Map

• our work requires lots of off road treks
• there is no good map of the area due to neglect
• Nuru is working to develop a map using GPS starting with the below working rough draft

One of the things we've had to develop in our work is a sense of direction. We have meetings in churches far back in the brush on top of hills, team leaders to interact with dispersed throughout the area, and even the trek into town to get food and supplies is an adventure if you take the "short" cut. Thankfully, we had a map to learn all of this quickly. Oh wait, no we didn't.

Unfortunately the area we work in is rather neglected in many ways, one of them being cartography. The only maps we have been able to find of the area have been very simple, just having one portion of one of the three major roads. This brings me to one of my side projects, a detailed map of the area.

click here to see a larger map

A secondary goal of this map is to give my family, friends, and blog readers (all two of you) an idea about where I'm actually doing my work. I've put markers on some of the important places I've mentioned in posts before such as the towns in the area and our leaders' homes (in purple).

Some interesting things to note, our six leaders were strategically selected to be far apart from each other so we could spread the wealth so to speak. As you can see from the map above, the purple dots are pretty well spread out throughout our working area. Our home is outside of our working region which is all the land between the two intersecting yellow roads and just outside of the roads. The Nuru office for the Community Development Committee (CDC) is near the intersection of the two roads in Nymetaburo at the dispensary marked by the medical cross. The motorcycle ride, our preferred way of transportation, is about 20 minutes from our home to the Nuru CDC office.

The map is a work in progress and I will be adding a lot more information to it as I gather more data. Our long term goal is to provide a map for Nuru to better plan activities and roll outs as well as giving a quality map to local officials who are currently lacking such a tool. We're quite a ways from that but we'll get there. In the mean time, please explore the map and drop me a comment or e-mail if you have any suggestions for the map!

two new pictures