Turning the Page

It's been two years since my last post here, almost to the day - crazy. Two years since the adventure of moving to Uganda faded into the normal day-to-day of work, friends, and weekend routines. It's funny looking back on my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed self posting about the same cringeworthy expat topics that now make my eyes gloss over. Expats in Uganda come in-and-out of the country every 6 months with various NGO and embassy contracts which means every 6 months you're meeting a new person who wants to tell you about how they bargained an extortionate boda ride down by 30 cents, how they had the CRAZIEST night at Bike Mikes / Bubbles, how they named their newly adopted street puppy Chapati, how they'll be hiking Virunga / seeing the Bwindi gorillas / trekking with rhinos in Ziwa. I guess I admire their excitement for this undeniable adventure, but I swear to God if one more person tries to talk to me about how much they love rolexes....

After the plane landed and the dust settled, a process that probably took about a year after arriving in KLA, I was seeking out familiarity and routine rather than ad hoc adventure. I avoided people who are on short-term contracts because they'll never get past the touristy pleasures of Africa and focused on the people who approach Uganda like it's real life. For me, this ended up being my friends from work and the Mountain Club of Uganda. Just like in the US, I spend an average weekday waking up, working out, and then heading to the office until around 7pm when I would catch my friends for dinner & drinks. We're spoiled in Kampala with an amazing assortment of restaurants - Pardis for Lebanese, Mythos for Greek, Indian Dhaba for (you guessed it!) Indian, Torino for Ethiopian, Yujo for Japanese, Miso for Korean, The Lawns for South African Braai, Di Vino or Mediterraneo for Italian. 3 years here and the food scene hasn't gotten old. I ride a motorcycle to work nowadays, which is cool, but is mostly just an efficient, jam-less method of getting from point A to point B in a congested city. And, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I've spent almost every weekend in Jinja kayaking on the Nile.

Curious what that looks like? Check it out (I ♡ GoPro)

Nile Special, Bell, and Club waves (in that order)

Kayaking is arguably the best adventure sport that has ever existed. It's pure adrenaline as huge waves crash up against you. It's skill as you brace against waves, plug towers of whitewater, surf standing holes, and boof waterfalls. It's total serenity when it's just you and 4 friends drifting down an open, sparkling, mighty river. I've grown from feeling like I was going to die as I was tossed around underwater in my kayak on a grade 3 to (somehow) calmly navigating through grade 5 rapids and long, towering wave trains. Am I proud of that? Hell yeah. Building this skill was a conscious effort that meant repeatedly waking up at 5:30am on Saturdays to drive to Jinja, pushing past my anxiety as I paddled into bigger wave trains, battling the mental "I'm drowning" game with each roll, and many, many sore Monday mornings. 

I'm planning to leave Uganda in July for a few reasons, one of which is that our amazing section of the Nile is scheduled to be flooded by a new dam in August 2018 (though it may be delayed until 2019). I don't want to be around when that happens. I'm still out in Jinja almost every weekend, but now I'm paddling each rapid like a lover who is not quite ready to say goodbye. This breakup is premature. Is it weird that this song speaks to me? 

It's the end of an era for me in so many ways. So many changes. And knowing all the rapids I love are going to disappear - Vengeance, Hair of the Dog, Kula Shaker, Nile Special - seems a sad, but appropriate addition to my current narrative. There are so many memories I hope stay crisp - paddling across bubbling rapids to the sandy shores of the Lemon, playing volleyball in the slow current with the water wheel spinning in the background, turacos and monkeys moving among the palm trees, pouring tea and milk guarded by a beaded doiley before a dinner of soft rolls and pumpkin soup, methodically setting up my tent and filling it with pillows from the hammock huts, laying out my kayak in the wooden racks after a day of paddling, testing our agility with the table and box games, the list goes on.... 

This weekend I was laying beside a campfire past midnight with my friends on top of the hill on the Lemon. Flo was drifting in and out of sleep. Ben was playing some mellow acoustics from his speaker. Alice, Pàll, and the rest were passing around the huddle with some sort of word game. With my feet propped against a branch sticking out from the fire, warming after a midnight swim, I propped my head back to stare at the night sky. Just like a dream, the sky, dense with stars, sparkled and a clear, bright moon cast romantic shadows across the dark landscape. Soon this lifestyle is going to be a memory for me. My friend told me you should always be running towards your future rather than away from your past. It's taken me a few months to feel like turning the page is a step forward rather than an admission of defeat, but I'm there now. I'm ready to leave Uganda. I'm ready to pursue new passions and opportunities. Ready to grow what I'm capable of. But I'll never be ready to leave this moment on the Lemon.

 

Simple Things I Miss from Home

Fresh air
Gas station toilets
Clean bodies of water
Fast internet
Public libraries
Supermarkets
Conscientiousness

Sipi Falls

Five hours down the road from Kampala in the Kapchorwa district, you'll find yourself surrounded by waterfalls and coffee plantations on the fringe of a now extinct volcano. Welcome to Sipi Falls.

Wassup Sipi!

Sipi Falls

Chameleon encounter

Four of my friends from work and I booked a place at Sipi River Lodge, which ended up being amazing! We stayed in a grass thatched hut, equipped with 5 bunk beds and, at night, played board games and watched movies together from our bunks.

Our bunk hut, right on the river

It felt just like summer camp, only in the mornings we woke up to a three course breakfast and french press coffee.

Jaipur is now among the ranks of Fenix supported board games

And, not just any coffee - Bugisu Arabica coffee grown by Ugandan farmers in the Sipi mountains. African coffee is typically known for its fruity and acidic tones, but Bugisu Arabica is much more earthy and bold. Perfect for the chilly, misty mornings in Sipi, when you can sit with you hot mug of coffee and look out onto the lush waterfall in the jungle around you.

Our morning breakfast spot - picnic tables overlooking one of the waterfalls.

Zoomed in on the falls.

The waterfalls, surrounded by banana trees and ferns in the heart of an African jungle, are so serene and make the area feel like a prehistoric oasis.

In a cave under the falls. Must have been prime property in caveman times.

On Saturday morning, we climbed down the mountain, through coffee plantations and subsistence farms, to the main waterfall where you can swim in the clear, cold basin and take pictures that make it look as though you're going under the falls. Actually going under the falls would result in less-attractive pictures where you bear the expression expected of someone being sprayed by a fire hose.

Too much. TOO MUCH!

Along the way, we ran into a few ReadyPay customers who had our panels sitting on the tin roofs of their homes. It was my first time casually running into a customer, since I don't visit the villages all that often unless it is a planned customer visit. It was amazing to hear how they loved the product. Sometimes from the Kampala office, I start to doubt our impact, wondering if all the hype is just a byproduct of a false-consensus effect and whether, to our customers, we're just another commodity. But as we spoke to one of the fathers who owned a ReadyPay kit, it became obvious that our solar was having a substantial impact on his life and that he felt a deep gratitude to the brand. He spoke about how his daughter was using the kit to do homework at night, how his security light kept thieves away, and how he was excited for the opportunity to get other loans from Fenix. Many people on the mountain clip into the utility lines that run through a nearby village, but he didn't want to steal and didn't want to support a practice that is very dangerous. ReadyPay enables him to live by his values without living in darkness.

I find, in the west, we're trained to be cynical about development efforts, and perhaps for good reason. There are a lot of people here who are too self-absorbed to really get the problems they're trying to fix. But the other reality is that this family in Kapchorwa lives under a government that takes no responsibility for the basic utilities a functioning society needs. I love Fenix and, specifically, my company's for-profit business model, because it means we HAVE to create value if we want to survive. In Sipi, I saw that that value is real and tangible and very deeply appreciated by our customers.

Our customer - you can see the panel on the roof!

After saying goodbye to the families, we hiked up to another fall, taking pictures like 90s cover bands along the way, keeping in line with our summer camp throwback.

I was expecting to reach the top and stand in relative solitude overlooking the peaceful beauty of the valley. Instead, we pulled ourselves up onto the top of the rock falls and emerged into the Ugandan equivalent of a hopping laundromat.

Laundry time

Ladies were washing clothes in the stream while kids ran across fallen tree bridges and pulled their cattle from grazing patch to grazing patch.

All blades of grass may look the same to us,
but cows seem to have more refined preferences.
If only its leg weren't tied to a branch...

As usual in Uganda, just when you think you've reached the wild "bush" country, you realize you're still just in somebody's backyard.

Nonetheless, their backyard is spectacular.

Carol's Chapatis

This weekend, I'm going to Sipi Falls (a beautiful waterfall in eastern Uganda) with some friends and I offered to make everyone rolexes for the drive out. Immediately after offering, I remembered that my chapatis are not exactly up to par and ran to our chef at Fenix to see if she could give me any tips. Ladies and gentlemen, I finally have an awesome chapati recipe to pass along to you! These are some of the best!

CHAPATIS du CAROL

Ingredients:
1/2 kg baking flour
1 onion, grated
1/2 garlic, grated
2 tbsp. cooking oil
lukewarm water
1 tsp. sugar

Method:

1. Grate onions, garlic in lukewarm water
2.  Add oil & sugar, stir
3. Add baking flour & knead to a soft dough
4. Add 2 tbsp of oil & continue kneading until your hands become clean
5. Leave the dough to rest for 30 minutes
6. Make the dough into small balls
7. Roll balls (one at a time) into round shape on a warm frying pan
8. Brush the chapati with oil on top and turn the top side down to fry. Do the same with the other side until both side are golden brown.

Virunga

What’s black and white and red all over? A bubbling lava lake releasing clouds of noxious gases from deep within the crater of a 11,300 ft. active volcano! Or, more specifically, Nyiragongo in the Virunga Mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Harder to see the white here, but the point is... VOLCANO!

After traveling to western Kenya in early February to pilot a new Fenix project, I hopped a flight to Nairobi to meet up with Colin and a few friends and begin our journey to the DRC to hike Mount Nyiragongo. You may or may not have heard about these Virunga volcanoes, but let me rant for a second because they are so awesome and so terrifying. 

First, volcanoes in general are so cool! They are basically giant soda bottles, perpetually shaking, until the build up of gases and water vapor causes a massive explosion! How do the gases get there? If you don’t care or already know, move to the next paragraph. If you’re like me and never took Earth Science in high school, prepare to be amazed! For stratovolcanoes like Nyiragongo, there is an oceanic tectonic plate moving under a continental tectonic plate in what’s called a subduction zone. I’m picturing it as a spatula going under a pancake. As the crust of the oceanic “spatula” moves under the continental “pancake”, the minerals on the spatula’s surface get heated and release water, which is oh-so-cleverly termed “dewatering” (and all of the 6th graders give a cheer for this easy-to-remember term in the word bank on their science final. Have fun with lithosphere and asthenosphere kids ;) ). The water rises up into the bottom of the pancake, where the upper mantle sits, and actually lowers the melting point of the mantle. I didn’t know this was a thing, but it is and it’s called flux melting. We always learned water has a high boiling point because of hydrogen bonds and Van der Waals interactions, but in this case it’s a volatile and lowers the melting temperature of rocks composed of silicate materials. So when the mantle melts, it has a lower density and rises up, though the earth’s crust, incorporating silica-rich rock as it goes until it reaches the magma chamber within the volcano. After all that pressure below the earth’s surface, the magma chamber is a nice low-pressure spot to hang out. And just like that lady in yoga who you wish wasn’t quite so relaxed, the magma leans into a “sun salutation” and allows all of its pent up gases to escape. Then, when so much gas has been released that the rocky surface of the volcanic crater can’t hold it in any more, the top of the volcano blows and all hell breaks loose in a volcanic eruption! SCIENCE!

Because it's not science without diagrams

Nyiragongo is a freaky volcano, even among all of the other explosive beasts in the world. Stratovolcanoes like Nyiragongo are steep (my thighs will attest to that) and usually contain magma with a high silica content. The silica is what makes lava viscous and allows us to imagine outrunning potential flows. Nyiragongo is an exception. It has a low silica content, meaning, if it’s coming at you, it’s flowing down its super steep face at 60 mph. Yep. You think getting hit by a car is bad? Think again. 

When Nyiragongo last erupted in 2002, the city of Goma saw lava flows that were 1 mile wide and taller than the tallest person you know (6’ 6” ft). And as if that wasn’t scary enough, there was the possibility of the flows setting off Lake Kivu. Because, yes, Lake Kivu (only 12 miles from Nyiragongo), is a bomb waiting to explode. 

Though you would never know from this picture of a peaceful fishing boat

The US State department has announced that it aims to generate 30,000 Megawatts of new energy across sub-saharan Africa by 2030. If the methane from Lake Kivu were released, it would meet that goal 3 times over in one day. Lake Kivu also contains about 2% of the carbon dioxide that the world produces in a year. If lava reaches and warms the lake, there’s a very real possibility that it would trigger a methane explosion, which would simultaneously cause a release of all carbon dioxide. We would see lake tsunamis and a carbon dioxide cloud that would asphyxiate the 2 million people living on shore. On a normal day, this region is a paradise of lake views and towering volcanic peaks. On a bad day, it would be a living (if you’re lucky) hell.  

So after flying from Nairobi to Kigali (Rwanda), 

Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, nestled in the rolling hills (and power lines! Whaaat?!)

Rwanda countryside. Looks like that chocolate river in Willy Wonka.

taking a 4 hour matatu ride to Goma (DRC), 

Matatu at the matatu stage. Thought we lost Colin,
but thankfully found him before needing to break out the trail of Reeses Pieces.

and then passing 12 miles of houses made from black lava rocks and boys flying down roads on chukudus, 

Chukudu - DRC specific wooden scooter

we arrived at Mount Nyiragongo, ready to take the 6 hour hike up to the summit. The hike was led by a Virunga ranger, who has accepted the formidable responsibility of defending and maintaining Virunga in the face of invading rebels, poachers, and commercial ventures attempting to exploit natural resources. 

The two park rangers who led us to the volcano's summit

As recent as 2008, Virunga was overrun by the rebel group M23. While the Congolese army retreated from both Virunga and Goma, the rangers remained to defend the park. 

Bullet holes in the welcome signs to Virunga National Park

Just think about that. 

I like to think we all have something so important to us that we would die to protect it, whether it’s your mother or son or even your way of life. But there is something so noble and virtuous and sad in saying you would die to keep a stream running peacefully through the brush. You would die to make sure the shores of a lake never see the corruption of a profiteer and the base of a mountain never hears the crack of rebel gunfire. In a country where death has become a way of life, these men have decided that if they die, it will be to deliver Virunga from the violence and turmoil that has torn apart so many lives. Virunga is, in so many ways, the spirit and soul of the Congo. 

We climbed through jungle bush, strolled in fields of yellow flowers, 

Hiking down the Nyiragongo with another volcano in the distance

and then reached the nearly vertical peak leading up to the crater. 

The peak is devoid of all plants at 11,380 ft. and covered in sharp, igneous rock from the last eruption. 

Hiking up some rocks

It was by far the steepest cliff I’ve hiked and, with no trees around, vertigo became a real thing. 

The huts where we stayed on the edge of Mount Nyiragongo. Did I mention it was steep?

Colin near the summit, taking in the view. Note the superb toilet placement in the background.
Talk about a loo with a view.

But I have never seen such incredible views. 

The huts where we camped, looking out over Goma and the border of Rwanda and DRC.

We could see the nearby Nyamuragira volcano. We looked out over Lake Kivu, across the border to Rwanda, and later in the night, Julia pointed out the noticeable line between Rwanda and the DRC when the Congo lost power.

And then we reached the edge of the crater. You are looking out over a 1.5 mile wide pit, with a rocky ridge that seems to span as far as the eye can see. Peering down through the billowing smoke, you see the bubbling and oozing lava glowing hundreds of meters below. Then and now, I cannot find the right words to describe what this felt or looked like, so I’ll leave it to the pictures and hope they inspire you to hike Nyiragongo too.

Falling Behind

It finally happened - I fell MASSIVELY behind in writing and now have a ton of things I want to tell you all from this past month of radio silence. Usually what happens next is:

• I spend a week writing 16 boring pages about every mediocre hotel accommodations and transport folly because I want you to know EVERYTHING
• I spend another week trying to edit those 16 pages because they’re so tedious they’re even putting me to sleep
• I then realize I’m two weeks behind with the more recent updates and cave into the spiral of being continually behind until I don’t post at all

Because I don’t want that to be the fate of this blog, I’m going to give you updates as a highlight reel. I won’t cover even close to everything, but we’ll just agree that will make future conversations more interesting anyway :)

Luweero

From the window of our car, Luweero didn't look like much more than a few brick storefronts with painted advertisements for MTN and Sadolin coloring the horizon. There are plastic cafe tables with men drinking cokes under umbrellas, chickens pecking at rubbish piles scattered here and there, and children running errands to the store, shuffling along the road holding tomatoes or chapatis. But after talking with Robert, one of our best salesmen at Fenix, I realized Luweero is a town with a lot of political history.

Painted brick storefronts

In 1981, the National Resistance Army, headed by now president Yoweri Museveni, began the guerrilla bush war in opposition to the Obote regime, seeking support from rural Ugandans. Obote responded with efforts to quell sympathizers - looting, internment camps, and mass killings in what is now the Luweero Triangle. This isn't some distant history lesson. This is brutality that was very real to people in Luweero. And that is unnerving. Robert lost his dad when he was forcibly recruited to fight for Museveni during the Bush War. Robert's oldest son was orphaned by these killings and adopted into his family.

But you would never know that if you were just looking around town today. Things are quiet and calm in the hot afternoon sun. Most of the economy in Luweero is derived from farming. I met Joe, who referred to himself as Trader Joe (so weird to get those references here). He plants basil and celery and broccoli - all very hard crops to grow in comparison to corn, which is much more typical. He also grows sweet potatoes, but not the common white and purple variety here - the western bright orange sweet potato. When I asked Joe how he even got the seed potatoes to start, he said he has a friend in Mexico who sent them to Uganda and Joe now makes a good amount of money selling the potatoes to expats, who can't get them anywhere else. Joe hates the potatoes. In fact, he really didn't like most of his unique crops, but profit is profit!

But the real reason we were in town was to test user perception of our lighting systems

Testing perception of kit lighting...
with some very sophisticated duct tape anchor points

and to gauge our customers' interest in the idea of a credit score made available through Fenix solar loans. This project is my "baby" right now at Fenix. The analytics and code behind building the score is already exciting for me, but I had been hesitant about whether our customers would really understand what a credit score is and how it can be used. If somebody has very little exposure to finance, do they understand the terms of a loan or do they just pay what you charge them? Can we make the credit score something they can understand and work to improve?

The short answer to those questions is: people understand what a loan is, they understand credit, and they are very excited to have a means to control their financial reputation.

Take Joe for example. He farms on land that he rents in a swampy area nearby the primary school. He is doing well, but has rent to pay to a landlord who is always considering taking back the land next season. That's a lot of stress for Joe, who already learned how to grow on this land and has his crops seeded there. So when an agricultural loan through Fenix becomes a possibility, Joe's eyes light up as brightly as the solar lamp next to him. A credit score would allow Joe to use his solar loan with Fenix as a way to move away from dependence on his landlord's whims. A credit score will be a game-changer for so many of our customers, and they know it.