Preparation – Briefing

Wow, I can’t believe I’m already going to leave for Uganda next Monday! I’m starting to get a bit excited!

Today I’ve met with three of the board members of the foundation Licht für vergessene Kinder to discuss my mission in Uganda. It was very interesting to learning about the current projects, their team in Uganda, cultural aspects and to getting some more insight into the foundation’s work. It was also very helpful to being introduced with the values of the foundation, allowing me to incorporate some important aspects I’ll have to consider in my job.

I’ll report some more about my tasks once I’ll be on site.

Briefing? – Check!

Preparation – Medical stuff

Well, once you decide to travel to a country like Uganda you’ll also have to think about medical preparation. Vaccination might be recommended or even mandatory. In case of Uganda, the following vaccinations were recommended to me:

Yellow Fever, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Poliomyelitis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Hepathitis A + B, Abdominal Typhus, Rabies

Ok, fine be me, but what about Malaria? I will use repellents, mosquito net and adequate clothing, but my doctor strongly recommended to taking chemical prophylaxis, my pharmacist also, but then again others said I shouldn’t as this means that your body will have to deal with a massive chemical load and some of the medicine provide a long list of adverse effects which can also cause severe (long-term) damage to your body… So, what to do?

Well, I finally decided to taking the medicine as long as it doesn’t cause trouble…

Oh, my fellow farmacist prepared a super-duper first-aid kit that covers most eventualities... I hope I'll never need to use it! ;-)

Medical preparation? – Uhm… Check

Preparation - What to do with my greedy electrical equipment?

As a Swiss guy I never have to worry about electricity. There’s power sockets and plenty of power everywhere, availability 365 days, 24 hours a day. Ok, my mobile’s a bit thirsty and dies from time to time but that’s negligible.

Well, where I’ll live there’s no electrical connection, no power sockets. There’s a generator that runs from time to time so they can charge batteries but I’d prefer to being independent from that thing (I just got the information that it broke down anyway). So I did some research on that topic. I soon stumbled upon Sistech, a Swiss company located in Bubikon, who are specialised in mobile power solutions. They offer plenty of solar power based solutions for almost every purpose. I’m going to take some greedy electric equipment with me. That’s basically a notebook, camera, mobile and a kindle (which is not greedy at all). It’s no problem to charge the small stuff with a lightweight solar panel but in order to be able to charge a notebook battery I need some more power. So I drove to Bubikon and bought myself the Swisssolarcharger Volta XXL-88, which is a combination of a foldable solar panel (46 W, 17 V, 2.7 A) and a power tank (24’000 mAh, 88.8 Wh) and the necessary connector cables for notebooks, mobiles etc. The whole set weighs around 2.2 kg, which is still pretty light although they offer much lighter solutions which are still very powerful but as I’m going to stay at the same location most of the time, I decided to choose the more robust solar panel.



I’ve tried it out at home and it worked perfectly. It only took around 3 hours to charge the power tank completely and it wasn’t very sunny. So I guess I’ll have plenty of power for my equipment.

Power? – Check :-)

Why Uganda?

Last year I quit my job. It’s been a couple of busy years and so I had accumulated two months of unused vacation days. As I didn’t just want to spend my vacation hunting for a new job, being on standby, doing job interviews and so on I decided to focus on a personal project for now. So I started to thinking about how to spend my holidays before getting back to my orderly life in good old Switzerland.

Where to go? I mean it’s a big and beautiful world and there’s plenty of great places to be discovered. I thought about visiting a former workmate in Thailand or travelling to New Zealand.  During my daily workout some idea flashed through my mind: why not doing something meaningful instead of just go travelling? Why not going to Africa, the cradle of man, to work as a volunteer? I couldn’t get rid of this craze during the next couple of days and started to do some research about this topic. Geez, there’s so many organisations offering volunteer jobs and there’s really so much crap going on in this area! Charity turns out to be real big business.

Well I’ve learned a lot from my research and discussed my plans with some friends. I also reflected a lot about the pros and cons. Finally I had to pose a question to myself: Why would I want to do this? Would I want to do it for the right reason and would my work really be appreciated? The answer was: I don’t know, but I knew that I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Suzie I got introduced to the president of the foundation Stiftung Licht für vergessene Kinder whom I contacted a couple of weeks ago. After a phone call he invited me home to discuss my request and to tell me more about his foundation. The foundation's goal is to support orphans and abandoned kids all over the world. I liked what he told me and what they did for the kids in Africa and India. Unfortunately he also mentioned that there will not be enough work to do for me but he had the idea that I could work for his sister who’s been living in Uganda for a couple of years and is donator for the Foundation for Local Farmers in East Africa. She lives in Chopalwor, near Masindi where she’s running the Eco-Farm and other projects on behalf of her foundation. He told me that he was going to visit his sister for a couple of days. He would discuss my volunteer’s work with her and proposed to meeting again after his return.

That’s what we did and it confirmed my resolution to going to Africa!

Personal project? – Check :-)