Kampala Day 3
First of all thanks to all of you regulars that are following the blog. I look forward to flipping on my laptop after we’re done for the day and once I’m back in my room for the night to check out the comments.
Today. There is so much to say about today. I’m not even going to attempt to detail it all. I’m hoping the pictures do a liitle of the talking for todays post. I’ll just provide a short commentary before I load the pics.
I knew - and I think we all knew (although the teams never really openly discussed this when we were together) -that at some point we’d be face to face with the poverty that blankets much of Uganda. Today was an emotion filled day: amazement, fun, wonder, curiosity, empathy, pity, anger and many more I’m sure i’m just to tired to think.
Before I go into the summary of the day - I have to tell you about my trip to the local church for Mass today. There is an RC church close to the hotel. I had heard they have a 6:30am weekday service. So I got up at my “usual” time and walked the 4 blocks over. When it started there were at least 400 people in there - unbelievable - at 6:30 in the morning on a weekday! Even more amazing was the fact that when it was over and the crowd was streaming out; there were just as many people coming in for the 7am Mass. That was a different experience and one that will be with me for awhile - especially the fact that of the 400 people I am the only “azungo” (white person). As you can imagine I received alot of curious stares. The people sitting around me were typical Ugandans - gracious and kind.
So today we visited the Kasawo Namuganga credit union (or SACCO as they call them here). Its about 50k outside of Kampala. A rural area to be sure. We had a brief meeting with the manager and loan officer then headed out. He wanted to show us off to the community There are many strategic reasons for doing this all of which I agreed with. I had mentioned to the manager that I realized that one of the more valuable benefits to his SACCO of our visit was that the local community was aware that we were there. Its true. By the time we’re done tomorwo (only 2 days scheduled here) we will have a number of operational and governance recommendations to leave him with - however as he noted - his credit union gets a lot of PR mileage from a member realtions standpoint from this vistit. There’s a whole lot more that went on today but I’ll leave it at that and hope you enjoy the pictures. Please note that I chose not upload some of the more graphic images of poverty that I captured - cause you’ve all seen them before i’m sure and we dont need them here at this point. Ok so thanks once again. Check back tomorrow.
Charlie
Today. There is so much to say about today. I’m not even going to attempt to detail it all. I’m hoping the pictures do a liitle of the talking for todays post. I’ll just provide a short commentary before I load the pics.
I knew - and I think we all knew (although the teams never really openly discussed this when we were together) -that at some point we’d be face to face with the poverty that blankets much of Uganda. Today was an emotion filled day: amazement, fun, wonder, curiosity, empathy, pity, anger and many more I’m sure i’m just to tired to think.
Before I go into the summary of the day - I have to tell you about my trip to the local church for Mass today. There is an RC church close to the hotel. I had heard they have a 6:30am weekday service. So I got up at my “usual” time and walked the 4 blocks over. When it started there were at least 400 people in there - unbelievable - at 6:30 in the morning on a weekday! Even more amazing was the fact that when it was over and the crowd was streaming out; there were just as many people coming in for the 7am Mass. That was a different experience and one that will be with me for awhile - especially the fact that of the 400 people I am the only “azungo” (white person). As you can imagine I received alot of curious stares. The people sitting around me were typical Ugandans - gracious and kind.
So today we visited the Kasawo Namuganga credit union (or SACCO as they call them here). Its about 50k outside of Kampala. A rural area to be sure. We had a brief meeting with the manager and loan officer then headed out. He wanted to show us off to the community There are many strategic reasons for doing this all of which I agreed with. I had mentioned to the manager that I realized that one of the more valuable benefits to his SACCO of our visit was that the local community was aware that we were there. Its true. By the time we’re done tomorwo (only 2 days scheduled here) we will have a number of operational and governance recommendations to leave him with - however as he noted - his credit union gets a lot of PR mileage from a member realtions standpoint from this vistit. There’s a whole lot more that went on today but I’ll leave it at that and hope you enjoy the pictures. Please note that I chose not upload some of the more graphic images of poverty that I captured - cause you’ve all seen them before i’m sure and we dont need them here at this point. Ok so thanks once again. Check back tomorrow.
Charlie
No comments:
Post a Comment