Karamoja

Green Warrior Funeral - Steve Cran

Posted by permaculturetv at 8:02 pm cooperation, liberation, people, permaculture, permaculture.tv, pioneers, planet-permaculture, transition No Responses » Tagged with: , , , ,
Nov 292010

The vultures seemed to know it is a funeral.

I watch the huge turkey sized birds drop out of the sky and land under the big shady tree to watch the mourners. One of the Green Warriors has died of a mystery illness. He was definitely one of the best we’ve trained here in Abim. First he felt stomach pains, then his nose began to bleed, finally he vomited blood and died. I can see his grave behind his mothers hut as we sit under a tattered tarpaulin waiting for the other mourners to arrive. The custom here is to bury the loved one 2 days before the funeral. Good idea in the tropics.

We wait quietly for 2 hours. Finally the God-botherers arrive, three of them, and sit in front of the four staff that brought me here. The priests take it in turns to sing hymns, say prayers and, without missing a beat, slip in a sermon or two. I make a mental note to have these guys banned from my funeral if I get one. Stand up, sit down, sing this hymn, stand up, sit down, …if we speed this up it could be good exercise.

We stand for another hymn and the villager’s voices sound beautiful on this fine afternoon. I watch the mother and the 2 wives. The old mother begins to cry but she continues to sing. I feel a lump growing in my throat. What a shame. These are good people who have lost a valuable member of their family.

The father tells the mourners how he took his son to hospital and the doctor wouldn’t see him (probably holding out for a bribe) and without diagnosis, prescribed his son quinine. Quinine’s a strong malaria drug and everybody knows you don’t vomit blood from malaria. Those slack medical bastards!

They drag me up to say a few words about my former Green Warrior. I tell them he was a special guy and I’m so sorry for them losing him. I tell them on the next training, please send me another of their family and Ill give him or her a position. We have our obligatory warm coke and shake hands with the father and the mourners. They wave as we drive off. What a shit day… I hate funerals.

The pick-up’s full of hand tools and woven plastic bags. We’re speeding through the savannah leaving a jet trail of red dust behind. Along the way we come across the many people on Indian-made bicycles, usually with someone sitting on the rack. Most of them peel off the road and crash into the long grass. I ask the driver why they always crash like that. He laughs and says it’s rare for them to have working brakes so it’s easier to crash. The crash victims always smile and wave as we pass. Lucky there’s no hills here.

This village has a passionfruit project and a vegetable garden. They have one bore pump and the dry season is upon us. Our plan is to dig a sump and line it with earth bags and then cement-render the bags. This sump catches all the wastewater from the hand pump instead of it creating a mosquito breeding swamp at the end of the cement gutter. The villagers under the guidance of Titus, another Green Warrior, have dug a 3-meter deep cone shaped hole and it is ready for the bagging. I get the villagers to start filling the bags and Alfred and I jump in and start laying the heave sacks like bricks. The men hang back and its mainly kids at first filling the bags. As we get the wall up, more villagers appear and slowly begin helping. I grab a few guys and make them take over from me so I can photograph what we are doing. This earth bag technology is great stuff. So simple and effective. We are inventing new earth bag structures every day.

Once we finished rendering the bags, the villagers are impressed. I tell them they are moving ahead now with their resettlement village. This is sustainable development, step by step. This formerly wasted water will now service their garden and passionfruit until the rains come again in
a few months. I pull Titus aside and stress the sump must be fenced or one of their cows is going to end up floating upside down in it. Nodding he watches the herd of thirsty cattle lurking under the nearby shady tree… He gets it.

We get back and find out several other people have died of the mystery illness the previous night. Alfred says it might be ebola virus. I think he’s joking but he’s not smiling. He tells me he was in a plague of ebola in 2003 in Gulu. It started the same way. First one guy died and he went to the funeral. Shortly after all the women who helped to prepare the body died after vomiting blood. Then the chief died. After that some of the people that attended the funeral began to die. The army came and sealed off the town. Alfred says there was a lot of fear because they were putting people into rubberized body bags and zipping them up even before they were dead…many people that were sick went away to hide because they didn’t want to be buried alive. Bloody hell! I think of all the handshakes at the Green Warriors funeral.

We are unloading tools and materials on the side of the main road. Once in a while a vehicle speeds past and we all disappear in clouds of hot, red dust. The community wants to build a bakery with one of my Jumbo mud ovens right on the side of the road. They weren’t thinking of dust in the wet season when they sited the oven. As we work the gossip is all about the mystery disease. A lady just down the road has been vomiting blood last night but she is still alive. The women here recon it’s got to be ebola. I’m headed home to Australia in a week and I don’t want to be trapped in a plague. As we lay the bricks for the foundation, I ask my driver what’s the escape route to Kampala if I have to hoof it out of here on foot. He laughs and says he’s coming to Kampala with me. He tells me we mustn’t tell anybody where we are from or they will run away.

Day by day the oven takes shape. An old man stops on the road and yells at our group. “Why are you building a termite mound?” I get the translator to yell back that the termites are paying us for building this one and we have built all the termite mounds around here. Our team of mud mixing villagers laughs at my poor joke. Lots of people stop and watch us. The more it takes shape, the more volunteers join our crew, mostly women.

On the final workday we get 30 women mixing mud and laying the final layer of mud and straw mixed together. Slap, slap, slap as the many hands pat down the mud to get any air pockets out of the chocolate coloured mud mix. This oven is 2 meters across at the base and will crank out some bread, cakes and anything else they can find to cook. Amazingly, I’m the only person that looks dirty at the end of the job. Most of the crew has barely a mud spot on their clothes. Only the women’s feet are muddy. How do they do that I wonder. We watch, as a convey of WHO vehicles passes. A military escort packed into pick up trucks is close behind. They have come to identify the illness. The worst outbreak is 25 kilometers south. One of the international NGO’s has panicked and abandoned their compound and just up and left overnight.
Wimps!

Tomorrow I’m out of here at dawn. The disease isn’t ebola…it’s still a mystery but WHO recon it’s not the dreaded ebola so there’s no roadblocks tomorrow. Whew! I hope it peters out and is gone when I get back in 6 weeks… I walk the compound looking at the many vegetable pumping gardens. I say good bye to my ducks swimming in the pool at “Duck-Vegas”. I say goodbye to Wilimena the friendly piglet. I say goodbye to the 4 turkeys and 3 chickens in the poultry pen. I walk through the nursery and mentally note there are 10,000 trees here that will stay here until the wet season begins again. I say my good byes to all the staff in small groups. “Safe journey” they all say. “Wash your hands and stay away from the markets”, I tell them. “Don’t drink that brew out of those communal buckets either!” I don’t
want to go to anymore sad funerals…

Australia, here I come!

The Badlands of Karamoja - Extreme Permaculture with Steve Cran

Posted by permaculturetv at 3:41 pm cooperation, culture, democracy, design, ecology, education, food, gaia permaculture, industry, liberation, people, permaculture, permaculture.tv, permaculture.tv, pioneers, planet-permaculture, transition No Responses » Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Sep 292010

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?

Green Warrior master training week in Karamoja

Posted by niccolo at 1:00 am permaculture.tv No Responses » Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Jun 022010

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.

Green Warrior nursery takes shape

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.

tree seed collected from village

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.

Green Warriors tools

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.

plastic cans

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

Warrior permaculture - Extreme Permaculture with Steve Cran

Posted by niccolo at 12:53 am cooperation, culture, design, ecology, education, liberation, people, permaculture, permaculture.tv, pioneers, planet-permaculture, transition 6 Responses » Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Feb 012010

Hello again from Northern Uganda. A lot has happened since my last blog and its hard to believe its been just over a week.

steve-field-maps-600

Im driving the ute at speed through the bush. There’s 4 of us in the cab. Its getting dark and we’re late. We should have been in camp hours ago. We were delayed by a series of comical events but now it’s not so funny. The guys with me start telling local horror stories. “If the warriors catch you you will surely perish” one guy says. The other guy adds “This is the area they operate.” I press harder on the accelerator! We make it home without incident.


It’s easy to get complacent about security because the people seem so friendly and always give me a wave.


The Karamojong have a fearsome reputation. They are cattle people.

tank-600

They love cattle because it is a symbol of wealth, prestige and they cant get a wife unless they have at least 200 head. A “Kjong” as they’re nicknamed can give a description of a particular cow to another Kjong who can walk 100 kilometers and pick that exact cow out of a herd of a few thousand.

They live and breath cattle. Each Kjong male has a cow whacking stick and a small wooden seat which he carries everywhere. The guys and the girls have the same haircut and both wear a king of striped robe. The women wear a neck full of colored beads and the guys wear a colorful top hat and earrings, sometimes with colored feathers.

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The youth are bored. They stand for hours watching their cattle, or somebody else’s cattle. Their life is worth nothing until they have cattle. Where do you get cattle from if you want a wife? You get an AK47 and go on an organized raid and steel them from “the enemy”. There’s nothing to lose except a dull life. They even take on the army, a thousand young warriors itching to get free cattle.

One of my roles here is to come up with a solution to the “warriors”.

hut-600

I go to a Manyatta, a stick fort surrounding a few huts. This is were the women live permanently while the warriors roam the land looking for fodder and water with their prize cattle.

They’ve built the manyattas for defense high on the slope of the valley but away from water. The land is drying up from over grazing, charcoal making, fence building and drying winds. The soil is starting to blow away. The women have to carry water a kilometer from the hand pump in the valley. I crawl through the entrance on my hands and knees. No fat people allowed! they wouldn’t fit.

crawl-hole-600

There’s a narrow hallway of sticks and another crawl hole. Very clever for defence. Any intruder would be very vulnerable to attack. I make it through the maze to the cooking hut. I swallow hard. These people are starving. This place reeks of extreme poverty. There’s no maize in the granary. The kids are slow and have distended bellies (worms).

An old woman is sitting on a dirty cow hide. I shake her rough hand. Her skin is dusty and looks like leather. I smell rotting flesh. On a stick rack next to me are 2 giant bush rats , each the size of a corgi. They have been gutted and are covered in blue assed flies. They have been dead a while.

My translator Catherine wrinkles her nose and I point to the carcasses. “You hungry?” I ask. She moves away rapidly. We get the hell out of there and make our way to the vehicle down in the valley. How can I help these people? Their village is too far from water. They want to grow food but they can barely carry the water they need for survival.

The bore pump in the valley has a strong hand pump sticking out of a cement circle. The girls place the gerry can under the spout and jump up and down holding the handle. A group of thirsty cows jostle each other to get at the flow. One cows tounge snakes out and slurps at the water going into the gerry. Slap! A girl whacks the cow on the face. It doesnt care. There’s a puddle below the cement ring with cow shit, flies and mud all squashed up into a foul soup.

I see a design in my head. Animal trough at the outflow. Steel pickets with barbed wire surrounding a community vegetable garden with a lockable steel gate. I see the outflow from the trough running into the garden and fruit trees with heavy duty guards planted around the garden. OK I’ll try that. Saves the women from carrying more water.

Im in Moroto. It has paved roads! Ugandas third highest mountain looms over the dusty town. I see a prison. My driver says there is a farm in there. “Can we go in?” I ask. I thinking of a story I read about Idi Amin’s prison system where inmates were given sledgehammers to execute each other. The driver nods and we turn in.

A guard is sitting under a tree. Lazily he puts the barrel of his rifle in the dirt and pushes himself to his feet. He calls over a tall guy who takes us on a tour. The prisoners are dressed in yellow shorts and tee shirts. They look like a soccer team.

Their gardens are pathetic. Only four varieties of hybrids. The same story everywhere. No diversity. I see these squalid huts and feel sorry for the prisoners. “that’s where the wardens live” says my guide. Oh dear! I meet the head warden. I tell him what I want.

I want to improve their gardens in exchange for them becoming a seed bank. He agrees.

Most of the 90 men prisoners and Kjong warriors caught in the field. I want to work with them so I can understand their culture. I cant find them in the bush and its too dangerous to look. Here they are a captive audience.

I can train them and expand the non-hybrid open polinated seeds I am collecting. The prisoners can make a business of it. The warden is overjoyed. He takes me to meet the governor who gives me the thumbs up.

I’ve always wanted to make a permaculture prison and now its in my lap. The inmates smile and laugh when my translator “Ram” (short for Ramadan) tells them what the Mazoonga will do.

Im driving all over Karamoja looking for strategies that are working so I can put them in the manual I’m writing. Sometimes I have a military escort which is a ute with 4 armed soldiers hanging off the back. I’m slowly coming up with a plan.

These cattle are killing this place. I hear of a farm where ex-warriors are growing casava and loving it. I’m headed there next week.

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My garden at the compound is growing. An 11 year old boy “Achilla” who I call Atilla waters it for me. He’s going to be a doctor when he grows up. This place is growing on me.

Source: Steve Cran, Uganda

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