The Visit to Ddimo

This week, we took a trip to visit Ddimo, the fishing village at the end of the road that runs from Kalisizo to Lake Victoria.  The town has about 3,000 residents, so significantly bigger than Lwemode, but from the looks of it there was a huge grid presence.  Betty told us that if we didn’t sample the water while we were there, we would have bad luck on every return visit, but we decided that bad luck is a better option than schistomiasis, or whatever parasites make it so you can’t swim in the lake.

Do they sell a lot of fish from Ddimo?  Ish.

This is how Ronald McDonald and his colleagues looked as they visited the site of their second McDonald's.

The ultimate purpose of our trip was to scout out a spot/see if this is a suitable place to set up Branch #2 of the center’s internet café franchise.  Earlier in the day when we were brainstorming, Junior and other center members had suggested we set up a second internet café in Ddimo, and two members would move to Ddimo to start it up and run it with the intention of eventually forming a group of people who are from Ddimo who can run it for the center.  This seems incredibly ambitious, and I’m surprised that two members would be willing to move to Ddimo in order to get this up and running, but every time that we’ve seen any sort of ambition with this group there seems to be follow through to match it. 

Julian and I are obviously incredibly excited about an expansion like that, bringing the same services to another underserved area.  However, we do have some concerns about benefit to Ddimo itself.  There do exist phone charging and even phone repair services in Ddimo (although the people who repair phones in Ddimo do send the phones they can't fix to Bbale, one of the Lwemode Youth Center members already), and anything that the center sets up in Ddimo would almost surely begin as a phone charging/phone repair center.  We're looking into the amount of investment required to bring computers and internet to a shop, but setting up a new shop, so incurring new start-up costs like rent, supplies, etc., would require some time between beginning to generate profits and making large investments like computers and a monthly internet plan.  If the place ultimately provides a currently unavailable service, internet and computer access, then that's positive, but during the time that it only provides already existing services and has profits going towards a group not based in Ddimo, it can't be incredibly beneficial for Ddimo.  Hopefully enough of the capital gets reinvested in the project in Ddimo that this won't be an issue, but it's something that we are slightly worried about.

Briefly discussing wind power options.  (That idea was squelched because wind in Ddimo is incredibly seasonal, and essentially only blows three months a year. 

Another concern is internet availability.  Mobile phone companies provide basically all internet access here in Uganda (Orange is apparently the best company, providing internet via an orange stick that plugs into a USB port) and even while we were up at Ddimo, Junior had trouble placing calls to Lwemode about some problems with his pine tree plantations.  Julian is on the case though, investigating methods of signal enhancement!