Welcome everybody to Part 2 of our volunteering programme here in Uganda. We’re going to be here until the beginning of August, so there’s still a good bit left of our year away, even though we’re aware that we’re heading into the home straight.
We’re here today in a proper internet cafe in Jinja, Eastern Uganda’s largest city, and just a few kilometres away from our little village, a loose collection of scattered huts and houses which calls itself Kyabirwa (pronounced, in customarily amusing Ugandan fashion, as Chabeera). Jinja itself is notable for being the source of the River Nile (it pours out of Lake Victoria just south of the city centre) and, combined with other bits of Nile-based extreme-sports tourism like rafting and bungy-jumping, it attracts a goodly number of mzungus. We think it’s a fascinating enough place even without all the things that seem to attract an unnatural number of long-haired Australians and madcap Dutch tourists, being, as it is, a perfect snapshot of immediate post-war colonial optimism. The central grid of streets is lined with amazing albeit deteriorating Art Deco houses and shops, built for British and Asian entrepreneurs, while the suburbs are full of spacious villas from the 1940s, replete with nautical design motifs, then-fashionable flat roofs and circular crittal windows, perfect for the fashionable, forward-looking administrators and ex-pats of the time. The whole place is an experiment in concrete construction, in a climate which actually suits it as a material, and when the sun shines along the rows of expansive, plain white surfaces, it really works, like some colonial, small-town version of Miami Beach, only a bit run down (well, it has been seventy years). The really astonishing thing, though, is how well-preserved it all is, with little or no development in the intervening period to interrupt the low-density, ’40s garden suburb appearance. For a historian, it’s a really interesting place to be, at least visually, but it also happens to have a lovely, lethargic, laid-back vibe. In many ways it’s not dissimilar to Tanga, the city which was closest to us during our time in Tanzania. Nothing much happens in a hurry here either (e.g. any kind of development) and it’s a genuinely relaxing place to stroll around, trying to catch an occasional, ultra-welcome breeze off the Lake. It also has a particularly good Indian restaurant.
Main Street, Jinja
We arrived here a fortnight ago, and have been really warmly welcomed by our host family, the school we’re working in, and the kids and their families in the local community. Kyabirwa is just a nice place to be: it’s populated by very friendly people (who just happen to live in very photogenic houses), we’re staying in comfortable and spacious accommodation (quite different from some of the structures we’ve been staying in this year!), and there’s a good, well-planned itinerary at the primary school, ideal for those who want to get their teeth into some teaching. In truth, this wasn’t always the case in our previous project, but actually the biggest difference here from southwest Uganda is the temperature. Jinja is HOT. Almost indescribably hot. It’s sunny, and kind of burny (though not as burny as it was in Kenya), but being here is worse because it’s like being slow-roasted from the inside. Even in the shade it is BOILING. Even Linda thinks it’s too hot. Yes, you heard right. So the temperatures must be ridiculously high.
We’re not far from Kampala, just an hour-and-a-half by matatu, and just a few miles from Jinja, but it still feels like we’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s a 25-minute bodaboda ride into town, but it’s a world away where we’re staying. The community is quite poor, perhaps owning less and living in more dilapidated, more cheaply-erected houses and huts than many people in Ruhanga did; the roads are in quite poor condition (we’ve come just after the rainy season has finished -thankfully- because there are proper gorges in the middle of the paths where rainwater must have just cascaded down towards the Nile, which is only a couple of kilomteres from where we’re living); and there doesn’t seem to be much work for local people, with most having to head to town to find any kind of employment (Jinja has a small industrial economy). Despite all that, though, the school is in an okay state, but this is mainly thanks to the money raised by volunteers over the last three years than to any intervention by the government (Kyabirwa is a state primary school, but receives very little in the way of funding or supplies from the Education Ministry). But as we’ve seen time and time again in Africa, poverty and deprivation are no obstacles to happiness and friendliness, and the local people are noticeably engaging and smiley, even by Ugandan standards. Their English is limited, of course (although not as limited as our Lusoga, the local language), but they are among the friendliest people we’ve met. Which is slightly surprising given that Jinja is something of a tourist destination. You normally find that the more tourists there are in an area, the less friendly and more cynical the local population will become. Here in Jinja, it’s still in its embryonic stages, and the people have yet to see the inherent frustrations and negatives of Third World tourism, the Insulation Syndrome, where rich white people get bussed in, completely cut off from the so-called unsavoury realities of African towns and villages; where they get dropped off behind closed gates so they can happily spend loads of money in private lodges and hotels (often owned by nest-feathering MPs or foreign ‘investors’); and where they rudely and paranoically ignore local people’s offers of taxis, crafts and homespun tours. Yes, we know it’s annoying, and yes we’ve been there, too: no tourist likes being hassled. But at the same time, when you look at it from the people’s point of view who live here, how is it that so much expenditure can lead to such miniscule local or regional returns? And just what exactly does happen to the so-called promised trickle-down from tourism development?
Street scene, Kyabirwa
But that is all yet to come, if it comes at all. What we have at the moment is a hassle-free, super-chilled town which does what it does, only allowing itself an occasional whinge about Museveni and his increasingly nepotistic style of government.
It’s funny: most of the best-educated people we’ve met have been stoically anti-government. The West likes Yoweri Museveni and his generally pro-American, pro-market stance, and at first glance you’d have to say he’s worked wonders with Uganda in terms of keeping it peaceful and growing the economy, especially when you compare it to countries like Tanzania. But actually, when you travel around and ask people, and look into people’s front rooms, and study what’s on the shelves in the tiny local shops dotted around the countryside, you really can’t see much in the way of progress, and you really won’t see much in the way of prosperity. That is, neither of the things his manifestos always promise. Allied to that, prices are now beginning to skyrocket, particualrly now Libyan oil seems to be quite tricky to get hold of, and ordinary subsistence Ugandans are really beginning to feel the pinch. At some point in the near future, too, Uganda is going to run out of room. It’s only a small country (the same size as Britain) but the population is a runaway rollercoaster: in 1951 it was 5 million; in 2001 it was 24 million; in 2011 it’s 32 million. It’s still overwhelmingly a subsistence economy, and traditionally parents divide up their land among their male children. So as each generation passes, the parcels of land get smaller and smaller, even though the number of children borne to each family remains the same. At some point, people are going to have to stop having eight, ten, twelve children, and the macho culture which has driven it is going to have to get over itself. Either that, or families simply won’t have enough land to feed themselves. The reality is already beginning to bite, and Kyabirwa, unfortunately, is no different.
Kyabirwa Primary School
You see, when you walk into a classroom there’s one thing that hits you. It’s totally insane, utterly ridiculous, downright silly. You just can’t imagine how many children are packed into each classroom. We can tell you the numbers all we like, and you can read them and say “Gosh, that sounds lie a lot”. But until you see it, hear the noise, feel the heat, and study the number of faces, eyes, smiles, shirts, whatever, you simply won’t believe it. So the school has seven year groups and ten classes. Primary 1 (seven-year-olds), Primary 2 (eight-year-olds)) and Primary 3 (nine-year-olds, although containing some fifteen-year-olds who have had to repeat quite a lot) all have their year groups spilt (in fact streamed) into two classes. In this way, the school has been able to reduce the number of children in each class to under 100. Primary 4 (10-11 year olds, who have one classroom, about 6m x 6m) contains 161 children. P5 (11-12) contains 137, P6 (12-13) has 121, while P7 (13-14) has only (!) 57. It’s a logistical nightmare: getting around the classroom is all but impossible (the desks are all at different angles, crammed in like some giant tessalation puzzle); marking more than 150 books for each lesson is a ludicrously gargantuan task; while trying to make sure that everyone in your class is understanding what you are teaching is almost impossible. Yet the teachers are asked to try and accurately assess and plan for each child in their class, as we would in a British primary school class of 30. And how easy is that?
P.E. with Primary 1
What’s amazing is that the school has implemented some really quite up-to-date teaching strategies, and all the trendy buzzwords of modern educational terminology are there, as if the Ugandan Ministry has been on some dreadful factfinding mission to a New Labour educational thinktank. Unbelievably teachers are asked to try and differentiate, to make sure children don’t fall through the gaps, and to pitch their lessons to include all age groups and abilities within their cohort. But, to be honest, it’s a task of such Herculean nature that there isn’t a teacher in the world who could keep on top of all that, as well as making their lessons interesting, engaging and effective. But they cope remarkably well, and children’s attendance is good, their exam results are passable, and there’s belief-defying high morale (well, usually) in the staffroom. This comes mainly from the team of teachers that the school has, but is underpinned by the work done by Moses (the volunteer co-ordinator) and the headteacher Robinah. In addition to actually making the school work, despite the odds, they have all made us volunteers (there are currently three of us there) most welcome, too, doing everything they can to make us feel like we’re properly part of the teaching staff. As a result we have been given responsibilities in line with those positions, and so far, happily, we’ve had a busy and fulfilling time at the school.
During the first week we just popped into each class to see how things are done and to get a feel for the school. It’s amazing, just seeing what the teachers are up against physically, let alone professionally, for it’s a long school day which takes place in a supremely difficult learning environment. Children come in from 7am, and spend the first hour or so cleaning and tidying the school compound. Except on Mondays when there’s assembly (the children stand outside in the sun for anything between 30 and 60 minutes) lessons start at 8am and continue until first break at 10am. After break, lessons begin again at 11am and go on until lunch at 1pm (P1, P2 and P3 go home at this time). The Upper Primary classes, however, are back after lunch at 2pm and are taught until 3.30pm, after which there are games until 5pm. During that time, teachers have to mark books and draw up lesson plans, since there’s no electricity in the area and therefore no light to work by in the evening. It’s exhausting for us part-timers, and it’s visibly hard for the teachers, but for the kids it must be really tough. Especially with the heat generated in those classrooms, and the fact that they only have one cup of porridge a day (even that isn’t provided by the government, but is donated by a school in Bristol, who also built them a kitchen to prepare it in). Also, you’d think that being so tired and hungry, the children’s behaviour would deteriorate during the day, but in fact they are terrifically well-behaved, especially given their age and the number of children in each classroom. It’s testament to the commitment and application of the staff that they are able to hold it all together, but if many more children are admitted to the school (legally they can’t turn down any application) the whole thing really might start to burst at the seams. Moses is already talking about teaching classes outside under mango trees like they used to when he was a kid, and that’s definitely not in the latest government guidance.
Assembly
But life for us is relatively easy. At the moment, we’re not having to make official lessons plans but teaching from schemes already drawn up. Linda has started teaching in Primary 3, where she’s done some work on phonics with’ small’ groups (she takes 12-15 children out each time, and it still takes a week to get through one class), and some basic English language with the two P3 classes. Up to and including P3 the children are taught all their subjects in Lusoga, and their grasp of English is still quite tenuous. From P4 all subjects are taught exclusively in English, so that transition year from Lower to Upper Primary is incredibly hard for the children, as they’re being taught concepts in Maths, Science, etc in a language almost totally unknown to them. It makes the strides they make in P4, P5 and P6 all the more remarkable, given that their curriculum is roughly that of a British middle school, and they’re having to learn it in a different language. I mean, how well would you have done at school if all your O-Level or GCSE syllabus subjects had been taught in German?
Primary 3
So while Linda helps the younger kids get to grips with English (the cow is big, the elephant is bigger) in preparation for life in Upper Primary, Andy has taken the easier path and opted for classes that already speak English, and have a good understanding of their subjects. He’s teaching Social Studies to P6 and P7 and English Language to P6. Social Studies is a kind of wishy-washy nomenclature for what we would equally wishy-washily call Combined Humanities, and includes such disparate topics as Swamps and their Influence on Human Activity, Conflict in Mediaeval Africa, Traditional Ugandan Song, and the History of Apartheid. It would probably be fair to say that in most areas he’s seriously out of his depth (e.g. the history of Bantu and Nilotic migrations), but is just about holding his own in a few (he wishes he’d paid more attention in GCSE Geography, but it was hard when Mr Hartland was SO boring). Nevertheless, it’s good fun, and it’s generally agreed that the children do benefit from hearing native English speakers, even though our accents are apparently very hard to understand, and we have no idea what we’re talking about.
Half of Primary 6
So after teaching, Andy gets back to more familiar territory and plays football with P5 and P6 (badly, but only because the pitch is really rocky and the ball is stupidly bouncy, okay?), while Linda does her marking and planning. The two of us have talked about starting up an Art Club (no promises) because it’s an area that a number of pupils have showed promise in, but it’s something that just isn’t nurtured here. Ugandan schools don’t have the time, the space or the resources to cover any subjects outside the (very rigid) curriculum, and you have to wait until Secondary School to do fun things like drawing, model-making or computing. But realistically, very few of the children from Kyabirwa will make it beyond their P7 exams, and that’s not because they don’t have the ability but simply because they don’t have any money. Secondary Schools are massively expensive, more so for the subsistence folk round here who would only see or touch money a handful of times a year. So it might be nice to do something creative for the kids, maybe after school in the hour-and-a-half they’re supposed to be doing games but usually end up hanging around gossiping or booting a ball around, but we’ll see how realistic it will be.
Walking home
We leave school at 5pm, and then we take the short (7 minute) walk down the lovely red mud lane back to Moses’s house, where we have a wonderfully refreshing/painfully freezing (according to which of us you ask) bucket-and-scoop shower, and relax in our room for a bit until tea is served. Our room is in one of two ranges built in Moses’s compound, and it’s coolly spacious with a high metal roof and a few bits of generally comfy furniture. The blocks are fairly new and can house a dozen or more volunteers at any one time, but for now it’s quiet, with just the laughter of Moses’s children (his two youngest are there, Daniel and Winnie, plus two adopted children Isaac and David), the constant chatter from the Weaver birds busy stripping the tree behind the thatch-roofed kitchen, and the occasional moo or cock-a-doodle-do from nearby farm animals puncturing the silence. We sit and read, listen to music, play with the kids, do a bit of school work, and enjoy the calm until dinner time, which is usually about 7.30pm. Moses’s wife Florence cooks for us and is, in short, a very talented woman. The things she can do with a wood fire, a couple of knackered old cooking pots, a handful of root vegetables and some beans is nothing short of stunning. I mean, how do you make yams taste nice when you don’t really have any ingredients other than, well, yams? How do you make cabbage taste so good that it’s the best thing on your plate? How do you make beans so tasty without copious amounts of Homepride chilli-con-carne powder? We don’t have any answers, but instead we just sit and savour the results.
Sitting on our front stoop: Linda and Daniel at home at Moses's place
After dinner we sit and chew the cud with Moses about Uganda, the UK, and the state of our respective nations. He’s a deep and deeply interesting man, who’s led a complex life, and who can speak absolutely fluent English, not to mention twenty-or-so other languages he knows. It’s almost as if he can think in English, too, with a very familiar sense of humour, a surprising and delightful turn of phrase (Africans are the funniest race of all, in our view), and a linguistic agility we’ve rarely come across in East Africa, even in Kenya where English is widely spoken as an equal-first language. It’s nice to spend time with a family, too, something we haven’t done since we were in Kisayani, and it’s even nicer to have been made honarary members of that family. So we’re Uncle Andrew and Auntie Linda out here, too, as well as to the nephews and nieces we miss back home in Britain who, no doubt, have now grown up beyond all recognition.
At night the stars come out and light up the huge African sky, so wonderfully clear and mind-bogglingly plentiful. And the whole place is quiet, with just the faintest of rumbles from nearby Bujagali Falls providing a constant but meditative soundtrack to the hot African nights. That is until those bloody Weaver birds start up again, anyway. The nights are the warmest we’ve experienced (even Linda has discarded the previously ubiquitous thermal top and woolly pyjamas): in Yamba and Ruhanga we were at high altitude, 1500-2000m or more; in Kenya, the semi-arid climate brought chilly nights as well as burning hot days. Only in Tanga on our weekends away in Tanzania was it like this, although it was a bit stickier there. But while there’s cold water there to cool you off, there’s not really a problem, although it’s devilishly hot in town today. The bad news is: it’s only going to get hotter as we approach the middle of the dry, hot season in July and August.
So there’s a little introducation to what we’ve done and what we’re doing out here. There’ll be more to come soon, especially as there’s good internet (and the cafe does amazing milkshakes). We’re not so remote, even though you wouldn’t think it if you were to walk around the village: there’s just huts and plantations within the immediate vicinity of Moses’s house, but there’s Jinja just a motorbike ride away, while the village of Bujugali is only a 30 minute walk, where there’s a bar and a restaurant. So we’re not so deprived here, not so isolated, and we’re not roughing it like we have done. Instead, we’re taking our teaching duties seriously, and trying to enjoy the very African environment around us, because after this is nothing but the long slog back to a British Autumn. Ho hum.
With best wishes to everyone reading, until next time,
Andy and Linda
ps for anyone wanting to get in contact with us, remember our phone number stays the same, but we don’t have a postal address here.
