A Busia Home Companion

Before we left for Africa, I read an article online that described Busia, Uganda as a "dusty border town". That seems about right. It seems the town sprung up as the Trans-African highway crossed over from Busia, Kenya into Uganda. Its a bit ramshackle, but the people are quite friendly and the children are enthralled with munzungos (white people). Its a sprawling town that uses bicycle taxis (boda-boda) to get around. The left photo is Maggie riding a boda-boda from our hotel to the internet cafe. Its a 25 minute walk or a 8 minute bike ride which runs 300 shillings (about 15 cents).

We're to have the grand opening of the internet cafe on Thursday. The mayor of Busia has agreed to be a guest of honor as we unleash 128K of the interweb on Busia (slight hunor there, I know). The computer school will be one of only a few of its kind in eastern Uganda, so people have expressed delight over its opening. The first weel we were here, New Hope Orphange underwent the final fieldwork on their audit and even their auditor said how happy he was about the school. The computer center is divided by a partion into 5 computers for a school seperated by a wooden partion from the other six computers that form the cafe. Its also possible to use four of the school's computers as part of the cafe, but we may be streching the limits of 128K. We have an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax that will provide additional services to patrons.

The right photo is Martha talking to Megan outside the clinic where Hanna was staying. Yes, that's a drum full of burning trash in the alleyway. It exploded shortly after we took the photo (minor explosion). There's lots of small fires as people burn trash. They don't generate too much trash, so there's surprisingly little for the town, but the smell was one thing you got used to (its not a bad smell, but its is unusual).