The construction materials used for building come almost exclusively from the local area – very local – right next to the structure local. The soil is rich with red clay.  The lowest cost construction is mud and water mixed into a sticky batter that is slapped into a a grid of sticks tied together with banana trunk strips or twine. Usually covered with a smooth layer of cow dung – also very local. In the rainy season a wall of banana thatch is used to keep the rain of the sides of the building. Roofs are made of banana thatch.  Windows and doors are bought from the local millworker who uses hand tools – saw, plane and measuring tape.  The paint comes from Mbarara – bought in the local “we sell a bit of everything” shop. The second type of construction is brick.  Clay is taken right from the yard, mixed with water and ash and formed.  They build a kiln around the bricks, of cricks and slow fire over a series of days.  The concrete is also a local recipe. Workers tools are a plumb bob, string and a tool to butter the bricks. I didn’t see a level.  The roof on the brick homes is corrugated tin – the cost of which put a bit of a halt to moving in – lots of homes were finished except for this feature.  The third type of construction was concrete and stucco. It looks very Italian in comparison to the modest mud and brick – with concrete railings and details. Overall the use  local materials created a very integrated aesthetic that was textural and beautiful to look at.  Floors were always dirt. Homes average about 15 feet wide by ten feet deep, one story.

UNDP Field Office

Bar, Barber and Hotel

Outbuildings are always mud and stick except for an occasional log cabin construction – but trees are scarce so this is unusual.  The typical outbuilding were the latrine, kitchen and bath shelter, sometime a goat house.  There must be some night time predator for goats because in lieu of a goat house they would often be tied up in the kitchen if it was a very rural area.  I also saw a corn crib and various storage sheds.  

Latrine with banana thatch

Latrine with tin roof

Latrine interior with basket to hold "toilet paper"

Bath shelter on back of kitchen

Corn crib

This the the yellow gerry can that is used everywhere in the country to collect water.  Access to water is the key issue at the center of all other.  It needs to be boiled to drink, you need it to be clean, and you have to carry it from very long distances so every drop is precious. On average it’s an hour walk to the cleanest water source in Ruhiira.  Don’t into a gorge where the UNDP has tapped a spring and collects water in a number of large holding tanks open to the community.  The next stage of the project is to pump the water up to the street level, eliminating the arduous climb back up  the side of the gorge while carrying 40 pounds of water. This is usually done very early in the morning – before school.

AIDS CLINIC (due to move to main building)

The compound is currently being landscaped and the aids clinic is scheduled to be moved out of the container building into a more appealing building. This is also where the cluster’s ambulance resides – on average it gets one call a day – most often for women having a difficulty in birthing. The ambulance is usually called in by a Community Healthcare Worker (CHW) over a cell phone.  

Training for CHW’s takes place in a central building. The UNDP cruiser does a loop around the cluster to pick everyone up and brings them to Kabuyanda.  There is no electricity the training center, and it is not large enough to hold the entire group so many people sit just outside the door. The MV4 services of the clinic are in high demand, although it is suppose to service people from the cluster, people come from as far away as Tanzania, the border of which is about 200 kilometers away. Kabuyanda is a very different town from Ruhiira.  Larger, more bustling and slightly more cynical.  Where the people in Ruhiira are curious and friendly, here the people want you to give them money. My walk through town had a similar “pied piper” effect – where a group of kids follow behind you in a long trail – but there interest was not about my whiteness but in the shillings in my pocket.  

There is a small AIDS clinic in town that offers testing, counseling and educational programming. The walls are covered with homemade posters offering instructions and advice.

Having visiting a number of latrines and kitchens, both separate structures I was very excited to finally have an opportunity to get inside the home.  There were no surprises really – some people had living room furniture, others just had simple stools. The rooms were small and dark – the shutters were usually closed.

The walls were decorated with calendars, political posters and articles cut out from the newspaper. There weren’t any personal photos. The living room is also a work space for shelling beans and doing homework. There was often a shelf for stacks of papers and a sideboard for storing things.

The bedrooms were tiny, with a pallet on the floor in most cases and a clothes line. Clothes were draped in layers over the line. No closets, no bureaus but turquoise mosquito nets – similar to the clinic. In some cases the dirt floors were actually shiny from sweeping over time.  

The photo above was in a previous posting on CHW household vistis. The photo on the right is a also living room, in this case the walls are decorated with posters and drawings done for homework assignments including one on the digestive system.  I remember doing the same assignment in 6th grade. Below is another detail of a decorated wall.

Kitchens are separate from the house.  Here you see a typical small shack with no chimney so it gets pretty smoky inside when things are cooking.  The stove needs to be covered because of the rainy season  There is usually a seat, a mortar for grinding g-nuts into paste, and a and a pot. In some cases there is a drying rack in indoors.The middle photo shows a  drying rack for utensils and dishes.. This keeps them off of the ground and allows them to dry completely. The typical stove is show on the far right – it is a group of three large stones and the fire in made between them. The pot rests on top. Various cooking tools include a “mingling stick” what we’d call a wooden spoon, a gourd to hold oil and the ubiquitous yellow gerry can for water.  Banana leaves are used to cover the food and keep the in the moisture.

This is a unique stove that’s a bit like a woodstove with two holes on top. They have built clay walls that surround the hearth and it features a chimney. The pots go over the holes. Not only does this design divert the smoke outside, it also reduces the amount of wood used – one of the key challenges being worked on by the Earth Instittue – wood for burning is quickly deforesting the landscape.  There are two efforts, one to plant a milion trees and the other is to find ways to make cooking more efficient.  They have been working on a new stove design – I haven’t seen it yet. 

In this case they are using corn cobs as an alternative source (lower right).

My guess is that they cook one pot of motoki a day and leave it wrapped in banana leaves.  The other foods that I’ve seen at the market consist of tomatoes, cabbage, onions, “irish” (white potatoes), and egg plant, a small round vegetable about the size of an egg, and white.  Speaking of which the yolks of the eggs tend to be very pale.  Very little spice is used, lots of salt and ghee.  The street vendors sell grill meat on sticks (primarily goat), samosas and chapati.

Note the metal roof, vents and the large window – all  unusual features.

The is the kichen for the hotel next door  (far left) – hotel’s are really restaurants that you bring your plate to and for 500 shillings (about a quarter) they peel back the banana leaves and heap on the local staple of cooked and mashed plantains. (This where the chicken was hanging out.) We ordered one plate and divided it in half.  The samosas are part of a box lunch from the lodge which quickly became a distant memory. The stack of stools were bought at a roadside market between Kampala and Mbarara – they are incredible comfortable.

This is the g-nut mortar.  Roasted G-nuts are not as dense as peanuts and have a slightly sweet flavor.  The bananas are a common sight in a kitchen – the bowl is filled with peels and you can see some chucks of matoki on the floor. Here is the kitchen at the field office. Only one of the burners works at the moment, but we manage to cook dinner every night huddles around the stove by candle light.  We also heat water for our bucket baths and tea.  There is a lock on the rainwater collection tank to keep the neighbors from tapping in.  The kitchen, which is about six feet by six feet could really use a shelf.

Thursday was another day in the field only this time with two of the local CHW’s, Cricket and Shaquil from the UNDP and a videographer and photographer working on a weather station project that is connected to the cellphone communications system that was the original topic of the “Design Jam” that Design in Kind put together at Pratt close to a year ago. The cellphones are carried by the CHWs (signal strength is a non issue in Uganda for some reason) who will be able to call in and enter data, call for an ambulance and check in with the village doctors.  We visited two farmers and two households.  This family had 12 members, the grandmother, her daughter and 8 children and the daughter’s husband who we didn’t meet.  The house was very remotely located at the end of a dirt path.  They had recently built a corn crib and a new latrine. When we arrived the women were shelling G-nuts and the kids were hanging around outside with the youngest daughter, no more than eight months old plunked down in the front yard.