Ochan Self-Help Alliance

First, apologies to Rojina whose name was misspelled in our blogpost of July 30, 2010. Pictured here is the courtyard at Rojina’s compound which has turned into a worksite for the building of her new, durable home. 4,000 ISSB bricks made by Opac youth trainees under supervision, stand ready for service next to their brick-making machines. In the background a traditional home slumps while to its right a tree stands tall, perhaps sensing that this is its lucky day: it has been spared the ax as these ISSB bricks dry on their own in 4-24 hours due to their composition of cement, murrum, sand, and water. Gone is the the traditional method of hardening mud bricks through firing in an oven for days.

Rojina’s walls are now rising and one of the housing leaders in our project, Esther, is inspecting how these bricks interlock both vertically and horizontally for a tight fit that reduces the amount of mortar needed to bind them.

Closeup of one outer wall

Murrum for the bricks has not been dug in the courtyard, so no gaping depression will be left to adversely affect the environment; instead, it is extracted with permission from one of many government-owned murrum quarries used to mend the roads in the area. Pictured are the trainees along with OCHAN’s president, William, digging and loading quality murrum into our lorry.

Our lorry gets sand from a privately owned quarry a few miles away. OCHAN pays the owner by the lorry-load.

We hope our next blog on this project will be soon and present to you Rojina in front of her completed new house.

On July 11, OCHAN visited the tree nursery of Mr. Julius Odwe, who first introduced us to melia volkensii last summer in a visit to our project site in Opac.  He touted it as a great hardwood treethat could grow well in semi-arid zones, provide timber as a source of income after 10 years, and help to fight soil erosion and effects of climate change. Until this day we had no idea what a grown melia v. tree looked like.  We were treated to so many grown and aging versions that we went crazy taking photos and came away even more convinced of the tree’s value as well as its beauty.  We also learned that a local variety of this tree does not grow as straight as ones imported from Brazil which we saw on this day.  Learning that the soil melia  v. likes for germination contains, in ratios of 8:1:1, black soil, manure, sand will help us be more successful in germinating our seeds.

over ten years old trunk of a melia v.

tops have been removed to encourage growth of trunk's girth

We visited the home of one of Mr. Odwe’s relatives where the melia v. were stately and at least 10-15 years old. A youngster in the home nimbly climbed up one tree to get a sprig of seeds for us to carry back to Opac.  We once again thank Mr. Odwe for the hospitality and tour he arranged for us even though he could not be present due to pressing police business in Kampala.