A Sweet Girl Named Desire

(with apologies to Tennessee Williams…)

Tuesday is Eid and despite the fact that there are very few Muslims in this part of Uganda it is a public holiday: in the country as a whole 11% of the population are Muslim and 85% Christian. However, until the morning itself there has been no confirmation from the District Education Office that schools should close for the day so staff and pupils have mostly arrived. After prayers and singing, the day children are told they may go home: 'Go straight home, mind, and don't play in the mango trees on the way' the Headmaster warns them. I find myself wishing that I knew where these were as I would love a mango but have seen none since arriving; perhaps I should follow the children and find out. I, for my part, am relieved to have a day off as I have developed a nasty sore throat and cough and have almost lost my voice. Having spent years building up resistance, as teachers of young children do, to every known virus in England (and frequently boasting that I never get ill) I have now succumbed to a hefty Ugandan one: many of the children here have runny noses and hacking coughs. Fortunately my 'medical chest' contains cold remedies but I shall resist using my one precious course of antibiotics unless I really have to.

This week's teaching at the Primary School has gone well and I feel I am getting into the swing of things. In addition to several English lessons I have one class for science for which the topic is 'Personal Hygiene'. I take along various items from my sponge bag as visual aids but I quickly realize that few are familiar to the children – for some, possibly not even the comb and soap. Children here have virtually no hair; their heads are shaved or they have just a very fine covering of hair until they are in their teens or older. It is quite difficult to tell girls and boys apart because of this; but it certainly takes away the worries (so ever-present in the UK) about headlice and explains why the bottle of shampoo I have brought along causes such a stir. The toothbrush and toothpaste, similarly, are objects of great curiosity and when I ask how many children have ever seen a toothbrush before not a single hand goes up. A twig, peeled of its bark, is used instead and judging by the gleaming white teeth the children have, and the good state of the adults' teeth too, this method is highly effective. Of course, a diet almost entirely free from sugar must help, although I do wonder how they get sufficient calcium since dairy products are virtually non-existent and milk a great luxury, even for young children. At the end of the lesson I teach them 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush' (so that we can do the washing actions) but have the greatest difficulty explaining what a 'cold and frosty morning' is – never mind a mulberry bush. To explain frost to children whose climate is never less than warm, and who have never eaten ice-cream nor even seen a refrigerator is something of a challenge! Collecting in their books for marking at the end of the lesson is a salutary experience too; a pile of seventy is quite bad enough to carry, let alone mark, and I quickly work out that even if I only spend two minutes on each it will still take over two hours to complete the task…

One little girl, Desire, stands out from the rest of the class. The phrase "bursting with enthusiasm" must surely have been invented for her: she is bursting out of her dress, her shoes, and almost her own skin in her determination to give answers and share what she knows. She is a funny scrap of a girl, scruffy and unkempt but her answers are always correct and her responses lightning quick. When I drop my chalk, it is she who rushes forward in a flash to pick it up; and she is out of the door before I have even finished asking the class where I might find a board rubber (and returns with a piece of screwed-up paper – I should have known better…). At the end of the P3 science lesson she hangs back until the other children have gone then asks shyly if she may smell my bar of soap, which she does with closed eyes and a look of undisguised pleasure. I wish I could give it to her but I know it would only cause difficulties. However it is in assembly that I notice her most for here she really shines. The singing is usually led by any child who volunteers on the spur of the moment to sing the first line of the hymn and then the first line of each subsequent verse so the other children can follow the tune and the words. Desire is only in P3 and as an eight-year-old would not normally take on this role which is generally that of a P7 child. However she bursts into song boldly and unselfconsciously as the hymn, a lively favourite in the local language, is announced and everyone follows her lead; and, taking herself to the front of the assembled children she breaks into a little dance in time to the music as she sings, clapping in time to her swaying steps. Her face glows with self-absorbed delight as she carries the entire school along with her verse after verse; until eventually the teacher has to tap her on the shoulder to ask her to bring this seemingly endless song to a close, and she skips back to her place smiling contentedly. I marvel at her sweetness and at her sheer zest for life: she is an exceptional little girl. She is one of the fortunate minority, I find out later, who has a CHIFCOD sponsor to pay her school fees, buy her uniform and pay for her board which means that she should be able to continue to the end of her primary schooling even if the crops fail or some other financial disaster befalls her impoverished family. For her and for many others though, secondary education is not guaranteed. It is a good deal more expensive to sponsor a child through secondary school (though still a very modest sum by our standards) and, understandably, fewer people commit to this. I wonder to myself - will this bright, talented, sparky girl become just one more of the numberless children who drop out of school at secondary level because a sponsor did not materialize for her? Details about sponsorship can be found on the CHIFCOD website: www.volunteeruganda.org and I urge, indeed beg, anyone who might have it within their means to do so to consider this – especially at secondary level. In terms of an opportunity do something worthwhile for a fellow human being it could hardly be bettered. Desire, and so many others like her, deserves the bright future that could so easily be hers – but might so easily be denied her. So much hangs in the balance out here….

The staff have lunch in a classroom and I am enjoying getting to know my new colleagues as we eat. They have wonderful movie-star names – Godfrey, Anton, Warren, Gloria, Victoria, Robert, Justine – and are mostly young and all very friendly. One question you never ask here is "What's for lunch today?" because lunch is the same every day. There is a pot of dried beans plainly cooked in their own juices; and posho, the maize porridge drunk at breaktime which when left to cool, sets into a solid mass that can be sliced or broken into chunks. We sometimes also have matoke (cooked plantain) as an extra treat. We all wash our hands outside first, taking it in turns to hold the big yellow water carrier marked 'staff' for the next person in the queue and to pour water over their hands onto the grass – there is no soap or towel but it's good just to rinse off the morning's chalk dust and grime. Somebody sends a child off to find me a fork – not that I have asked for one, but I am quite relieved not to have to use my fingers as the others do as I know I would make a dreadful mess with the beans! Despite the simplicity of the diet here I feel I am eating quite healthily. A typical meal in a middle-class Ugandan home would usually consist of several starchy foods – sweet potatoes, rice, matoke perhaps; some vegetables such as carrots or cabbage and either bean stew or a small amount of stewed meat. The meat, despite long cooking, is invariably tough and chewy and chicken generally a pile of little bones from which you must try to extricate a few mouthfuls of sinewy flesh. For the majority of the village people here, though, meat is only eaten at most once or twice a year – at special celebrations like weddings, say - and all of the good produce they grow is sold to give them the cash for basic day-to-day essentials like clothes, so they eat extremely poorly. For people with the cash to buy them, pineapples and bunches of tiny sweet bananas are everywhere, a limited choice of starchy root vegetables available, eggs fairly easy to come by and a kind of sliced bread which I can best describe as like the gluten-free loaves you buy in health shops – spongy, dense and apt to stick to your teeth – quite widely available. Dairy products are nowhere to be seen as without refrigeration they just don't keep; so the diet is very low in fat. A special variety of Blue Band margarine that will keep unrefrigerated is the only spread available – slimy and bright yellow, it has little to recommend it – so it pairs up quite well with the bread! Oddly enough, there is nothing I really miss or crave for; even the big bar of chocolate I brought with me remains unopened in my suitcase. In the context of such poverty food ceases to be the higher-order, pleasure-seeking activity it has become in the developed world. Boiled potatoes with a tasty pink sauce made from peanut flour has become one of my favourite dishes but on the whole eating is a functional rather than a gastronomic experience here and the world of the foams, mousses and amuses gueules of Michelin-starred restaurants seems a million miles away. This is not to cast aspersions on haute cuisine – I am the first to enjoy a good meal ; more an observation about the curious place of food in our lives - and our ability to adapt our expectations to new environments! What's more, it's over three weeks since I had a glass of wine and my body seems perfectly content with unremitting bottled water, somewhat to my surprise – I hope to come back in December a few pounds lighter and thoroughly detoxed!

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