow food. Major Benson tells me his troops are disarming the Karamajong villages and need to help the people with a living to replace cattle raiding. Lieutenant Edwards job is helping the villages with agriculture. I give them a manual each and we discuss Green Warriors. The major asks me if his soldiers can become Green Warriors. I tell him anybody can be a Green Warrior. A new plan starts to form in my mind. We agree to meet up in a few weeks to discuss the options.
The military escort arrives. These guys have different weapons. We are headed to Ding Dinga, a border village 1 km from Kenya. Many raiders pass through this area from Kenya; steal cattle and race them back over the border. We strap on our weighty bulletproof vests. My driver asks me if the vest will really stop a bullet. I joke that it has a money-back guarantee, he doesn’t laugh.
The trip is rough as the roads are still on the truck route to the mine. We see some wild camels and a troop of baboons playing in the mud next to a swamp. They scream and bolt as we pass. The more guns people here have, the less wildlife. The baboons know the score!
In Ding Dinga we park just outside the community and remove our vests. We instruct the soldiers to stay put. We don’t want to frighten the villagers. Too late. When we walk into the village the young men have disappeared, only the women and some old guys are left.
Our Green Warrior is there digging a bore-pump garden with the women. He is pleased to see me, as his village is the most remote in our project. I skip the formalities, give the women a cheery grin and grab a hoe. They all start working faster when I join in. I show them how to shape the beds with a flat top to survive the heavy rains. They have an interesting smell, the smell of wild humans. These guys exist with no money. They eat no processed food, only wild meats and fruits. I like their smell. I wonder what I smell like to them because very soon I’m covered in sweat.
We have no common language, just digging and laughing. After a while I realize its 2pm and too hot to seriously work so we take a break under some shady trees. I seat them in a circle and get my Green Warrior to translate. I explain that they are good, smart people and its time to let go of aid and become self-sufficient. They clap and cheer. I also tell them the only physical sign of god on this earth is nature so when we work growing things we are working with god. (I’m a free thinker, not the religious type but missionaries have converted these people) They clap and cheer again. I give them some pest control pointers and its time to leave. The Green Warrior and I have a quick chat over at the vehicle.
He used to be the chief for 10 years until he retired. He asked me if I could get the army to lay off harrassing the project. The army has been searching the village for weapons and the male youth have all taken off. I tell him about the Major asking me if the army can have Green Warriors. He gets excited and says he could get the village to work with the army if they are genuine. I tell him I will talk to the major. We hug and its time to go.
Just out of the village we stop to pick up the escorts and put on the bulletproof vests. All the way back I’m thinking on other armies like the Thai army and the El Salvadorian army who assist the communities they are in with permaculture training. The communities begin to trust and rely on the army and the army gets solid intelligence and support from the community. It would work well here. The other thing is here the army and the police live so poorly themselves. It would be a multi-benefit activity.
Its time to return to Abim, the long way today. The military escorts cost the organization heaps so we have to go home out of the security zone which is an extra 400 kms on rough roads. I’m just about to leave when Major Benson calls me. He wants a lift the first 200 kms. No worries, if he’s in civilian clothes. We don’t want to be seen cosy with the army (even though we use their escorts!)
The major and I chat for the 4 hours on our journey about Green Warriors, army style. He tells me that in his village he is self reliant with a few acres of land and many diverse crops. If you are seen carrying food home in a plastic bag in his village it’s seen shameful because you can’t grow your own food! Yeah, I like this guy!
The plot thickens!
We dump the major off in Mbale after I give him instructions to google Jim Humble and MMS, the miracle mineral supplement, for curing AIDS. Yes, that’s right cure AIDS. The army looses many soldiers each year to HIV/AIDS, not to mention friends and relatives. One must be very careful about giving out the cure for AIDS.We head for Soriti. It’s getting late afternoon. In Soriti we pick up Catherine, our admin support person for Green Warriors. She’s had malaria but is ready for work now. The long way to Abim is getting longer and darker. It is forbidden to drive through the zone at night but the flooding has cut a few roads. The driver is exhausted and nodding off. I take over. I whack the ute in 4-wheel drive so I get better traction at speed.
We are diverted several times because a huge flood has sliced away the roads. At 9 pm we have been on the road for 12 hours and everyone is sore from the constant jarring on rough terrain. The headlights only pick up the rim of a hole and I can’t gauge the depth. One hole I hit sends us airborne and my head bashes into the roof . Another head wound! We keep going on this seemingly endless trip until we get to a flooded river.
There are vehicles parked on both sides but a small truck exits the water with 15 villagers pushing it. A villager comes to the window and tells us his group will push us. There’s a bridge with the water flowing a meter over it and 2 large holes either sides. My passenger’s recon it’s too dangerous. I see a guy wading up to his armpits across the river. If you can walk, you can drive! I give them the option of staying on the riverbank the night but I’m rooted and want to get home. My gut says its ok. The passengers think it through and see outside it’s raining.
They’re coming with me. We drive slowly into the river with all the windows open and no seatbelts on in case we have to swim for it. The danger is extra swells coming down the river when we are in a deep point. The water is up to the door handles when we drop into a deep hole. The bonnet disappears but we have a snorkel and the engine drives us onwards to the far bank. As we pop out the other side the villagers who have been pretending to push us all cheer. I give them $5 which is the standard fee and just enough to get a jerry can full of brew. We make it home a couple of hours later. My body is sore for 2 days after from the trip.
Next week is Green Warrior nursery training week. I hope the warriors can make it to Abim across this flood-ravaged land…
Source: Steve Cran, Green Warrior Permaculture. Content is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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