I’m so far behind on my blog that it’s gone beyond the point of being funny.
We’ve been in Uganda now for 3 months and it’s been interesting, welcoming, rewarding, friendly, hospitable, challenging, frustrating and great fun.
Most of it anyway.
Our days have been filled working with the Amaha We Uganda team. Helene’s Fuel Briquette project has been a tremendous success amongst the AWU Women’s Cooperative groups.

We’ve heard from over 400 women & children how this has significantly changed their lives.

Our focus over the last few weeks has been to try and really launch the Fuel Briquette operation in Kasese Town itself and to get the library construction project completed.

We get spoiled in the UK, if you need something you just trot down to the local hardware store and buy it – or you shout at the builder and tell him to get more men / get his finger out.
It’s impressive what people here can achieve with few resources and little money. They can produce something useful out of pieces of what we would regard as junk.

They are tremendously ingenious and impressively hard working. But sometimes, when you’re trying to put a plan together to a tight programme, it’s like herding cats!

We did get some time out. Judith flew in from the UK and we had a week with her in Jinja & Murchison Falls before she also spent time with us on AWU projects in The Rwenzori.

So what I should be doing now is putting up some pictures of our visit to Murchison Falls.

Even better than the National Park, was the time we spent at Ziwa where early one morning we were fortunate to spend 3 hours with a Ranger walking through the bush…

…during which time we came across 10 rhino.

A really wonderful experience and a rare privilege to be able to get so close to these fearsome animals.
Showing you more pictures like this is what I should be doing…

But I won’t, because 4 days ago some scumbag broke into our car and stole a couple of bags.

One was a plastic cool bag. I hope the rat-fink who lifted it is feeling pretty pleased with himself that he got away with half a bottle of Sweet Chilli sauce, one third of a jar of mayonnaise (a rare luxury out here) a handful of mini-Snickers Bars (Helene is distraught) and 6 ice- bricks to keep the bag cool.

I don’t know how the scumbag saw the bag in the dark, on the floor behind the seats, but the punk obviously thought it was too good to resist.

The creep must have know what he was doing because we were only sitting 10 meters away in the garden of a hotel having a drink.
The car was in the hotel car park, which was patrolled by a local police officer, in full uniform, with a rifle (most likely without bullets though).

If I sound bitter about the toe-rag who did this it’s because it’s so out of character for the experience we have had here in Uganda.

Unfortunately the miserable little bugger who broke the door lock and stole our mayonnaise also walked off with my satchel containing our iPad, my glasses, a bunch of electrical components and our journal of the last 18 months’ travel.

Worse still, having spent the last 3 weeks researching and collecting data for a number of Amaha We Uganda projects out here, the festering little leach also walked off with all of our paperwork, data, reports and presentation information.

Creep.

So, instead of having a bunch of pics to show you of us with the Rhinos, or at Murchison Falls, all we’ve really got are shots of the local locksmith trying to repair the car door lock (there’s nowhere within 200km that a new one can be bought).

And pictures of us spending hours at the police station making statements.

It’s not so much the value of the equipment (we’ve been on the road for 18 months and don’t have receipts so it’s not insured) it’s the inconvenience of now having nothing to work on.

Worse, it’s the loss of our travel journal and all the hard work that has gone into the AWU programme research.

We work with some of the Street Kids here and they’re putting the word out that there’s a 500,000 Shilling reward for their return (about 5 month’s wages).

You never know, something may turn up.

For now anyway, our posts may be a little lacking due to all the pictures we’ve lost on the machine and the fact that we haven’t had wifi to be able to back anything up for the last 2 weeks – I feel a bit of a dunce about that.

Regardless of whether or not I’d backed things up though, the journal can’t be replaced.

But then, neither can the memories we’ve accumulated.

However, some great news. The budget and report we sent to the Amaha We Uganda team in the UK has been approved (despite us losing most of the data to back it up). We are enormously grateful to them for their good faith in us and their generosity.

As a result the project in Kasese to launch Fuel briquettes commercially (and raise invaluable funds locally for the team in the ground here) will get off the ground next week.

There will be a lot of sweat put in over the coming month so please support this project, justify our faith in the team here and (to pay back some of the money they have sent us) make a donation at Amaha We Uganda.
Thanks.