It's not often that boaters can experience what Uganda has to offer, from white water to a surging effort to bring education and opportunity to Ugandans, says white water paddler Bob Daffe.

During a rafting and kayaking trip to the African country two years ago, Daffe, of Whitehorse, came across what he describes as a story of overwhelming devotion. It was created by a couple who are driving the initiative to provide orphanages and schools to impoverished areas.

There is nowhere else he knows of where paddlers can run the rapids for days, then pull over to take a break and offer whatever skills they have to the locally established Soft Power Education initiative.

It's an organization formed by Anna Small, a former truck driver of British descent who used to drive for a tour company that provided long-distance, overland excursions.

It was through her work driving in the mid-1990s that she met her husband, Bingo, who was running a white water paddling company out of Jinja, a community on the banks of the Victoria Nile river that empties into the north end of Lake Victoria.

The couple now have three- and five-year-old daughters. And while Bingo continues to run the white water business, Small has forged ahead with Soft Power Education.

To date, the organization has built two orphanages and is working on refurbishing a number of large primary schools that are in bad shape with relatively small teaching staffs.

As the owner of Tatshenshini Expediting with a passion for white water, much of Daffe's time this trip was spent paddling, though he did do some plastering of walls and painting.

'What is different there, what I have never seen before, is people rafting and kayaking, will suddenly see a place where they can stop and make a difference, and they jump on it,' Daffe said in an interview.

He and his partner, Theresa Landman, also took with them $2,000 US raised through donations collected through Daffe's white water business in the last two years, and by Landman through her colleagues at the Whitehorse General Hospital.

Ayla Kempton, a 19-year-old Whitehorse teenager, was among the three young women accompanying Landman and Daffe, along with Daffe's 22-year-old daughter, Alison Daffe, and 22-year-old Laina Rushtan.

As a member of the Yukon Development Education Centre, more of Kempton's time was spent working with Soft Power Education.

Kempton and Daffe will host a presentation of their visit to Uganda this evening at 7:00 at the Association Franco-Yukonnaise building on Strickland Street.

Daffe said the Soft Power initiative, as opposed to the hard power persuasion of military might and such, has taken hold in and around Jinja.

Uganda is a country of about 27 million people, with some 90 per cent living in the rural areas where there is no electricity, no television or running water, and none of the amenities Westerners take for granted. An individual's bed is often a corner of the dirt floor in the family hut.

With about 20 per cent of the populations affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, statistics indicate Uganda is not as bad off as other African countries embattled by the deadly disease.

Daffe said that when he visited Jinja two years ago, billboards were used to promote the use of condoms as a primary tool to fight the spread of AIDS.

Those same billboards are now being used in a major campaign by a U.S. organization to advertise abstinence from sex as the only effective way to combat the disease sweeping the African continent, he points out.

Daffe said there are those, however, who don't agree with replacing the condom campaign with the promotion of abstinence, and who believe that losing the focus on the use of condoms will only make matters worse eventually.

When big companies or organizations come in with substantial funding for relief assistance, they can come with their own conditions 'and push some of the other programs out of the way, because they don't like what is being said or done.'

With Soft Power Education, said Daffe, the approach is grass roots.

Daffe knows of a Belgian traveller who visited the Jinja area a couple of years ago, returned to Belgium, where he raised $45,000, then returned to Jinja with the money and his time and skills.

There is also the story of the Canadian doctor who ended up in the region because of her passion for white water paddling, and has since returned on a more-or-less full-time basis to help educate Ugandans on the prevention of malaria, which kills 70,000 a year in the country.

Daffe said while the urban residents of the country understand malaria and how it is spread by mosquitoes, in the rural areas where communication is limited, residents don't understand malaria, how its is spread and how it can be prevented.

This same doctor, he points out, is also providing affordable mosquito netting.

Daffe said many of the rural residents are farmers who make their way by growing subsistence crops, mixed with some cash crops like coffee beans.

The Jinja region, said Daffe, is a place where people can go and make a difference.

'And it is easy for us to make a difference,' he said, adding that Self Power Education is a homegrown relief effort.

'It is not a large world organization, and that is what is kind of neat about it.'