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