Village Visit #2 - Milmil

This past weekend, we visited the village of Milmil, in Katakwi district.  It was about a two and a half hour drive to get there, but the area that we drove through was beautiful (Anthony will share some pictures).  And as we got further out into rural areas, there was not much traffic, so it wasn't too challenging to do the driving, other than dodging potholes!

                               

We stayed at the home of Vincent and Amelenia.  They have six children - five girls and one boy; the children are older so they have only three of them staying at their home, but nine grandchildren live there too.  So it was a pretty big place and full of people.

 

We were accompanied on our visit by two people who work for KIDO: Andrew Ben and Emmanuel (Emma).  They helped to translate for us since Vincent and Amelenia don't speak English.  This is Emma:

He was with us most of the time, so we got to hear about the agricultural work that he does in these rural communities.  He is one of the people from KIDO who I will be working with over the next two years.

Unlike last weekend, this family took our offer to work with them seriously.  In fact, they had more confidence in Anthony's endurance than he did himself!  They let us plough their field with bulls. 

We thought maybe we would help for about half an hour and then they would continue without us (presumably it would go more quickly when we were not the ones doing it...)  However, we ended up helping for the entire time - two hours!  Anthony did half and I did the other half. 

Anthony kept trying to stop to take a break, but they made him keep going.  You can see how much fun the kids were having watching the plowing and rolling around in the dirt.

We also were allowed to help milk their cows, but only for a little while.  At that point, we needed to get going to another village where we were going to visit some people with whom KIDO works, so they rushed us through the milking.  It was different from milking goats - the teats are higher off the ground, so it was a bit harder to aim the milk into the buckets.  Vincent demonstrated for us before they gave us a bucket and stool.

Here are a couple other activities that I got to participate in.  First, pounding ecomai, the leaves of a local tree that people eat as a vegetable during the dry season:

This was a rather funny situation because they had me sit and pound it while everyone watched with great amusement!  Then, this is how they churn milk.  I also got to try it, but there is no picture of me doing it.

The people from Milmil had received cassava cuttings and they walked us out to the garden that the community group planted and cares for together.  They dug up this cassava plant so we could see how big the tubers already are:

Most of Saturday was spent walking and visiting other communities where there are groups who have benefited from KIDO's work.  We walked two hours to get to these people and then walked even more to get from one group to another!  It was lots of good exercise.  On the way back, we watched a beautiful sunset. 

People were really surprised to see white people walking and the groups that we visited were happy to know that we were willing to walk so far to see them.



The groups that we visited were ones who had benefited from receiving goats, groundnuts (peanuts), and cassava cuttings for planting.  I especially liked hearing from people in the groups who were the secondary recipients of goats.  One woman had received a goat and passed on the first female kid to another woman who was there to tell us about it.  They also told stories of how they were able to sell the groundnuts and cassava that they harvested to buy goats, then sold the kids from those goats to buy cows.  Then, they were able to sell the calves and milk in order to pay to send their children to school.  Another interesting reason that they were thankful for the cows was that they were able to have cow dung for their gardens and for repairing the floors and walls of their houses. 

Once again, we were blown away by the generosity of the people we met.  We were given a chicken by at least one person in every group that we visited (we left the village with six), some small bags of groundnuts, a giant bag of beautiful beans, some eggs, chapatti, sodas, and a goat(!) from Vincent and Amelenia.  Honestly, it was REALLY hard to accept these gifts because we are so undeserving and we already have so much more than we can ever need.  However, we do know that there is dignity in having the ability to give to others and also great joy in sharing what we have.  We need to continue to learn how to accept the generosity of people who are grateful for the way that God has provided for them.  And we also need to learn how to be joyfully generous with what we have.

We did bring an Ateso Bible for our hosts, Vincent and Amelenia (as a very small note of thanks for their hospitality to us).  They already had one Bible, which was well-read and worn, but they were very happy to have a second one for their family. 

One other really cool thing to note is that their family is Catholic.  In fact, most of the people we met in the villages we visited this weekend are Catholic.  But they are working together with KIDO, which is part of Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG) and there are members in the groups from the Catholic church, PAG, and Church of Uganda.  We were happy to see this unity among Christians of different denominations.