Starting Work
{ August 4th, 2008 }
A post for the Water For People Blog that talks more about work than I’ve done elsewhere so far:
Welcome to my office; or at least to my temporary office. Really for the moment, I have three: My back porch, which will hopefully have an internet connection soon; Café Pap, a coffee shop with okay internet; and Bubbles O’Leary, an Irish Pub with free, decent internet. Although it’s a little strange to be nomadic, until Water For People has more staff than just me in Uganda, it doesn’t make sense to build a full-fledged office. Once there’s internet at the house it’ll be easier to make that the primary temporary office, and trips between the coffee shop and the pub will be less frequent.
Jon, and I left Denver exactly two weeks ago. We arrived to Kampala, sight unseen, and have, had a very steep learning curve since being here. Though about 15% of my time was spent in Kenya before joining Water For People, and there are definite similarities, I’m also finding a lot of differences. For one, it’s taken both Jon and me the last two weeks to begin to figure out the conversion from US dollars to Ugandan shillings. Currently, the exchange rate is about UGX 1600 to 1 USD—not math that is easy to do in one’s head, especially when prices end up in the millions of shillings. On top of the conversion, which we’ll eventually stop doing on a regular basis, it’s also been tough to figure out what prices should be in Kampala.
Last week, Alex Mbaguta, the Program Liaison for the Uganda Water and Sanitation NGO Network (UWASNET), and I spent all week collecting the final paperwork to submit Water For People’s application for registration to the NGO Board. This final week was the end of a process that has taken Alex, Kathy Miller in Denver, and I the past two months to complete, and Wende Valentine in Denver, Alex, and Kathy also in March of this year.
The application to register as an international NGO in Uganda itself is fairly straight forward. What proved difficult were the numerous documents that were required as further evidence of Water For People’s legitimacy. Though Water For People has an excellent reputation in the countries where we currently work, that reputation is just beginning to bud in Uganda. UWASNET thinks very highly of Water For People, which definitely helps. Their legwork in Kampala allowed us to get most of the Ugandan pieces of our application together before I arrived.
Last week, Alex and I had a few false starts, but finally after several meetings at several different offices and three trips to the NGO Board office, we were able to submit our application. The Board sits next week to review applications, and we have our fingers crossed that the Water For People application will be reviewed on Wednesday. However, we were told that there were a lot of applications this month that arrived before ours, and so it might wait until the Board sits next month to be read.
The next few weeks and months will be spent largely listening and learning about the water sector in Uganda. I had preliminary meetings last week with the Rural Water and Sanitation Commissioner at the Ministry of Water and the Commissioner at the Office for Water for Production. Both were brief, introductory meetings, but I was able to introduce them to Water For People and explain a little about how our programming has historically worked, what Water For People programs look like in other countries and what we’re hoping to do in Uganda. I will make appointments to talk with them further once we’re registered to learn from them what they see as the sector’s primary needs.
At the same time, I’m beginning to make contacts with a number of local NGOs, mostly recommended by UWASNET as good organizations to partner with. I’ll start by revisiting the organizations that the team of volunteers visited during the scoping study to understand what they learned and what has happened in the time since the scoping study happened. I’ll also study the UWASNET membership directory, which gives a short profile of the 140 water and sanitation organizations working under the UWASNET umbrella.
It’s just the beginnings of an office here in Uganda, but it’s slowly coming together!
