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glenbrae school support staffe bay

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the storry of petscot

There is a kerosene lamp known in the Luanda language as tandoori. It burns like a candle and it gives off thick dark smoke that slowly causes a black coating on the roof of the house, the walls, the furniture and other household items. It is the commonest type of lamp used in poor homesteads in Uganda. Meanwhile, our forests are diminishing because about 95 per cent of the country’s households depend on firewood and charcoal for cooking. The use of lamps such as tandoori for lighting and firewood for cooking leads to household air pollution dangerous to human health. Nearly 20,000 young children die of indoor air pollution-related pneumonia annually in Uganda, while globally an estimated 3.5 million deaths every year are associated with the problem – mainly women and children in low-income countries1.

Currently, according to the government’s Rural Electrification Strategy and Plan 2013–2022, less than 5 per cent of Uganda’s rural population has access to hydroelectricity. This low level of electrification is an impediment to achieving the desired transformation, which includes the provision of cleaner and more efficient technologies for cooking and lighting in all households2.

During the civil war in our country (1980–1986) my wife, Mary, and I lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where we used electricity for lighting and other household purposes. As we prepared to return to Uganda when the war came to a close, we sold off the television, the cooker, the refrigerator and all our other electrical appliances, since we would not be able to use them in southern Uganda where we meant to set up a small farm and where we had no electricity.

Both Mary and I had grown up in homes without electricity and we knew what to expect, but not our children. When they saw their mother lighting the tadooba, one of them said, “Mama is lighting a small stove”. They had to see for the first time a charcoal flat iron used for pressing our clothes. They were alarmed to watch her laying the firewood and lighting the fire in the small grass-thatched shade that passed as our kitchen, fearing that it could catch fire and that she could even get burnt herself. It took all of us quite some time to get used to life without electricity.

In 2004, thanks to DANIDA, a Danish donor agency, and the government of Uganda, hydroelectricity was to be extended to neighbouring Rakai district, and our Member of Parliament, Gerald Ssendaula, announced that the transmission lines were to pass through our home area and that several villages including ours – Ngereko in Kisekka sub-county – were to benefit. The good news arrived when we were still burdened with our children’s college tuition fees and the construction of our present house.