Time Flies When You're Budgeting And Buying Textbooks And Running Careers Days And.....

It's been a really busy week since my last post (although 20 points for a crested crane in the garden on Wednesday morning, woo!). We spent last weekend in the Central House with the whole group, spending Saturday having our End of Week 2 meeting.  There are lots of exciting plans afoot at each of the different schools, and it was great to see all of the other PWs for a Nile Special, a candlelit curry and a bonfire in the back garden.

After two weeks of getting our bearings, planning, budgeting, scratching our heads a bit and then planning some more, our ideas are really beginning to take shape and we are getting started on the main body of our work and investment. Although there’s lots to do and lots that may change before September,  now seems like a good opportunity to give a brief overview of what we are planning to do with the money we have raised.

Our main priority for the summer is the library. Before we arrived, the school had fewer than thirty relevant textbooks on the premises, and these are shared between 260 students and staff. Our Project Manager assures us that Kakiika’s is the smallest school library she’s ever seen, but it’s still not as small as some technical schools in the area. The textbooks used by technical schools are much less readily available and are significantly more expensive than those on the main secondary school curriculum, making it much harder for schools to provide an adequate number. We have purchased the thirteen curriculum textbooks available locally, and will be sourcing as many others as we can from Kampala or even further beyond.

Not only are we looking to make the library better equipped, we are looking to make the library space well used. Currently, the library shares a space with the staff room, which is occupied during the day and locked after class hours. Our headmaster has very kindly agreed to give up the space to the library, and move the staff room elsewhere in the school, so we will be getting our DIY SOS faces on to refurbish and redecorate. We have started to open the library during evening study sessions, and our new student librarians are doing a fantastic job of running these.

Although the library is our greatest overall project, the most pressing deadline is the End of Term Fair we are organising next week. One of EPA’s focus areas is post-secondary opportunities for students, and technical schools are centred on trades and skills: it would be madness not to marry the two together to encourage students to look beyond Year 3 and consider the true range of options available to them. A range of teachers, governors and external speakers will be running talks and workshops throughout the morning, and we’re really looking forward to the sports tournaments in the afternoon.

After the school holidays, we are also planning to install some concrete hand washing stations to give students proper facilities and a constant water supply to keep themselves clean  - particularly when it’s the dry season and you spend every day up to your elbows in concrete.

Similar stations at another EPA school in Mbarara - we're hoping to build something along these lines

This “brief overview” seems to have grown arms and legs of its own, so it’s probably time to stop. Still having a wonderful time, still happy to take questions from, and still grateful to those of you reading these updates!

Will and the games prefects with sports kit we've bought and rugby balls donated by his former school

Health questionnaires

Uganda Bingo!

Thought I'd post something a little different, if only because budgeting for our water/sanitation projects is making me slightly loopy and after two weeks, I'm finding the quirks of life in Mbarara rather entertaining. Ready to play?

Crested crane sighting: 20 points. They are Uganda's national bird, and rather graceful. Major patriotism points.
Maribu sighting: -5 points. These, on the other hand, are dreadful creatures. Kind of like a cross between a heron and a pelican, but with scabies and a very menacing demeanour, they look simply awful.
Someone shouts "mzungu!" as you walk past: 3 points. "Mzungu" means "white person", but is more a term of endearment and bewilderment than offence. 5 bonus points if the person shouting at you is over the age of 10.
Finishing a Ugandan portion of matoke: 10 points. Matoke is a type of plantain, and a staple of most Ugandan meals. Although very tasty, it's about twice as dense as mashed potato and tends to come piled high. Eating the lot is a commendable achievement.
Falling for mzungu prices: -20 points. 10,000 shillings for a watermelon?! Pffft.
Swerve to avoid an enormous pothole on the road: 2 points. The not-getting-stuck part deserves at least 5, although marks are justifiably deducted for the slightly hair-raising fashion in which we avoid the craters in the road.
Nil points for a boda boda sighting along, as these motorbikes are everywhere, but 2 bonus points are awarded if anything interesting is strapped to the back. A full single bed is a personal favourite sighting.
Someone telling you something is "very OK" or "very fine": 10 points. Huge compliment. Good job.
Impromptu group performance at a school culture day: 15 points for effort, points for coordination and musical talent debatable. On a group visit to Shuuku at the weekend, eleven PWs and two coordinators cobbled together a strange mash-up of "London's Burning" and "We Will Rock You" at the last minute. It was as strange as it sounds. Don't ask. Snaps of some slightly more talented performers below.

All bingo fun and group humiliation aside, it's been an exciting week, as we're coming to the end of our planning time and are starting to make our first investments in the school - more news soon!

Pink shoes and a titanic papaya given to us by one of our colleagues

Thunder Only Happens When It's Raining

Ms Nicks wasn’t wrong – at least on a meteorological level, yesterday afternoon in Kakiika serves as Exhibit A. A sudden crack of thunder ripped through the relative tranquillity of the outskirts of Mbarara and the heavens opened like I’ve never seen before. Coming from a Glaswegian, that’s saying something.

We are right in the middle of Uganda’s dry season, and the lack of rain across the region is proving problematic, even for Kakiika’s impressive water tanks installed by last year’s PWs. Rain is almost clockwork, and is not due until the second week in August; any other rain is, as one man told me, “accidental”.  Any day in the dry season is a good day for rain, but yesterday was a less good day – we had our termly Board of Governors meeting, requiring a full squad of cooks to spend hours in the outdoor kitchen preparing an enormous lunch for us all. On the plus side, by putting buckets outside the door, Alice and I have collected enough rain water from the roof to finally wash our hair!

The outdoor kitchen (before the rain came on...)

Preparing posho, a hard maize meal porridge 

"Do you think there's enough to wash my hair yet?" - Alice

I half-mentioned our church marathon in a photo caption last time I posted. How anyone can spend four hours in a church service, I feel, requires something of an explanation. On Sunday, we turned up at church just before 8am, only to be told that the service we were looking for wasn't until 10am. Returning at 9.55am, we find two men preaching in front of a small crowd, one in Runyunkore and one in English. This, you tell yourself, must be the bilingual service you were looking for. I say bilingual: although there are notionally two languages on the go, the two get carried away and end up shouting over each other, leaving you with no idea who Ezekiel is and why he is in a Valley of Dry Somethings. Before you get too lost, the choir come to wake you up with a wall of the most incredible sound. Whatever your views on religion or its place in the developing world, there is no denying that church in East Africa is of huge cultural, as well as spiritual, significance. It is nothing short of amazing. The music and dancing was non-stop for at least an hour, if not more, as each choir and each singer chips in for some of the worship. Utterly mind-boggling, but so dynamic and energetic that it truly is a joy to watch.

 By this point, you say to yourself, we’re two hours in – pretty respectable effort, must be time to go home after the end of this song. But two more pastors climb the stage and start talking. One in English, one in Ruyunkore. This is the English service we had been looking for – apparently, the last one was a Kiswahili service (?!). So we start all over again. Two more hours pass, there are many anecdotes (the bishops’s wife has had an alarming number of near-death experiences, it seems), and we finally leave, slightly confused , knackered but made to feel very welcome.

In and amongst all of this, work with our partnership school is going really well. Our first week at Kakiika has been largely spent getting to know its community and trying to work out where we can make the most effective investment. As well as sifting through files and cupboards to determine what the school already has to work with, we’re speaking to as many people as we can. We’ve started a suggestion box for staff and students, and over the week we have had some really interesting feedback. Great colleagues, great students, great country – three happy PWs!

Our makeshift suggestion box has been full all week with contributions

Visiting a third year tailoring class, currently at work on traditional Ugandan dresses

One step closer to photos!

Sadly, I'm having a few problems with my own camera, so we're missing a few pictures - including, most importantly, those of the reputed shoes. In the meantime, I have a few of Will's that I thought were worth sharing. Most of them are well-taken, some smartly edited, and all taken in the morning- clearly, they're not mine.

Varying degrees of daft, but all blissfully unaware that we were about to spend four hours in church. 

First day at school today, lots to get stuck into over the coming week and lots more to share with you - more soon!

A Matatu Named Beyonce

I'm in an Internet cafe, the signal is patchy, I reek of mosquito repellent - but I'm here in Uganda! After many hours of flights, airport stopovers and a lift with Beyonce, we have made it to Mbarara, ready to head off to projects tomorrow. Matatus are rather like minibuses, and the most common mode of transport here. They’re quite an experience, and all have rather curious names – “Chelsea F.C”. and “God Is Brave: Kampala Masaka” were our alternatives. Beyonce seems relatively normal in comparison.

Home for the last few days has been EPA’s central house in Mbarara, and we've spent two days firing through some in-country orientation and project planning before our Head Teachers’ Conference tomorrow morning. This is a chance to gather all head and deputy head teachers of our partnership schools, the summer team and the new project workers together to evaluate last year’s investments and discuss the direction of this year’s plans.

Together with my partners, Alice and Will, I will be working with and investing in Kakiika Technical School. Being the only technical partnership school, we have a unique school to work with and we’re all really looking forward to the next nine weeks. Particularly given our newly-discovered shared love of tea.

Unfortunately for the blog, the pink running shoes have remained firmly in the bag. Although, with Lycra leggings not being appropriate for conservative rural dress standards, I will apparently have to learn to run in a skirt over the top. Hmm.

Even more unfortunately, there are still no photos yet – my camera is a) out of battery and b) still a bit sandy from its last outing in Africa, but watch this space!

A Brief Introduction

Back to Africa, back to blogging! Whilst I'm fairly confident my only current reader will be my mum, I feel I should start with a quick introduction to who I am, why I'm blogging and what a pair of pink shoes have to do with anything. A law student and current Project Worker with Education Partnerships Africa, I will be spending the next ten weeks working with the charity in southern Uganda, investing in a technical school in Mbarara to improve opportunities for local young people.

For some unintelligible reason, in a last minute packing crisis, I have packed my luminous running shoes : neon pink, with more garish neon green soles, and inevitably muddy/sweaty/often both. Heaven only knows why I've brought them: as a lifelong exercise-phobe, they are a curious choice to say the least. However, I'm hoping that this blog will serve as a record of my volunteering, my travels and the many weird and wonderful tracks trodden by my pink shoes and I.

*UPDATE -  Finally, one or two photos of the house!*

Pink shoes in our 'shower room'

Pink shoes in the bedroom I share with Alice: the mosquito-net-and-PVC-pipes combo does quite a convicing impression of a luxury, Lawrence of Arabia-esque  four-poster bed...

One of the school buildings and a dormitory