Actioning our investigations....

Friday was Election Day and we had been cautioned by a number of people to stay out of the main towns.  So having investigated a number of potential projects and after much deliberation Thursday was the day to make decisions and start spending some money!   We raced around and didn’t run into too many hurdles, except for large trucks overflowing with keen supporters cheering and singing to bolster their campaigning President.  Some of the stores and companies we needed to visit were closed in anticipation for what may have been a violent election but the Africans simply put it down to timid Indians!   But who could blame them after Idi Amin gave them 72 hours to leave the country in 1972.

Foundations progressing well....

Workers are progressing well with completing the foundations

Once workers have marked out where future walls will sit with bricks, the area is
then filled with soil. 

Beauty Salon 

We had decided to allocate USD$200 to helping Francesca, a former Kidron schoolgirl and orphan, set up a modest hair and beauty salon. She was so excited to receive rollers, a hairdryer, combs, chairs for her clients, and scary-looking tubs of chemical bleach which would have any Remuera blonde running screaming from her chair! This will get her started, inspire her to continue with her craft, and with the help of Big John’s industrious wife Barbara, hopefully have a salon up and running in the coming months. While a beauty salon might seem anomalous in a village where a majority reside in mud huts, we have been advised by many in-the-know that it is potentially a very lucrative business (a blowwave, for example, costing approximately ($7), which is an impressive price, considering the GNI per capita (dollar value of a countries final income in a year divided by its population) was $295 in 2008. We also envision that Francesca’s salon will be a burgeoning business with which future Kidron girls may also be involved following the completion of their primary education and some requisite training, as the regrettable reality is many will not go on to matriculate from High School, due to lack of funding or aptitude.

Following Wednesday’s extensive research into the wild and wonderful world of rearing layer chickens, we pre-purchased 300 1-day-old chicks to be picked up by Big John on 17 March, along with feeders and water apparatus. This means he has a month to construct his coop, employ someone to oversee the process, and take care of any relevant ends to ensure this project is a success. We have every faith in him! Back at school and the dormitory site, the dedicated engineer Tony (who we are yet to see actually leave the site!) was happy to receive a cash advance to pay for labour. To ensure the workers are energised and happy despite their long hours, USD$25 was used to buy them all a chicken to eat for lunch - a gesture akin to buying builders at home a slab of VB for their hard work. Finally, a convoluted phone call to a Chinese-owned, but Kampala-based maize mill company rounded out the day, with detailed quotes for various parts of the mill being satisfactory and comparable to the ones we got in Jinja earlier in the week.