“You go in to solve one problem, and you have all these problems,” said Joanna McDonald, operations director for National Lake Rescue Institute in Uganda. McDonald has been in Homer since October, working as a handler at the Howling Husky Homestead and learning to mush sled dogs with Linda Chamberlain.

“MegaFloat,” McDonald’s exhibit this month at the Homer Council on the Arts, shows how the NLRI developed a locally made life jacket — and used art to teach Ugandans to accept the bulky, bright orange life jackets the locals call MegaFloat. The show includes McDonald’s description of the project, with photographs by Captain Atube John Bokki, manager of the MegaFloat factory, and paintings by Simon Banga, MegaFloat’s resident artist.

“MegaFloat is about so many things,” said HCOA director Hope Finkelstein. “It’s about ocean safety, sustainability and a community taking care of oneself.”

McDonald, 32, a native of Stonehaven, a fishing village in northeastern Scotland, grew up working in marine rescue with her father, Hamish McDonald. After graduating from the University of St. Andrews, Fife, she went to work for her father’s company, Maritime Rescue Institute.

She spent three months last summer in Kaiso, Uganda, getting the MegaFloat program going. American mariners have the luxury of safety services like marine weather forecasts and the U.S. Coast Guard and the USCG Auxiliary. Uganda has had no lifeboat service, no weather forecasting and no marine safety programs.

“There’s nothing,” McDonald said. “There really is nothing.”

A village of 2,600 on the eastern shore of Lake Albert, Kaiso, like Homer, has a large fishing community. Seventy percent of its income comes from fishing or fish selling.

People travel on ferries, 20-foot wooden boats with 25 horsepower outboard motors, loaded with passengers and freight and only a few inches of freeboard. A warm, freshwater lake, Lake Albert can go from flat calm to a roaring thunderstorm with high waves that can swamp a boat in minutes.

“If you drown, no one will look for you and no one will record your death as a statistic,” McDonald said. “You will just be gone, just another one of thousands of men, women and children who drown in Africa’s Great Lakes every year.”

Photo by Michael Armstrong A comic strip by Ugandan artist Simon Banga was one of the tools used on the Mega Float project to teach people about using lifejackets.

In designing MegaFloat, the NLRI wanted a lifejacket made from locally available materials, with no fancy snaps, zippers or reflective tape, but that met international safety standards.

Something given away would be cut up and sold for parts, so MegaFloat is sold, on the theory that mariners would protect their investment.

Oh, and it had to have a cell phone pocket, because even though African mariners don’t have radios, almost everyone has a cell phone and a prepaid phone card.

The NLRI came up with something similar to the old Mae West lifejackets, a U-shaped ring of fishing floats held together in a fabric tube with long string ties — in bright international orange. Price: $7.

“They love the color,” McDonald said of the Ugandans who have tried out the life jacket. “They love the fact that it’s really bulky. They love that feeling of security.”

Another challenge has been convincing mariners MegaFloat works. Last summer, NLRI teams traveled around Uganda in a Jeep, flying its logo on a bright orange flag. Banga, the MegaFloat artist, drew a series of comic strips showing how to put on the jacket and why it should be worn. The big test is to get a volunteer to try on MegaFloat and jump in the lake.

“You put them in, and it’s like an epiphany,” McDonald said. “‘I’m floating on water. How can it be?’’

After convincing mariners to buy a MegaFloat, McDonald said she hopes they will at least keep a life jacket on board, and put it on when a storm blows up. The NLRI also would like to see life jackets worn by ferry passengers.

Finkelstein is talking with people in Seldovia to have the MegaFloat exhibit on display there this summer. She encouraged school groups to see the exhibit. A large poster is there for people to sign and send messages back to Kaiso.