I scream for help; no one comes. I quietly listen. The man seems to be alone. He doesn’t have tools and will be unable to break open the shutters or doors with his bare hands.
Read MoreCoffee and Banana Farm in Buweswa
friends in a mountain village
Small Holder Farms in the mountainous region of Bugisu Uganda
Community Mapping
I leave on foot up the mountain behind my house at 6:45. The slippery trail of a road is deeply rutted from the heavy rains we’ve been experiencing this month. Children, groups of women, and men pass me, as I negotiate the mountain with shoes caked in thick gooey red mud.
I have an appointment with Christoper, the chairman of the cooperative that I am working at, for a coffee farm tour. I have a vague idea of where his house is, so I continue walking for 45 minutes. Local farmers assure me that I am heading the right way then suddenly the trail stops at a tidy looking farmhouse. A Ugandan farm wife waves and calls to her husband to come out, the young children stare at me from a distance. I might be the first American to climb this trail!
Their names are Joseph and Lona, and they graciously spend an hour with me answering my questions about their lifestyle. After a tour of their garden plot, and their livestock shelters, Joseph and I walk 20 minutes along a narrow trail through small coffee tree farms. I’m keen to see where his family gets their drinking water. The public well is adjacent to their church and a new primary school that the church is trying to establish. The school is of simple mud and wattle construction. Each small room is neatly swept with hand hewn benches lined up in front of a chalkboard. They educate over 100 children ranging from nursery school through primary school.
My Nokia buzzes. It’s my supervisor calling, interupting my conversation with Joseph about the school’s potential. John is surprised that I walked so far on my own. I hang up and tell Joseph that John is expecting me to backtrack to Christopher’s farm. Joseph and I climb the path back to his house and we sit with his wife under their coffee trees. I pull a flask of hot rooibos tea from my bag. We sip the hot beverage together, smiling and appreciating the morning. Christopher and John can wait.
Details:
· Joseph is one of the few farmers who tends to a kitchen garden. He grows beans, tomatoes, squash, and greens for his family’s consumption. The garden is fenced with barbed wire to keep the free range poultry and animals out.
· Joseph has multiple plots of land scattered across the parish on which he maintains coffee farms.
· Joseph and Lona send their older children to boarding school in Mbale. Their commitment to their children’s education is commendable and rather unique. Many children in the Buweswa parish have not been attending school this year because the coffee harvest was devastatingly low so parents are unable to allocate money to pay school fees.
Consulting with Coffee Farmers in Eastern Uganda
In the Field
“We’re going to climb today to visit another savings group, remember?” Yes I remember, visiting farmers in the field is the best part of the week for me. The clouds look thick this morning, I am anxious and ready to move. He notices my eyes glancing towards the door, “We can’t get there before 11 AM, because the farmers are in the fields all morning,” says John. Yes, I remember this too, but all the same once the daily rains start the mountain roads are slick trenches of mud. “Good, you wore your good boots today, you will move very well,” John says appreciatively.
John is the Manager of the Buweswa Growers Cooperative Society (BGCS), located in Mufufu village. We have been working closely together since I arrived at site a fortnight ago. The BGCS property is the center point of the village, and my little colonial-era cinder block house is right on top of its hill. I can see mountainous coffee farms covered in mist from my front porch.
This will be the ninth savings group that I have visited. Our window of opportunity is narrow because the rains begin at 1 PM, or earlier. We begin trudging up the muddy road, still sticky from last night’s showers. Boda Bodas come from both directions hauling supplies going up, and people coming down. Villagers are heading to the main road several kilometers down the mountain. We reach the tiny village at the top of the mountain behind my house, about a 45 minute hike, and we keep climbing. I haven’t had a chance to really explore these high altitude villages because of the rainy season but this morning the clouds parted, and we feel the full force of the equatorial sun on our faces. Small holder farmer families have built their homesteads close to the mountain road; they tend to their various plots spaced throughout the district. We stop to greet everyone; they are all curious to hear a foreigner greet them in Lumasaaba.
After another 45 minutes of hiking, we reach the savings group who have gathered in a church building on top of an adjoining mountain. The church is missing a wall, a welcome open-air shelter. Our group of farmers are all very much at home, calmly looking over the coffee farms and mountain vistas, comfortable in the cool mist. “Let the meeting commence.”
Site Placement ... becoming more real
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.
site assignment
rolling out chapati dough
Last week a group of us new ag. trainees shadowed another ag. specialist who has been working on various projects in central Uganda for the past 10 months. He introduced us to different Village Savings and Loans (VSLAs) groups, we walked down dusty country roads greeting community members, and learned to cook local cuisine.
This brief taste of rural life reinvigorated my desire to partner with Ugandan farmers, but first I am finishing a few more weeks of onboarding sessions and then a month of intensive language training.
preparing lunch from scratch
The best news of the week has been site placements.
I learned that I am going to live in the Mbale region of Eastern Uganda, an hour south of Mbale city. First there is a month of language immersion to complete, starting next week, where I may be living in Mbale city with a local family, but am still waiting for details.
After I pass the language proficiency test (please!) I will move into a modest bungalow located in the rural parish of Buweswa, a lush coffee growing region in the foothills abutting Mt. Elgon National Park. There I will be working with a coffee growers cooperative for two years.
I will accept all good vibes as I attempt to learn and grow in this beautiful East African country.
morning walk in central Uganda
Ugandan Post
“Dear Michelle,
Congratulations! You are conditionally invited to serve as a/an Agribusiness Specialist in Uganda…. and will join the legacy of more than 240,000 Volunteers who have served with the Peace Corps, working alongside community members in 144 countries to support locally identified development priorities.”
Country: Uganda
Title: Agribusiness Specialist
Sector: Agriculture
Departure Date: August 1, 2024
I am almost there! After months of completing applications and exams, and after a healthy amount of discussions with those around me I am finally packed and ready to live in Uganda.
Schedule thus far:
August 1 – 2 Meet cohort in D.C.
August 3-4 fly to Uganda
6 weeks general training at Peace Corps Training Center (not in Kampala)
6 weeks language training w host family in the field
2 years live and work with Ugandan community
TFN (ta for now)
PS.
Internet connectivity will probably be in and out for the next 27 months. WhatsApp is the best way to reach me with jokes, stories, and updates.
