Food for Thought

Q15. Complete the proverb: "Half a loaf…."
Answer: "Half a loaf in the hand is better than two in a bush".
I couldn't agree more with the boy who has offered this sensible answer in the Primary 7 English revision paper and only wish I could give him a mark for such an inventive amalgamation of the two familiar sayings – but sadly, I must stick to the marking scheme which gives no credit for creativity – nor for amusing the marker…

It is Thursday afternoon and Independence Day in Uganda, so we have another public holiday. Although schools are officially closed I have spent the morning up in Kanungu watching the official celebrations with the Kirima children and now I am at home trying to finish the pile of exam marking I was given yesterday. It's been another long morning, this time of speeches, parades, march-pasts and salutes accompanied by a brass band so excruciatingly bad that you admire them just for being brave enough to appear in public. As the people joyfully celebrate 46 years of freedom from British rule I feel, as the only English person there, horribly out of place, like a very conspicuous gate-crasher at an extremely private party, and wonder if at any moment I will be hauled up in front of the soldiers and asked to explain myself, my country and all its imperialist machinations. But no, today the people are in far too good a mood to let the presence of a 'mujungu' – white person – interfere with their festivities and so I can sit back and enjoy myself along with everyone else.

The Kirima choir has been practising hard for today as, along with many of the other local schools, they have been invited to perform in front of the great and the good of Kanungu District Council.Ibsen, the teacher who trains the choir, has bought a new drum for the occasion, made in Mpambire, a traditional drum-making village along the road to Kampala. Earlier this week he showed it to the children proudly in assembly. "This drum", he says "this drum must be respected, do you understand?" He strokes the cow-hide lovingly. "If anyone.." he says in a voice tight with emotion, "…if anyone does not respect this drum, I will…" he pauses, searching for something bad enough that he can threaten "I will…" His voice trails off miserably as he fails yet again to identify a punishment weighty enough to fit such a crime. The children just nod their heads sympathetically; they have got the message. The drum will be respected….

I go to watch one of the first rehearsals, with the respected drum making its debut, held in the dusty stone-floored hall after school. The choir, children ranging in age from nine to fourteen, are in a huge semi-circle and Ibsen demonstrates the rhythm he wants them to clap, an incredibly complex syncopated beat that I cannot for the life of me master – although they pick it up effortlessly. One by one he introduces the body movements, the rhythm to be beaten by their feet and the song, in parts, that carries the whole thing along. Groups of children are selected to perform another set of movements within the circle and they pick up the choreographed sequences instantly. There is a mounting sense of drama and excitement as the drumming grows louder and the solo singer who is leading the performance dances ever more energetically and confidently. Ibsen prods and pushes, shakes his fist and shouts to get the effect he wants – no-one is allowed to be half-hearted. The children have an incredible innate sense of rhythm and seem totally at ease and uninhibited. There is not a snigger or a nudge from anyone as he gets them to stamp, wiggle and leap about, and I find it rather moving to see the adolescent boys and girls, at an age when most children are painfully self-conscious, working so seriously and proudly at these strangely primitive sequences without a flicker of embarrassment. Their performance on the day is faultless – despite the local madwoman who decides to join in with all the dances and is courteously ignored by the performers who just let her, wrapped up in her own little world, carry on enjoying herself.

I have also spent some time in the Nursery this week. Nursery 1, the three and four-year olds, occupy a tiny room which is furnished with the same pew-like bench-and-shelf units, each seating five or six children – often more – used in the other classes. Seated in rows, the fifteen little ones sit and chant, sing, count and recite, sometimes making a circle at the front for some practical activities, for most of the morning. I watch a number lesson where they carefully count the stones that comprise their number apparatus : their only equipment other than what they find outside is a pile of slates which they use for drawing and scribbling. They have not a single item of play apparatus, not a book, not a puzzle nor even a few bricks. Yet their lovely teacher Diana keeps them happily occupied with a medley of songs and action rhymes – they know more English nursery songs than I knew existed, as well as many in Ruchiga – and a succession of other little activities and lessons. She is a remarkable teacher; patient, kind, firm, and endlessly cheerful and energetic. She has an air of serenity about her and even in such an impoverished environment always manages to look wonderfully elegant, bringing a touch of glamour to the bare Nursery classroom in her dusty Chanel suit which has doubtless made its way to Kanungu from some privileged wardrobe across the ocean. Robert, the other teacher who works in the Nursery, is another fascinating character. Tall, gentle and the oldest member of staff here by some distance, he is a passionate devotee of Nursery education, believing, as I do, that it underpins the whole of a child's future learning; he loves working with the little ones. He tells me one breaktime that his parents didn't send him to school, and so, desperate to be educated, at the age of fourteen he enrolled himself at his local school in Primary 1 (Year One) with the six-year olds and worked his way through the system, always eight years older than the others in his class, finally taking his 'A' levels when he was twenty-seven. He then trained for the Church then finally went into teaching as – he admits – a very mature student indeed. Between them, these two teachers create a wonderfully happy, nurturing atmosphere in the Nursery – but, oh, how much more they could do if they had some toys and play equipment!

I have been here for nearly five weeks now and my working week has settled into a routine: on Mondays and Tuesdays I teach at the Primary School, doing at least one hour-long lesson in each class from Nursery 1 to P7, and two in some; on Wednesdays and Fridays I work at the College; and on Thursdays at the Great Lakes High School. All of these present me with different challenges: the Primary School because of the style of teaching and the size of the classes (the two inextricably linked of course); the High School because, much as I like them, teaching secondary-age pupils is definitely outside my professional comfort-zone; and the College because of the amount of preparation needed for each of the two-hour lectures on Business English (to the Travel and Tourism students) and Communication Skills (to the Micro-Finance students) that I have to give each Friday. And all three because my only resources for any of them are a blackboard and piece of chalk! This week I have started supervising student teachers in their final teaching practice placements on Wednesdays and have felt much more on home-ground doing this – as well as enjoying getting to see an interesting variety of schools. I spend long hours in the evenings and at weekends making lesson plans and lecture notes – yes, the boot is on the other foot now, my former staff will be glad to hear, after having been the one requesting such plans for so many years! The advantage of working in three different settings is, of course, the variety it offers; and also the chance to get to know three different sets of staff and students. It's quite a demanding regime but, as my sister Dot said before I set off – "It'll be character-forming – and you're never too old to have your character a bit more formed!" .
I have started reading stories to the children in all the classes at the Primary School at the end of their English lessons and they really love this: it is a new experience for them. Even the older children are fascinated by picture books and are happy with the same simple stories that the younger children enjoy. There are no books, not a single one, in the school other than text books and even these have to be shared between six or seven children – there is one per bench in each class. There are no reading books whatsoever and, unbelievably, the children learn to read without ever having a book in their hands or a moment's individual attention. Of course, this is of enormous interest to me and you can be sure you will hear more about the subject in future blogs!

Walking to the Primary School in the mornings is always enjoyable; plumes of woodsmoke drift in the air as people start the day's cooking, the sun has just risen above the banana plantations on the hills opposite, and a little coterie of children gathers around me as I walk up the hill, some wanting to try out their English, others just content to walk along with me stealing curious glances as we go. My vocabulary is growing slowly and I can now say 'olireje' – good morning, and 'osibireje' – good afternoon, as well as 'agandi' , so can pass the time of day with the villagers, who are now getting used to seeing me and are always very friendly. Out here no-one would dream of walking past you without some form of greeting, even if you are complete strangers. Autumn must be arriving in England but here, so close to the equator, the days never alter other than in the amounts of rain that fall, and it is lovely to feel the sun on my face each morning and to have warm nights every night…

Saturday arrives – and a day out! I have arranged to visit Ishasha, which is at the south-western tip of the Queen Elizabeth National Park and only an hour's drive from Kinkiisi. Jenna, the bursar is coming, and Novias too, as, despite having been brought up only a few miles from the park, she has never been there – it's a luxury only tourists can afford on the whole, despite a reduction in charges for Ugandan residents. We have to leave at 6.00am in order to see the animals before the midday heat drives them under cover. Dawn is breaking as we drive along the quiet roads but already people are out and about – whole families including tiny children walking along the road in the semi-darkness on their way to work in the fields. The hilly banana plantations give way gradually to savanna and it suddenly feels quite possible that at any moment some creature might emerge out of the undergrowth. As we near the entrance to the park a herd of elephants does indeed appear in the long grass near the road and soon colobus monkeys, Ugandan kob and buffalo too. We are the first visitors of the day to arrive at the park and in fact barely see any others while we are there: because of its remoteness this corner is the least visited part of the enormous 2,000 km park. However, it is the only place in Uganda (and one of the few in the whole of Africa) where one can see tree-climbing lions and I am hoping against hope that we will be lucky today…

The park has many varieties of primates and we see gibbons and chimpanzees as well as monkeys, and huge numbers of antelope, warthogs and elephants. We find a family of hippos cooling themselves in the Ishasha River which runs through the park and provides the border with Congo; and at one point a huge 'monitoring lizard' as our driver Nicholas calls it, crosses the road in front of us. There is an amazing variety of brightly coloured bird, butterfly and flower species here and in a Proustian moment I am transported back to the stamp-collecting days of my youth when, I recall, the African stamps were always the most beautiful and sought-after, though the names of many of the countries, as the political fortunes of the continent have waxed and waned, have changed: Ruanda-Urundi, forever imprinted on my mind for its set of exquisite flower stamps, must now presumably be Rwanda.
The tree-lions prove elusive, however. Nicholas, who knows the park well, drives to all their favourite haunts – they have a liking for sycamore fig trees and we slowly circle round several dozen of these with no success. After a couple of hours we decide to call it a day - but Nicholas isn't going to give up so easily and insists on taking us to one last spot where he has seen them before. And there they are! A pair of huge lions, languidly stretched along a branch, one sleeping and the other licking its paws. This is a rare sight indeed and we sit watching them for some time while they in turn fix their eyes on us – though for rather less benevolent reasons, I suspect…. It's a sobering thought that, within living memory, such creatures wandered freely in the Ugandan countryside. A paragraph in the newspaper that I occasionally get access to reports that a 'marauding lioness' that had escaped from the Queen Elizabeth National Park has been shot after a two-week reign of terror in which it killed many farm and domestic animals – although worse was reported from nearby Ethiopia where another escaped lion killed and ate a man. Gruesomely, the paper reports that he was identified when his intact head was found in a field near to where he had been working…..

On a brighter note, the health pages in the newspaper always make interesting reading and in case any of you have scalp problems, I pass on this advice from the 'Your Questions Answered' column in the same paper: " Cow dung, urine and brake fluid are not effective, and may even prove dangerous, in the treatment of dandruff".

You have been warned!