Pictures...not yet.

sorry...picture uploads aren't working. I think I'm going to try it a diffent way next time.

Business Plans

We spent about 4 hours yesterday combing through business plans. There's was everything from cafe's to farms to microfinance organizations. Some are excellent, astute observations and explanations of their target market and the market inefficiencies that they solve. Some still need a little bit of work--like questioning, "who is going to buy this?" Its so great to be doing some business-type consulting. Even though a finance degree is about the last thing one wants in the US right now, its turning out to be valuable in Africa. It turns out that financial reporting and projecting is one of the areas that are a little less emphasized in the curriculum.

As far as pictures on the blog. We're working on it, I'm going to try right now. But no promises, The computers in Uganda are from the 1800's and don't have all the fancy software plugins needed to load pictures. Not to mention that the whole nation runs on dial-up. Yeah, its pretty slow.

Ranch and Village

There's a lot of bikes in Uganda. They all come in this sort of one-size-fits-none style where giraffes are the only ones with legs long enough to reach the pedals. You see them everywhere often with a four crates of bottled sodas strapped over the back tire that leans and rattles like a tropical version of jingle bells. You see all sorts of things on the backs of bikes, sugar cane, 2x6 boards, a stack of firewood, people, we heard one story of a coffin strapped sideways on the back!

Crystal and I visited the Cornerstone Ranch Thursday Friday and Saturday. It is 600+ acres of working dairy farm, primary school, secondary school and the Cornerstone Leadership Academy. Its an amazing place that is home to an incredible group, not the least of which are black mambas, green mambas, c0w-eating pythons, puff adders and a host of insects that strangely bring thoughts of teradactyls to mind. We stayed at the African Hospitality Institute which, along with African Children's Missions is just adjacent to the ranch. AHI is a vocational school that trains local at-risk ugandans so they can get into the hospitality industry. The food is fabulous (the snakes say the same about the tourists) and we had a taste of home with fajitas & coffee ice cream. We also borrowed some bikes and set out on a tour of the ranch property--inspite of a valiant effort we were forced to turn back after a mile or so when Crystal, being unable to reach the pedals while sitting on the seat--actually being hardly able to reach the pedals and clear the bar running from the handle bars to the seat--became tired. The bikes are really magnificently large and the brakes will occasionally clamp on to the tires like pit bull that's been abused. Interestingly though, you see young children, 6 or 7 year olds that stand inside the triagle frame of the bike with their feet on the pedals, on arm like a chicken-wing over the frame and the other hand steering--its really phoenomenal to watch and after inquiring about it to a few ugandan friends they confirmed that that is how kids learn to bike in Uganda. So we didn't spend too much time biking, the heat being a factor in addition to the bikes themselves.

I did, however, get to bike around with one of the local employees of African Children's Mission to local villages and visit some of the children they sponsor. It was a moving experience as back in the States you get pictures of kids that need sponsoring for $30 a month or something and all you get is a photo and maybe a line or two about their parents dying of aids. But its impossible to mentally bridge the gap between standing in my kitchen opening junk mail and the child that can eat for a month on what we spend on a nice lunch. But here I was across the gap. Sitting on a crude bench in the heat, flys everywhere with children that haven't eaten yet today (it was 4pm) and have one pair of pants that reminded me of western fringe that went all the way up to the waisteband. Some of the children ran up to me and grabbed my hand not letting go until I stood up to leave, others jumped in my lap rubbing the hair on my arms or touching my 3-week beard. Other children were more shy and they would hide behind they aunt or caretaker or an older sibling and peer out at me with a smile. A lot of the kids were sponsored, I was sure they're picture was on someone's fridge in the states and an automatic deduction hit their visa card every month and somehow the money made it here to buy a little posho and beans so this child could eat once per day. Some of the kids were not sponsored, they were still waiting for someone to take a liking to their picture and send off a little money...still other kids, many other kids, were sponsored last year but with the credit crisis and recession non-profit giving has been sharply reduced in the states and it echoes loudly in Africa and they had lost their sponsor. To someone in the states this child was an expense that had to be cut since money is a little tight, to this child that means no school fees, and longer periods between meals.

When we got back to Kampala we had arranged to stay with some ugandan friends for the weekend while another visiting couple used our room at cornerstone. We had no idea what to expect, other than they told us, "We live out in the village, I hope that's okay." Of course we offered our confident affirmations that we were excited to experience "The Real Uganda" having absolutely no clue what exactly the real uganda was. We had an amazing time. We were overwhelmed with hospitality, served amazing local food, and their apartment was a great little hideaway amidst fruit and coffee trees. They took us to visit Lake Victoria which was beautiful, its so big its like an ocean--indeed when they found it they must have thought they reached the coast. Little waves patted the shoreline and carried discarded waterbottles and other trash back and forth up the sand. The water was a distinct greenish-blackish color and actually looked a little more like motor-oil than water--needless to say we did not touch it. But it was so great to be back at a lake. We walked and described wakeboarding and waterskiing to them, boy do I miss the lake. That night was ate boiled liver and proving our apprehensions wrong was delicious. We looked at pictures--their wedding pictures, and some from college; we showed some of our pictures from home that we had on a flash disk. The we talked african politics, economics, and social reform before retiring to bed.

If I could describe the night with one word, hmmm....lemme think, HARROWING. For some absolutely ridiculous we-know-better-than-that reason we decided not to go to the effort of affixing the mosquito net that night. Big mistake. Some time around 3am as the beads of sweat turned into creaks running down our faces we decided to open the screen-less windows. It was like sending out an evite to all the local mosquitos that we were holding a banquet. We served up some nice warm Type A negative and some delicious O positive. MMmmm. Turns outs the mosquitos preferred the A negative and the little gluttons just about drained me dry. I almost needed a blood transfusion in the morning.

On Sunday we went to church together and really enjoyed the singing and dancing. Ugandans aren't into standing there numbly during praise and worship. Nope, its more like a Ska concert conplete with a mosh-pit near the alter. People seriously get down and dance, and tone deaf? doesn't matter, sing louder! Everyone was so friendly and we must have shaken 100 hands and returned twice as many smiles. Toward the end of praise and worship a note was passed through the auditorium that the pastor would like to know our names. We wrote them down with a tinge of terror hoping we wouldn't be asked to speak or cast out demons or something else awkward. Actually, the pastor was so nice and welcomed us by name, thanking us for being there. The US would do good to get a dose of African hospitality.

Sunday afternoon we went to a young marrieds group at cornerstone. We thoroughly enjoyed it (all 7 hours of it)! There were probaly close to 40 people there (counting small children as a half person) and after one individual shared some thoughts (for 45 mintues) we ate and opened it up for discussion. You can really learn a lot about a culture if you listen in to the issues young marriages face, some are identical to things we wrestle with in the states, some are so strikingly different that you feel baffled. It was an amazing interaction and was filled, like everything, in Ugandan hospitality.

It was a great 4 days, but we're exhausted. We're back at Cornerstone now. Miss you all! :)

More Fun Encounters

We just had a great afternoon meeting with the leaders of a local church in Kampala! They kindly picked us up and brought us over to their church grounds in a small village on the other side of town. We got to meet several children who are being sponsored by some friends in the US, which was amazing! The children are so shy when we first meet them. They smile, giggle, cover their mouths with their hands and barely whisper when we ask them questions : ) We have found that it usually takes meeting Ugandan kids a couple of times before they become more comfortable talking with us.

Last night we attended a dinner with the Cornerstone business forum group. We had a such a fun time talking and laughing with them. They are a great group of people.

We are excited to be attending prayer breakfasts, business forum gatherings and a married couple's group this week!

Football in Kampala

We're settling into Kampala. We've had some meetings with Cornerstone about what's going on and how we can fit in and apply our skills to help out. One of the big things we'll be doing the next six weeks is reviewing business plans. The "business forum" are a group of conerstone graduates that are aspiring to start their own businesses and they are all competing for a chance to get a lone from a group of american businessmen. We have already started reviewing the business plans and loan proposals and doing some editing, etc. We'll be meeting with several of the entrepreneurs over the next number of weeks and asking probing questions and helping to sharpen the proposals.

Yesterday afternoon I went to a football match (that's soccer). It was KCC ( the Ugandan team) against a team from Sudan. Uganda lost 1-0. It was the hottest 3 1/2 hours of my life. I was absolutely baking in the equatorial sun and stiffling humidity. When Crystal saw me last night after the game she exclaimed, "Whoa, you're sunburned!" I figure the darker I get the more I can blend in here, unfortunatly I'm more of a reddish hue.

The match was fun to watch though...its amazing how worldwide, across all cultural boundries, men love sports. When I looked around and I was the only white guy in the entire stadium I though to myself, "You're a long way from home." I went with 3 of the employees of Cornerstone and they took great care of me, making sure I didn't get lost (as if anyone could lose me--I stuck out like a sore white thumb) or get hit by a bus on the walk into downtown to catch bodas. Neat group of people and I am so appreciative for being included.

Easter in Gulu & Moving to Kampala

Happy Easter! We spent Easter weekend up in Gulu. We drove up on Friday and stopped by the Cornerstone Ranch in Ekitangaala (about 2 hrs out of Kampala) on the way up to Gulu because there was a big reunion for all the Cornerstone Leadership Academy graduates over the weekend. Cornerstone is an organization that's going to start showing up a little more in our posts, more about them below.

When we got to Gulu we went over to the Youth Corps home that is near the Restore office to spend time with some of the girls that had not been able to go home for the holiday. The Youth Corps homes are homes that house groups of girls or boys that either do not have parents or family that will support them or their parents/family is not a positive environment. The kids ranging in ages from elementary to high school live in the home together. 1-3 mentors live in the homes with the kids and take them through a discipleship curriculum and love them like a big brother or sister. Them mentors are usually university students that have graduated from the Cornerstone Leadership Academy (CLA--mentioned above and elaborated upon below). There was a raging storm outside where about an inch of rain dropped in an hour and was accompanied by constant lighening and thunder. The power had been out in gulu for 6 days and so we spent the evening playing cards by the light of a single candle on linolium(sp?) and concrete floor. The girls served us king-sized portions of posho and beans for dinner and we just had a great time playing cards and teasing each other about losing. "Cards" is the only game that is played in Uganda and is similar to our Uno except everyone plays with slighly different rules, ie: sometimes a jack reverses the direction, sometimes its a wild card, etc.

On Saturday we went to the Restore Academy and spent time with the kids that were studying for their exams (equivalent to our finals week) which started on Tuesday of this week. We played some more cards and then went into town to buy food for the Easter Feast. That night we had several of the students over the the restore house and played more cards.

The Easter Feast: So on Saturday on the way home from town we stopped by the live goat shop on the side of the road and picked out a nice fat little she-goat for Easter. We tied her up (against her will) and threw her in the back of the SUV. She ran around the yard of the Restore Office all that afternoon and night crying for her fellow goats--I think maybe she knew it would be her last night.

So on Easter Sunday we assembled in a small African hut amidst a deluge that was dripping a little through the ceiling making little cups of mud on the floor. There was the sound of beating drums and singing in the background from some of the students holding a "fellowship" in one of the classrooms. The boys tied the goat up and laid it down on a bed a leaves and that was it for the goat. I'd never seen an animal that large get slaughtered right in front of me. Growing up in Orange County I tended to buy my meat nicely packaged from Trader Joes, it didn't come with fur coat, brown eyes and four hooves. On a little bit deeper level it struck me as powerful to witness the killing of a goat on Easter. I thought about how goats were sacrificed as a sin offering long before Jesus was offered as the final offering. To see something actually die for you is powerful--in a practical sense this goat gave her life to feed us, but in a symbolic sense it takes a blood offering to atone for sin. It was an experience I will not soon forget. And, BTW, I did eat some of the goat later and it wasn't bad, really a greasy meat, but I'd try it again.

We also got to go out to lunch with the boys and girls Youth Corps homes from Gulu on Easter. What a great experience. The restraunt was a buffet of local indiginous foods and we all served ourselves mounds of it. It was an incredible treat for many of the kids, as restaurants are not usually part of the weekly (or monthly or yearly) agenda.

On Tuesday we took the bus from Gulu to Kampala. If you've never taken a bus in a third-world country your really missing out on an experience. Live chickens flapping around, goats standing in the aisles and relieving themselves at will--its a real treat. Not to mention the shear terror you experience when you come withing 6 inches of other passing buses at 120 kph. Our bus ride, thankfully our bus ride did not have these usually standard elements. We rode the Post Office bus which delivers mail to all the passing towns and we had a phonomenally careful and slow driver, something we'd prayed for the night before. We sat in the very front seat for the 7 hour trek which was not a bad place to sit. The biggest inconvenience was that on top of the 90+ degree heat outside and almost negligable ventilation in the bus, we were sitting on top of the engine compartment and the floor was rusted through in a few spots so blazing hot air was pouring onto our feet the entire time. Picture yourself sitting in a bus in ridiculous heat and humidity, not airflow and you're sitting on a furnace that is so hot that after the first hour the bus driver put a tarp over the floor to block some of the hot air. I had had to put my feet up the whole time otherwise they would have been pretty burned. With the tarp down it was bearable.

So we made it to Kampala yesterday. We're actually going to be spending the majority of our time in Kampala over the next three months because of the shifting of needs and opportunities. We're really excited to be in the city, where we feel like we can use our gifts to minister more effectively. After losing our place to stay in Gulu (I think I had a blog post about that--the landlord tripled the rent and we got the boot) we were really confused and searching for what we should be doing. Some doors opened to help out an organization called Cornerstone in addition to our continued work with Restore. Cornerstone is an organization that runs dozens of schools across Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, & Tanzania. They also run a network of Youth Corps homes described above. One of the things Cornerstone runs is the Cornerstone Leadership Academy which is a very intensive leadership training and discipleship school for 25 outstanding students to be a part of for the Junior/Senior years of high school. The kids that CLA graduates are phoenomenal, the cream-of-the-crop and we had gotten to spend time with many of them. One CLA graduate is the headmaster of Restore Academy.

There was a couple from Seattle that had been working and living in Kampala for 8 months focusing on creating a professional development curriculum to go along with the spiritual development curriculum that cornerstone offers. This couple was leaving Uganda today and leaving a need for someone to maintain, implement, and add to their work here and Crystal and I are so excited to jump into this need. Everything seemed to be pointing to Kampala so we made the decision to move here and continue our work with Restore by taking care of logistics and meetings for Restore in Kampala and also living at the Cornerstone headquarters and working at Cornerstone as well. There are also some additional ministries we would like to get involved in that are here in Kampala. Stay tuned for more specifics~

We hope you are all well, thank you for reading these long-winded blogs! We miss you all tremendously!

Boda's and Jams

We've been in Kampala for a off and on for a couple of weeks and we're finally starting to get our bearings. We've been staying near downtown and so we've had a little more accessibility to getting around. We're about a 15 minute walk from the country's only mall and so we've had a little more access to email (and civilization) lately. Its nice to be close enough to downtown to be able to walk instead of taking the boda-boda's. The traffic is so terrible sometimes that its faster on foot anyway.

We took a boda across town last night and got stuck in such a bad "jam" that our boda driver turned off the bike and we sat there for 10 minutes until it started to move. When it did start to move some of the most terrifying seconds of my life ensued. There's so much pent-up aggression when people have been sitting there for several mintutes that everyone took off and tried to ram everyone else off the road. We ended up charging over some glass shards onto the sidewalk and we got bumped by a van. And I would consider this driver relatively safe for Kampala. Needless to say, we're going to be phasing out our usage of bodas in Kampala.

We had a great dinner last night with several people from Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands that are all doing work here in Uganda. There are a lot of great things going on here. More about this in a future post...

Rafting the Nile & Bring Solar To The Villages!

So much to catch up on! Turns out that internet is harder to come by than we though :)

Last weekend we went to Jinja to do some "touristy" activities. I (Ryan) got pretty sick on Saturday and could hardly stand up. We managed to get me on a boda and to the international clinic for a Malaria test (which came back negative). We were told the test would cost a dollar or two but when we went to pay we think we got the "Muzungo" price. We were told 15,000 ush. ($7.50) and when we started to pay she said, "15,000 for the test and 30,000 for the consultation" the "consultation" that I received was 30 seconds with the doctor who mumbled, "No sign of malaria or parasites" in an almost undecipherable accent. so we paid $25 bucks for it, but sometimes there's nothing you can do.

On monday I was feeling much better and was able to white-water raft the nile. Phenomenal! There are 5 grade V rapids including a 16 foot waterfall. We flipped 3 times and I was sucked a quarter mile down river--underwater--on the largest rapid named "Big Brother." It was so much fun, and is considered to be the best rafting in the world by many. Even more, they are putting a dam across the nile and so the world-class section of river that I ran will only be raftable for another couple of weeks and then it will be gone forever. Kinda sad really, but I understand that a lot of people need electricity, so the dam is all bad either.

We came back to Kampala for a few days during the week and set up some appointments with contacts that we had. One of which was a man that I sat next to on the bus to Jinja. He started his own solar company and developed a technology to drastically lower the cost of an "solar system" (not the one with planets) so that it is reasonable affordable for people in smaller towns and villages. We talked on the bus like old friends for 2 hours on the way to Jinja and then swapped emails before we parted ways. Yesterday Crystal and I were able to meet him in downtown kampala for some passion fruit juice and talk about solar, and different business models and ideas. It was such a great two hours as we talked about how to get affordable, and clean energy to the 15-20 million people in Uganda that have no power at all. He can set up a basic solar system that powers three lights, a cell phone charger and an FM radio for $150. This is a perfect product for the villages and is desperately needed. Electric light at night would allow adults to work into the evening extending the work day and productivity and would allow school aged children light to do their homework by. You can imagine the transformative effects that power would have on the development of Uganda. Also, nearly everyone in the villages have cell phones, but no way to charge them. Instead they spend hours sitting at "charging stations" and paying for electricty to charge their phones so they can stay in contact with loved ones. Solar truly has an ability to transform a lot of people lives--and to be able to do it for $150...Incredible! I got to apply my finance background and go through some financing models of how he might be able to extend credit to his customers or structure his working capital to grow his business.

I loved this conversation and I came away so inspired about how business can transform peoples lives.

We're still in Kampala this week, we're hoping to connect to a few more contacts before heading back to Gulu at the end of the week.

Group Homes & Jinja

So much has happened since the last post and at 3000 shillings an hour for internet there's not time for it all now.

We're in Kampala at the moment, Garden City Mall. We ventured from Gulu Thursday night and spent time at a Youth Corps group home in Lira then made our way by van, boda, bus, another boda to Jinja, the source of the Nile River. Spending time at 4 different group homes on Wednesday and Thursday was amazing. It was the best interaction we have had yet with the kids. They served us dinner- beens and posho, and then we all sang a couple of songs together and then ate dinner. It is incredible to interact with the kids to tell them about San Diego and to learn a little about their lives here. It takes time to develop trust and transition into deeper conversations. We know it is good to just interact and love on the kids. All the kids in the group homes are separated from their families. There is one or two mentors for 15-20 kids so just being a big brother for a while is a ministry in itself. In Lira we were able to have an amazing conversation with the mentor at the group home and representatives from 4 different non-profits working in the area. We discussed what the mentors' biggest challenges are and where they need assistance and help and how they see this model becoming sustainable in the long term.

I became ill in Jinja, and as our neighbor in Gulu said, "when you're sick in africa, you HATE africa." It was a rough day that included a malaria test at the local clinic. No malaria. I regained enough stregnth to white-water raft on the nile on Monday. Then we stayed at the Haven Monday night and caught a ride to Kampala last night (tuesday). We have so many more stories and thoughts...they will be posted soon.