Uganda holiday & community project

We provide a link for visitors, volunteers and researchers to engage with community organisations, from a well-supported and comfortable base. We are a small family, not-for-profit company, committed to community development. UK organisers are unpaid volunteers.

Our proceeds are spent on a family education fund and, initially, on repaying necessary improvements to the house. We help community projects with fundraising, and provide a flow of volunteers. Later we hope to be able to donate more to local services. Our charges include payments for household maintenance and services, and local liaison work, including interpreters and guides. Visitors on the 12-day trip pay £25 to the community organisation they are placed with. Some visitors may choose to provide preparatory and follow-on help. Some may choose to stay in local houses.

We ask visitors to take personal responsibility for their waste and to discuss issues of rubbish, water and ecology with their house and community hosts. Water bottles and glass are recycled, though other plastic is a problem, and obviously there is no rubbish collection. The house uses stored rain – the tanks and plumbing having been repaired. In drought periods children and farm workers carry water in churns from bore holes.

There is no air-conditioning, but Kanaama lies relatively high and is pleasantly breezy, cooler than Kampala. Cooking is done over fires – necessitating wood supplies. Milk, meat, beans, vegetables and fruit are mostly produced by the family.

Western visitors increase the strain on all sorts of local resources: water for showers and laundry; diesel for electricity; wood for fires. We are considering other forms of power for Kanaama, and are investing in better water supplies for the farm, for local families, and for visitors. In the context of climate change, intermediate technologies are more than a solution to poverty and to inadequate infrastructures for clean water, power and transport. Interest in developing biogas and solar power abounds, and compulsory science in secondary schools will hopefully boost this movement enormously.

Hosting visitors, working to budgets, and managing links with community organisations enhance skills, encourage cooperation, and widen knowledge and perspectives. The project treats women and girls equally with men and boys, appreciates women and domestic tasks, and brings wives more fully into decision-making. By sharing the same house, visitors will exchange experiences and support each other, and mealtimes provide opportunities for discussion with family members. Our 12-day trip ends with a day of reflective discussion and follow-up ideas. We hope that at least some visitors will maintain contact and support with family and community members afterwards, not least through our website.