Day 22, Various, Amuria and Soroti

It wasn’t too early a start and I had breakfast at the guesthouse. The breakfast comprised toast (from the horrible sweet bread they have here), juice (mostly apple I think), coffee (instant with hot milk), omelette (with peppers, red onions and tomatoes) and a banana. Good fuel for the day ahead. 2 out of 5.

We then set off for Amuria, it was on 40 km away, but took about an hour to get there. The road wasn’t as bad at the one the previous day from Mbale to Soroti, but it was just a dirt road. I’ve thankfully managed to regain my ability to fall asleep when traveling no matter how bad the roads so was dozing when we arrived in Amuria. To call it a one horse town would be an overstatement, there aren’t any horses any nearby. We went to the regional office first where I met all the local staff and then we headed off to Arizona Restaurant for the training session.

The Regional Office

With the VAD staff we had a group of 19 researchers who were all local people, generally well regarded in the communities that they came from. Some were local government representatives at the sub-county level. We went through the questionnaires that they would be asking to between 450 – 600 households in the district. All the respondents need to be members of community groups that have previously been set up by VAD and are based in around 14 villages across two sub-counties and two parishes in the district.

The baseline survey is a necessary part of the project as without it, we won’t be able to put in place any monitoring and evaluation after the project has been completed. There will be a number of KPIs that will be measured mostly on the subject of food security i.e. ensuring the households have enough food to feed their families through improved agricultural methods and some tools. The project is being enabled by Signpost International with funding from Comic Relief. It will be very interesting to see the outputs of this project over the next year.

Lunch was at the restaurant and comprised of rice, beans, posho, chicken (bad), beef (worse), greens (yellow this time). It was a massive plate and horrible. 1 out of 5.

After the training session we went back to the office to hang around for a while whilst we updated the questionnaires from feedback at the session and printed them out. We then headed back on the hour long journey back to Soroti some of it in the dark and we had some sporadic rain. The wet season has been fairly dry and is coming to an end now, so any water is quickly soaked up. When we got back to Soroti we went to a local restaurant where I had goat, rice and matoke washed down with a Coke. 1 out of 5.