It's almost a month since our last blog. Since then we've taken to living in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. It is a lively place but with rush hour pollution you could cut with a knife. A trip to the shops feels like the equivalent of smoking a packet of cigarettes every day!

After over a year without really stopping anywhere, waking up each morning in the same bed is an odd (but welcome) feeling. Having rented a gorgeous apartment the - gasp! - fully tooled up kitchen has seen our culinary cravings run amock: an outpouring of curries, cakes, freshly baked bread, stews and all manner of other half forgotten treats have been conjured up in our little gas oven.

The real purpose of this hiatus, of course, is for our major volunteer activity: the Rocket Stove project in Uganda. Though it sounds futuristic, the truth is more prosaic: helping a company with a new type of stove that burns fuel efficiently.

There are a range of benefits with this product:
* Environment: deforestation is a major problem in this part of Africa - less fuel burned in stoves means more trees left standing;
* Climate Change: less fuel burned means fewer carbon emissions with an impact on the rate of global warming;
* Health: the "double combustion" technology of the rocket stoves fully burns wood, meaning less smoke - respiratory disease is a big problem as most folks here cook inside with no chimney;
* Economic: and finally there's a financial effect, as families save money on fuel and the stove sellers create jobs for stove builders.

This is an example of the "seed financing" approach to development aid - supporting individual entrepreneurs whose success will help the wider community. In this approach, the people best suited to solve the problems of Africa are the Africans themselves - we simply provide the benefits of our training and expertise. It is at the opposite end of the spectrum from crisis aid or big international development programmes, which have been criticized for fueling corruption and creating dependency culture in the developing world. It's easy to pull apart any attempt to help out but there is a growing sense that big aid projects often reduce developing countries' ability to be self-reliant. Eritrea (drought and civil-war riven neighbour of Ethiopia) has even gone as far as refusing any further food aid - preferring to solve their problems independently, no matter how hard.

Anyway, though aware that our contribution won't change much in the big scheme of things, we are excitedly working on putting I.T. systems and business processes in place to help the Ugandan stovemakers extend their organization. Our first steps are building a system to track and interact with their customers and a website to market the organization to the world. Along with this, we are looking at their marketing strategy and business processes, providing recommendations on how to scale-up their business from its current Kampala area to a national (and later international) operation.

Along the way there are again some interesting challenges dealing with African culture, working in the voluntary sector and even very practical problems: daily power cuts that cause work to grind to a halt; massive thunderstorms that explode out of nowhere, just as we commute on the back of "boda-boda" motorbikes through rush hour traffic and - wildest of all - the major earthquake that set our walls shaking and had us running for the shelter of our doorway on the eve of Cheryl's journey into her 32nd year.

Check our Latest Adventures section below for pictures and stories from South Africa or Botswana or Zambia.