ONE OLD GUY. ONE YOUNG GUY. TWO FOOD EMERGENCIES.

I'm the old guy in this story and my food emergency kicked off in earnest on 23 March. Lockdown day. The day the old world ended and the new world was born. The food bank I manage was presented with a set of seemingly impossible problems. With all churches and offices closed, our usual £4000 a month of food donations were a thing of the past. It was also clear that the days of our being able to spend £500 a week on delivered food from the supermarkets was also a thing of the past. And yet it was also clear that demand for emergency food was about to explode.

The problem seemed all but impossible to solve.

Thankfully as things turned out, my 23 March feeling of dread turned out to be unfounded.

Last week we provided food for 550 emergency food parcels. In the old normal, 100 parcels would have been seemed like a busy week. So. A 500% increase.

People ask me how on earth is First Base managing? How indeed? The answer is actually pretty straight forward. We are managing because we have had unbelievable support.

We have had backing from the Scottish Government and Dumfries and Galloway Council. We have had loads of donations on our online fundraising page. We have had amazing generosity from local food companies. We suddenly have a small army of brilliant volunteers which means more or less every one of the 550 food parcels we issued last week was individually delivered.

The whole thing has grown from the bottom up. In less than a month, a system to rival Amazon Prime has somehow morphed into place. Our local and National governments didn't try to interfere and micromanage. Instead they were wise enough to provide fast track funding. They oiled the wheels and left the community to solve the problem.

And I am pretty sure nobody has gone hungry in Dumfries and Galloway.

It has been a privilage to be a part of what has happened. Truly. My part has mainly been driving my shiny Arnold Clark transit van around the highways and the byways. Blue skies and long views. Referral emails land into the inbox on my phone and every few miles I pull into a lay by to redirect them out to our distribution centres for delivery. A mobile office in the midst of a sun drenched Scottish postcard.

I drive. I co-ordinate. And I spend money. Lots of it. £7000 a month and rising. I can spend the money because First Base has been given the money to spend. Our 500% increase hasn't lifted any of our basic overheads by so much as a single penny. Our monthly spreadsheets show no change for wages, rent, or utilities. The only increase is the cash we spend on bought in food.

With such widespread support, meeting the challenge of the New Normal has actually been surpsingly easy. It goes to show what can be achieved when a community comes together.

We should all be heartened. Proud. Glad to live in a well run country where the old values of community are very much alive and kicking. It is no accident that 82% of Scots approve of the way we are dealing with the Covid 19 crisis. The polls aim the approval at the Government in Edinburgh, but I think it is bigger than that. I think the 82% approval is for all of us and the way we have come together to make sure nobody has been left alone.

Too dewy eyed and wishy washy? Maybe. Everything about the last couple months has made me happier than ever about our decision to leave England behind and to become New Scots. What a relief it is to live in a country where track and tracing will be carried out by local health boards and councils rather than Serco or similar dodgy corporations who happen to have bunged a few quid to the Tory Party. 

Anyway. Enough already. In a nutshell, this has been my part in my food emergency. Challenging but ulitmately hugely satisfying.

Time to move onto the young guy in this story.

Rabson.

And his food emergency. 

And when you have heard about the last two months in Rabson's life, I think like me you will reach the same simple conclusion.

We really don't know we're born.

A little background.

We met Rabson on our last trip to Uganda. We were there to distribute sanitary pads to 2000 schoolgirls in Kabale Province. This is the work of the Kupata Project, a small charity we set up a couple of years ago. 

To get around the place, we hired a Toyota 4x4 from the hotel. The month before we arrived had seen record levels of rain. And believe me, when it rains down there, it really rains. At best, many of the roads are the equivalent of the roughest farm track you will ever find on a Scottish hill farm. If you add in a month's worth of Noah level rain, the roads become lethal.

It is about 10 miles from our hotel to Kabale. The road winds along Lake Bunyoni before heading up and over a mountain. The road snakes and winds up and over and you really don't want to spend too much time looking over the edge. Touch the brake and and you're pretty much sledging. I've done a bunch of driving over the years, but the road to Kabale was a country mile beyond my capabilities.

So it was break glass and ask for Rabson. He would chuckle, catch the keys and throw the Toyota over the hill like a rally driver. He made the impossible seem run of the mill. Had he been on an intensive 4x4 driving course? Of course he hadn't. Somehow he had managed to teach himself.

Rabson is probably the most self made man I have ever met. He has taught himself English as well as twenty local languages. He has self learned all about the animals of Africa. How to find them. Where to find them. How to observe them. And more than anything else, he has taught himself how to solve problems. 

Africa throws up constant problems to overcome. Every hour of every day. Physical problems like roads turned into quagmires. Human problems like bent cops looking for a reason to make your life a misery. Nothing is straightforward and if you're a green as grass Muzungu (White guy), then you need a Rabson to make things go right.

When it comes to sorting things out, Rabson is absolutely world class. Part Artful Dodger, part UN field worker, part PHD high flier.

When we were with him, his life was pretty precarious. Generating enough income to support his family was a constant battle, but he never seemed daunted. If there was a way, then he was confident of finding it.

Well. Rabson's lockdown day made my lockdown day look like a Sunday afternoon picnic.

Lockdown in Uganda meant the borders were closed. No more tourists. No more visitors. Nobody to take out on Gorilla safaris. No income. No nothing.

Lockdown meant millions of Rabsons went from having not a lot to having nothing at all. No furlough schemes. No help for the self employed. No Universal Credit. No nothing.

He headed back to his home town of Kasese and started to get his head around finding a way to put some food on the table for his family.

In Scotland, lockdown means anxiety and boredom and claustrophobia. In Uganda, lockdown means a clock ticking down the days to starvation.

And then Mother Nature decided to intervene with the bottomles cruelty she seems to always save for Africa. The skies turned dark and a vast deluge of rain was thrown down on Kasese. The land was slowly overwhelmed. And then the land slipped and broke. Tides of mud crashed through the town destroying houses and lives. Bridges were ripped away. The hospital was wrecked. People perished in a sea of cloying liquid mud.

Newly homeless and desperate families sought what dry ground they could find and erected makeshift camps. No light. No heat. No food. Minimal shelter. Real deprivation. Ticking clock deprivation.

And with the whole country clamped into lockdown, there was absolutely nobody there to help. Not the Government in Kamapala. Not the UN. Not the Red Cross.

Nobody. The countown to starvation was underway.

A problem. A problem beyond anything we can even start to get our heads around.

A picture paints a thousand words. Well here are many thousands of words. Here is the nightmare world Rabson suddenly found himself in.

Sorry but yes, that is a human leg you are looking at.

So. Here he is. A young guy in his twenties who has just lost his all livelihood, surrounded by a biblical tragedy. How easy it would have been to sink into a pit of despair. But despair isn't Rabson's style.

Instead he chose to take on the problem, just like he had taken on every other problem in his young life. Unlike me, he had virtually no support whatsoever. All he had was a mobile phone and his wits. So he took to Facebook and started to tell the story of fifty men, women and children in a makeshift camp in the midst of a nightmare. He sent the story to people he had taken to photograph the gorillas. People from all corners of the world. He coaxed and cajoled and collected donations through his phone. And with the donations, he went shopping for Posha. Posha is maizemeal and 4kg is enough to keep a person living and breathing for a week.

As I watched his efforts from a digital afar, I wished for the umpteenth time in my life that I had a bank balance like John Grisham. Managing a food bank and writing novels not many people read doesn't give you much of a bank balance. We sent £100 to Peace, our ever wonderful volunteer down in Kabale. We asked her to do her thing and get the cash to Rabson. We also asked her to find a way to get sanitary pads up to the women and girls in the camp.

Between them, Rabson and Peace made things happen. Our £100 was duly turned into a week's worth of Posha and Rabson managed to borrow a motor bike and make the long drive to Kabale to collect the pads.

By hook or by crook, Rabson has found a way to keep the families in the camp afloat. With food and sanitary pads and pots and pans and old clothes and blankets. He has so far been able to solve the problem through ingenuity, determination and sheer force of optimistic will.

Quite frankly, I am in awe. My food crisis has been nothing in comparison to Rabson's food crisis. I have been given so much support and so many resources whilst he has had virtually none.

We live in a world which seems to be slipping over the edge of a cliff into a nightmare. The problems are beyond anything we have seen since the darkest days of the second world war. And really, where do you even start? Billions of people are living through very personal nightmares.

I would like to cut through the enormity of everything and focus in on one remarkable young man who is doing remarkable things in a tiny, forgotten corner of the world.

Rabson.

It is going to take a month or two for the people in the camp to rebuild their homes and their lives. No cavalry are about to ride to the rescue. All they have is Rabson. And my god, they are lucky to have him.

We would like to see if we can help him to help them. The Kupata Project is all about providing sanitary pads to schoolgirls, so we can't use any of the funds we have raised so far to provide emergency food. But any funds we raise in the wake of this blog can be used for emergency food.

To provide 4kg of Posha per week for everyone in the camp for a month costs £400. A fiver each from eighty people.

All I can do is ask for your support because there is a young man out there in the very heart of Africa who is doing something truly remarkable.

I think he deserves our support.

I hope you agree.

Here is the link to the Kupata Project's online fundraising page.

THE KUPATA PROJECT ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE

Thanks for taking the time.