...and yet another life-threatening dose of malaria.  This makes it four times for me.  As many of you have been asking about it, here is how it went down.

Having said my goodbyes in the little village of Buyaya, I headed to the town of Jina to say goodbye to another friend.  I went out to do a few errands and then - bang- I lost any semblence of energy and collapsed onto a matress and the floor and I completely failed to move for the next 12 hours or so.

The next day was fly-to-Korea day, so I had to go.  Luckily some of the energy came back and I was able to pack my backup and do some last minute errands.   I got a private hire to the airport, checked in and crashed in a corner.

Entebbe to Addis Ababa and then onto Delhi was doable.  I felt like crap, but made it through ok.  Delhi to Beijing was dreadful.  I threw up thrice (in the bathroom thankfully) and lost all energy again.  I informed the hostess and they were kind enough to wheel me out in a wheelchair.  A young Chinese gentleman took me through immigration and then collected my backpack (I had a non-connecting to Korea).

And then - well - he dumped me in a corner of the airport and left me.  He even took the wheelchair when I was plainly incapable of walking.  I said to him "Hospital dude.  I need a hospital."  He said, "No hospital here", to which I replied "There are no hospitals in China?".  He kinda laughed and went on his way.  Bastard.  I tried to sleep for the eight or so hours until the next flight.  I managed to get around and check in by leaning heavily on the luggage trolley.

The flight to Korea was comfortable enough.  I caught a bus and a taxi to get to my school.  The director and good friend of mine So Jisook was there to greet me.  I told her my sorry state and she rushed me off to hospital.

Comparing Ugandan healthcare and South Korean healthcare makes for an interesting exercise.  The last time I had malaria in Uganda, it was a very quick procedure.  I met the doctor, got a blood test to confirm the malaria, and before I knew it I was in a hospital bed all IV'ed up.  Korea was quite the opposite.  It took a while to meet a doctor, and then I had to wait three (!) hours for the result of the blood tests before finally getting my IV.  Uganda is so much efficient that South Korea* in malaria treatment.

After a day or so in hospital things took a turn for the worse. I started shaking uncontrollably and my temperature soared.  The doctors told me that they were worried that the malaria might spread to my brain and lead me into unconscious.  Very dangerous to say the least. The wanted me there for another week or so.  This was bad for two reasons. One, I didn’t want to stay there for a week because - two - I arrived with no health insurance.  The hospital bill might rise as high as $US 6,000.

This was the low point.  I didn't have $US 6,000.  If I did, I'd be back in Africa.  Combine this with the slight chance of death and it was all too much for me and I started sobbing into my pillow.  In a rare fit of energy I posted a fairly depressing status on Facebook.  The support, positive responses and offers of help I got back were truly heartwarming.

I left the hospital after three nights.  I told the doctors about the work I did in Africa and the Philippines and I think they took some sort of pity on me as the final bill was a tick under $US 1,000.  Promises of help came to fruition and a total of $US 907 has been donated to date.  If it goes any higher than $US 1,000 then the balance will be used to buy mosquito nets for the village I use to live in.

This whole experience was quite scary, especially when I thought I might die.  I am please to say that there were no deathbed conversions.  I was tempted at one point to convert to Thorism (Thor has lightning bolts, you know?) or start following Vishnu.  Who couldn't like a blue, multi-armed elephant god?

* Not a sentence that is often used to compare the two countries
 

I recently survived my third dose (!) of malaria.  Ugh.  It was awful.  I was out of action for four days, two of which were in hospital.  My blood pressure dropped to 70/50, I had almost no energy or appetite, and my body constantly ached.

Still, I survived though.  But how I did survive?  Who should I thank?

I'm going to thank goodness.  The goodness that is inside all of us thanks to many years of human solidarity.

I want to thank those numerous and often unthanked scientists who worked for many years on the healthy cocktail of drugs that were fed directly into my bloodstream via an IV drip.  I should also thank those people who came up the IV drip in the first place!  Who knows how many lives have been saved by the such a simple little invention?  All of these scientists have published their results in peer reviewed scientific journals for little or no personal gain.  Thank goodness for them.

I also want to thank the people who helped me directly:

• Scarlet Nabwire who got me safely to the hospital and sorted things out as I collapsed in a corner. 
   
• The doctor who took care of me and reassured me every step of the way.
  The doctor studied in London and could be earning excellent money there.  He returned to Uganda however so as to people help his fellow Ugandan.  Thank goodness!
   
• The nurses who tirelessly helped me and promised me I'd be ok (in Jesus' name no less!).

Notice that I am thanking the goodness in all of these people.  I am not thanking God. 

Daniel Dennett - philosopher extradonaire and personal hero of mine - recently suffered a dissection of the aorta that almost finished him.  He wrote an article about the experience called "Thanking Goodness".  A lot of my thoughts for this article were his originally.  His article can be found here.  I have reproduced it below.

Thank Goodness - Daniel Dennett

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder.

Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by c-t scan that I had a "dissection of the aorta"—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two—channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I'd had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life, since the tangle of scar tissue that had grown like ivy around my heart in the intervening years reinforced the aorta, preventing catastrophic leakage from the tear in the aorta itself. After a nine-hour surgery, in which my heart was stopped entirely and my body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping, I am now the proud possessor of a new aorta and aortic arch, made of strong Dacron fabric tubing sewn into shape on the spot by the surgeon, attached to my heart by a carbon-fiber valve that makes a reassuring little click every time my heart beats.

As I now enter a gentle period of recuperation, I have much to reflect on, about the harrowing experience itself and even more about the flood of supporting messages I've received since word got out about my latest adventure. Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence  is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea,  India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning  out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day. Had I had my blasted aorta a decade ago, there would have been no prayer of saving me. It's hardly routine today, but the odds of my survival were actually not so bad (these days, roughly 33 percent of aortic dissection patients die in the first twenty-four hours after onset without treatment, and the odds get worse by the hour thereafter).

One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.

In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain,  no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I'm not just talking about the standards 'at the top'—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I'm talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking "What if I'm wrong?" Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn't replicate his results because they just didn't share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.

What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any  more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends' remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: "I've been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK." The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it. 

But isn't this awfully harsh? Surely it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I'm not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about. For another, we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn't work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking. If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition; I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best. If you would even consider filing a malpractice suit against a doctor who made a mistake in treating you, or suing a pharmaceutical company that didn't conduct all the proper control tests before selling you a drug that harmed you, you must acknowledge your tacit appreciation of the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself, and yet you continue to indulge in a practice for which there is no known rational justification at all, and take yourself to be actually making a contribution. (Try to imagine your outrage if a pharmaceutical company responded to your suit by blithely replying "But we prayed good and hard for the success of the drug! What more do you want?")

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come. Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science. Thank goodness for the music of, say, Randy Newman, which could not exist without all those wonderful pianos and recording studios, to say nothing of the musical contributions of every great composer from Bach through Wagner to Scott Joplin and the Beatles. Thank goodness for fresh drinking water in the tap, and food on our table. Thank goodness for fair elections and truthful journalism. If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world, or contribute in thousands of other ways to the manifest improvement of life on this planet now and in the near future.

Or you can thank God—but the very idea of repaying God is ludicrous. What could an omniscient, omnipotent Being (the Man Who has Everything?) do with any paltry repayments from you? (And besides, according to the Christian tradition God has already redeemed the debt for all time, by sacrificing his own son. Try to repay that loan!) Yes, I know, those themes are not to be understood literally; they are symbolic. I grant it, but then the idea that by thanking God you are actually doing some good has got to be understood to be just symbolic, too. I prefer real good to symbolic good.

Still, I excuse those who pray for me. I see them as like tenacious scientists who resist the evidence for theories they don't like long after a graceful concession would have been the  appropriate response. I applaud you for your loyalty to your own position—but remember: loyalty to tradition is not enough. You've got to keep asking yourself: What if I'm wrong? In the long run, I think religious people can be asked to live up to the same moral standards as secular people in science and medicine.
 

Back over here, I hinted at all the successes that Meaningful Volunteer has had in 2009 thanks to its merry band of volunteers, but did not have the space to enumerate them all.  Now as the new year begins, its seems fitting to list the successes.

So, here it is! Meaningful Volunteer's year in review:

General

• Meaningful Volunteer holds its launch event in Korea.
   
• The Meaningful Shop is launched
   
• Computer Studies lesson plans released under the Creative Commons License (any non-profit can use them for free)
   
• Meaningful Volunteer partners with CERV Philippines

Philippines

• Established Meaningful Volunteer in the Philippines with our first two volunteers
   
• Appointed Eden Navia as district manager
   
• Purchased a motorcycle for use on the island
   
• YouTube videos released of our Filipino programs 

RYE School Program

• Established a RYE School on the island of Tablas 
   
• Purchased four laptop computers for use in the computer programs
   
• Summer Program launched
   
• Control Group testing completed
   
• Detailed student statistics added to site
   
• RYE School building plans released
   
• RYE School proposal completed
   
• Laptop computers donated by Ed Thayer
   
• RYE School classes added in Carmen, Cawayan and Sugod
   
• Projector donated by Bob Bosza
   
• Laptop computers donated by Bob Bosza (again!)
   
• Pico-Hydro feasibility study released
   
• Teacher handover notes added to the site to ease volunteer transition

Project Mangrove

• Interactive mangrove reforestation project plan released
   
• Interactive coastal map released
   
• Detailed mangrove species list released
   
• Mangrove Education Kit released
   
• Summary of problems at nursery released

Project Lifecycle

• Partnership formed with IRH
   
• Project Lifecycle detailed in outline
   
• Information released about the local healthcare centers
   
• Sexual health surveys finished
   
• Community Talks
   
• Healthcare workers in twelve different villages trained
   
• Healthcare workers rolling out the SDM method
   
• Locals using the SDM method
   
• Interactive project plan released

 School Building Project
 

• RYE School building plans released
   
• RYE School proposal completed
   
• Pico-Hydro feasibility study released
   

Meaningful Shop

• Payawpao Orchids group formed
   
• First payment to the Payawpao Orchids
   
• The Meaningful Shop launched

Uganda

• Meaningful Volunteer arrives in Uganda.
   
• Appointed Scarlet Nabwire as district manager of Uganda
   

Heart of Uganda

• Project Plan released
   
• Buyaya chosen as target district
   
• Community told of our programs
   
• A detailed census of Buyaya and a educational survey completed
   
• A generator donated

RYE School

• Three classes added in Buyaya

Excellent!

Way (way) back over here I laid the seeds for was what to become Meaningful Volunteer.  It’s now been about a year since Meaningful Volunteer has got down in dirty in both the Philippines and Uganda.

During that year, the successes have been amazing.  Meaningful Volunteers^* have made a real and lasting impact in developing communities.  I started listed all that we have accomplished, but the list was becoming too large and unwieldy!  This is surely a good sign!

But now, it is time for me – Malcolm Trevena founder of Meaningful Volunteer – to let go and move on.  At least for a little while.  I am going to be moving back to South Korea with a view to returning to Uganda in the not-too-distant-future.

Why would I do this having had so much success with Meaningful Volunteer?

Well, firstly both the Filipino and Uganda operations are in the immensely capable hands of Eden Navia and Scarlet Nabwire Waduwa respectively.  These two ladies are awesome!  They are proof that there are amazingly capable females in developing countries just waiting to excel giving the opportunity.  I have no doubt that Meaningful Volunteer will flourish in their hands.

Secondly, while Meaningful Volunteer had flourished in terms of a meaningful impact, it has not flourished financially.  It is a constant source of frustration to me that Meaningful Volunteer has – without doubt in my opinion – the best volunteer programs going around.  Couple this with its non-profit status and it is a wonder that volunteers have not flooded in. 

But – alas – they haven’t flooded in and I don’t know why.  Marketing seems to be Meaningful Volunteer’s Achilles heel.  And this – incidentally – is where you can help.  Very soon we are going to work on some high quality flyers that you can distribute around your campuses, schools, churches, mosques, or wherever it is you like to hang out.  Watch this space for more info.

South Korea will allow me to engage in some serious fundraising for the organization.  This is where I can be of most use at present.

And lastly, it is time for me to step back and take a breath.  I love this work.  It is my passion.   Alas, the work does not love me quite as much and it has taken a serious mental toll on me.  In my recent past, I suffered horribly under the burden of poor mental health.  It once prevented me from working for the best part of a year – including a five month stay in a psychiatric hospital.  Yikes!  Scary stuff!

I am now in a position of recognizing the signs that could lead me into that dark hole again.  I haven’t taking great care of myself mentally.  I spent the past year constantly throwing myself against the brick wall of extreme poverty and it is no surprise that I have come out bloodied.

I gave much thought about how to survive mentally before I embarked on this journey and – quite frankly – ignored all my own good advice.  Some valuable lessons learned no doubt.

What other lessons have been learnt?  

One way to do this kind of thing is to partner with local NGOs and let them be responsible for taking care of volunteers and running the programs.  This method is wrought with problems: Corruption and incompetence being at the forefront.  This is what I saw time and time again in Africa especially and it was one the main reasons why I set up Meaningful Volunteer in the first place.

A much better way to do it – in my opinion – is to set up your own NGOs, establish easy to replicate systems, and appoint competent people to be in charge of them.  This is – of course – what I did.  The problem with this is that it takes time (and therefore capital) to get it established.  You need to establish a track record before the volunteers will arrive. 

This is what happened in the Philippines.  Meaningful Volunteer did (and is doing) great things in the Philippines and the volunteers have come as a result.  Due to a whole raft of reasons – not the least being without power for seven weeks now, this has not quite happened in Uganda.

So the lesson learnt is that setting an organization takes time.  A lot of time.  And you need to expect to burn money as it establishes itself.

Why am I telling you all this?

Meaningful Volunteer has always been based on honesty and openness.  I hope that by sharing my experiences, others can learn from it.  Heck, maybe you wanna do what I do and set up your own volunteer organization.  Send me an email.  I’d be happy to share all that I have learned with you in the hope that more people can be dragged out of extreme poverty.

What’s next for Meaningful Volunteer?

Well, that question is best directed to Eden and Scarlet.  But to whet your appetite, here are some upcoming future projects:
 

• Meaningful Coffee
  A fair-trade coffee product from Uganda.
   
• Meaningful Fashion
  Meaningful Volunteer gets its own fashion label!
   
• A comprehensive HIV program in Uganda
• 
  A school for the Philippines and an orphanage for Uganda
  Both green-powered!
   

Watch this space!  Exciting times ahead for Meaningful Volunteer! 
 

^*I love that phrase!  Not just plain old boring volunteers, but Meaningful Volunteers
 

Inter-NGO politics is a common problem in NGO saturated Africa.  One must not encroach on an NGO’s turf.  “This is our turf.  Not yours.  No, you can’t set up a school here.  Yes, yes.  We know it’s needed, but you were not listening.  This is our turf.”

It is a little frustrating and quite the opposite of my experiences in the Philippines where I worked quite closely with a – technically speaking – competitor.  We shared resources and both benefited as a result.  We were both working for the betterment of the Filipino people so there wasn’t a conflict of interest.

One tries to be “above all this” and keep the welfares of Africans firmly at the forefront of one’s mind.

This was put to the test recently when a NGO^* moved in on Grassroots Uganda’s turf.  Grassroots Uganda is an NGO I set up in 2006.  It has about 170 ladies involved and raised about $US 20,000 last year.   One American lady liked the organization so much that she decided to – well, these no easy way to put this – butt in on two of our women’s groups and try to take them over.  She has stolen logos and text from Grassroots Uganda for her own NGO.  She even disbanded one of our boards and then immediately reformed it as her board! 

This is frustrating.  I’ve turned a blind eye for the most part as she does sell an enormous amount of merchandise.  She is helping to empower African women, which is the reason for which Grassroots Uganda was set up for in the first place. 

But things recently took a rather sinister turn.  As I reported over here, one of the Grassroots Uganda ladies – Flavia – was hideously attacked with a machete by her former partner.  She was lucky to survive.  Grassroots Uganda along with some good souls from around the world, have raised about $US 2,000 to help Flavia cover her medical expenses.

Pretty cool, huh?  Who could object to this?  A victim of a horrific domestic violence incident gets the help she needs.
Turns out the previously mentioned infiltrator does object.  We are apparently “stealing her thunder” and “she’s mad that Grassroots Uganda is helping her” (as one of Grassroots Uganda volunteers put it).  Incidentally, she has contributed nothing to the rehabilitation of Flavia

The possible reason I can think of for such behavior is that she’s really not interested in empowering African women, but is more interested in the glory of being seen to be helping African women.

So what is one to do?  She is hindering us trying to help Flavia: Local volunteers are walking on eggshells.  They want to help Flavia, but don’t won’t to offend the aforementioned lady for fear of losing an income stream.

We can’t really stay “Say the hell away from our groups!”, as she has her glory-sinking tentacles entrenched firmly inside the groups.

This sorry tale reminds me of the recently concluded talks in Copenhagen.  The outcome from the talks was lukewarm:  Too many countries and ill-informed interest groups pursuing their own selfish agendas.  The sooner we realize that we share this lifeboat called Planet Earth, and that our fates are closely tied with the less fortunate, the better off we will all be.  This applies equally well on a global scale, smalltime inter-NGO politics, and the fate of one poor victim of domestic violence.

^* Name withheld to protect the guilty.
 

Here's a good idea: Design a whole lot of cool systems that'll empower a group of impoverished people in many ways. 

Get some literacy programs together - both English and computer, get an online shop together to sell their crafts, work with local health officials to begin the fight against HIV, and bring in some international volunteers to help you.

Then all you need to do is rent a house, flick the electricity switch, and you're away.

Flick the switch.  Ugh.  Flicking the switch has taken four weeks.

The Heart of Uganda programs - that have been patiently designed over the course of months - have all been delayed for four weeks due to ongoing power nightmares.

Our initial time in Uganda was spent targeting an area in which to start our programs.  We settled on the Sironko district as detailed here^*.  We found a gated compound in a little village called Chino.  The house had all the right electrical connections inside the house and a power line running right outside.  All we had to do was "connect it up".

To recount the entire tale of woe would take another four weeks.  For brevity's sake, here are some selected highlights:

• We arrived on a Tuesday.  People assured us that we would have power by Wednesday.
   
• The guy who was going to install electricity dieing (seriously).
   
• Giving a guy 80,000 shillings (about $US40) to come early and connect our house to the main electricity line. 
  This proved to be pointless as the main electricity line wasn't on.
   
• Hiring a retired electricity worker to come to the village to tell us what the problem was.
  The place where the main electricity line connects to the village line was disconnected along with a transformer.
   
• The landlord failing to sign the electricity agreement for three weeks.
   
• The electricity company refusing to connect the power until we had organized a community meeting to discuss safety issues.
  This is fair enough.  Many people die in Uganda every year as they try to illegally connect their houses to the grid.  Just a few days ago, a ten year girl died after stepping on an illegal line that had fallen off her house. 
   
• At said community meeting, the electricity company representatives shuffling their feet, and gazing into the middle distance.
  I didn't know it at the time, but shuffling one's feet and middle distance gazing means "Give me a bribe and I'll connect you now."

We have another community meeting organized for this week.  The electricity reps will almost continue their "zig-zagging ways" (as they say here in Uganda).  I'm not going to bribe them.

Once we are connected, we will be the only (legally) connected house in the parish. 

On the plus side, some kind hearted souls have donated a generator to Meaningful Volunteer.  Not only will this help us to get over our initial power problems, but it will also help to keep us operating during the numerous "normal" power outages in Uganda.

^*Seems slightly tragic now that one of things we liked about Sironko was that its electricity was "quite reliable".

Illiteracy.  HIV.  Malnutrition. 

Three huge problems in Uganda.  Wouldn't it be great if you could solve all problems in one easy to run program?  The staff at Meaningful Volunteer think they have come up with a solution.

The Three Problems

• Illiteracy
  Illiteracy rates are huge in Sironko (Meaningful Volunteer's target area in Uganda). Many people are denied even the chance to attend school and face an ever-increasing English language dominated world without this vital skill.  We are about the conduct some literacy tests around the region to find out the true extent of the problem.
  
  Those who perform poorly on the literacy test will be invited to join the program.
   
• Nutrition
  Yesterday I visited a wonderful old lady who lived in a mud shack.  Her husband had passed away many years ago and she had lost her only child when he was young.  She is lucky to eat a meal a day.  Sometimes she doesn't eat for days on end and shakes uncontrollably.
  
  She was ashamed that she had no food to give us and at one point set off to get some firewood to cook something with.  We had to ask her to sit down again and we got some simple supplies for her from a nearby shop
   
• HIV
  Everyone knows how bad that HIV problem is in Africa.  Meaningful Volunteer is about to conduct a census survey to try and get a handle of the size of the problem in Sironko.
  
  One obvious solution is to get the ARV medication into the hands of the sufferers.  The ARVs need to be taken after eating.  If you're not eating regularly, then it is pointless to be taking the ARVs.

The Solution

Illiteracy rates are high.  Nutrition is poor.  And HIV sufferers can't take their ARVs because they are not eating regular meals.  Hmmm...  How could we address these problems in one easy to run program?

The staff at Meaningful Volunteer have come up with a solution:  Run a literacy program, and provide ARV medicine to take with the meals!  Three nasty problems solved at once!

How to Fund It

A simple meal here costs 500 shillings (about a U.S. quarter).  ARVs are usually freely available from the local clinic.  Taking paper and other resources into account, we can run a literacy program (with ARVs and food of course) for about $US10 a month per lady.  This will include four hours of tuition a week plus a meal everyday.  Each lady will take turns to prepare the meals for the day. 

Meaningful Volunteer will conduct a pilot program with ten ladies.  We will be having sponsorship opportunities so you can help a lady to solve her HIV, malnutrition and literacy issued all in one go.

Way back in September 2008 (see the entry on my personal blog here) , I had an idea to start an online shop that would empower Ugandan women. 

My search for something to sell led me to the village of Namukuma.  Namukuma has no electricity and is a one hour car ride down a dirt road, followed by a half hour motorcycle road down something that might be generously called a goat track. I'd given my usual "What crafts do you have?" speech to the community.  The lack of forthcoming crafts was frustrating enough for me to advance my ever receding hairline.  I was almost ready to give up.

Then Alaisa Nandudu came along.

Alaisa had been up all night and making this seed bracelet.  I was suitably impressed.  Alaisa was living in a small house with her husband, four of her own kids, two HIV orphaned nephews, and a bunch of chickens.  Alaisa and her family were eating maybe one meal a day.  She had it rough.

One thing led to another and I eventually released GrassRootsUganda.com.  One village I knew I had to go back to introduce GrassRootsUganda.com was Namukuma. 

So, what happened next?

Well, firstly GrassRootsUganda.com has gone from strength to strength in my absence thanks to dedicated volunteers on the ground in Uganda.

Alaisa herself has made great progress.  With a little extra help from a volunteer, and the money she has earned from GrassRootsUganda.com Alaisa has moved out her her one room "home", bought land and built a brand spanking new home.  It's not quite finished.  It needs doors, windows, a concrete floor, and a little work on the roof.   Out back, Alaisa has a little farm that she uses for both for food and a cash crop.  See here and here.

Here in Africa, one sometimes feels like bashing one's head against a wall with all the poverty and corruption and people seeming to be working for poverty.  Then I remember Alaisa and I get up and try again.

* Just for interest's sake, here is Alasia's orginal biography from the GrassRootsUganda.com site.

Alaisa lives in a single room with her husband and three of their own children.  Her sister and her brother-in-law both died of AIDS and Alaisa is looking after their two children as well.  Her nephew is HIV positive - he is very prone to malaria and misses many days of school.

Her husband can sometimes get work digging the soil on other people's farm for ush1,000 ($US0.54) a day.  He is happy to get ten days of work every month, but would like more.

Her husband is also a trained tailor.  Alaisa often pleads with other tailors in the area to rent their sewing machines for ush5,000 ($US2.70) a month.  They cannot afford to buy material to convert into clothes, so they can only perform simple repairs for between ush200 and ush300 ($US0.11 and $US0.16).

Alaisa use to own thirty chickens, but twelve died because she couldn't afford to feed them properly.  One kilo of maize bran (chicken food) costs ush300 ($US0.11).  The chickens sleep in the same one room apartment that Alaisa and her family live in because Alaisa fears they will get stolen again.  They eat some of the eggs and sell some for ush100 ($US 0.05) per egg.  She hopes to sell some of the chickens to raise school fees.

At the moment, they are managing to keep the children in school.  They are paying ush15,000 ($US 8.18) per year for each of the children to go to school.  Alaisa wishes she could send at least some of her children to a boarding school, but cannot afford the fees.

Malaria is a problem in Alaisa's home, much like everyone else's in her village of Namukama. 

Alaisa can only afford to feed her family once per day.  Sometimes they cannot afford to eat at all and they go hungry.

Alaisa walks a five kilometer round trip every day to fetch the five jerry cans of water her family needs.  The water is unsafe for drinking and needs boiling.

She hopes that many Namukama necklaces are sold on GrassRootsUganda.com because she wants some capital to pay for school fees and uniforms.  She would also use the money to rent a bigger home and purchase a sewing machine.

She wished that her husband could have a permanent job and the Namukama could get electricity one day.
 

Check out this house.  Nice huh?  That'll cost you the princely sum of 1,000,000 Filipino pesos, which is about $US20,000.

So why wouldn't you want to move here?  The houses are cheap, the people are wonderful and the weather balmy.

One of the best things about life in developing countries is th cost of living.  Everything is so cheap!  The bad things include education, security and healthcare.  They're all terrible!

Take healthcare for example.  My 62 year old mother^* recently volunteered in the Philippines.  My mum's a diabetic and managed to get her toe infected, which is a very serious thing for a diabetic.  She may yet lose her toe.  Being the dutiful son that I am, I decided to get her to the hospital.  This is where the problems start.  I had to send a friend Jen Jen (who was wonderfully helpful throughout) to get a tricycle to get my mother to the hospital.  Getting into one of those things is hard at the best of times, let alone when you have an infected toe.   The staff at the hospital were awesome and did everything possible to help my mum. No complaints there.  The hospital didn't have a well supplied pharmacy, so Jen Jen and I had to dash out to get the required medicine.  We had to go to four different pharmacies to get it all - one of which was in a neighboring town!  Even getting her back home was an issue.  We had to hire some peddle-powered tricycles to get her home, though - truth be told - I think she quite enjoyed that experience! 

It is interesting to note that a Filipino nurse working in the States earns ten times as much as a doctor in the Philippines. 

Security is also an issue in developing countries.  2010 is an election year in the Philippines.  The current president recently tried to change the constitution to allow her to rule for more than two terms.  There is also a small chance that she will declare martial law to maintain power.  Regardless of what the president does, there will be violence in 2010.  The double whammy of presidential and mayoral elections guarantees it.  Candidates will be shot, there will be violence protests, and banks will be robbed to raise bribe money. 

And education is also - alas - pretty terrible.  Only the very lucky students on Tablas island (where Meaningful Volunteer is based) will get to go to university.  Most will finish elementary school, but some of those will emerge illiterate. At a guess, I'd say about 50% will finish high school.  There are a dearth of reasons why education is so poor on Tablas.  Poor governance, bad roads preventing access to schools, under resourced classrooms, disillusioned teachers... the list goes on.

So, if the low cost of living good enough to offset the educational, healthcare and security issues?  Come on over and check it out first hand and make up your own mind!

^* If she can, why can't you?

Physically preventing the elderly and young from access to emergency food is not something I thought I'd ever be doing.  Yet, there I was - as part of a human wall keeping the aid workers safe from a desperate crowd.  Elderly hands kept poking through the wall as people begged me for food in broken English.  One grandmother fell to her knees and pleaded and pleaded for an aid pack.  Shafaq - a fellow volunteer - broke protocol and gave her one.  I remember one young girl trying to piece together a torn aid docket in an attempt to get herself some food.

Desperate people do desperate things.

This was all in response to Typhoon Ondoy which slammed into Manila leaving hundreds dead.  The even bigger Typhoon Pepeng was mercifully deflected at the last minute.

The aid effort was coordinated by the Bayan Muna (People First) political party.  Bayan Muna is headed by Satur Ocampo.  Mr. Ocampo is one of the premiere human rights activists in the Philippines.  He has been arrested, tortured and harassed by various oppressive regimes.  He even has some daring prison escape stories.  Mr. Ocampo was one of the people I was keeping safe at the aid distribution.

Looking back at that day, I can't help but feel a little guilty as I was little more than a 'disaster tourist'.  I didn't really help in any meaningful way.  Meeting Mr. Ocampo was a personal highlight.  I'll die a happy man if Meaningful Volunteer achieves half as much as he has.