First Impressions

Wednesday 17^th September

Today I visited the two CHIFCOD schools in the village: the Primary School and the College. CHIFCOD (Child to Family Community Development Organisation) is an organisation founded in 1993 by four local men, one of them Hamlet Mbabaze, who decided that the village needed better provision for its families and young people. The Primary School was opened in 1994 and has grown year by year and now has several hundred pupils aged 3 to 13 (although there are some older students those who have repeated a year or started late ).

To anyone used to English schools it is easy to be shocked and judgemental about the physical circumstances under which the school functions. There is a blackboard at the front of each quite small classroom; the pupils, between forty and seventy in a class sit crammed onto wooden benches behind narrow table-shelves. They work for solid one-hour periods (apart from Nursery 1 and 2 who work for half-hour sessions), with teachers rotating around the classes, so the children stay put but the teachers move round. They have core subjects of maths, English, Science and Social studies and also do RE, agriculture and cultural (own language) studies. They start the day at 7.30 with an assembly and this morning I woke to the sound of their gloriously harmonious singing, accompanied by drumming, wafting across the valley. Two hour-long periods before break, and two after, take the children to lunchtime. Lunch is cooked at the school in huge pots over wood fires, usually beans and maize porridge. At 2pm they have another two hours of lessons then break again. Although school officially ends at 4.30pm the boarders, which is most of the children over 7, then do prep, and the older children have another prep period from 7.30 until 9.30. At 5.30 they wash their clothes and themselves and have tea. The dormitories have three-tiered bunks crammed together so that thirty or forty children are in one room, for which the children have to bring their own foam mattresses. Washing lines hang above the bunks for the children's clothes to dry on after they have washed them. On each bed is a small tin trunk in which they keep their few possessions. Two matrons look after the separate boys' and girls' quarters and several member of staff live at the school and look after the boarders, after teaching six one-hour periods during the day first! The boarders have lessons all day on Saturday then on Sunday go to Church – and do more prep. 'Don't they get very tired?' I ask. 'They are used to it' is the reply. Indeed, this is the reply to most of my questions about the children's lives. The teachers, too, work incredibly hard; their days are long and relentless. They too, it seems, are used to it. They plan their work for the next day each evening in longhand using carbon duplicating paper for their planning sheets and write each hour's lesson on the board to be copied down by the children; the only way to manage teaching such large numbers of pupils.

The conditions in which the children live and work could hardly be poorer. Even the young children seem to have no play materials or equipment ; the walls are bare, and everything very shabby by our standards. Yet the children are very well-behaved, extremely courteous and perform very well in the national grading tests that take place at the end of Primary 7 when the children are 13: this is a high-achieving school. Their dormitories are bare, bleak and crowded yet for most these are better conditions than they would have at home and they are certainly better fed than they would be there. Most that I see walking along the road or in school have no shoes. I pass tiny children balancing huge plastic water carriers on their heads. A huge number are orphans. Many suffer from malnutrition. Childhood in rural Uganda is very, very hard.

In the afternoon we visit the Great Lakes College ,also in Kinkiisi. A newer, more spacious establishment also built by CHIFCOD, this caters for students from sixteen upwards who want to do diploma, access or degree courses. Some courses are vocational, such as agriculture or office skills whilst others are academic. Students have to finance themselves – there are no student loans – so courses run at weekends, at night and during the holidays for those who have jobs, as well as during the day. There is a two-year teacher training course and the Principal, when I meet him, seems very keen for me to help on the Early Years Teaching Course, both in college and supervising students on teaching practice. He suggests two days a week there but will wait until I have finished all my school visits before committing myself.

Thursday 18^th September

A clear, sunny day after the misty 'wet-season' humidity of the previous two. Today we are to visit another CHIFCOD primary school some distance away in the Rift Valley, close to the Queen Elizabeth National Park, and also the Great Lakes High School which is being built with money raised by Highgate School in 2007 and although still under construction already has pupils. The two hour drive takes us through ravishing countryside of rolling, lushly-vegetated hills and widening valleys. The ubiquitous banana plantations give way to termite-mound covered fields and sparser vegetation: here it is hotter and drier than Kinkiisi and the people are much poorer still since they can grow little to sell. We arrive at Nyamirama School as the Nursery 1 and 2 (Reception) children are doing PE. The school is on a lovely big flat area of grassland and the fifty or sixty children are in an enormous circle playing games and singing – a delightful sight. Once again I am taken from class to class where, in unison, the children chant a word-perfect welcome in each one. I am then invited to make short speech of introduction to which the children listen in an absolute silence that signifies either total incomprehension or extreme courtesy – in the younger classes, certainly the former since they don't learn English until Primary 2 (year 3). The children are beautifully behaved and obedient, the teaching very formal, and the classroom environment spartan in the extreme. This school has smaller numbers in each class – a more manageable 35 -45 – and feels a lot less depressing than the one I visited yesterday – or perhaps I am just adjusting to this new way of school life? Boarding has just been introduced and I am shown the girls' dormitory where 47 mattresses, with no space between, fill the room – they have no money for bunks at present. Many if not most of the boarders have a sponsor through CHIFCOD – the only way they will get an education.

As we leave I see in the playground one of the 'improving' notices nailed to the trees which reads "Remember your responsibilities as children" - little chance to forget them when most have to go home and fetch water, gather firewood and carry out other household tasks....

Then on to the Great Lakes High School, about an hour's drive back along the red, dusty track. We stop to give a lift to two women who are walking to see a relative in hospital, each carrying a baby and a suitcase. They have already been walking for some time in this fierce heat and without the lift would be walking for many hours yet – and back again. When they have got out of the car Kellen tells me that one baby has clear signs of malnutrition, and the mother has already lost three of her six children this way. Sadly, unbelievably, parents have to pay for their children to go to school here, and have to buy their uniform too. Although a very small sum to us, the fees are crippling to such impoverished people and they will sell the food they grow in order to send a child to school, rather than feed the family with it. In government schools they are not fed; but CHIFCOD provides a midday meal for day pupils and three meals for boarders.

Great Lakes High School is set on a hillside with magnificent views across a wide valley. The new buildings gleam impressively in the sunlight; the campus has already been planted with flower beds and trees and looks most attractive. Not all classrooms have been equipped yet and the forty or so students have to carry their all-in-one desk and chair from one place to another for lessons. The fields surrounding the school have already, with the help of students from the College, been planted with maize and vegetables so that they can be self-sufficient, and they have two school pigs who will soon be breeding. The staff are delightful and very welcoming; the students courteous and hard at work. I look down 'Highgate Road' as the drive to the school has been named, and feel sure that everyone who contributed to the building of the school would be pleased and proud with the result of their fund-raising efforts: it is a fantastic achievement and will give the chance of a really good secondary education to so many children in the coming years. There is much still to be done before the school has its official opening in July but all the signs are good!

The Head Teacher is keen for me to come and teach some English at the school; something else to factor into my timetable when I put it together at the end of the week!

Today, Friday, has been the last day of school visits for me – proper work starts on Monday. We went to two even more remote schools up in the cloud-capped hills towards Kibale where the steep slopes are covered with tea bushes. We pass a building called 'Maternity Services and Placenta Pit' before reaching a tiny school built into the hillside where I am introduced solemnly to the staff. Ugandans tend to have either traditional English names such as Edna, Hilda, Eileen or Arthur, or biblical ones like Moses, Amos and(even) Herod. I thought I had encountered most possibilities for unusual names after so many years of teaching; however today I was momentarily thrown to be introduced to a teacher called 'Happy Christmas'....!

NB I apologise for the length of these entries. Once I'm at work I shall probably only update the blog once a week, at weekends. Email is very unreliable out here which is why so much is arriving in one big chunk!