Oystra Journey Day 6, 7, 8: Uganda

It has been nonstop since arriving in Entebbe, Uganda Friday morning. After getting our visas and finding our hotel shuttles, the busy streets took us to the capital city of Kampala. The streets were even more congested than in Accra due to the many motorcycle taxis that risk life and limb to get ahead of the slow traffic. We saw 5 people on one small motorcycle – what a sight!

As we got closer to Kampala we passed through the town of Katwe, which movie buffs will recognize from the movie “Queen of Katwe”. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

Once at the hotel, we took showers and headed out to meet John Businge, owner of Forever Sanitation. John described his pit emptying business and marketing strategy with great passion. He explained how city officials have recognized his success, not only for helping improve sanitation but making a successful business of it.

John shared a difficult personal story with us. His wife left him because he works in the sanitation business. The pain on his face was visible as he told his story, but he quickly recovered as he talked about his business. Sometimes the hard times are sources of motivation and maybe this is John’s motivation. This also highlights a stigma that must be overcome to solve the larger problem. Innovative technology that contains the mess and makes it less manual will make sanitation jobs more respected.

Kampala is very hilly and John explained that the lowlands are where the informal settlements (slums) are located. During the rainy season, these areas flood. Thus, the land value is very low and informal settlements tend to establish. These areas cause the biggest sanitation problems.

We followed his crew to a pit latrine to witness a manual extraction. First, they “fished” for trash with a steel rod with several barbs welded on the rod. They removed rags and even a sandal before scooping fecal matter with a small bucket. Thankfully, entering the pits, like we saw last week, is not practiced here!

The contents were then transferred to a larger bucket and carried back to their small truck to dump in barrels. The path back to the truck was, at times, a one person trail, sandwiched between a ditch and building, making it a long process to get the sludge to their truck. After watching for a while we went back to his office for a debrief before ending our first day in Kampala.

On Saturday morning we met several people working in sanitation from the Kampala City Council Authority. They took us to another informal settlement called Kawempe but is also known as “Hollywood”. It got its nickname from the movie “Queen of Katwe” because several scenes were filmed there.

The head of the community showed us the two public bathrooms in the market area, then several residential toilets. The pits were constructed above ground so when it flooded the toilet was above the water level.

Later we discovered that hiring someone to empty your pit is very rare and homeowners disposed of their waste in one of two ways:

1. Wait for a rain storm and remove some waste into the nearby ditch and let it go down stream
2. Remove it, pile it up, cover with trash and when dry enough burn it

Martin Nyanzi then showed us his transfer trailer that he designed with the intent of helping pit emptying companies. The idea is to bring the sludge to the trailer so a larger volume can be transported at one time, minimizing trips to the treatment plant.

From there we watched what is called the “Gulper”. It is an ingenious PVC hand pump used to pump sludge out of the pit. It works well when conditions are right, such as a high pit level and mostly water, which was the case for the demo.

After we arrived back at the hotel we reviewed the requirements for our phase II project and came to consensus on expectations which was one personal objective of mine for the trip.

Sunday we had the day off with two local tours planned. The first tour was to the Mabira Forest where we saw many rare birds and two different types of monkeys. Our tour guide was very passionate about the environment and very familiar with the forest inhabitants.

One inhabitant did not like our presence as we came across two ant nests and they were mean! We all had several ant bites as high up as the belt line just from walking on the trail! It was comical watching everyone swat ants in their pants but at the same time painful because the ants were merciless!

Next, we traveled to the source of the Nile river, the longest river in the world flowing south to north, like our own Fox River. Lake Victoria is its source, the second largest fresh water lake in the world behind Lake Superior. We took a quick boat ride to the source and got some great photos of the local birds before having lunch and going back to the hotel. Ask Rick how Ugandan banana peel tastes!!!

It is still hard for me to believe the horrific living conditions we’ve witnessed in two cities. I can only wonder how many other people in the world live like this. Our hosts from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have seen many similar areas and even some with worse living conditions! This makes me wonder what the refugee camps are like and could they even be worse?

Sanitation Tidbit #4

According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program, 27% of the global population (1.9bil) use private sanitation facilities connected to sewers that treat wastewater. That is us in the U.S.A – think about the 73%!