It was difficult leaving. It’s how you would feel if you were pulled out of a movie right in the middle of the action scene. You can feel that the activity is intensifying in but back in North Carolina you only get bits and pieces of it. It’s totally unsatisfying and in many ways it makes me wish I had never left. Part of the dissatisfaction lies in what my life has become here. It’s not as if I’m not having a good time, or that my work is unfulfilling because it is, and I’m happy to be here. It’s just that Uganda feels so distant to me now. What’s distant is the taste, the feel of the place. It’s the rush you get when you realize how truly fortunate you are. It indebts you with this urge to act and a deep understanding there is no sense in wasting time. It’s the same feeling cancer survivors have and it’s what’s left after everything you once valued is stripped away and laid bare. It’s the feeling that your life can have purpose. It’s the visceral, tactile sense that you’re doing something good for the world.

What’s replaced that feeling for me is a pervasive banality. What does it matter if I go to work or not or if I go golfing or go out or if i lay in my bed all day and stare at the ceiling. What’s lost in seven thousand miles between here and Uganda is the intensity of purpose in your everyday life. Every day I go out running to try to get that back but even on my highs I can barely scrape it.

It was the intensity level that was the most distinct aspect of the trip. Every morning we were up at 7. Every day was filled with hardcore marketing, relationship building, and investigative research. And every night we analyzed the happenings of the day and laid out detailed plans for the next. We were overclocking it, running on all cylinders in a desperate effort to make this investment pay off.

There is no question that the trip was a monumental success. Against all odds Jock and the rest of the shop crew were able to get a functioning production facility set up in Iganga. Hayssam found a man in Kampala who could make fiberglass molds for casting the concrete thus solving our only bottleneck for expansion. The big question of who will buy the machines was answered as well. Lead by Roey & Jeff, we ended up making some amazing contacts in Uganda. NAADS in Iganga has bought 21 machines for the Nakigo, Bulange, and Ikumbia subcounties. Three shellers are in use at a Millennium Village in Sari, two made it up to war torn Sudan and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) purchased 10 shellers with an open ended commitment for more. Henry is now in charge of running the facility which is owned & operated by native Ugandans and by all accounts we won’t be able to keep up with demand.

After looking at these successes you have to scratch your head as to why we aren’t all patting ourselves on the back. After all, it was students who played a huge role in accomplishing all of this. Students raised the money and managed the project at every level. It’s an impressive feat indeed but one that doesn’t lend itself well to satisfaction. The whole point of setting up the facility wasn’t to make shellers for just a summer or even just a year. The concept, if it was to succeed, was to start an industry of multiple facilities competing with one another in a full fledged market. Criteria like these aren’t fulfilled in a summer. It will take years for us to really know how our efforts have paid off. Until then self congratulations feel inappropriate. It sells our mission short & and betrays the very notion of sustainability. In a way we are like the founding fathers after the revolution; ever worried for the survival of the union. The glaring difference is that we can’t presume to be great men. There’s really no reassurance that we have done anything of value at all. And since the world doesn’t care one bit about our good intentions we have to succeed for it to actually matter. Everything hinges on what happens in Africa after we have left and that certainly makes me feel helpless and cut off.

I arrived in Gulu three days ago in the entourage of the Honorable Betty Ochan, Member of Parliament for the District. We came in a crowded jeep, crowded because Betty’s father had just passed away the same day and everyone else in the car was a family member traveling up for the burial. Earlier that week when the elder Ochan was still with us the plan had been for Jeff to come as well but under the present circumstances there simply was no room. When we arrived in Gulu I attempted to check me in to no one but 4 different hotels, but every single one was booked. USAID was about to open up an office the next day and there was also a meeting of something called |the British Council”, and the parking lots were glittering with hundreds of sparkling NGO, and IGO SUVs.

Sitting in the lobby of the fourth hotel I remembered that some folks in Kampala working with a group called Crouchet for Kids, that was teaching IDP returnees to crochet beanies as a means to earn income (don’t laugh they sell for $20 a pop in the US), was leasing a house for 4 months, that was capable of housing about 20 people. A few phone calls later and Betty had dropped me off at the residence. About 10 other folks are staying here all between the ages of 17-23, working for various groups: Crochet for Kids, a health car NGO called Renew that is building a hospital, and an advocacy and education group called Invisible Children. The place has a very college dorm sort of atmosphere, but everyone is very serious about their work and we wake up every morning and head out to our jobs. Action Against Hunger is right next door, I had a meeting with them in the morning of my first day here and they seemed very interested but were also very busy preparing for the opening of USAIDs office that day.

I spent the first day with the Gulu District Commissioner, a certain Walter Ochora, who invited me to come to the grand opening of USAID Office in Gulu, which would serve as a liaison for all of USAIDs work in rehabilitating Northern Uganda. I was put in contact with Ochora through the same individual that is attempting to set us up with a meeting with the President, George Piwang Jalobo, my Ugandan contact from Duke who is a tireless and passionate advocate for the North. The event was a very lavish affair, with probably 500 people present. Being the Commissioner’s guest was quite an honor, which has granted me some amazing privileges, namely the ability to sit down at a table with the US Ambassador to Uganda Steven Browning, Directors of USAID Uganda, Ministers of Defense, Health care Access, the Leader of the Opposition (who I had already met in Parliament), and MPs from all the northern districts. I sipped a coke as Walter Ochora, pleaded with our ambassador to send a US envoy to the peace talks in Juba. He replied that we were already engaged in a conflict in Iraq, and that a US presence would alter the talks dynamics. Later on we had cocktails at in another room and simply by showing them a few printed photos I was able to sell the project to the director of the Ugandan World Food Program who was perhaps more excited about the machine than anyone else. By the end of the evening USAID was requesting a proposal for the machines dissemination. That night I met with Walter Ochora, by the pool side of a very nice hotel he owns, we had tea with the Gulu Director of World Vision, who I also believe was quite sold on the project.

Yesterday I was supposed to sit down and outline a plan for USAID, but a friend called and said she wanted to take me out to the IDP Camps. We traveled with CARE International, that was setting up a remarkable program called the Village Savings and Loan System. http://www.vsla.net/ I could go own for about 4 emails about how incredible this system was. I saw one group of 30 women who had actually saved $500 between them in a refugee camp! But as remarkable as that was, the reality of there situation was also very disheartening. For the last 18 years 1.6 million people in N. Uganda have been living in camps with hundreds of thousands of people in each one, living in conditions that I can only describe as squalid. Huts that would normally be built acres apart now packed in a hundred to a square mile, all the same huts. Its strange suddenly being immersed in a world that you’ve only experienced vicarislouy through photographs and videos. Its different somehow when the kids with their bellies swollen from intestinal worms, and malarial eyes come close and hold your hand and smile at you. We sat down with these groups of women and watched them open their cash boxes. Each group gets one provided by CARE, and each box has three latches, with three locks, and three different keys. Thus it takes three members to open the box, and the box is only to be opened when all members are present, a fourth member without a key is charged with keeping the box between meetings. Who knew that there was even appropriate technology for banking? Through this simple system of checks and balances the funds are kept safe, and at every meeting a treasurer counts the funds, takes deposits, provides the loans and collects payments on loans that were already given out. Interest rates are decided by the group based on the risks associated with each loan. None of the money comes from outside, its all their own, whatever they could scrape together from growing food at the edge of the camps and selling it on the road. I asked these women how many of them grew groundnuts, and every single one raised their hands. I asked them how long it took for them to shell a sack, the answer came back: 14 days. I showed them a picture of our machine and told them it could shell a sack in one hour, the result in all the groups we visited was spontaneous applause. While walking around the camps, I made a few other discoveries. The first was that shea nuts grow all over the place in the camps, and people collect them, dry them, crack them open with stones, fry them and eat them. Very few get sold.

In Kampala Jeff and I met with a commercial farmer named Christopher Latutu, American educated and native of Gulu. He told us that he knew people in New York willing to pay $60,000 per metric tonne for Shea Nuts. I bought a pound from a woman in the camps for 400 shillings (about 25 cents) and she laughed at me as I gave her the money. She must have figured the shea was worthless, but by my estimate that pound was worth about $30. These refugees are living under trees dropping nuggets of gold and they have no idea. The people from CARE were very impressed when I told them we could also husk shea nuts with our machine. When I told them how much the shea sold for in the US I thought they were going to cry.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to take a machine that I brought with me to the Amurua District, traveling with me should be city officials and Walter Ochora the District Commissioner…well hopefully this is Africa and plans often change. I wanted to thank everyone for allowing us to extend our trip, I feel that the work we are doing here is incredibly key to this regions development. As the peace talks in Sudan continue, the refugees are beginning a slow migration back to their villages that they had abandoned 18 years ago. In the south the camps are down to 20% of their previous capacity, but closer to the border they are still 70% full. There are about 2 million in total now, and they are all farmers, and now that I have numbers from NAADs I know that the northern districts produce more peanuts than other districts by far. For the last 18 years these refugees have been almost completely dependent on the World Food Programme for their sustenance, but their funding for Northern Uganda has recently been slashed in half. I asked the woman from CARE International that I was traveling with what was going to happen, and she said that a certain amount would starve to death. She also told me this was particularly tragic because every year hundreds of tons of food spoils in the fields because they don’t have the capacity to process it. All the present efforts have been placed on improved seed varieties, and agricultural techniques, but almost no one has done enough work on agro-processing. I can’t think of a better place to be in the world then where I am. This afternoon I also will be meeting with the leaders of Grace Academy, which has a vocational program whose director is interested in working with us to produce our machines by teaching returnees (some of whom had been kidnapped by the LRA) how to make our machines…..

Its 6AM in Uganda, and the roosters are crowing, I don’t know what else to write.

Roey

We haggled (rather, Hayssam haggled, and I took notes on how to haggle) the guest houses down to a reasonable price and sauntered off to a nearby restaurant where we happily chowed down on some egg roll (a hard boiled encased in a sphere of potato…so cool), cassava and yoghurt. All was well. We had swagger.

We returned to the guest house and shared stories of mutual friends. We laughed. We planned the next day. We were ready for Western Kasese. We had Sunday off because no offices are open on Sundays, so we planned to take the day off to hike the Rwenzorri Mountain. It was there, gleaming, ready for the taking. Day 1: conquer the mountain. Days 2 and 3: conquer the Gnut/Coffee biomass fuel business. Day 4: Leave with the wind at our backs. We had swagger.

Unfortunately, rotten yoghurt…or egg roll…or whatever it was, doesn’t really care whether you have swagger or not.

News Flash to Joel: food poisoning makes you sick. Very, very sick.

I woke up Sunday morning with the normal lurch of my stomach beckoning me to the porcelain hole in the ground. Normally, I visit the toilet at 7am and my stomach feels fine for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, Sunday was not going to be a normal day.

If you don’t like reading about bodily failures during acute sickness, please skip this paragraph. 7am - 10am was spent traveling between the bathroom and my guest room. First came vomitting. Then came diarhea. Then the process repeated. I finally caved and took my cipro at 10am. By this time, I was pretty much completely devoid of fluids. Dry heaves would have been welcomed at this point. Instead, my body wanted everything out, including bile and stuff I didn’t even know existed. Green and bitter. Bleh. Then, dry heaves. Then, nothing. A brief respite.

I thought the cipro would help, so Hayssam and I set out for the internet cafe. I thought I could diagnose myself with wikipedia and common knowledge. 15 minutes of surfing landed me with ascaris (a parasitic worm) or a microbial infection. Both could be solved with medications. The conclusion was that all I had to do was take cipro and albendazol and both would be taken out, just in case. I had swagger.

Of course, 15 minutes of surfing was rudely interupted by another 90 minutes of vomitting and diarheea. The illness wrung me like a sponge.

Fact: swagger does not help you when you barely have the energy to remove yourself from the fetal position in a small internet cafe in Fort Portal, Uganda.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t need swagger. The internet cafe service rep called his friend, a doctor, who rushed to the scene. I hadn’t even noticed he was called. He paced in, took me to a back room and listened to my chest. “Low blood pressure. You need fluids. You come with me to hospital.”

We didn’t know the guy, so Hayssam and I wanted to make sure that what he was saying was necessary. He explained that I needed to be taken to a clinic for an IV. To be honest, I was scared of going to a hospital/clinic in Uganda. How much would it cost? Was it safe? Do they know what they are doing? Such little faith. Fortunately, I was too crippled to be modest.

“IV. Yes. Electrolytes. Low blood pressure you say? Electrolytes will help. Yes. Yes they will. Hayssam — yes, the doctor is right, electrolytes will help. Yes, necessary. Take me. Boda boda? No, please no! Walk. Not far. Not far? Yes, I can make it. Let’s go.”

We did not have to walk far. We walked into the clinic. Suddenly the doctor had a name — Henry. Suddenly he was my friend. He measured my blood pressure — 80/60. Low. Science = good. Suddenly I had faith in the doctor, in Henry, in the clinic, in Western Uganda, in Uganda, in health care, in people.

Lie down on bed.
Slight pinch. Cool sensation as electrolytes enter arm.
Pills for vomitting
Pills for microbes
Pills for flagyllates
Pills for pain
Pills for appetite

Fluids enter body, breathing life inch by inch back into me.

Wait 1 hour.

Eat. Smile at Henry and nod in thanks.

Sleep.

Wake up to find Hayssam and Henry discussing business. Apparently Henry runs his own NGO in the area, doing AIDS education among other activities. I told Henry about Nourish and the way we operate. He is a good man. Slowly, swagger started to creep back into the conversation. A serendipitous ending indeed!

After our long journey we had finally arrived. Seeing Maggie, Joel, and John again was refreshing and frustrating. There was so much that they already knew so getting the big picture out of them was very difficult. It’s very hard to articulate just how in the dark I felt at that point in time. There was so much I wanted to do but I had little sense of where to go. Disoriented is a good word for it and I hated it.

I came in at the end of the planning period for the project and given last semester’s work load I had always stayed at the periphery. I had a sort of willful ignorance on the project but only because I figured I would find out what I needed to know in due time. That afternoon I volunteered to go to a meeting with a local microfinance organization called the Hunger Project and talked with Jon and Maggie for the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what had happened since May 10th.

That evening was a crash course on the project and by the end of the night my head was throbbing. The production facility was set up during the first two weeks and we just finished training group of three Ugandan workmen to do the day to day welding and cement molding. On the marketing end, we were currently in talks with a number of community based organizations to help publicize the machine. Groups include NAADS, a governmental organization promoting agricultural modernization, WAACHA, an orphans and woman’s organization that connects with dozens of co-ops through its AIDS outreach programs as well as a number of microfinance providers. While initial talks felt promising, we still had sold only 1 machine. The demand seemed to be there, we just had to close deals. We talked for hours, going over all of the details of the project. The clouds of ignorance had parted and after the Sunday night meeting I felt invigorated, excited and truly thankful that I had the opportunity to help out this project.

The next day Jon, Fletcher, Alex and I set out to talk to NAADS about their previous commitment to purchase 6 machines. They had called informing us that they would be late (Welcome to Africa - WTA) so we walked around Iganga central market for an hour. Just to give you a sense of what Central Market is like, imagine Goodwill, on a dusty road, where food is sold by the bulk and where you have to avoid things like cars, bikes and roaming cattle. You truly could buy almost anything in Central Market from cell phones, to shoes, street meat to solar panels. It’s really quite impressive (there is even a survey agency but it seems that they had recently closed up shop :-(). The reference to Goodwill is not made in jest. It turns out that much of what the developing world wears comes from donated western clothes that are sold to merchants. It is this vast proliferation of cheap and durable clothing that has lead to the collapse of the garment industry in Africa.

Just on the outskirts of Central market is the NAADS office. We didn’t know quite what to expect from them. Since they are a government funded program they have a strong network of offices & contacts by default. To back it up they also talked very big. When we met Peter and Immaculate, the Director & secretary of Iganga District, they expressed an interested in purchasing 6 machines now, and 14 machines next week with the prospect of purchasing over 3000 for the Iganga district alone. Needless to say the broke down sign outside of their headquarters made me take this with a grain of salt.

With camera in tow (thanks Alex Copp) we packed into the NAADS truck and headed down to the production facility housed on the south end of a maize processing factory.
Immaculate was impressed with the facility. We talked for twenty minutes and she reaffirmed her plan on purchasing machines (at some point in time). After she left Jon and I crunched some numbers and soon realized the magnitude of what NAADS deal would be. Connecting into the entire NAADS network would require us to produce over 20,000 machines. At 4 machines a day we barely could keep up with current commitments. We would need more moulds, more welders, more workers. We would need more space. The wheels of capitalism were turning in my mind and I could help thinking about how we could blow this thing out of the water. We did a video shoot for Alex describing the deal and afterwards I started to realize, from the outside looking in, how much fun I was having. I’ve always wanted to run a business and work the ins and outs of strategy and deal making. This project feels so tangible to me, so salient. Its just like running a Nourish venture on a larger scale. I can devote all my time to it and know that everyone around me is doing the same. Challenges lie ahead but that’s part of the fun. I’m not on vacation, I’m at work and I’m having the time of my life.

No surprise to any of you, but the Uganda Project made it into the CEI newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:

How do three friends from Carolina — a sophomore, a senior and a recent graduate - find themselves traveling to Uganda this summer to launch a manufacturing facility? It all began with an inclination for helping others. Then, the right idea came along.

Maggie Salinger, now a rising sophomore majoring in international studies, didn’t necessarily see herself starting a business. But her desire to help people combined with Carolina’s encouragement of entrepreneurship led her down this path. “I’ve known for a while that I wanted to be involved in a career based on providing some sort of assistance to impoverished countries, but I never knew what that would be,” she said.

Joel Thomas, who graduated in 2006 with a degree in biology and a minor in entrepreneurship, got a taste of social entrepreneurship as a student by working with Nourish International, an organization designed to support student-led ventures that raise funds and increase awareness about the global hunger crisis. He points to the inspiration of Sindhura Citineni, director of Nourish International and a 2004 UNC graduate. “She was my mentor and was always very encouraging,” Thomas said. “And the rest of the university, through the entrepreneurship minor and the Carolina Challenge, is so active already.” Thomas is now the director of Nourish International.

Danika Barry, a rising senior political science and public policy major, knew she wanted to help people in other countries develop into entrepreneurs.

In November 2006, all three attended a talk on campus from a representative of the Full Belly Project, a Wilmington, N.C.-based nonprofit. That’s when they learned about Full Belly’s invention, the Universal Nut Sheller — a simple mechanical machine that can shell peanuts 50 times faster than by hand. In many places around the world today, women and children spend more than eight hours a day hand shelling the nuts. Peanuts provide the primary source of protein for about half a billion people worldwide.

To check out the rest, go to http://www.kenaninstitute.unc.edu/centers/cei/?y=news.20070605&t=News

My mother asked me a few questions about our living conditions, so I thought it would be beneficial to post for the entire readership.

Iganga: Iganga is the….4th largest cities in Uganda, I believe. It is a trucking town ~50km east of Kampala, the nation’s capital. It is not a city like you would think of one in the US, but more of a really large town. There is a main road that runs through town which is also the major highway of the country, running east west connecting Kampala to Kenya. Iganga is between Kampala and Kenya, so we imagine that Iganga is partially a trucking town for folks connecting Kampala, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya. Iganga is a sprawling town with a bustling market and chaotic traffic patterns. Street lights? Of course there are none. There are bikes, vans, cars, trucks, larger trucks motorcyles and people sharing the road. It is chaotic. We stick in teams and we are very safe. Everyone in town is very kind and we have had not problems with safety. I feel much safer than I did in Buenos Aires. Interesting.

Smaller roads extend from the town and transform into dirt roads fairly quickly. They are not difficult for the drivers to navigate. While the traffic generates huge roaming plumes of dust in the town, the sky remains a constant, beautifully blue African sky at all times, except when it rains, and that only lasts for an hour when it does.

The Najja guest house is simple, but it works well. The rooms are dormitory style…3 or 4 four beds per most rooms. Simple foam mattresses. It has electricity. The bathrooms are interesting…a hole in the ground. It took a little adjusting, but not too difficult.

We eat all of our meals at the Najja restaurant which is associated with the Hotel. The food is simple, but i personally enjoy it very much. Spanish omelette and ‘chips’ for breakfast every morning. Collared greens, rice and pineapple for lunch. And dinner is the same as lunch.

Avg. day:

7:30am: wake up
8:25am: leave for breakfast late when we were supposed to leave at 8am.

8:45am: order breakfast. Food comes in 5 minutes…or half an hour. You never really know.

~9:30am: People leave in teams for demonstrations of the shellers to coops, meeting with traders in the market, meeting with govt. officials, meeting with microfinance administers, meetings with NGO’s, or working at the factory.

~12:30p, 1pm: lunch at Najja restaurant

2:pm: back to work!

6:3pm: Dinner

Nightime: meeting as large group to plan for the next day. Discussions of the project, reformulating the plan etc. Some hang out and chill. Others work on the plan nonstop. Some sleep. Others do not (Roey). It works.

Ok, this was fairly straightforward, and I hope I did not bore anyone. I thought the parents might enjoy a description of our day to day life.

I made it to Uganda in one piece. The flights were very nice save for the food that was made of a substance that inhibited regularity. That aside, arriving in Entebee on the shores of Lake Victoria was like stepping into another world. The first thing I noticed was how lush and mild Uganda is for a country right on the equator. Since the Uganda national airport is under construction we were processed in a small shack by the side of the runway. While I was in line for visas I realized that I had accidently left my book on the airplane. I rushed back up to get it as was greeted by some thouroghly surpised crewmen. The grounds crew came up too to inquire as to what I was doing back on the airplane and it made for quite the tense first encounter in Africa. After realizing I was harmless they directed me to the lost and found where my book was thankfully returned. I was anxious to get by book back because I really wanted to finish reading it. Little did I know that I wouldn’t lay my eyes on another page again.

Uganda is everything I could have hoped for and more. This is not a tounge and cheek statement and it certainly didn’t start off that way. The first night at the Red Chili Inn and the subsequent ride from Kampala to Iganga was uncomfortable at best. I cannot speak for Alex, or Ashley (my most excellent travel companions), but being in a foriegn country, alone, broke, without a cell phone, and so completely out of the loop made me want to scream. The breaking point was almost reached after waiting for 30 minutes in a Forex Exchange branch in Kampala and soon after when we were forced to fork over 131,000 UGX for gas ($1-1687UGX conversion rate). Luckily for my nerves and my happiness everything was about to change.

The ride from Kampala to Iganga was a 120 kilometer 3 hour crash course in African driving. In Uganda there are no traffic lights, there are no lanes, and there are no speed limits. The only thing preventing drivers from careening down the roads are the potholes ::chasmes::, which are everywhere. Despite this chaos it all seems to magically work. The van taxis stuffed to the brim with passangers always narroly avoids the bicycles loaded with banannas which always narroly aviod the pedestrians that cross the street in the middle of busy traffic. To tell you the truth it is like Frogger without the lilypads. The colorful driving coupled with the stunning visuals of vistas and poverty made for a fantastic ride. My spirits were lifited as we arrived at the Naijja Annex where the group was to be staying in Iganga. I was just about take a sigh of relief until we realized that no one was there and we had no way of contacting anyone from our group. We were alone, yet again, in Uganda but luckily it was not for long…

come back tomorrow for the next installment

Chaz

Today Alex, Chandler and I went with Hannah (the local peace corps volunteer) to her Womens Alliance and Children’s Association (WAACHA). Her groups are a very different demographic than I have dealt with up to this point. As Chaz mentions, NAADS has been a huge asset but they advise farmers that are already organized and collectively working on development and financial stability through agriculture. The WAACHA groups are very poor and all the women are widowed and many of the children orphans. Visiting with them has been an amazing experience. After greeting the women and feeling how coarse their hands were and seeing their feeble state of health it became immediately apparent how badly they have need these machines. It also made me wish I could have got this machine to them 30 years ago when they really needed. The combinations of emotions lead to a nervousness I had never expected to feel going through a translot. However, I felt immense pressure to demonstrate the machine well so that the groups would understand the benefits that it can provide.
As for the others, (Fletcher, Roey, Hayssam, Ashley, Maggie, Roman and Chaz) they were here in the Iganga market demonstrating the Nut Sheller and were able to spark a lot of interest. Jeff was in Kampala meeting with Peace Corps and an organization that deals with Moringa Oleifera (a cindarella plant that has over 100 beneficial uses). Joel was in town but I have not seen him so I do not know what he did but I am sure he did not waste minute. As for Kelly, she was in the shop today acting as the mzungu shop foreman.
As for the future, we have demonstrations with WAACHA for the next two days and also an important demonstration with the Hunger Project (a group that does micofinance). On the first several of us will be leaving on the grand tour which will take us to at least 3 cities (Tororo, Mbale and Soroti) and maybe several more. It should be a great chance to market the machine to many more farmers.
Back tracking in time, Chunky, Allen and Eddie left yesterday to make a stop in Lewaro and drop off 3 machines and then return to the states. They were a fun bunch and it was great having them. Jock also left with that group to file the proper paper work for his upcoming tour to Sudan, one of highest peanut producing countries in Africa.

Dinner has just been served at the restaurant next door so it is time to go.

Cheers

After a small budget scare, it appears as though we have enough funds to support the shop during the summer until harvest. The smaller farmers will be able to afford the machine after harvest (August/September).

Fletcher and Jon.