Uganda Trip: House and Land

What trip goes without disappointments ever? Not this one! The first setback was having no battery juice for the camera on the day we visited my land and also inspected my house. Although I had 3 battery packs for backup, I had forgotten to bring along their charger. As such, there are no current pictures of the house (except the glib below) and none of the land.

The second disappointment was the size of my house. It turns out that on my father's orders, the house had been shrunk from the size called for on the blueprint I kept back in the US, mostly because he thought it was too big. I had not been informed of this change beforehand, only finding out when I commented that the house looked smaller than I thought. Its length was reduced by more than 35 feet, for example, and while the floor plan was kept the same, all the rooms are proportionately smaller than I would like. In fact, we'll end up not having enough dining/living room space and must lose one of the bathrooms because the shrinking left it practically a sliver barely enough to fit a toilet seat. To say I was supremely pissed doesn't describe enough how I felt. If it wasn't near completion, I would have sought to tear down the house and start all over -- to specification (and maybe a different floor plan). Nonetheless, I will work with what we have there.

The house is in the background, seen from the front.

What is left to do about the house are final touches, painting, and furnishing. The doors and windows will need to be redone, the landscaping and grounds spruced up. The plan is to put the house up for rent or set it up as a (tourist) guest house when it is complete, until we retire into it.

The land is out in the village, about 70 miles away from Kasese town (where the house is) off the road towards the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. My mother has done an excellent job maintaining and growing all kinds of staples on it. The only problem I see with it is that it is landlocked and not near the main road. To reach it, you must traverse small paths along other people's land. The plan at this point is to buy the piece of land directly in front of mine (between mine and the main road), or find another nearby that is next to the main road. Land is exponentially more expensive in that area, in what seems like a "land rush" of sorts. Those with bigger chunks of land are growing eucalyptus trees or pepper for export, amidst the usual subsistence crops. So it might take a little while for the landowner in front of me to sell, or for us to find another suitable piece of land adjacent to the road. But whenever that happens, our plan is to build another house and setup poultry farming on it. Poultry is surprisingly a good business in the area, both for eggs and meat.

When we went to visit the land (in background).

The takeaway from this third phase of the trip is that seeing things with your own eyes makes all the difference. I had seen pictures and taken Skype tours of the house and land, but my expectations were still quite different than the reality (especially with the house). But having seen it all, I'm better prepared to plan for and direct development of these properties. I was not impressed with the house, but I like the prospects of the land.

Further out, this is where we plan to retire: into that house (and the new one on the piece of land we are yet to acquire), and to farm the land we own. In retirement, we imagine we will spend half the year in the States with family and grand kids, and escape the colder months to Uganda for a season of farming (cultivation through harvest of some crop). Until then though, we'll visit the country every 2-4 years, do vacations or holidays with family there, or find missionary opportunities in that part of the country. It is a growing trend for Americans to retire abroad, and we are jumping on that bandwagon. We envision our retirement (30 years away still) to be quite active and full of travel or mission work, God willing.