We went to Jinja today – the second largest
town in Uganda and about 75 miles from Kampala. There were two reasons for
going there I guess: firstly it’s a well-known tourist spot, so a good enough
reason for a family on holiday to visit it. But it is also on the itinerary for
one of the CRED teams in October so with my team’s coordinator hat on I had to
do a risk assessment and plan the finer details of what the team would be doing
on their visit.
One of the key reasons that Jinja has
developed into a tourist location is that it is situated on the banks of Lake
Victoria at the point where the mighty River Nile starts its journey north
until it enters the Mediterranean Sea. Thus Jinja is officially known as the
Source of the Nile.
As far as that goes, there’s not actually a
lot to see apart from a lot of water that somewhere stops being Lake Victoria
and starts being the River Nile. But one of the tourist industries that really
built up around it all was the ‘Nile Adventure’ industry, including a lot of
white water rafting due to the presence of a 7km stretch of the river that had
a series of pretty impressive rapids that people would raft down with great
delight and fuelled by a mssive surge of adrenaline.
The main place to do this rafting, and an
area of outstanding beauty, was the Bujagali Falls located 10km downstream from
Jinja, and the point where the rapids were really really impressive. I have
been there several times – not to do the rafting (too much of a woose for
that!) but to enjoy the beauty, majesty and power of the Falls, and also to
watch others who are braver souls than I, as they hurtle down the rapids.
Today, when we visited, it was a very
different scene that greeted us. Gone are the rapids, gone is the rafting and
gone are most of the tourists – arrived is a massive great hydro-electric dam,
a flooded valley, and some pretty fed up locals.
Uganda is a developing nation, and
understandably is keen to find ways to increase its revenue as well as achieve
secure sources of energy. With all that energy contained in the River Nile
being right on its doorstep, it is no surprise that it is harnessing the power,
and using it not just for domestic power but also as a precious export.
Of course this has been done time and
again, all over the world, to various degrees in the name of progress. But
today was the first time that I actually met people who had been affected by
it, and heard their story – it brought a personal dimension that I’d not encountered
before.
Alex, and his brother Emmanuel, have lived
all their lives in and near Bujagali Falls. The water has been their permanent
friend, as well as provider of food, and source of employment. Before the dam
was built, Emmanuel earned money as a white-water rafting guide, and Alex was
known as the ‘jerry-can man’ due to his ability to ride the rapids sitting
astride a jerry-can! Indeed I remember seeing him in action, and afterwards he
would come out of the water and chat to the tourists and live off the tips that
he was given. Both of them made a reasonable wage out of it, and enjoyed what
they did.
But then the dam came, and the valley was
flooded. The water level rose by 25m, most of the islands that were dotted
within the river disappeared, and Emmanuel no longer had any white-water
rafters to guide, and Alex and his jerry can were made redundant.
Chatting to them today, they said how they
had been given a small amount of compensation - $500 total. Not very much for
the loss of a livelihood, but thankfully they were smart enough to invest the
money and bought a simple boat that can seat up to 15 people and with that they
are slowly building up a business in boat rides around the area.
We gave them some business today, and had a
very pleasant hour or so being guided past submerged islands, with just the
tops of the trees sticking out, and seeking out some of the birds that live
along the water’s edge. Four varieties of kingfisher, plus cormorants, herons,
storks, smaller birds, monkeys and even a monitor lizard were spotted, and the
lads delighted in telling us all everything they knew about each species.
But we also went past people trying to eke
a living out of the remaining bits of their land – the land that was the higher
ground, and is now at water’s edge. Farmers growing their daily food on land
that is very steep and precarious, when once they had had good land that gently
rose from the riverbanks. And of course in this country where 25m is a lot more
than the length of some people’s plots of land, there will be many families who
have lost all their land and are now living somewhere new, starting again with
trying to make ends meet.
In this time of climate change and
increased greenhouse gases due to excessive consumption of carbon fuels, the
need for alternative energy sources is more acute than ever. And as Uganda
seeks to develop itself as a nation, it is good to see how hydro-electric power
will be aiding that, rather than fossil fuels. It could be said that it would
have been irresponsible to do otherwise. But it adds an extra dimension to the
whole story when you meet some of the victims, and the situation moves from
being a faceless case-study of international development, to a personal story
of survival.
Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit shown
by Alex and Emmanuel I’m hoping they’ll do OK. Oh that it might be so for all
the other families affected by the big new dam at Jinja.
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