Picture Me Walkin'

In the past few months several new people have joined the team living in the house here in Mbale. Among them, Joel and Brad really hit the ground running. Before they arrived, I had spent months talking about how we should organize a neighborhood trash pickup. Within a week, they had taken on the project and developed a far reaching framework bringing in the local government and community groups for a monthly neighborhood trash cleanup. They worked through countless ludicrus frustrations, for example one meeting with the Mbale Industrial Division Municipal Council: They waited an hour before a single councilman showed up. After an hour and a half of waiting, they finally managed to get the meeting underway. Ten minutes later the group had reached a consensus: another planning meeting with the same group of people in 3 weeks- the day of the proposed trash cleanup they were meeting to plan. It took them weeks of no-show meetings and gallons of waragi, but eventually they got the project ...

I have at all costs resisted talking about my work here in Africa in any way shape or form. I guess one could take this as an admission that I don't actually do any work at all. The truth is that I actually work reasonably hard- certainly not as hard as if I were in the US getting paid, but harder than my neighbors or any of the government people we interact with. There are a couple reasons I don't talk much about the work: (1) I think it's unprofessional (and I'm nothing if not a consummate professional and model worker bee at all times) and (2) the nature of community work and working in Africa in general is that its incredibly frustrating and seemingly pointless on a day to day basis. Nothing works as planned and everything reverts to chaos, especially when working with the community. I could easily fill pages and pages with bitching about broken appointments and the minutia of my day, but that would be neither fun to read nor to write- so what's the point. L...

A little bird told me that some people out there think we don't do anything but sit around playing cards and eating any bug that crawls by. Well, I'm here to set the record straight. We work hard. We just don't talk about it, because it's top secret. And maybe a bit boring. So to spice things up, I might throw in a few random pictures. (Lifeguard Man- He dances. He guards your life. Get it?) Basically, as the project now stands, MAPLE works with microentrepreneurs, providing basic skills training to complement the financial resources that have been assembled within the community. We shifted away from trying to work with the larger microfinance banks, because they were bureaucratic and, frankly, didn't always seem to have the borrowers' best interests at heart. This isn't really the place to get into the whole debate over the need for financial sustainability in order to reach to the most people and all that noise. Leave it that we shifted to working with SA...

Sorry for another break in the posting. We are in the process of moving into our new house, so we've been out in the 'burbs supervising the various repairs. But it's starting to come together. We had a nice home-cooked meal of rice and beans last night, complete with the obligatory avocado. Tonight, it's pasta. Luke is giddy like a schoolgirl at just the thought of some good ol' white folk eatin'. The past week has actually been amazingly productive. We met with a local SACCO, a type of informal-ish credit institution. Basically, there are a bunch of members who pay in some small sum, then take turns borrowing a larger portion of the group funds. The one that we have partnered with focuses on vulnerable women and children, and is actually based out in our neighborhood. It's looking much more promising than trying to work with the larger microfinance institutions, if only because there is much less bureaucratic nonsense to work through. Plus, we may have more...

So to get things started out, here is what we're going to be doing. I'll go into some amount of detail about background stuff, because I have only really told the whole story to those who press me for details or ply me with drinks. I write long, and may or may not ramble, so probably you'll just have to get used to that. This is the broccoli post; it should get more fun once this is out of the way. We are going to Lira, Uganda to do ground-work setting up a microfinance organization. The organization is called MAPLE, which together with some friends, I started at the UO in like 2006. Our website is on the right; it has more info about what we're doing and about microfinance. Shouts to Peter Dixon, Morgan Williamson, Rachel Breaux , and Ron Severson . without you all I'd be back in a cubicle or something right now. View Larger Map We got a grant from the Meyer Fund last year to set up the infrastructure of the program, but we can't use the grant money to do an...