End of Term?

On July 29th we celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary! Who would have thought we would be celebrating 35 and 36 in Uganda!! We spent the evening having a lovely meal at the Japanese restaurant just over the road.

This is my 20 minute walk to get the matatu down to college each day. The water in the distance is Lake Victoria.








Sometimes I meet cows being taken for grazing on pieces of waste ground. They are also seen on the busy Ggaba Road some mornings!

These are the little 'shops' just down the lane.








We buy fruit and vegetables here and now do not pay 'Muzungu' prices. They charge us reasonable prices. A big hand of about 20 bananas are usually about 65p and a huge pineapple about the same!

Term dates said the end of term was August the 22nd. Exams were to be the week before but on Friday (1st Aug.) I was teaching the last lesson when the Dean of Students came to say exams had been postponed until the beginning of next term and the students were all to go home this weekend! A bit sudden! The reason I am told is that the college has run out of money and so cannot afford to buy any more posho and beans to feed the students for the final three weeks of term. Tutors have not been paid for two months and a notice went up on the staffroom notice board to inform us that our salaries had not been credited to our accounts and we would be paid 'when the college had the money'! We all said we wondered if that would be Christmas! I gather that this is not an unusual state of affairs and schools often close early becuase they cannot feed their boarders. I feel really sorry for the tutors as they have rent and school fees to pay for their own children. We are all hopeful that the large numbers of in-service teachers arriving on 25th August will pay sufficient fees to pay us all.

Visiting the parish

I helped our college Chaplain, Father Jude to successfully bid to a UK charity called Signpost for money to set up a poultry unit to support disadvantaged families in the parish. Last week I went with him to visit some of these people who live near the college.

This house is lived in by a very old lady. Her daughter told us that she was 70 and although they did not know how old her Mother is she must be around 90! The house is typical, made of mud bricks, rendered with mud and a corrugated tin roof. The view of the 'kitchen' through the window amazed me.

A friend had sent me some lovely little girls dresses which we took to the families we visited. They were so grateful although the children seemed a bit confused as Father dressed them for a photo!

Father Jude dressed this little one. I am not sure she quite knw what to make of it all!

Here are three generations, Grandmother, daughter and grandaughter

This girl in yellow, who was a bit older put her dress on quickly and posed for me! Many of the families are affected by HIV/Aids and it was sad to see how many children were not at school. Even though the government schools offer free education to the first four children, families have to provide uniforms, books, pencils and money for food at school. With families having six or more children it is not possible to send all of them to school. There are in fact nowhere near enough schools so many try to raise the fees for 'private' schools of which there are many. Class numbers are still often approaching 100!

It was an interesting and eye-opening experience. This girl looks after her grandfather who explained the loss of feeling in his feet due to his illness as 'his toes not being in the right order any more'.

New Special Needs Classroom

The school next to the college has a Special Needs class with around seven children with a range of disabilities. Their classroom was very dark and cramped so it was great news that a container company (Maersk Uganda) was donating two containers for new classrooms! I was very unsure about classes in containers but the conversions were great with a roof and windows and some paint they are a great improvement on the previous room. On Saturday we sat around for a couple of hours waiting for the guest of honour who had got lost to arrive so the containers could be officially opened! The choir sang and some trees were planted and after many speeches, a bottle of soda and samosas it was finished!

Rugby!

We have spent many weekends at either Kyadondo or Kampala Rugby Club watching all sorts of matches. Internationals between Uganda and Namibia and also Kenya both won by Uganda so great atmosphere, sevens and womens rugby! These photos were taken this weekend at the semi-finals between the Heathens and Kobs (top division teams) for the Uganda Cup. It was great fun with Kobs winning convincingly 20-16, not the expected result! All the yellow advertising shirts, horns and balloons are supporting the Heathens sponsored by the mobile phone company MTN! As you can see from the photos there was a band, acrobats and cheerleaders not to mention the scantily clad disco dancers with male dancers looking 'cool' in hoodies! Not really what we are used to at Saltash!! Our treat is pork 'muchumo' barbequed pork on a stick and Nile Special beer. It still seems odd to be watching rugby in hot sun in a t-shirt. Rob has joined the referee society and now has a Ugandan IRB qualification for training referees, so he observes them at matches and writes reports. They at least now use the decent metal 'Acme Thunderer' whistles we brought back for them in the new year rather than the awful plastic ones they were using! The support is always very enthusiastic and good humoured with the girls from the Uganda womens team the loudest, often with rude comments to their male counterparts but very knowledgable! They do a 'knockout' countdown whenever anyone is injured!

It is something I did not think we would be doing here!

Murchison Falls

The Nile as you approach Murchison Falls. In some ways the lovely green valley reminded us a bit of the Tamar except the trees are wrong and then we spotted this big crocodile!!

Me at the top of the falls getting wet.....was Rob saying 'back a bit..back a bit!' ???

The regulation photo of the rainbow over the falls. We drove to the top to look down! The noise of the water and the spray was amazing.

We went to see the bottom of the falls on a boat trip. it is very green in the valley with the spray from the falls. Oddly another couple on the boat who were also volunteering in Uganda were living in Launceston and he was one of the people that set up the CFE in Saltash....small world!

We stayed at Paraa Lodge - the view from our room. Did you know more people are killed by hippos in Africa than any other animal?!! This one was grazing happily early morning maybe looking for the swimming pool which was being rebuilt!

Murchison Falls National Park is the largest protected area in Uganda. It is in the far northwest and had some security problems but seems OK now. It has many giraffe. We drove in through forest north of Budongo where the charity has a project and this part of the park is savannah.

This is the ferry from one side of the Nile to the other! While we were waiting for the ferry there was some excitement, the game rangers spotted a dead hippo floating like a huge inflatable toy down the river! It had obviously been in the water some time going by the smell that wafted across! The rangers jumped in a boat to inspect it and came back saying it had been speared.

Staff Outing!

The In-service teachers left last week and the college staff then had a module writing workshop. We spent last week trying to write the subject modules for moderation by Uganda Martyrs University. It has been really hard work and I am still working on the Communication and Educational Technology one with help from another tutor who also teaches the subject. I will also have to write some of the Special Needs Education module but haven't even started that! Pre-service students started drifting back to college during the week asking, 'Did you have a good holiday, Madam?' I suggested that asking tutors if they had had a good holiday was not a good idea as we haven't stopped since they left!!
We did however have a staff outing on Saturday. It was a very typical Ugandan affair! We were told transport would be provided at 10am. The tutor organising the trip did say that it was 'African time' so I knew we would not leave on time! We sat in the staff room reading the newspapers, doing crosswords and some did exam marking. We drank tea and coffee and finally were told the transport had arrived... at 12.00!! The problem we were told was that they had booked three matatus but there was not enough money so after protracted negotiation we were only having one! Matatus seat 14 and there were about 30 signed up for the trip! Not to mention we were also taking the college 'sound system', 4 large speakers plus all the extra bits...computer keyboard, electric cables etc. etc. On top of that there were crates of drink, sodas and beers, plates and of course food. They love their food here in fact if money 'goes astray' it is said 'the money has been eaten'!! Food consisted of twelve large cooking pots with food prepared by students in the Home Economics department.
At 12.30 the first group set off, including me with a large iced cake on my lap! The trip took about 40minutes and we arrived at a beach on Lake Victoria about half way between Kampala and Entebbe. It was a beautiful piece of parkland with green grass stretching down to the lakeside, huge trees with red-tailed monkeys jumping about and lots of birds. I was sorry I had not taken my camera but other places near the lake I have visited have always been a bit 'tatty and tired'! We tumbled out of the taxi, cake intact! We went to a thatched banda with the first food pots only to be joined by another group who had also booked in. We were sent to another banda and then spent time looking for a power source...remember the sound system! Some of the trees had fluorescent lights hanging in them with wires sticking out of broken sockets. Electricity here is pretty scarey...the students attatch the bare wires for the TV (no plug) to the socket by using the plastic top from a biro stuck into one hole and then they stick the wires in the other two.....it frightens me every time I see it but that's how they are used to plugging things in!! Anyway power was found and the sound system sparked -literally- into life. In the park next to us another party was going on and they also had loud music blaring so it was a sort of competition to out do each other! Such a shame in such a lovely place...it would have been so peaceful watching the birds by the water! The matatu had departed to collect the rest of the party so eventually everyone and everything arrived. Lunch finally happened at just after 4pm!!! It was a good spread:- fried chicken, fish, goat stew, bean stew, spinach,green beans, carrots, potatoes,yams, tomato salad, cabbage, chapatis, rice and a sort of gravy called soup! It was piled high on the plates and we ate with our fingers. There was beer and sodas and then we cut the cake. People danced to the music and sat on the grass chatting, The principal attended not wearing her nun's habit much to everyones' surprise. The first group left around 6.30 as the sun set leaving the younger staff members to finish off the beer and hopefully be picked up by the returning matatu! I shall hear about the rest of the evening on Monday!! We have attended a number of functions since we arrived and this one was very typical....non-existant time keeping and huge amounts of food (usually the same dishes) along with loud music! It was good to be out with the staff outside work having fun! Sadly no photos but others had cameras so I expect to see those...probably awful ones of me 'dancing'!!

Sipi Falls

Once we had left Henry and his family we went back to Jinja. Although we have visited Jinja several times we had never actually been to the source of the Nile. We saw where the Nile starts its three month journey of over 4,000 miles to the Mediterranean.

The next day we set off to Lacam Lodge overlooking Sipi Falls half way up Mount Elgon. It was an amazing place on the slopes of the mountain with the most incredible views across the Karamoja plains.

The first waterfall we could see from the camp, the top fall was a three hour walk up the mountain so we opted to walk to the second fall which was an hours walk!

I walked to the another camp called 'The Crows Nest' which was 4,000ft and again the views were breathtaking. The photo shows the thatched roofs of the bandas at Lacam Lodge above the fall on the right of the picture. Our guide George (watching Rob Sketch) took the photo of us looking up at the falls! We are so lucky to have this chance to see such beautiful places.