Taking Henry home!

Students go home!

Henry looking smart in his suit ready to go home.

On May 1st we went back home to the village where one of the students we have been helping by paying some of his fees and providing money to buy the resources he needed for teaching practice. Final exams were over and we arrived at college to collect him, his trunk, mattress and a bunch of matoke (green bananas). Other students were piling into matatus (taxis) with all their gear. What a welcome we received! His family live very near Lake Kyoga and the Kenyan border about four hours north of Kampala. All the family and neighbours came out to meet us and then we were invited into a traditional hut with a 3-piece suite and a table squashed in and Henry's father said a prayer and made a speech welcoming us. They served us sodas, hard boiled eggs and nuts and then each family member was introduced and shook hands. We were then taken to see the crops they grow on their plot of land and the goat project that they are setting up to support the family. Henry has 3 brothers and 2 sisters. We then had lunch! They brought many bowls and serving dishes with potatoes, rice, matoke,chicken, goat, a salad of carrots, peppers and avocado and what they call 'soup' a thin vegetable stew like gravy. The very odd thing was that having brought in this feast and said another prayer, all family members left and we were there on our own!! Do we serve ourselves and eat?......will Henry or his Mother or Father join us?.......should we wait?......we looked at each other.......!!!! Luckily our driver Joseph who we know well ,returned from changing the flat tyre on the car and explained that we should eat as the custom is for men in the family to eat together, women to eat together and honoured guests (us!) to be served separately! The food was very good, far more than we could eat and I hope the family would eat what we left. That sort of 'spread' is definitely not the usual fare! We had taken some money as a gift towards the goat shed roof but were also given a copy of their project funding request for 17million Ugandan Shillings!! A bit more than even us 'muzungus' have to spare.

The village

The rock!

The goat shed without roof.

Quote from the covering letter: It is indeed a pleasure to be with you today in our family. Surely, your historical visit shall never be forgotten. God is indeed great.Indeed our guest, on behalf of this family, allow me to deliver a note of appreciation for accepting to travel all the way from Kampala to what I can proudly refer to as your second home.Surely our dear guest, it is hard to get the exact words worthy or equivalent to all that you have done for us.

Our meeting with the family was in some ways strangely formal with well organised introductions and the children only allowed to peep into the hut to see these strange people! Henry and his brother took us to see an amazing volcanic rock in the bush about 100m high and about 500m long! Then we returned to say goodbye to be given a woven basket with g-nuts (peanuts) they had grown and some embroidered serviettes and tablecloth. Henry's mother giggled and shrieked both on our arrival and departure, hugging me and laughing as I kissed her cheek!


The Family


We then set off to stay a night in Jinja before going to Sipi Falls which I will write about in my next entry.

Teaching Practice

A few pictures of some teaching practice students in a school near Lake Victoria not far from the college. The compound is better than many I have visited with plenty of space and some swings for the children to play on. It is however on very low lying swamp land and is prone to flooding if the level of the lake rises. Kampala has many properties built on swamp levels and they regularly flood. This is the foundation or 'baby' class and this one has only a few pupils. The students here worked hard to produce some colourful charts and teaching aids to help their teaching. The number cards are made from old cardboard and soda bottle tops. Balls, skipping ropes and dolls are made from polythene, palm leaves and banana fibre. There are no ready made resources in most classrooms.

Another school where I was observing in baby class had 40 pupils squashed on benches in a 'lean to' wooden shed on the side of the building. The young boys and girls are still pretty amazed to see a 'muzungu' (white person) and come to touch my arm to check the colour doesn't come off!! Some days I am stroked by many small black hands and scruitinised very closely! It is very funny and I feel sorry for the poor students trying to teach. In this class I went along the benches so they could all shake my hand so we could get on with the lesson!

At break they all run off to get their 'porridge' made with maize meal, looks and has the consistency of polycell wallpaper paste! They always offer me some but I had some once and that was enough! It is a hot filling mid-morning snack for them though, many families are very poor and have a very poor diet. At college the students are fed 'porridge' for breakfast and break, posho (another maize meal delight, white and solid and tasteless) with beans at lunch and supper. The fruit here is abundant and for us very cheap but it is never served at meals. If they want fruit they have to buy it themselves which is a luxury most cannot afford.

Teaching Practice is over, the external examiners came last week so I hope most of the students have passed. They now have a couple of weeks to revise before their final exams.

I have designed a simple sheet on the computer which I hope the college will let us use as the 'Examination Seating Plan'. Last year I was amazed when they gave me paper and a ruler so that each invigilator could draw a plan of the exam room and fill in the student code numbers for each exam. The cultural paper has four parts(music, art/craft, R.E. and P.E.) and you have to do a plan to go in each envelope of answer sheets! So I hope my 'inovation' of a pre-printed pro-forma is accepted which will make it a bit less tedious! I only hope college has a bit of money to print them out............watch this space!!

Easter at Lake Mburo

We spent Easter weekend in Lake Mburo National Park. It is a lovely park, the only one with a complete lake within its boundaries. The tents had en-suite shower etc. and when we wanted a shower Apollo came with a jerry can of hot water which he tipped into a bucket and hoisted it above the tent! There was a open thatched dining/sitting area where they served three meals a day not to mention the odd beer or glass of wine!

We went on a number of game drives and although the park does not have any lion or elephant we saw many different antelope.

These are Topi.

The park also has Impala. Other places we have visited have Uganda Kob but in this park they have impala (Kampala is named after them).

Here is a picture of my favourites,

Waterbuck.

We also saw lots of warthogs, zebra, bushbuck and hippos in the lake. The weather was very un-ugandan! It was so cold and windy on the Saturday evening that the boat trip to look for crocodiles was cut very short. The lake was so choppy the people in the front of the boat were soaked! Then on Sunday we had booked a guided walk in the bush but it rained all day!! We had to go in the car!

These dung beetles were amazing! Two lovely metallic green beetles about the size of the end of your thumb co-operating to roll this ball of dung! Well I thought it was pretty clever, anyway!!

It was a lovely weekend.

One year on!

We have been here now for a year, I cannot believe how quickly time is passing!! Here are some photos of our field trip to Budongo Forest to one of UCUs projects.

A trading centre where we stopped to buy provisions to take to the research camp. The butchers where we bought meat!
The banda at the camp - in the forest and below the 'facilities' a bit of a trek in the night!!!

Budongo Forest is in the north west of the country not far from Lake Albert. They are researching how to stop the animals eating the village crops and so stop the villagers killing the Chimpanzees and other monkey species (black and white colobus, Vervet, Blue and Red-tailed) all of which we saw at close quarters.

The research camp is in an old, abandoned logging station. At least they have stopped felling trees there. Much of the forest has already been destroyed. We stayed for the weekend and I was able to track chimps with the researchers while Rob visited the test sites for growing crops the animals do not like. They plant tea and chillies, which they do not like, around the maize and banana crops to dissuade the animals from eating them.

Tracking the chimps was amazing.

The only problem was that I was so
excited being so close my photos were pretty terrible! The female kept looking back...to check we were still keeping up??!!

2008!

Happy New Year!

We returned to Uganda on January 10th having enjoyed a very hectic but very enjoyable month in England and then a few days in Cape Town on our way back. It was great to catch up with family and friends but were very pleased to return to the warm, bright sunshine! The first week back we had no power, no internet or telephone so we definitely knew we had returned to this 'developing' country!

Teaching was hectic for the three weeks of the in-service teaching programme but I really enjoyed being back with the huge classes (over 100) of very appreciative teachers. We then had some time before our pre-service students return so I was able to join Rob on a field trip to one of the charity projects.

We went to Queen Elizabeth national park to Ishasha to see the trench they have dug and the fence to keep the elephants from wandering out of the park and eating the villagers crops. It is 20kms long!

We stayed in a town called Kihihi which was very busy and 'African' and had several game drives in the park. We looked in vain for the famous tree-climbing lions but they had killed 2 buffalo and so remained on the ground. We decided they were too full of buffalo to climb! It was brilliant, QE is a lovely green park with many animals. We also went to Rwenshama on Lake Edward to see the rescue boat station. The hippos were just off-shore where the fishermen were bringing their boats out! Hope these photos give some idea of what a great trip we had.....we are so lucky to have this opportunity!

Herds of Buffalo (Queen Elizabeth NP)

Elephants (Queen Elizabeth NP )

These 2 young bulls posed for a few photos and then started to threaten so we left them in peace!

Rwenshama-fishing boats on lake Edward

hippos in the water!

Vultures at a buffalo kill

Ishasha wilderness camp. Congo border just across the river so they have closed the camp for safety. It was an idyllic spot with many birds and hippos in the water - very close!!

Last Post?

I thought that my last post was the last one before we come back.... if you see what I mean?!! But CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) in Kampala means we have a 2 day public holiday and travel anywhere in the city is almost impossible as they keep closing roads and the place is crawling with security 'police'. As the college is on one of the main roads to the main conference centre we are probably going to stay at home!! Hence I thought you might be interested in the college Music Dance and Drama House Competitions. They took place on Saturday on the theme of 'HIV/AIDS Prevention through Behaviour Change'. Each of the four houses (named after the Uganda martyrs - St. Joseph, St. Lwanga, St. Andrew and St. Kizito) took part in choral singing, traditional dance and folk songs, drama, poetry and a speech. Each item was adjudicated and marks given and St. Kizito house won( the first time ever!). My house, St Andrew sadly, only managed third place overall but I was happy as the poem and the speech, which I had helped to write and coach the performers in, both won their sections! It was very 'Ugandan' in that the students left all rehearsals and writing until the week before and we had to give every afternoon over to practises not lectures! However our play which was written the evening before also managed a second place! It was a very colourful and energetic affair with lots of drumming and bright costumes and much teasing amongst tutors and students as to which house was the best!

Rob was invited to present the prizes with the college Principal and they were mobbed by excited students as the final marks were announced! It was another very different experience for us compared to the somewhat serious and restrained music/ballet festivals we are used to.

Exams and teaching practice

We are looking forward to our trip back to the UK for Christmas and hope to catch up with everyone and all the news!!

I have just finished marking 79 exam scripts for one of our two year one pre-service classes. I thought you might like some of the answers given to a question on the Professional Education Studies paper in the special needs section......

'Briefly explain the causes of physical disability'

Answers included the following:-

'Witchcraft whereby one may be bewitched.'

'That family planning is also another cause.'

'Mistreating, especially by the step-mother.'

'Going to small gods because they can give medicine to a woman who is pregnant to produce a boy or girl according to her choice and end up producing a disabled baby.'

'Natural calamities such as mountain erruptions when the hot magma comes out.'

'Some people get a disability because they were cursed.'

Rather sadly the following are correct answers that show the difference between being born here and the first world........

'Poor nutrition - children end up suffering from Kwashiorkor, Marasmus or Rickets.'

'Diseases like Polio or bad Malaria.'

This is a school near the college where I supervised the students on Teaching Practice. It is run by a church charity for disadvantaged children and orphans and unusually has very few puplis at the moment. I was told it was because it is built on rented land and the owners have given the school notice to vacate the land. It is called 'Rivers of Joy Primary School' and here are a couple of photos.