Upland rice lights up Wakiso family

Feb 23, 2005

BRUNO Nzarubara and Regina Namuyanja have been married for 20 years now. They are both aged 45. They have two boys aged 20 and 13. But all this time, the family has lived in abject poverty.

By Denis Ocwich

BRUNO Nzarubara and Regina Namuyanja have been married for 20 years now. They are both aged 45. They have two boys aged 20 and 13. But all this time, the family has lived in abject poverty.

All they had at their residence down the valley in Lwantama village, Kakiri in Wakiso district, is a rickety mud-and-wattle house which could collapse any time.

The house has never had even cow dung or clay smear. It smells and looks like a chicken rest room. The tired wall is slanting, gaping and peeling off. Atop the roof, the decomposing grass has become fertile ground for weeds.

One metre away behind the house is a see-through bathroom-cum-urinal made of dry banana leaves and patched with an old sack. It throws a stench of urine.
A few yards away from the shelter is a classical rural pit latrine that has neither walls nor roof. It is barricaded from only one side facing the compound, by grass ‘wall’. It is home to maggots, flies and nose-splitting smell of human faeces.

Until recently, that was the vicious circle in which the couple was entangled.
Today, Nzarubara and his family have become a symbol of hope and a living testimony to the impoverished that they can also extricate themselves from the fangs of poverty if only one could work hard.

On February 17, fleets of cars including Pajeros, Benzes and Land Cruisers pulled up in Nzarubara’s freshly cleared compound. The guests, including the Vice-President Prof Gilbert Bukenya, had come to launch the Rural Mortgage Housing Scheme for the poor.
Standing right in the middle of the compound was a new two-bedroom house.

“You wonder how they have been sleeping inside that shack, especially when it rained,” one guest commented. It is too weak to withstand a storm.
The couple has no household utensils nor beddings. They hang their tattered clothes on sticks poked into the roof. An old mat passes for a mattress and polythene bags for bedsheets for the couple. “Possibly they use the wife’s gomesi (wrapper) for a blanket,” says Dr. Moses Kizza Musaazi, the engineer who built the new house.
Sooner or later, the situation will change, thanks to Nzarubara’s hard work.
Nzarubara took upland rice growing introduced in Kakiri some months ago seriously.

When he ambled to the microphone, he had no words. He stood beside his wife in front of their old hut, both hands folded across their chests, overwhelmed by the new development

Poverty and humbleness were written all over their faces. Nzarubara looked at the new building and mumbled, “It is all because of rice.” Perhaps he had never dreamt of living in a permanent house but one acre of rice did the magic.

Bukenya handed over the keys of the new sh4m house to Nzarubara said by growing rice, farmers are able to earn good money which, if properly saved, could boost their livelihood.

He cited Nzarubara who had so far saved sh790,000 on his bank account. This is how he become the first beneficiary of the project.

Bukenya said the mortgage scheme is President Yoweri Museveni’s vision to transform the poor. It mainly targets peasants who can show commitment and ability to save money to pay for the mortgaged house in three years. But Bukenya feels that those who grow rice, sunflower and soya beans have a higher chance of saving because these crops have better returns.

“One of the major things that needs to be transformed for the rural poor is housing,” Bukenya said.

From Wakiso, the rural housing mortgage scheme will roll out to other districts.
Bukenya estimated that 450,000 households (about three million Ugandans) are living in abject poverty.
“If every poor peasant got such a house, the villages would be transformed,” Bukenya said.

At least 38 per cent of the 26 million Ugandans are living below the poverty line. Like Nzarubara, they can hardly afford a meal a day.

To them, owning a permanent house is simply unbelievable. Fo millions of people caught up in such a web of poverty, a project like the Rural Mortgage Housing Scheme is a only ray of hope.

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