VSO Roadtrip to Soroti
on Random Uganda (Uganda), 07/Dec/2009 04:35, 34 days ago
December 4thVSO Roadtrip to SorotiDecember 2nd was international volunteer day. Or some such sort of event. About a week or so before I received an email from Daniel at VSO saying they were looking for 10 volunteers to take a bus trip to Soroti to take part in the festivities—which were to include tree planting, a march down mainstreet, and some media interviews to encourage international volunteering. I had mixed feelings on the invitation. On one hand, I haven’t been to Soroti yet (Soroti lies about due north of Kampala about 15km from the south shores of Lake Kyoga, but to reach it you have to drive northeast to Mbale and Mt. Elgon and then hook northwest for a couple more hours) and I try not to miss any opportunities to check out new places in Uganda. (The Bradt guide for Uganda doesn’t say much about Soroti except that the only thing to do in Sorotiis to climb the large rock that looms over the center of town—sounds pretty good to me. We would also be driving fairly close to Sipi falls, so we had hope that we might persuade the busdriver to take a diversion.) But, as one of my fellow volunteers commented, the VSO program office would ‘have trouble organizing a piss-off in a brewery,’ so it would be likely that a fair amount of milling about aimlessly would be written into the agenda. True to form, the email said the bus would depart at 11am so we could make the radio interviews at 5pm, and we left Kampala at nearly 2pm and gotinto Soroti about 8pm.On the bus: Geoff and Sabrina from Kamwenge; Hazel, Stacy and myself from Kampala. Agnes and Amelia from Kabale. Peter, one of the Kenyan volunteers. Wilson and Dunstan and several other returned Ugandan volunteers. And Grace, Rose, Harriet and several other members of the VSO program office staff. (Benon, the VSO Uganda country director, drove one of the VSO SUVs up to Soroti, despite empty seats on the bus, thus effectively negating all of the carbon offsets of our entire tree planting exercise)On International Volunteer Day (IVD), after a suitable interval of sitting about the hotel, we went to Independence Park near town and watched the brass band warm up the crowd while we waited for the organizers to go buy hoes and shovels and watering cans… This years IVD had the theme of ‘saving the environment’ and ‘combating global warming.’ VSO Uganda, aside from a few volunteers working in wildlife conservation, does not have any ongoing projects involved in saving the environment from global warming. (VSO international does list environmental conservation as one of their core programs—so all emails from VSO do say ‘please don’t print this email unless you really have to’ at the bottom). UNDP, the other major group of volunteers attending, also doesn’t have any ongoing environmental projects in Uganda—unless you count the environmental impact of their large fleet of white SUVs.But we got to listen to a speech from the district chairman about how he expects Uganda will stop global warming in its tracks given the success Uganda has had fighting HIV/AIDS… ‘it used to be that AIDS was a terrible disease, but now it is just like getting a cold, you take the drugs and you get better…’ (which may be why, after years of the HIV incidence falling—from nearly 20% down to about 7%--the incidence in Uganda is starting to creep back up.)And we got to plant seedlings in Independence Park and in the mayor’s garden. Using a hoe with a metal blade precariously attached to a peeled stick, I managed to dig 20-30 holes and get blisters on my hands. It gave me newfound respect for the women I see every day wielding their hoes, turning over their fields one clump of dirt at a time. All together we planted 200 and something seedlings. I asked the man from the mayor’s office when we could expect rain. He said he hoped in April or May. (He mentioned quietly that, yes, it would have been better if we could have planted the trees a few months ago at the beginning of rainy season, but, then, itwasn’t IVD a few months ago, the time was not right for gesturing and speeches.) I don’t think things bode well for our little trees.The next morning I jogged into town and climbed the rock. The nice soldier on top, once he finished putting his trousers on, told me that I wasn’t supposed to be up there. But he didn’t point his AK47 at me and he politely accepted my excuse that I wasn’t carrying any money in my running shorts to give him.Rose, a little miffed that she had to ride the bus back with the volunteers, instead of in the luxury of Benon’s vehicle, nixed the side trip to Sipi falls.I was waiting for my eggs at breakfast when the busdriver came and told me that‘everybody was waiting’ for me on the bus and that I should come. It was 0855 and we had planned to leave at 9am. I told him that I’d be on the bus at 9… (those damned mzungus, always making you wait!)