Work Update 

This week I was able to visit the Bugembe Town Council, the town where I will be focusing my research. After an interview with the Town Council Health Inspector, which ended in him begging the NGO (that I’m conducting the research out of) for money and a new trash tractor, I got to see the numbers, that have been engraved into my head, in real life. 14 sanitation workers. 64,000 residents. 1.5 tons of waste produced per hour. 9 designated trash collection bins. The goal of my research is to recommend improvements to their waste management system, which in theory should be easy if I could just take a page out of Northwestern’s book and just raise the price of garbage collection. However, this garbage tax currently stands at 3,000 shillings per month per store/household ( less than 2 USD), but is met with constant uproar and backlash from Bugembe residents. If it is hard to move past a 2 USD tax, I really don’t know how much faith I can put in improving resources for the Town Council.

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After learning all of this from the Health Inspector, it became evident to me that my research must be more sociological and behavioral based than in the technicality of a system. Sadly, this idea was met with big challenges from the CEO of the NGO, as he is adamant my focus must be on assessing the current system in place by the Town Council. An assessment that I basically already finished after one meeting with the Health Inspector and observation of daily life in the Town Council. This leaves me with the task of spinning the work I know must be done, in a light that satisfies the CEO and completes the task that I was paid to do and sent 10,000 miles away from home to accomplish.

Personal Update

So, I’m not going to lie, this past week was one of the more challenging periods of my life. The work climate in Uganda is a lot different from the US. The average day in my NGO’s office, which is composed of 5 workers (all men), alternates from political/ social debates about life in Uganda and searching through Facebook. That obviously leads little time for work, however, this is fine because this NGO honestly produces a lot more work than a lot of the organizations around it. Although, for me this is an issue because it leaves me in an office with no internet and colleagues who speak little english, beyond technical terms, from 8 am to 5 pm. I am hoping to buy an internet modem this week, so that’ll help take a little burden off of my psyche. Oh YEAH! One thing also happened.. I was lucky enough to experience a high fever and bacterial infection, which left me in the bathroom for 5 hours straight, and required me to make the hour ling journey into Jinja 3 days in a row for medical treatment. This experience has been interesting to say the least so far. I hope to move from this introspective experience into being able to do the real work (research) soon.