The Water Bottle - UG vs US

My celebration earlier this week about my boxes being done.....was a bit premature.  Sigh.  Machine broke, behind schedule, blah, blah, blah.  Philip has ASSURED me they will be done by next Friday.  Did I already say sigh?  So my fingers are crossed for next week, but I'm not really holding my breath.

However!  Things are shaping up despite that.  Meet Jimmy:

Jimmy is my hero of the week.  He owns the popular local pub that does a trivia night every Thursday.  A couple weeks ago I had a conversation with him about my recycling project and he was very supportive and told me to come his way when I was ready.  Well, Wednesday night I got a phone call from him; "Morgan, I have very many bottles for you.  And tomorrow is a big night, so I don't think I'll be able to store them any longer. Do you think you can come get them, or should I dispose of them?"

Jimmy is quite proud of his pub's grounds - he is considering changing the name of the pub to The Green House  

"You're already saving them for me?  Amazing!  I will come get them tomorrow for sure."  So I arranged with St Monicas to meet me at the pub in the afternoon, I brought my gigantic sack, (see last week's post) we filled it with bottles, and they were carted off to become bricks for a new hut.  Awesome, right?  I'm just so happy that it's working already, before I can even put as much energy into as I would like.

Jimmy and an employee tossing the empty bottles into my over-sized bag.  They're storing them in that broken freezer.  Awesome.  

My friend Elizabeth - who works at St Monicas - was surprised by how many bottles were collected in one week by one establishment, and said, "Oh man, we're going to have to hire more people to start filling bottles!"  Which thing I could not be happier to hear.  That's the idea, right?  Build the economy, protect the environment, strengthen the people.  I can't tell you how happy that makes my heart.

That is a lot of bottles!  You can't really tell from the photo - but that enormous sack is about  one-third full.  

I can say however, looking at all those bottles got me thinking.  And here is where I get just a bit preachy, so if you want to check out now, feel free.  Here in Gulu there are very limited options for safe drinking water.  It's inconvenient not to use bottled water at best, and impossible at worst.  But in the States, when is the last time you heard about someone getting sick because they drank tap water?  OK, so all my siblings and I did get sick once as kids drinking from a pump at a park that had a sewage leak....ew...but that is the RAREST case.  In fact, I'm willing to bet I am now one of the only people you know that has ever been sick from drinking water in the US.  So what I am asking is why do we feel the need to drink so much bottled water when we have such abundant safe drinking water already available?  People will argue that there are other things in their water they don't want to ingest: rust, chlorine, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Guess what?  Bottled water contains all kinds of other things you don't want to ingest: the plastic leaches all sorts of nastiness into the water, (including arsenic?!?) particularly if it's had a day in the sun or a hot car.  Also, did you know that nearly all bottled water in America comes straight from your tap-water source anyway?  In nearly every state it's just filtered from tap water - and then put in toxic bottles and sold to you when  you could be drinking it free!  (Without arsenic!)  So why not just filter your own water!?  And if you want the toxins, you can store it in your own plastic bottle for free!  :-)  Or you can use glass or a stainless steal water bottle.

 Seriously though, I'm going to ask for another couple favors; A. Look into your local water source and see what the water contains.  If it's clean, drink up!  B. If there's stuff you'd rather not have in your own water, use a tap filter.  C. If you have to use bottled water (which if you're like me and carry a water bottle with you everywhere will be a very rare occasion,) please don't let my efforts here be in vain and recycle that little bottle!  (Maybe even after reusing it!)  If I haven't convinced you, you should really check out the documentary Tapped and let them try.  I watched it via instant stream on Netflix (oh, the days I used to have Netflix accessibility....)

OK, done preaching.  Thanks for sticking with me through that.  Now, leave me some awesome actually-I-did-get-sick-from-tap-water stories in the comments, or, even better, let me know of your very valiant efforts not to use bottled water.  Thanks for reading!

One Man's Trash

Things are shaping up.  I think.  I hope.  I just had a conversation with my box guy, Philip, and he thinks (while I hope and pray) that the boxes will be done in four days.  Which means on Friday or Saturday I can get them up here to Gulu.  HALLELUJAH!!!  That means I can get the stencils put on - if not over the weekend, then on Monday - and I can finally start distributing them next week!  I have butterflies just thinking about this!

Practicing it's new-found purpose in the world.

I had a few good things happen this last week as well: I had the prototype made up for the grocery sack recycling holder.  I wanted something at a very low cost, something small enough to fit in a kitchen, and something that looked fairly nice.  So I bought these large white sacks they use to carry rice and flour and such in, and had a girl I know help me out.  She is just learning to sew, but wants to go to school for fashion and design.  So she cut the sack into four, stitched up the sides, and attached these little handles out of scrap material.  I'll slap my logo on there and pass it out to residents willing to collect their grocery sacks for me.   Exciting!

Kinda cute, don't you think?

Also, I finally received my ENORMOUS recycling sacks.  Tracking these things down was kind of a trip.  When I called the guy selling them on the phone, he told me he spoke, "Only Swahili, only Swahili."  No one speaks only Swahili.....so I had to have Lenox - a kid who helps around our house here - talk to him about buying them.  So then the guy came to Gulu, with the bags, but wouldn't call me because he was afraid.  So bizarre.  Consequently, it took longer than planned, but I got them!  They're nice and clean now, but soon they will be full of nasty dirty bottles waiting to head to K'la.  

Unraveling the bag to see it's full potential.  

This is Lenox - he's a tall guy - probably 6'2", so you can see this is a large sack.

There was a group of volunteers in from America that asked if I had anything they could do for me.  So I organized a garbage pick-up day.  And then they cancelled.  But that day I was walking to get my bicycle tire fixed (it's been flat four times in four weeks....that's getting old....) and decided to do a little garbage pick-up of my own.  I filled my basket full of empty water bottles on the side of the road.  After only one block, my basket was overflowing.  And this is in a relatively clean part of town.  There were a couple young girls who saw me picking them up and were eager to help, so they carried a few extras to my gate, though they could not figure out why in the world this white girl was collecting bottles for money.....  But this inspired me to do two things:  1. I'm going to organize a service project garbage pick-up day with my my church members - I think they'll happily help me, and 2. I'm going to start carrying a plastic bag with me everywhere I go and fill it with garbage that I can reuse/recycle.  I am turning into the crazy garbage lady.  And I kind of love it.  

Good bottles will be taken to St Monica's while the crushed and broken ones will wait here to be taken to K'la.  This is just the beginning!

The Wrong Kind of Green

OK, the post is late because I ran out of internet.  It's pay-as-you-go here, and I only pay for one month at a time.  I can never quite remember when my package runs out, so when I run out Saturday night, there's not much I can do till Monday.....I do hate not being able to check my email though, there's nothing I like more than getting an email from friends and family!  (Hint hint....)

Anyway, life is humming along.  Painters have invaded my house and disrupted any sense of order that I had.  The good news is, my walls are painted now and I finally got to unpack my suitcase after a month.  And I will say, the new paint is miles better than what was there previously.  It was dirty, there were huge holes in the walls, there was plaster showing through in places, there were areas that had been cemented over for heaven-knows-what reason, sometimes two colors of paint on one wall....I really should have taken a before picture.  So anyway, the painters did a really nice job of patching the walls and everything before they painted, so truly, it's very much improved.  The only problem is, my room is now purple.  What's wrong with purple, you ask?  It's Loree Thielbar purple, that's what.  Growing up we had this great family friend, Loree, who was a-kick-in-the-pants funny, always said what every one was thinking but not saying, and happened to love purple beyond all reason.  She would put the most shocking colors of purple in the strangest places in her home.  But that was Loree, and it was fine.  I didn't have to live with it.  But now I do.  However, let me count myself lucky, because the rest of the house has been painted LIME GREEN.  Yes, that's right.  Every other room in the house, even the living room.  Lime.  And most unfortunately, the trim on my ceiling has been abducted by this heinous color as well.  So at night, I lay down on my bed, stare up at the ceiling and contemplate why anyone would voluntarily choose to have it look as though someone vomited on their walls.  I suppose I will just try to keep my head down (literally) and feel grateful when I am accosted by two purple walls every time I walk into my room.

The purple walls, in all their glory.

I'll let this one speak for itself....

Maybe if it had only been one wall....

In other news, I have come a long way on the brochures and am just looking for a place to get them printed.   And I would like to say I have my stencils all made since it's been three weeks since I started the process.  But I don't.  The temporary stencils are finished....the kind that will last for a good 100 uses.  But I need the kind that will last for 1000+ uses.  Miscommnunication at its finest, yet again.  So John, my stencil man, has gone back to the drawing board and tells me they'll be done next week.  Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you?  If I can time everything just right, I'll have the brochures, stencils, and boxes all within a week of each other and then really get things kicking at all once.

A little sample of the temp stencil's capabilities.  Not bad.  The next one should be even better.

I couldn't figure out how else to show you all the brochure....so you get a screen shot.  Windows Starter doesn't allow you to go full screen with your document.  Ah, well, you get the idea.  

Finally, it has been raining here like mad.  Which means it's been really cold as well.  It was not this cold last "winter" which is summer for the rest of you folks.  It rained daily, but it wasn't so cool all the time.  I mean, I'm not complaining.  When the sun shines it's still really hot, so it's a nice reprieve, it's just strange to wake up to overcast skies so often.  I had a ways to walk on Saturday after a particularly bad storm, and my little flip flops were not the most of ideal shoes I could be wearing.....But again, I'll take it the mud if it means I don't have to sweat so much!

I'll bet Old Navy never dreamed their flip flops would see the day....

Carrots, A Hut, and Reusable Bags

I have three things to tell you, as referenced in the title of this post:  

First: I have been wanting a garden for years.  Years.  Imagine my excitement, then, when one of the guys working with my roommate's NGO stood outside my window the other day and held up three beautiful, freshly-pulled-from-the-ground carrots.  I went crazy over them, and ate my first raw carrot in Uganda.  Carrots here just aren't very good - that weird woody inside part of the carrot is always really big and really woody.  This wasn't much different, but I ate it anyway, for the shear novelty that I was eating a carrot grown in MY yard.  Someday I WILL live in a house with a yard that I can plant my own garden in.  But until that day, playing around in my roommate's garden will suffice.  I can't wait to try whatever comes up next!

Aren't they just so pretty??

Second:  I visited St Monica's compound again this week and this time was able to see the new water-bottle hut they finished a couple months ago.  It's pretty awesome.  They have some volunteers staying there at the moment, and the volunteers were put to work painting the inside of the hut.  It's a pretty large hut, and is "self-contained," meaning it has its own fully-functioning bathroom.  And it has electricity.  Oh yeah, and it's made entirely from water-bottle bricks.  So dang cool.

You can see the dots on the top half?  Those are the bottoms of the water bottles.  

The water-bottle caps in a diamond cut-out on the inside of the hut.  

The hut's in a bit of disarray from the volunteers and painting, but you get the point - that weird protrusion is the bathroom.

Painting volunteer.

Third:  I am on a one-woman mission (well, I guess everything about my being here has been a one-woman mission all along....) to train supermarket checkers in Gulu what to do when someone says either, "I don't need a bag, thank you," or "can you put it in this bag I brought, please?"  It's difficult every time.  I'll buy a single item - say a bag of sugar.  It's in its own bag already, why do I need another?  So I'll say, "No bag please," and by the time I've finished paying and go to grab my sugar, it is inevitably in a bag.  And then I have to take it out and explain that I don't need the bag, but please do re-use that bag for someone else, and I get all manner of strange looks.  If I have many items and ask them to use the bag I brought, they just set my bag aside and use their own anyway.  Oyoyoy.  My trip there Saturday evening was especially difficult.  The store's new produce section is in one part of the building, but you have to take it to be weighed in another part.  Everyone does the same thing we do in America - use fifteen different little plastic bags for each peice of food they are purchasing.  Three tomatoes?  That's one bag.  One green pepper?  Second bag!  Of course my being the "recycling lady" here in town means I cannot indulge in this behavior, so I just put the produce in my basket - bag free - took it over to be weighed, and this is how I received it back....

Sigh.  What could I do?  So I took it and headed to the checkout stand, where I had to tell the nice man bagging that I didn't want a separate bag for my eggs three times, and then STILL had to take them out of the bag, and said, "Please, let's put them in here," referring to my own bag I'd brought.  Finally he said OK, and proceeded to put the rest of my food in his own plastic sack.  I just started laughing at that point, and trying not to be offensive, once again took everything out of the store bags and put them in my own, resting the eggs carefully on top.  (None of them were broken when I reached home, even without his extra plastic bags.  Imagine.)  I really prefer to use the main open-air markets that stink of fish, but where you know the produce was grown in some woman's back yard, and she'd rather keep her own expensive polyethylene bags if you have one already.  But when you're in a pinch late Saturday night.....

Awesome headless self-portrait of me and the bag I knit on the plane ride over.  Yes, I make the best environmental spinster ever.  

Moral of this story, boys and girls, think of my struggle here in Uganda, and when you go to the store in America, bring your own re-usable bags (or reuse a plastic one!) where the cashier will easily know what to do with them and just might even give you a couple nickles back for bringing them in.  Don't let my efforts be in vain!

Green Drinks

I have crossed over.

I am officially a "green" geek.

How do I know?

I spent the better part of the week in Kampala getting everything settled with buying the recycling containers/boxes and paints to put logos on them.  While there, I also visited several recycling operations in the city - and yes, I was geek-ily excited.  But that was to be expected; I've been seeing videos and reading articles about all this machinery and the process for months and months now, and getting to see it in person in a developing country, was just exciting.

Outside Omega Plastics

A mountain of plastic bags!  All to become a new material.  

No no, the geeky part came at the polyethylene recycling plant - Omega Plastics.  They recycle plastic bags. When I walked in I was greeted by a very nice looking Indian man about my age.  He was happy to show me around and was very open and honest about how recycling was going well and not going well in Kampala.  He helped me understand what would make it worth their while to come pick up waste in Gulu (having one ton - literally - of grocery sacks.....this is why no one has tried to do what I'm doing!) and posed some important questions for me to consider and made some really good suggestions (including that we buy one of their old smaller machines - only $5,000.  Oh man, how I wish that were in the budget!  Maybe someday.....)

On our walk around the plant we also discussed a bit more friendly topics; his family is three generation Ugandan-Indian.  Half his family moved to Canada during the Idi Amin years, half of them stayed in Uganda keeping a low profile. (Read this article if you don't know about the expulsion.)  He went to the international school in Kampala and then to Canada for university, consequently he has hardly any accent at all.  His father runs the recycling business, and he's willing to help out now but has some things started on the side of his own.  As our conversation wound down and I was getting ready to go, he asked how long I was in town.
"Until Saturday morning," I reply.
"Oh, have you been to Mish-Mash yet?" he asks, referring to a new artsy place in town that just opened up.
"Not yet, but I've been hearing good things about it."
"Yeah, you should come out Friday night, and then we could talk all about recycling and I'll tell you all the crazy stories about why it's so difficult in this city."

......

Did I?....Did I just get picked up on by a guy who used a recycling line?  .......  And was it viable?  Yep.  Yes, I did.  And it was....

I laughed over this for hours afterwords, thinking of the ensuing conversation we would have late Friday night.  "We could...you know, go back to my place?  Talk about....recycling?..."  Oh, how roMANtic!  I have entered a whole new phase of life.  

Plastic Recycling Industries - the land of waste hard plastics.  Owned by the Rwenzori water bottle company. 

That night I went out to watch the football (soccer) game with one of the girls I was staying with there in Kampala.  We were sitting next to this kid who asked what I was doing out here and when I told him he said, "Oh!  You have to come to Green Drinks!"
"Green Drinks?"
"Yeah, my housemate is out here working on renewable energy stuff and started a night called Green Drinks.  It's the first Tuesday of every month and everyone gets together for the evening to discuss the environment and ideas and successes and all that.  It's a lot of fun."

And you know what?  It did sound fun.

I have crossed over.

A few of the plastic sorters that work at PRI.  They laughed and laughed and laughed at having their photo taken.

The sea of water bottles, jerry cans, and other hard plastics.

Whinny gave me a tour of PRI.  Lovely woman in front of a load of trash.

This is the final product for PRI - washed and chipped plastic.  

Rwenzori is the largest bottled-water manufacturer in Uganda.   They now make more money off recycling plastic than they do their bottled water.  

And yet, unfortunately, right across the street from PRI's gate you can see remnants of burnt plastic.  An uphill battle for sure.  

Love's Much Lovelier

You know that old song that says “love’s much lovelier the second time around”?  Well, I have discovered this week that song it totally applicable to my being here in Gulu.  My first six weeks in Gulu last year were some of the most blissfully happy of my life.  I was just so completely smitten by this place and my life that I didn’t have one depressed thought for weeks.  Then there was the moment where I literally nearly socked a bus driver for completely unrepentingly losing an entire case of varnish I had traipsed all over Kampala to find.  It came at the tail end of a very stressful trip to Kampala where I felt lost and taken advantage of at every turn, and I really probably would have hit the guy if my friends David and George hadn’t been there to cool me off.  And like all good things, my time of bliss came to an end.  It wasn’t over night, but a couple months later I settled into rather disparaging feelings about this place I was living.  I wanted a shower, I wanted a bathroom, I wanted to cook pasta, I wanted to stop sweating.  Thankfully, I was able to find a really great place to move into (shower, toilet, and pasta-cooking stove top included) and my body acclimated and I even felt cold sometimes.  And then I felt like I was at home.  I was prepared to stay in Gulu for a while.  But there were still highs and lows, and the highs were pure elation and lows were some of the lowest I’ve experienced. 

Today makes two weeks exactly since I landed in Gulu Town again.  So perhaps I’m putting my horse before the cart here, but I think I’ve calmed down here.  The last two weeks has brought a whole host of emotions (many of them ranging between thinking I’m completely crazy for trying to do what I’m trying to do, and then feeling like this is the most important thing I’ve every attempted to do) but thankfully, none of my emotions have raged the way they did last year – good or bad.  Since I knew exactly what I was coming back to, there was none of the anticipation, excitement and discovery of a new place.  Of course that’s a bit sad, but with it comes none of the feelings of frustration, exasperation and annoyance at all things that are difficult about becoming accustomed to an entirely new culture.  And truthfully, I’m thrilled at the fact that things are bit more even keeled.  As many of you know, I’m a rather dramatic individual, I really experience the highs and lows of life fully, and so those times in life where things are a bit more equal, I almost feel happier about being here than in the crazy elation of my high points.  So all I week I’ve found myself humming, “Love’s much lovelier, the second time around, love’s more comfortable with both feet on the ground.” 

Inside this little (little) doorway is the Gulu Municiple Education Office.  I went on a serious goose hunt looking for it today.  How did I ever miss it?  It's in totally plane sight!

I’ve certainly experienced frustration – I opened my bank account over a week ago, and I still can't access my money.  The company in Kampala making the recycling containers, told me a couple days ago it would take four weeks to fix their broken machine that is supposed to cut my boxes.  Water has been off about 10 of my 12 days here, and power follows right behind that.  But somehow I just feel easier knowing it will all work out eventually, the water will come back, as will the power.  I talked to the boxes guy about how we can work out the problem and he’s going to help me with the sample so I can take it to another company next week.  My donation funds have now been transferred to Uganda, and I should be able to access them soon.  And I had a lovely chat last night with a German girl about how her heart breaks when they print off books worth of paper so they have a copy of everything when the power blows.  She told me to come to her office as soon as I could with my recycling boxes. 

My friend John (on the right) is making the stencils for our recycling containers.  All those things on the shelves ?  More stencils!

In America, once I figured out my fundraising process, everything happened so quickly.  The money started rolling in, and I started making preparations to get back here.  I could hop in my car and cross off an entire list of things in one morning.  I felt a bit like a gerbil in one of those rolling balls.  I could run and spin and really get somewhere, you know?  Landing in Uganda was a bit like hitting honey in my rolling ball.  It didn’t come to a screeching halt, but it has certainly slowed down.  So I have learned to write two lists – the one that I need only myself to cross off, and the one I need others' help to cross off.  One I know I can put deadlines on, the other I know may take days to get anywhere.      

I'm off to Kampala this week (finally!) to get things going and meet with a few recycling programs there in the city.  Wish me luck!

Gulu Town, Revisited

And I'm back.

It's odd just how familiar it all feels.  Truth be told, I was a bit apprehensive coming back.  There were things I was starting to forget.  Things that were so familiar to my day to day life here in Gulu, that when I was in the States and would finally remember, I couldn't believe I had forgotten.  And that made me nervous.  But stepping off the bus into Gulu was like coming home.  I've moved a lot in my life and home has many definitions for me, and I was very happy to realize Gulu fits the description.

It's hot, my ankles and feet were swollen like a pregnant woman's, my bicycle has a broken seat, flat tire, and no brakes, I have ridiculous jet lag (I'll sleep a full night one night and not a wink the next) I have mosquito bites again, and my awesome parasites are having a joyous reunion with the local flora inside me..... But it has been positively glorious walking the streets of town, re-acquainting myself with everything and running into my old Ugandan friends. I was probably most excited when I ran into one of the young women from my church youth organization that I was in charge of last year - Carol.  Her and her sister Faith were my favorites, so when I was unassumingly sitting outside eating breakfast at a cafe one morning and she walked by, we did plenty of girly squealing and hugging.  Oh, and my old motorcycle-taxi driver, Ray.  He was riding his bike down the street and stopped at an intersection.  I was waiting to cross the street, and we saw each other.  White girl running into the middle of the road to bear hug a boda driver......  Everyone around certainly thought I had lost it.  He finally pushed his bike out of the middle of the road and we had a nice long chat.  I love that kid.

This is me and my Young Women my last week in 2011.  Aren't they so beautiful??  Carol is the second from the right, standing.  

One not-so-lovely reminder of Uganda I've had this week is just how long it takes to do anything here.  So my Recycling for Hope to-do list for weeks one and two has been slightly altered.  I thought I'd be heading to Kampala on Monday to get the recycling boxes cut, but after interviewing literally every bank in town and finally deciding on one with the least amount of absurd fees (who charges a fee for depositing money??!!  No wonder no one puts their money in a bank around here!)  I opened the account, only to be told it won't be active until next Thursday.  Without access to money there is not much I can do about the boxes.
Thus, K'la is being put off a week.  But this will give me some time to do a bit of research/observation I need to do here anyway.  I did have productive and encouraging meetings with the organizations I'll be working with this year, which of course got me very excited to get started despite everything.

The living quarters.  You can't see the gardens here, but you can see the hanging herb garden!

The most exciting - and certainly the best thing I could have done RFH productivity-wise  - was to procure housing.  Housing in Gulu is hard to come by and can sometimes take several weeks to find.  I luckily only had to spend two nights in a very classy joint called Sunrise Guest House - which barely fit my suitcase and had a shower that didn't work and a toilet without a seat (my favorite) - before moving into what is now home.  The house is a bit ghetto - it's owned by a British woman named Daniella who is my age and is fixing it up.  So it has tons of nice amenities - an inverter and a generator for when the power goes, an extra water tank and pump for when the water goes, and with my rent money a solar-powered water-heater is being purchased for the shower.  And walls are being patched and painted next week, so I'll post photos of my room once I get everything situated.  The absolute best thing about the house though, is that Daniella is trying her hand at gardening and has tons of space to do so.  She said I'm welcome to join them, and I can't even tell you how happy that makes me!  I have been yearning to garden for a good six years now and am thrilled I finally get to satisfy that yearning.

So overall it was a great week.  Maybe not quite as productive as I had hoped, but I count it as successful nonetheless.  I can say I miss home and having family around all the time and friends just a phone call away.  So don't hesitate to email, skype, or send a letter!  (My address is still P.O. Box 993, Gulu, Uganda.)  Thanks for following my blog and for all your support and encouragement.  Here's to another great year in Gulu Town!