Piggery Part 2
on Thea's Blog (Uganda), 23/Nov/2009 10:00, 34 days ago
After months of anticipation, piggery day finally arrived last Saturday. All available VSOs, plus a few extra mazungus, travelled out to Buhara, a nearby village, to help a local NGO– the Buhara Good Shepherd Childcare Project - construct a luxurious 3-bay pig pen. Piggery being a tried and test means of income generation, and this being one of the agreed VSO-sponsored cluster projects for the year.The biggest drama of the day happened before we even reached the village when a monkey, recently released from its cage and seeking revenge on its captors, took a bite out of Sabrina’s leg. Not wanting to risk the small but scary possibility of contracting rabies, Sabrina and Geoff headed off in search of the treatment and sadly missed the day’s activities. With the monkey still at large, the rest of us did not hang around but set off at a pace towards Buhara.So we were a slightly reduced party who eventually arrived at Edward’s Dad’s house to offer our not-very-advanced construction skills. Not wanting to interfere with the engineering of the site itself, we started off with some basic labouring – carrying stones, water and wooden poles. But even here we were desperately shown up by the children, who seemed able to carry twice their body weight with no visible difficulty. Once the basic shape of the pig pen had been marked out, we turned our hand to some hole digging, post mounting and even a little bit of hammering. With maybe as many as twenty of us at work, the pen went up with impressive speed. We were then rewarded with an immense meal followed by dancing and singing from the kids.