Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
“Monkeys live at the top of the hill,” university staff told us. “They are shy, not like baboons. At the top of the hill is your best chance of seeing them.” Camera in hand, I determined this morning to go photo-hunting for the resident monkeys. I tried several roads which went left and up but always dead-ended in someone’s driveway.
Finally, I came across a young man getting off his motorcycle in one of the driveways. Just beyond the driveway was a high gated area around several huge water tanks. “Good morning,” I said, “I’m Dr. Ruby Dunlap. I’m trying to find the way to the top of the hill.” (I wear the “Dr.” with egalitarian American lightness but Ugandans value titles as much as they value conservative attire and one potentially offends by being too casual with either.)

“I need to do the water process here,” he smiled, “but I’ll be happy to show you the way afterwards.” I followed Sam into the area which secured the water supply for UCU. Besides the large holding tanks—about the size of half a tennis court—there was a wall of smaller tanks with an assembly of hoses, gauges, and various appliances attached to them. Sam opened and closed lines and hoses, carefully explaining how an engineer from Australia with contributions from an American water processing mission, had devised a system for UCU unlike any in Uganda or even in East Africa, which provided the university community with safe drinking water.

“Water engineers come from Makerere,” he said, “to study our system and see if it can be copied to other places. When the engineer left, he forgot to leave an operating manual so I studied many books and wrote the operating manual for this. And when he came back and looked at my manual, he said it was exactly right.”
“Where does the water come from?” I asked. He told me that the water for the town and the university was piped in from springs just outside the town. Another NGO made the water safe for the townsfolk; UCU was responsible for its own. “Domestic” water is water made safe for bathing, laundry and dish washing. Dishes washed in this water are safe if allowed to air-dry completely.

Drinking water, however, has to be specially processed to be made potable. It comes out of the faucet crystal clear while the domestic water comes out with a decided brown tinge. If allowed to settle, brown sediment covers the bottom of the container. “You have a very important job,” I said to Sam, “and I am impressed with how you keep the water safe for all of us.”

“Would you like to see the waste water treatment place?” he asked eagerly. “Yes, I’d love that,” I smiled. “Let me give you a lift,” he said. The smile stayed on my face with just a little effort.

Motor bikes and lighter weight motorcycles are ubiquitous and called “boda-bodas” in Uganda and Kenya, too. This, we were told, is a shortened form of “border-border,” a designation by those making frequent border crossings between Kenya and Uganda. “Boda-bodas” challenge the bicycle as the most common wheeled transportation in Uganda. Women rarely, if ever, are the drivers and sit primly side-saddle as passengers. For a woman to straddle a motorcycle would be unacceptably indecent. Eyeing the machine, I noticed a special footrest for a female passenger, sat myself primly sideways on the seat, and grabbed the handle at the rear of the motorcycle which seemed designed for that purpose.

Sam transported me thus with utmost care and courtesy to the sewage treatment plant. With equal care, he explained what each tank did, the back-up system of septic tanks if the main treatment plant failed, the age of the bacteria in each holding area and so on. He then took me to the plant office and showed me the books, the results of regular testing, and the manual to which he had contributed a major portion. “We have four full time staff at the university for water and waste treatment,” he smiled proudly. I marveled out loud at the critical importance of clean water and appropriate waste water treatment and how much we take for granted in our well developed communities that these will be supplied for us. I also asked him if he minded if I posted his photos on the Internet; his “Yes” had no hesitation.

“Now let me take you to the hill,” he said. “We will have to walk.” Outside the gated property of the university, Sam and I walked up a steep, rutted incline about half a mile. We passed an orphanage of neat round huts and a section of impoverished dwellings around which chickens busily searched for food and human residents cut or carried fire wood.

At the top of the hill (I didn’t see any monkeys) was a complex of well constructed and well maintained buildings, the location of the Ankrah Foundation. A cousin living in Washington D.C. had emailed me a couple of weeks ago that she met the directors of this foundation at her church and wondered if I would be anywhere near it in Uganda? Here I was, looking at the conference center in person. The interconnectedness of our world has impressed itself on us like this several times in the last few days. Sam smiled while I introduced myself to the staff; the directors are still in the U.S., returning later in September.

A Sudanese clergyman we just met knows and has visited a Sudanese woman and her children, friends of ours, in Murfreesboro. The head of the UCU health sciences department, Michael Smith, did surgery with Senator Bill Frist when Frist was in Sudan a few years ago. With both the clergyman and with Mike Smith, we spoke sadly about what war does to families. Fathers, seeking positions in a stabilizing Sudan, leave their families behind. Mothers, wanting greater security and the promise of an education for their children, watch the fathers leave. They may be separated for years. So are families broken up even after the shooting stops.