A Day in the Life of the Roving Team (Tuesday, Oct 21)

0620 – Cell phone alarm goes off, time to wake up.

0630 – Cell phone alarm goes off, again. Actually wake up.

0640 – Breakfast, (eat as much as we can because we don’t know the next time we’ll be eating again.)

0700 – Pack our bags/the truck with everything that we’ll need for the day.

0720 – Leave the guesthouse for the day and pick up Yona, the Diocese Water Engineer, from the Kagando Hospital Entrance.

0800 – Reach the farthest possible point accessible by car and set out on foot.

0830 – Meet the Local Chairman of the village, part ways with Mike. He goes with the chairman to map out the schools and churches in the community while me and Asaph go to investigate the sources. We’ll switch roles tomorrow.

0855 – Reach Buzira Primary School, draw a crowd/following, as is typical with most kids we see. Get my pencil sharpened with a razor blade because the school does not have a functioning pencil sharpener.

1000 – See a fruit that I’ve never seen before. Ask Yona if it is edible only to turn around to see the guy behind me already eating one. Apparently, it’s wild, but edible. I eat five, they’re good.

1100 – Over three hours and just short of a 1000m higher than where we set out on foot, reach our first source of the day, the source of the Kabungi stream. However, it’s barely a trickle so we take the measurements just because we walked all that way to see it, but don’t bother with a sample because there isn’t enough flow to use.

1120 – Reach another source of the same stream a few hundred metres downhill. The flow still isn’t enough to really make it project worthy, but it is more than the first source so we take a sample.

1245 – Reach the source of the Kahindangoma stream. Clear the area and dig back until we find where the water originates from. Flow measures over three litres per second; this is good news, but less than Yona had measured on a previous visit.

1400 – Re-measure the flow about a hundred metres downstream to see if there is a great difference, which would indicate that there may be another eye somewhere upstream. The flow is about five lps, which is enough to warrant further investigation if our design requires more than the three lps we have already measured. Break out the banana pancakes (small Ugandan pastries that resemble bite-size pancakes, and are also our “lunch”). Share with the seven other guys that have joined us at various points of our journey so we each get just two pancakes. Start our trek back down the mountain.

1515 – Pass by the house of one of the men who are accompanying us. He goes into his garden to get some more wild fruits, as well as some passion fruits. I eat another five of the wild fruits, at least, and a handful of passion fruits too.

1600 – Meet back up with Mike on the trail on the way to the truck, and share successes/failures/other interesting facts (like the wild fruit) that happened that day.

1630 – Reach the truck, (after two months, this has been ingrained in us as being one of the most welcome sights, especially after a long day of walking like today) and drive back home. This picture's actually taken from one of the ridges we climbed in Kyrumba, about 1000 metres above where we parked the truck. I thought it was pretty cool that we could still see it from the top.

1700 – Drop off Yona at the hospital and return to the guesthouse. Greetings and pleasantries with the staff, standard Ugandan procedure with everyone you meet.

1730 – Glorious shower (cold water only though, but still glorious).

1800 – John and Katherine, a young couple from Florida who are working here for six months and who we met last week at the Kasese guesthouse, stop by.

1805 – I teach John how to eat the wild fruit, it’s his first time. He likens it to an unripe raspberry (I don’t think he liked it very much). Because of John’s reaction, Katherine’s too wary to try it herself.

1900 – Stomach can’t wait for dinner any longer; it’s been twelve hours since breakfast, our last meal. Drink a cup of tea to sooth the hunger pangs.

1930 – Dinner, my favourite time of the day! Dinner tonight consists of macaroni (our spaghetti), Irish Potatoes, Dodo (our spinach), Goat (the most common meat here in Uganda) stew, and bananas.

2000 – Download GPS data for the day and call Yona to arrange tomorrow’s schedule (which will be going back to Kyrumba, re:October 17 Blog, and once again, I’m driving…)The picture is of one of the little obstacles (I mean, rivers), that we came across along the only road into Kyrumba.

2030 – Go to the hospital canteen to buy more banana pancakes for tomorrow’s lunch.

2100 – Asaph goes to bed, too tired even to practice typing (we’re trying to teach him some basics to use a computer and most recently, he’s been learning to type).

2115 – Hear a weird buzzing noise (last night, we found a three inch long cockroach looking insect, so now we’re paranoid), Asaph gets up to investigate (me and Mike aren’t willing to do anything), it turns out be a small ladybug-like insect that’s capable of making noise far beyond its size.

2200 – Me and Mike pass out, content that we stayed awake all the way until 10pm.

2400-000 – A new day begins, we’ll start afresh, with the same goals, but for a different location.

*Obviously, everyday isn’t as long, or as hard as today was, but I think that today was a pretty good summary of a lot of what we do on a regular basis. Some would call it work, others, maybe something worse; but a lot of the time when I’m up in the hills, staring at the backdrop of the immense Rift Valley, the towering Rwenzori Mountains, or one of the Great Lakes (of Africa, that is), I can’t help but consider myself very blessed to be able to be doing what it is I’m doing.

On another, completely unrelated note and for no apparent reason other than to more accurately describe what this blog is about, I’ll be changing my blog address to wesinuganda.blogspot.com. So please use that address in the future.