Morning Glory

I have started to travel to Great Lakes High School on Thursdays by boda-boda (motor-cycle taxi) – the car journey is just too expensive because of fuel costs and besides, this is a much more interesting way to get there. The school is some way from Kinkiisi in quite remote countryside near a little town called Katete; the journey takes about fifty minutes and travelling there by motor-bike is a truly lovely experience. Ham, my boda-boda driver, picks me up at 7.30 (yes, he has a brother called Shem although their father is not called Noah..) and we set off with the cool morning air in our faces, past roadside verges blue-hued with tumbling morning glory flowers, barefoot children on their way to school, women with babies on their backs and hoes on their shoulders, herds of giant-antlered cows, tiny roadside villages and acres of banana trees. We travel up (engine on) and down (engine off, to save fuel) the green hills passing mist-shrouded valleys below, with the dark mountains of troubled Congo to one side and, far ahead in the distance, the flat plains of the Rift Valley. The motor bike sails over the potholes and boulders, cowpats, mudslicks and piles of stones, skirting and dodging the larger obstacles deftly. Women generally ride side-saddle here but I feel much safer sitting astride the bike which attracts even more attention and shouts of 'Mujungu! Mujungu!' (white woman) from the children than I usually get – it is clearly regarded as not quite proper…

After a while we turn down a smaller, quieter road and in the sudden hush of the deserted countryside the air resonates with bird-song. Brightly-coloured birds with wonderfully evocative names – the Cinnamon-breasted bee-eater, the Chestnut-bellied wattle-eye, the Red-tailed bristle-bill – swoop in front of us on the path then disappear into the lush greenery that is punctuated only by the iridescent crimson blossoms of the flame trees and the snaking red path of the road ahead of us. We, and everything around us, are bathed in benevolent early-morning sunlight: the line of a poem by Robert Graves comes into my mind, "….swims warm and golden over me, the sun's plenipotentiary". This will surely be one of my favourite memories of Uganda…

I arrive at the school, hair streaming, eyes streaming, nose streaming, just in time for my first lesson at 8.30am – fittingly, on poetry today. I feel inspired! Now that I am getting used to it, I begin to wonder why I didn't train as a secondary teacher – I am really enjoying working with this age group so much. But it's far, far too late to think about that now and I am just grateful for this opportunity to do it for a while. The pupils have asked especially for some help with poetry as they simply don't understand it as a form. All those Facts that have been forced upon them have left precious little opportunity to develop their creative side; they find the imagery in poetry, the subtlety of the meaning and the lack of clearly defined rules baffling - and it is my mission to convert them all into poetry-lovers over the next few weeks….

It is coming towards the end of the academic year here and in February there will be a new intake of students at the High School, many of them from Kirima Primary School. On Saturday the Year 7s (P7) at Kirima have their leaving service to which their parents are invited, along with all the boarders and a few special guests. The school hall and grounds have been given a thorough spring-clean (by the students themselves of course) and the stage - a raised concrete area at the top of the hall - has acquired a makeshift altar and some decorations. Fairy lights have been strung up (these do not work but still give a festive atmosphere), along with some Christmas bells, tinsel, and branches draped with toilet paper. The effect, though a little eccentric, has been so lovingly created that one cannot help but admire it. We are blessed with a dry, sunny day which means that the special lunch that has been planned can take place outside: everyone is in good spirits. Shoes have been polished, uniforms washed and at 10.30 the service begins, taken by 'the Reverend', as everyone refers to priests here, from the local church. The boarders, even the five and six-year olds, have been sitting quietly in the hall since 9.30: the service was scheduled to start at 10.00 – but this is Africa! I have begun to identify a particular philosophy, equally applicable to a church service, a meeting or a social call, which goes "Why try to fit into an hour what can be expanded to fill an entire day?" – there is nothing, it would seem, that cannot be improved by being taken at a very leisurely pace. The leavers' service, which is followed by speeches, singing, lunch, then more speeches and more singing, eventually ends at 5.00pm – a long sit even by African standards! The lunch is a special-occasion feast including meat, a rare luxury: there is stewed goat, rice, matoke and peanut sauce – and a bottle of soda each for the leavers. No part of the goat is wasted and the portion I am served contains some dubious-looking white tubes amongst the chunks of meat: I decide that this is a meal that will benefit from being eaten without the aid of spectacles. The goat tastes delicious, and if some mouthfuls are a bit rubbery – well, the peanut sauce helps them down. One doesn't leave food in Uganda…

As we embark on the second round of speeches the Headmaster leans across and asks if I would be kind enough to make a short speech myself. "When?" I whisper. "Now" he whispers back. I do as well as I can with my impromptu delivery – clearly a little too well, in fact, as a few minutes after I have sat down the Headmaster leans towards me again and whispers "The Reverend from the Cathedral has just asked if you would give the sermon tomorrow at the morning service". The phrase 'shooting oneself in the foot' springs to mind: this is clearly an invitation for which refusal is not an option. I have been asked to give all sorts of talks in my time but never, to date, a sermon: the last time I was in a pulpit was to read a lesson at the Carol Service in Canterbury Cathedral about fifteen years ago and that seemed bad enough even with the reading already provided. I walk home mulling over the possibilities and wondering on which of the sermon-styles I have experienced here so far I should model my own. Should it be of the bible-fumbling-ten-texts variety, or perhaps a passionate discourse like last week's, in which the preacher was so affected by the intensity of his own message that we had to sing an extra hymn in the middle of the sermon to allow him a few minutes to stem his tears and recover his equilibrium…? In the event I go for something simple, short and child-friendly and hope that while it is good enough, it is not so good that I will be asked to do it again for a while…

On Monday and Tuesday the P7 candidates sit their Primary Leaving Examination, a national test similar to Common Entrance. There are four papers in the core subjects which are sent off to Kampala for marking by external examiners. In January the grades will be published: these are from one to four, with a 'U' for failures. Kirima usually does very well in these, with most children achieving Grade 1: it is one of the top achieving schools in the country. It is not hard to see how, despite their bare classrooms and deprived backgrounds, they manage to do so well. The P7 children rise at 5.00am every day ready for their first prep session from 5.30 to 7.30am and this is often in the form of extra coaching from the teacher who is on duty with them (I wonder how either pupils or staff would react to a 5.30 start in England…!). They have extra maths and English lessons after school each day, another prep session from 7.30 to 9.30 each night, lessons all day on Saturday and some on Sunday too. The staff input is enormous and the children's tireless perseverance quite formidable . Some of them taking the PLE are already in their mid-teens, having either started school late or repeated years because of slow progress. For them and some of the younger pupils too, this may be the only educational qualification they get so the results are important. The drop-out rate from senior schools is extremely high and many children simply have to start full time work on the land to help support their families. Other luckier ones will go on to a senior school and take 'O' and 'A' levels if their parents can afford to let them study or if they can get sponsors.

The exams, which take place at a local government school, evoke the same responses that they do anywhere in the world: there are complaints that the papers are too hard, that some questions were unfair, that some weren't on the syllabus; but they aren't disastrous. As soon as the second day of exams is over the P7 pupils are free to leave. Those who live locally come straight back to school, pack the meagre trappings of their seven years of life there into their little tin trunks, roll up their thin sponge mattresses and leave. Others will be collected the next day, or catch a truck (the local equivalent to a taxi) home if they are some way away. All this is done in a very subdued way: there are no tearful goodbyes, no embraces, no 'keep in touch' handshakes with staff. The pupils simply pick up their belongings and go, dealing with what must be for many a huge emotional upheaval with the customary Ugandan lack of drama. It's time to move on to next phase of their lives…

I find this quite difficult. Although I have only been at the school for a few weeks I already feel fond of these children and have to restrain myself from going up to them and giving them a hug. But this is not how things are done here. The staff, who have nurtured and cared deeply for them for so many years, display an apparent indifference to the occasion and keep a low profile. There seems to be an unspoken agreement that neither adults nor children can afford to show or even to feel too much emotion on this or any other momentous occasion, when their lives are at all times so precarious and so permeated with hardship…

One girl, Florence, does come and seek me out. She has learned that a member of my family has become her sponsor and she wants to thank me. "God has answered my prayers" she says simply. She is a lovely girl, very bright, diligent and determined. She wants to be an engineer: an ambitious choice for a village girl whose parents, as she says in the letter she has given me to pass on "are living a peasantry life and so they are poor". She is always top of the class and there is every reason to hope that after a good secondary education at Great Lakes High School she will go on to university and achieve her ambition. She has been waiting for two years for a sponsor and there are many more still waiting. I feel so touched by her relief and gratitude: there is optimism in her eyes and some certainty in her future now. I know that quite a few people who read the blog have become sponsors in the last few weeks and to all of them I want to say: your money could not be better spent - these children are so deserving. Every day at morning prayers the sponsors are remembered with special thanks. Your support may be the one factor that will lift a child out of the relentless cycle of poverty in which so many families are trapped. Thank you.