Flowering plants rise from a lake onto a wooden boat. The watery garden enchants visitors to Kampala, Uganda. The vessel is one man’s attempt to protect a beloved African lake.
Lake Victoria is the world’s second-largest freshwater lake. It spans three countries. Yet it is plagued by sand mining, runoff waste, a decline in water levels, and pollution. Lots of pollution.
Former Lake Victoria tour guide James Kateeba’s Floating Island began as an elaborate recycling project. Kateeba constructed a bottle-buoyed boat in 2017 from plastic waste.
Heavy rains often wash waste into the lake. Kateeba asked fishermen from nearby landing sites to collect plastic bottles for a small fee. Within six months, he had more than 10 tons of trash. He tied batches of bottles in fishing nets and daubed them with dirt. That created a base for the boat. The contraption also provided fertile soil for climbing tropical plants to root. Their roots entwine around the plastic bottles, making the structure more secure.
Today, Kateeba uses the Floating Island as a restaurant—though he insists it’s first and foremost “a conservation effort.” The eatery comfortably serves 100 visitors at a time and can be unmoored to drift for pleasure.
Many who come to relax in this suburb of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, know nothing of the boat’s backstory.
Businessman Jaro Matusiewicz visits from Greece. He had “never seen a place like this,” he says, praising the boat’s atmosphere as he eats fish and chips aboard.
“If he’s collecting the bottles and using them, it’s fantastic!” Matusiewicz says. “You are not only cleaning the environment but also providing something unique.”
A similar project launched in 2018 in Kenya. A group built a small boat known as the Flipflopi from flip-flops, bottles, cups, and other plastic trash gathered along the Kenyan coastline. In Mexico, Richard Sowa lived on an island also floating on plastic bottles.
Like these other conservationist makers, Kateeba hopes his boat is an example. He says, “We should be able to encourage other people to design things . . . to deal with plastic pollution.”
“We had a problem of pollution as a country,” Kateeba says. “I decided to design something out of the ordinary.”
Wisdom helps one to succeed. — Ecclesiastes 10:10
Why? Recycling isn’t just a pop culture trend. The world is filled with opportunities to do good with mercy and wisdom and to model our lives after God’s great purpose of “making all things new.”
