Site Visit: 8 AM September 2024
· Find the public bus park
· Board bus
· Wait seated two hours until bus is full full
· Leave Mbale City towards Bududa
My stop is at Weswa junction, just before the town of Bududa. Arriving at 11 AM, half a dozen boda boda drivers cry out to me, “1000 shillings!” just to moto me that the last kilometer to the coffee cooperative. I walk.
Mist hung over the Manafwa River, swollen from recent rains. The surrounding mountains dodge in and out of the clouds. Dreams of primary forest filled with colorful birds, and endemic monkeys have long been forgotten. The region has been efficiently terraced, with banana trees, coffee farms, and rows of maize. The Ugandan side of Mt. Elgon National Park blends into the surrounding farming communities, or rather the other way around..
My sponsor, Buweswa Growers Cooperative, is organized from a series of colonial-era buildings solidly planted in the late 1940s. The board members were waiting for me on the hill. A bag of lightly roasted Arabica was opened, we stirred grounds into mugs of hot water and sat on bright blue chairs in the main office. After our introductions, was it an hour?, they eagerly escorted me to the white-washed building which will be my house. The cement floors were scrubbed clean, new mosquito screens were installed in every window frame, even my outhouse was freshly swept.
As I open my front shutters, cloud-filtered light fills the room. There is the path that leads down to the community well, I will be drinking and bathing with their spring water now. This is Eastern Uganda, like no other place I have been.
