So we’ve just got back from a week in Rwanda, a trip based around a quite prosaic and trivial reason (we needed to renew our visas: each entry to Uganda only gives you 90 days, and ours are nearly up) but one which became a defining and transformative eye-opener. It’s just a few miles south of where we are, so it’s easier to cross the border and get a new visa there than it is to do the long slog up to Kampala, and wait in a massive queue at the Immigration Department. So we popped down and, apart from the moment when Linda was nearly refused entry for being Irish, we were able to complete all the necessary paper work and get in. But enough about pointless customs bureaucracy, what about our trip?

Well, where on Earth do you start? Rwanda. The very word conjures up such vivid images, doesn’t it? And of course that one overridingly awful connotation. Without doubt, that single word -Rwanda- will be forever associated with some of the worst –and in some ways the worst- acts of inhumanity ever committed by apparently civilised man. And to travel to a place where genocide (a banal and impersonal word which doesn’t even start to cover what happened) was committed on such a scale and with such barbarity -within living memory- was a sometimes difficult and occasionally almost overwhelmingly moving experience.

Yet life, to our utter disbelief, has genuinely gone on for Rwandans, and atrocities have genuinely been forgiven. But they haven’t been forgotten, and despite the impressive level of ongoing development, the unique political unity, and the measurable hope which permeates every policy and every institution in every part of the country, there remains a subtle, barely detectable undercurrent of …something. It’s not ethnic tension, as you might expect; and it’s not really anything like social unease. It’s not even really detectable in the people themselves, although they are a noticeably serious bunch. But rather it’s something that you carry yourself, a feeling that unsettles you from within. And travel around as you might, you simply can’t escape it once you’ve been told Rwanda’s story.

Day 1: Ntungamo to Kigali

Our Rwandan story started off on an ‘executive coach’ (to be fair, it had a telly) from Ntungamo to Kigali. Actually, our journey didn’t get off to a great start when a bullying tout at the coach stage prevented us from getting on our bus because he had a personal disagreement with the bus company about some previous lack of payment or something. Quite what this had to do with us and our trip to Kigali we don’t really know, but his utterly repellent attitude gave us our first taste of really negative African behaviour. He was particularly unpleasant, and the experience provided us, first hand, with an example of what a depressingly chauvinistic society this still is; and how bull-headed, reactionary politicking -institutional even at the highest levels of a country like Uganda- is not much more than an extension of the dumb, classroom bully mentality that we saw in the prism of Ntungamo’s street business. Cheers, mate.

But anyhow, we flagged another bus down before it got to the stage (massively gutting out the fat tout), and we were on our way to Rwanda. And we were in for a real treat (and we’re not talking about the film they had on the TV). The road south to Kabale is beautiful anyway (we’ve been a couple of times), but once you cross the Rwandan border the landscape is just astonishing, and its beauty grows in intensity as you head further south. At first, there were gentle slopes of thick woodland lining broad, electric-green valleys of intensively cultivated tea; then there were hills of increasingly implausible steepness, stratified by hundreds of terraces, and loomed over by massive, brooding rain clouds; as we drove further into the country vertiginous verdant gorges cut deep into the land, looking almost bottomless; and finally vast, deep volcanic valleys ebbed and flowed alongside the winding road. You just don’t want it to stop. And if the few hours it took to negotiate these magical, other-worldly landscapes weren’t visually gratifying enough, when we arrived at Kigali –a city built on top of a range of picture-perfect hills- a rainbow soared up from behind the handful of skyscrapers which crown the city centre. It was mesmerising, almost heavenly; and it’s utterly mystifying and deeply unsettling to think that such horrors could have happened in such a stunning place.

We arrived in Kigali just before sunset, the surrounding hills delicately lit by a beautifully soft, glowing sunset, and the city just oozed peacefulness. If you’d come here seventeen years ago the sheer physical beauty of the country would have made what happened seem so cruelly ironic, so confusingly contrasting. But this is 2011, and Rwanda couldn’t have been more peaceful (although the bus station was a bit bonkers), so much so that we were happy to walk the two miles into town –at dusk- and check into our hotel. Prices are dear in Rwanda, mainly thanks to the many western aid workers and investors who have guiltily flocked here since the genocide, and inadvertently pushed hotel prices miles above the typical East African rates. We reckoned we had just about enough Rwandan Francs to cover a week travelling, but we wouldn’t be gallivanting around. And to be honest, it wouldn’t really have felt right anyway. We understand that the Rwandan civil war and the subsequent so-called 100 days of madness did happen quite a long time ago, and it’s of immense impressiveness and importance that the country has come out of it so positively and so prosperously, but we still felt that being carefree and privileged would feel a bit wrong. This is, after all, a country understandably short on frivolity.

Kigali

Day 2: Kigali

This seriousness and single-mindedness has paid off, though. For example, Kigali has been extraordinarily well developed over the last decade and a half. The roads are equal –and in many cases superior- to those you’d find in a modern European democracy. There are shopping malls for the now fully-emerged middle classes, upmarket suburbs where the civil servants and business people live and play, and a public transport system which, while somewhat confusing (hey, we’re still in Africa) still works surprisingly efficiently. Of course, there is still poverty (Kigali has a notably large number of homeless people, street kids and beggars with disabilities, who are often ‘fallout’ from the genocide), and there are still all the usual things you’d expect to find in an East African capital city: hawkers, hustlers, chancers, street traders, drunks. But it’s clean (witness the army of women who tend the lawns around the city centre -by hand), it’s lively (there’s a real vibe to the place, daytime and night-time), and it feels like a city that’s moving forwards, upwards, wherever, but definitely moving. Particularly noticeable was the lack of litter: some years ago the (extremely progressive and mainly unblemished) government introduced a law banning plastic bags. You can’t bring any into the country (our rucksacks were searched at the border) and all shops sell goods in brown paper bags, 1970s New York-style. So there’s not a whole load of ugly polythene bags blowing around the streets or collecting in garbage-strewn gutters, which is a refreshing change from most of the towns we’ve been to. It’s trivial, but it’s kind of emblematic, too. It says: this is a country which is doing things differently.

It’s safe, too. We felt entirely comfortable walking around the streets of Kigali, centre and suburbs, and the tri-lingual locals were invariably friendly, even if we didn’t see quite the usual quota of stereotypical African smiles. Transport around what is an incredibly hilly city is by motorbike taxi, and again the government has taken the initiative and regulated a mode of public transport which, elsewhere in Africa, is akin to taking your life into your own hands. In Rwanda, though, it is strictly one passenger per bike (last week in Uganda we saw five adults on one bike) and both driver and passenger must wear crash helmets. In fact, it just seems a better regulated and more sensible country all round, with a sense that people are moving together. But then again, what’s the alternative?

Linda, via mototaxi

Well, the alternative is what happened between April and July 1994. It’s not possible, nor pertinent, to write a history of the genocide in this blog, and there’s plenty of stuff out there in print media, in history books and on the net which will explain it more comprehensively and accurately than we ever could. But we would strongly recommend that you take a few minutes to familiarise, or maybe refamiliarise, yourself with what happened because it’s just so important to know about it. We wrote a bit about it after we visited the Nakivali Refugee Settlement in Uganda, but when you’re in Rwanda, and when you see and hear the stories as told in the excellent and deeply moving Kigali Memorial Centre, it really starts to hit home. Your experience of Africa and Africans will undoubtedly be shifted. And shifted quite a lot.

So here’s a very short history lesson. Rwanda, unlike other post-colonial African countries, is the right shape. Its borders weren’t the result of some pencil-necked Foreign Office pen-pusher arbitrarily dividing up a big map of the continent (note the lack of straight lines). It was tucked away, undiscovered, with a sophisticated hierarchical (but peaceful) social structure for hundreds of years before a couple of German explorers stumbled upon it a century or so ago. Even after Germany colonised it, it was a discrete nation state, and as a discrete nation state it worked. After defeat in the First World War Germany’s African possessions were confiscated by the League of Nations, and Rwanda happened to be handed over to Belgium by way of reparation (hence it speaks French). The Belgians did make progress in developing the country along Western lines, but they were only able to rule -like most colonial governments- by accentuating the divisions in the social structure, segregating the native population, and levering one tribe into dominating the others. In Rwanda they divided the country along social and ethnographic rather than purely ethnic lines, and created two distinct castes (the names may be depressingly familiar to you): the Tutsis (a taller, generally wealthier and better educated ‘tribe’) whom they chose to rule, and the Hutus (a shorter agricultural people) whom they chose to be ruled.

Having been artificially divided, the Rwandan people were thus manipulated throughout the Twentieth Century, and the discrimination suffered by the Hutus really started to foment around the time of independence. The Belgians had cleft Rwandan society in two so successfully that when the country achieved independence in 1962 a brutal civil war broke out, not entirely dissimilar to the genocide four decades later. The numerically much smaller Tutsis, deeply resented by the Hutu majority, were forced to flee the country as the (Hutu) government (supported by the French and the Belgians) engaged in an early example of ethnic cleansing. Tutsi resentment then simmered for decades in refugee camps over the border (the centre at Nakivali was a result of this war) culminating in a Ugandan-backed invasion and a resulting civil war in 1990. Half-hearted attempts at peace brokered some kind of cease fire, but extremist Hutus, sensing that their time in the sun was nearing its end, decided to invoke an apocalyptic ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem, and trained up thousands of young militiamen (the Interahamwe) to wipe the Tutsis off the face of the planet. To this end, they and the Hutu civilians who often supported them very nearly succeeded.

Walking around Rwanda today it is literally impossible to imagine what happened there. Literally impossible. Even after you’ve seen the photographs, watched the footage, and heard the deeply emotive testimonies of those who were there, it just doesn’t compute. Why did it happen? Perhaps more importantly, how did it happen? These are huge and fundamental questions but they simply don’t have answers.

So we visited the Memorial Centre, and we looked around it, and then we left it. That’s all we did. But in the process we probably changed a bit. Or at least our trip to Africa changed a bit. It goes without saying that the Centre isn’t a happy place, and in truth it’s a slightly weird tourist destination, but it’s just so incredibly important. It’s important because the 250,000 murdered Tutsis and moderate Hutus interred there prevent anyone from ever denying that ‘a genocide’ took place. It’s important because it records for history the stark, unimaginable facts in all their grizzly, inhumane detail. And it’s important because it draws the ultimate line in the sand: it is said that those who do not learn their history are condemned to repeat it, but here is a place where we are reminded of these crimes for all time. And this is as true for the Rwandans who go about their business every day in the shadow of the memorial buildings as it is for the rest of us, comfortable in our own seemingly stable democracies. These things can happen, and have happened, even where you’d least expect them. They can also be, and should have been, prevented.

The Memorial shows us plainly and dispassionately how inhumane man can be, and how terrible and how insane man sometimes is. But the recovery which goes on in the city around it is testament to how humane man can be, and how forgiving and how fraternal he sometimes is. Indeed, Kigali itself stands as a strange and quite remarkable juxtaposition, between man’s capacity for love and his capacity for hate. Certainly the Centre succeeded in its main task: to be informative; but it was also deeply moving, deeply uncomfortable and deeply shocking. Set against a truly deafening silence, it’s the statistics which hit you -and stupefy you- first: it’s simply not possible to get your head round the scale of a genocide in which up to a million people were butchered to death by their neighbours in just three murderous months. Then there’s the confusing and sinister contrast between the methodical, premeditative coordination of the Hutu authorities’ ‘solution’, and the monstrous, frenzied and gratuitous way in which the Interahamwe carried it out. The main choice of weapon was the machete, supplemented by clubs, knives and any kind of blunt instrument the Hutus could get their hands on. This wasn’t a war of guns, bullets and remote, unseen enemies. It was bloody, beastly, and totally ruthless slaughter. What finally hits you is that it happened to people, to individuals, as proven by the rooms full of photographs: genocide crystallised into painful, human reality. We simply cannot believe it happened, and we cannot understand how it wasn’t stopped.

You see, in the West our view of Africa is fractured, tainted and often awry. We think of it purely as a land of unrest, of starvation, of civil strife and of tribal conflict. For decades our news has told us only of obscure countries ruled over by tyrants, where refugees endlessly cross borders, and how only aid from the West keeps them alive. At no time do we actually think about the causes or consequences of our historical and contemporary involvement –why these dictators are able to cling to power, why there is no intervention before refugee crises emerge, and why only African countries where we have a vested interest are ever assisted. We also don’t care very much. Yeah, the suffering gets to us, and we’re very generous with our pocket money, but globally speaking Africa doesn’t matter much. Not to our leaders, anyway. So when the genocide erupted in Rwanda it was regarded by Western governments –at least those which had heard of Rwanda- as not much more than an internal matter, another inconsequential tribal conflict no different to those which have blighted the continent for decades, and certainly one whose outcome wouldn’t affect us in the West one way or another. And that’s how these things get ignored.

We left the Memorial with two types of disbelief. One came from being totally overwhelmed by what we’d seen and read (the interviews with genocide survivors were especially powerful, and it’s hard to understand that the things they talked about actually happened), while the other came when we saw Kigali spread out in front of us: where Tutsis and Hutus are working together, living among one another, almost as if nothing ever happened. The level of forgiveness is almost too far-fetched to accept. It was a confusing, bewildering day and, accordingly, we spent a weird night in a restaurant listening to a reggae band, trying to come to terms with what we’d learned.

Day 3: Kigali to Kibuye

After our short, intense, but reflective time in Kigali, we travelled west along the ridiculously well-engineered and ludicrously scenic drive to the ‘coastal’ resort of Kibuye. The scenery is at times alpine, at times like the hills of New England, and at times like the Massif Central in France, but much bigger and much more dramatic than all of them. The weather was beautiful, and the trip actually eclipsed the road down to Kigali for its variety and its sheer scale. Besides which, we were on a really comfy minibus, something the Rwandans have definitely got right.

View over Lake Kivu, Kibuye

 Kibuye is similarly delightful. And although the genocide was particularly bad here, you really wouldn’t know it. It’s like a sleepy Mediterranean town, tumbling down to the waterside with a kind of languid air, punctuated by occasional thrilling glimpses of stunning Lake Kivu. The lake forms most of the border between Rwanda and DR Congo, and is a beautifully calm, island-studded sheet of glimmering water. We checked in to our hotel –a brilliantly designed series of buildings on terraces overlooking the water- and sat for the most of the day either in the lakeside restaurant, or out on our pristinely kept lawn. In the evening the local fishermen set out onto the lake, singing their traditional sea-shanties as the sun set over the huge, craggy mountains of the Congo. It was bliss, and Rwanda surprised us yet again.

Fishermen’s raft, dusk in Kibuye

Day 4: Kibuye to Gisenyi

6 hours to travel 60 miles. That gives an average of 10 miles per hour, doesn’t it? Well, that was our how long our quintessentially African bus journey from Kibuye to Gisenyi took. Crammed into an absolutely ancient bus, we wobbled gingerly up mountainsides and round gravelly hairpin bends, reaching the quite well-developed resort of Gisenyi quite a bit later than we’d planned. But not so late that we couldn’t enjoy a truly fabulous, gourmet meal at a lakeside restaurant, owned by a Rwandan bloke who used to live in Forest Gate. We know we said we weren’t going to be frivolous or privileged, but Rwanda has got it so right that you can’t help but fall for her charms.

Kibuye to Gisenyi

Day 5: Gisenyi

Site of the worst killings of the genocide (of 60,000 Tutsis who were resident here in April 1994, only 6000 remained by the end of July), Gisenyi has almost completely reinvented itself as a tourist destination for wealthy Rwandans and international travellers. Now don’t get carried away, it’s not exactly St Tropez or Miami Beach (although it does have some sand), but rather it relies on its infectiously laid back, slightly faded colonial atmosphere, some excellent hotels and restaurants, and views to absolutely die for. Just yards from the Congolese border town of Goma (where, the day after the genocide finished, around 12,000 retribution-fearing Hutu refugees crossed every hour), it sits prettily on Lake Kivu in the shadow of the humungous Nyiragongo volcano, which last blew its top in 2002, and is framed by endless silhouettes of mountains.

Linda, the Paradis Malahide Lodge, Gisenyi

Having stayed the previous night in a cheap and not-particularly-cheerful hostel, we moved just south of the town to a not-cheap but unbelievably-cheerful lodge, located sublimely on a peninsula, created long ago by a lava flow into the lake, and covered by some of the most beautiful gardens we’ve seen, anywhere. And we lay on the beach looking out over the lake, thankful that places can change so much, and thankful that our lives have never witnessed the upheaval that’s so well hidden behind that disarming Rwandan friendliness and politeness.

Paradis Malahide Lodge, Gisenyi

Day 5: Gisenyi to Ruhengeri

Another day, another (much better) bus, and astonishingly another even more beautiful road. Rwanda just never fails to surprise and delight. We’d so recommend it. It’s just such a dramatic and surprising country; only half the size of Scotland but even more beautiful, we think, with the sort of jaw-dropping scenery your eyes just can’t get enough of. Our camera has come up pathetically short in trying to capture the views, and actually after a while our brains started to struggle, too. It’s almost like we were too impressed to properly record stuff. We arrived mid-afternoon in the pouring rain, and Linda was able to pop down to the unbelievably dodgy-looking but really helpful and friendly travel agent where she was due to pick up her Gorilla tracking permit. She was, shall we say, quite excited.

Gisenyi to Ruhengeri

Day 6: Ruhengeri

Ruhengeri is your basic, typical down-at-heel African trading town, but it’s been pretty well-developed since it started to be used by travellers as a base for tracking Gorillas in the unrealistically massive Virunga volcano chain. The town has surely the world’s most amazing backdrop: nine ginormous volcanoes, perfectly drawn against the dramatic, misty skies, all separate, all different but all equally impressive. Whatever the weather (bulging out subtly under layers of mist, or punching fearsomely upwards into clear blue skies) they loom large over the town, one of them still defiantly spewing out lava in an endless display of natural power, infinitely more destructive than even the madness of men.

Muhabura Volcano, Ruhengeri

Linda got up at 5am (Andy didn’t go tracking), and was driven to the Virunga National Park. With her guides and her group she set about hiking up into the misty forests of the Sabinyo volcano, looking for the family of mountain gorillas which had been spotted nearby earlier that morning by the Park’s scouts. The Sabinyo group were the family primarily studied by Dr Diane Fossey, pioneering wildlife scientist and subject of the famous film Gorillas in the Mist, and it was appropriately misty as the trackers headed up into the jungle. After about 45 minutes of walking, they spotted their first gorillas: a male and a female, both sitting in the trees despite their formidable bulk, munching on bamboo. Then another female emerged from the undergrowth –the bush was really thick in places- and sat noisily eating for a few minutes. Then, a deep growl and crashing from above: the giant Silverback male, the largest, heaviest and oldest in the whole National Park, was descending the tree just a few feet away from the trekking group. He clambered down, quickly and noisily, all 226kg of him. It can be quite startling, standing no more than a couple of paces away from a wild 35-stone primate, but gorillas here are so used to human visitors, and he was happy to just get on with his own business (mainly stripping and eating bamboo), only occasionally staring deep into the eyes of the people who had come to watch him. Silverbacks are huge, much bigger than you’d expect, and although they could crush you with their little fingers they are completely placid, peaceful animals.

Silverback of the Sabinyo Group, Virunga National Park

They’re pretty human-like too. After watching the captivating alpha male for a while (he grumbled and growled a bit, but apparently gorilla growls are a sign of peace and acceptance), a younger female appeared carrying on her back a four-week-old infant. The contrast between the power and confidence of the males and the fragility and helplessness of the babies is stark, and the interaction between families so empathetic. It’s criminal that these gentle creatures are still hunted for meat and for money, although the money being made by the Rwandan authorities through the sale of permits (they cost $500) is really making a difference to the survival chances of these amazing creatures. The number of habituated and non-habituated families is stabilising (there are about 800 individual mountain gorillas left on Earth) and birth rates are increasing, but even in the constantly monitored and therefore apparently safe Sabinyo group one of the adolescent females had been caught in a snare left by poachers a few days before, and was lucky to escape with her life. So the gorillas aren’t out of the woods yet.

Mother and infant, Sabinyo Group

 Rwanda is a challenge to get your head round. As we said at the beginning, when you know its story –even if you try to ignore it and accept the Rwanda of today- you are left dizzy; kind of punch-drunk. It is an assault on your physical and mental senses, and delivers huge highs and lows every minute you are there. It’s a captivating place, and one which gives your heart a real work-out: there are those awful heart-wrenching stories of families pulled apart, of men turning into monsters, and of a country trying to pull itself up by its bloodied bootstraps. Then there’s the heart-stopping scenery, where the land acts out its geological drama in some kind of hugely exaggerated physical theatre, all the while directed by nature as it pulls the African continent in opposite directions. And there are the heart-breaking smiles of Rwandan children, the cheeky, knowing grins of its thousands of orphaned street children, who grew up too fast but are as streetwise as anyone in the world. We thoroughly recommend a visit. They could use your support.

Linda and Andy

Ps some final statistics for you. A UNICEF survey in 1995 estimated the percentages of children affected by the genocide as follows:

99.9% witnessed violence;  87.5% saw dead bodies;  79.6% experienced death in the family;  69.5% witnessed someone being killed;  61.5% were threatened with death;  58% witnessed killings or injuries by machete;  and 31.4 witnessed rape. These are now the young men and women of Rwanda, working every day to make things better for themselves, their families and their amazing country. We stand in awe.

Welcome all, and a big hello from us here in beautiful Ruhanga. With more than eight weeks gone and less than four to go, we’re stunned at how quickly the time is going, but equally aware of how lax we’ve been in keeping our blog fully up-to-date. In our defence, we’ve been busy organising a big teaching programme in school during the last week of term (yes, school’s broken up for Easter holidays), doing some crucial (but not especially blog-worthy) admin work, spending a long (and stunning) weekend in Lake Bunyonyi, and being struck down with what you might euphemistically term tummy troubles. So apologies for not writing sooner.

So after our guests left (see last entry) and headed up to Kampala, and one of us was laid up in bed with a resonably severe case of UBTS (Ugandan Bog Trotting Syndrome), we returned to school. However, there wasn’t much in the way of teaching to be done as the children were sitting their end-of-term exams. Even the baby classes -where some children are as young as two- were tested (although their tests are oral. For instance the teacher might point at the wall and say “What is this?” The children get a mark if they manage to say “Wall”), while the rest of the school sat internal exams. These are privately published exams which the school has to buy in the local town, but as far as we can tell are pretty standardised. The results came out last week and it seems the primary school here is a fair way ahead of the local Government Schools (ours is private, but funded by sponsors). This is probably due to the fact that ours has a nursery school, so the kids who start Primary 1 have already had three years of education, not to mention three years of exposure to English, what with all these volunteers around (the most we’ve had here at one time was thirteen, which works out as 1 per 20 children, or two per class). So it seems the children are getting some kind of return for all the effort and input the volunteers have been making here over the years.

However, we are firm believers that there is always room for improvement, and our challenge to the staff and future volunteers here is to not only carry on helping and improving the school, but to make it a stand-out school in the district. A beacon school, where new ideas and a high level of input brings out the best in the children. Now, we do understand that this is a small, country school, populated by children who often come from large, poor and illiterate families, whose parents’ identity cards actually state their occupation as ‘peasant’. So we know the school will never be Eton or Harrow. But with all the input it’s getting -financially from sponsors and donors, and practically from volunteers- we don’t see any reason why at least some of the children here can’t really go on to higher things.

They say here that having good English is a passport to a better life: a clerical job, perhaps, or work up in Kampala; it seems its importance can’t be overestimated. And while we must largely bow to this theory, coming as it does from people who know infinitely better than us, we can’t help feeling that education should be much more than just a vehicle for achieving such narrow, Westernised aspirations. Of course, it should allow children and families to think big, and it should propel kids as far as they can possibly go. But -and this ‘but’ is true in Britain, too- what about the children whose dreams are, frankly, unrealistic? How do we best serve those kids who, for whatever reason, just aren’t ever going to get clerical jobs, or move to Kampala? When you live in a tiny, remote, rural community like this, the fact remains that only a very few children will move  onwards, upwards, or anywhere, for that matter.

Now, don’t get us wrong: all children should be given that chance. But there is an argument here that, alongside English, Maths, Science, Social Studies (and all the other stuff they’d get taught should they be bright/lucky/wealthy enough to go to Secondary School), the children should also, for instance, be learning the manual, practical and technical skills that the vast majority of them are actually going to need. The argument asks, pertinently, how are they going to gain expertise in car mechanics, bike repairs, construction, or tailoring? How, more relevantly, are they going to get the best out of their farmland? Because to be honest, as far as we can see, the vast majority of the girls at the school will end up being housewives, and the vast majority of boys will end up being farmers (if they’re given a fertile piece of land), goatherds (if they’re given a hillside) or brickmakers (if they’re not given anything).

Ruhanga brick fields

And here being a housewife means giving birth to -and then bringing up- as many as 10 or 12 children, doing all the farming (sowing and harvesting), doing all the cooking (slaughtering and boiling), doing all the cleaning (house, yard and children), fetching all the water, doing all the shopping, and milking all the animals. It can also often mean building all the structures around the household (eg kitchen, animal sheds, outdoor privy, outhouses, sometimes even the house itself), or doing part-time work (eg sewing, teaching, weaving, selling craftwork). Very often a wife will share her husband with other women (sometimes only one, sometimes many more: we know a man with eight wives), so money is always tight, and support for the family often isn’t there. Paying school fees is surely just another massive worry to add to the list? 

Being a farmer means working hard for your lifetime. It rarely stops, although the people here are relatively fortunate in that the rains are reliable, and there is always food to be had. Staples such as bananas, matoke (cooking bananas), cassava and potatoes love the climate and you see them growing literally everywhere. In fact, bananas are so abundant they use them as lids when fetching water (a fat green banana stuffed into a jerry-can spout makes a surprisingly good cork). But farming is a boring, repetitive and unrelentingly demanding way of life. The women usually look after the household garden (this will probably include bananas, coffee, tomatoes, cabbages, and maize), while teenage sons usually look after the herds of cows and goats, if a family is lucky enough to own any. The men help to dig the fields, establish and maintain the plantations, and cycle the huge, unwieldy, and deceptively heavy bunches of bananas to market each week. Sometimes, when they just need more help, and more free labour, they wonder why on earth their cildren are sitting in classrooms learning the alphabet when they’d be a damn sight more use on the family shamba. And, accordingly, hundreds of children in the parish don’t attend school.

Ankole Cattle herder

But we think there is a tremendous value in learning, which is probably why we’re here doing what we’re doing. Frankly, the children learn plenty about farming at home in the afternoons and during the holidays (they have three months off a year: a month over Easter, a month during the Summer, and a month over Christmas), enabling them to see the whole agricultural calendar of what has to be planted or harvested during which season. They will probably learn yet more about farming or brickmaking when they’re on the job, having left school early to earn a bit of money working as labourers for a relative or family friend. Growing up around the family business will provide future bike-repairers or hardware store-owners with all the training they’ll ever need. So it looks like lots of bases are already covered.

In addition to all of these, we’d really like to see a mixture of educational pathways, too. We have a Nursery School, and the beginnings of a Primary School, albeit limited in scope. These should give the most deprived families in the area at least a foundation in learning. We have families and businesses which provide a kind of direct on-the-job training, albeit deeply restrictive and often via unpaid child labour. These should provide at least some members of the family with a skill set and a head start in life. What’s missing is a community-based training programme, and we’d like to see the Ruhanga Development Board establish . There are, apparently, plans for this in place,and it’s slated to be ready once the children have moved up the school and finally left Primary 7. So we’re looking at 2017 or so for the present pupils, plus the wider community, to be able to access a resource centre which will be able to teach them miscellaneous practical and technical skills. It’s ambitious, but we think it’ll be the missing link in the educational provision of the area.

But even after all of this, there is a much more fundamental reason for educating these children; a sometimes capricious reason but one of critical importance nevertheless, at the very essence of ‘learning’. And that is that education expands minds and brings about change. We talk about these boys and girls working all day doing hard, heavy labour: we know that’s just the way things are in these communities, but we want them to change. And we talk about women being exhausted at the end of a gruelling, sun-baked day, and still being expected to satisfy the sexual demands of their drunk, adulterous husbands, even though they know it might result in another baby, or worse, the contraction of HIV. The women here are powerless to do much about it, either thanks to the total intransegence of the patriarchal society they find themselves stuck in, but perhaps more often simply through ignorance, and we want that to change. When the volunteers sit here talking about the minutiae of volunteering, the day-to-day issues surrounding the school, the trivia we all come into contact with when we wonder what we’re going to teach P1 the next day, they probably aren’t even aware of the symbolic importance of what they’re doing, nor the future changes which might be inadvertently being brought about. It might not seem like it when the kids just aren’t getting your lesson; and it might not seem like much when the kids in the Baby Classes are just rolling around on the floor, breaking wind and not listening to the teacher. But actually Uganda is being changed, millimetre by millimetre; and the Uganda of 2020 is being formed, moulded and altered. It’s the same all over East Africa, and it is education which is driving it. So would it be going too far to say that, amongst the drudgery of children’s duties, the unending burden of female labour, and the dismissive stranglehold of aloof, self-serving governments, getting children into class might just be East Africa’s salvation?

So, yeah, getting children into class is undoubtedly a Good Thing, and one which may indeed effect changes which resonate decades into our futures, but in the meantime we’re just trying to get the kids to be able to read properly. As we’ve mentioned before, teaching in Uganda is done by rote and repitition. Children memorise words, and learn English through simple (and often desperately mispronounced) imitation. The limitations of this are plain to see when you show even the brightest kids in the class a word they don’t recognise, and ask them to say it. Even a word like ‘mat’. They know ‘cat’ and ‘hat’, but they go blank at ‘mat’. How so? Well, they’re not actually reading  the words, they’re just memorising wordshapes and the wordsounds that go with them. They’re not able to make the connection between ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ looking the same, and sounding the same. And until you understand the reason why ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ look and sound the same, you’re not really reading. So Linda and another volunteer, Helen, have been introducing some basic Phonic training for the teachers, with the notion that next term they will be able to deliver Phonics-based reading lessons in their classes, and start getting their children learning how to sound words out when they don’t recognise them. It’s beginners’ stuff, really, but the size of the undertaking starts to dawn on you when you realise the teachers have little or (mainly) no idea about sounds or phonetic English.

Linda leads a session on phonics for class teachers

Here, the alphabet is taught (from the age of three) as Ay, Bee, See, etc, rather than Ah, Buh, Kuh, etc (which is actually not accurate, either), and as a result neither teachers nor pupils had any understanding of how F could be pronounced ff, rather than eff, or how G could be guh instead of jee. But despite this, they all picked it up really quickly, and thoroughly enjoyed the silly (but effective) Jolly Phonics actions which make remembering the sounds much easier. The teachers have now had three introductory sessions, a small amount of resources made available to them, and a demonstration lesson where Linda and Helen taught a few of the children. So now it’s up to them (perhaps in partnership with future volunteers) to get the children reading properly. This, we feel, would represent a quantum leap in the kids’ literacy development, and really would set them apart from other schools in the area.

Interestingly, it should also help the pupils learn their own language more effectively, too, as nearly all the sounds are the same in Runyankole as they are in English. The headmaster, Paddy, who teaches Runyankole classes, can often be seen close to breaking point in his lessons: the way he teaches Local Language is by breaking down words into sound groups, and getting the children to learn them by heart: a kind of phonics but done in a really old-fashioned way. So the children repeat  BA, BE, BI BO, BU; CHA, CHE, CHI CHO CHU; DA, DE, DI, DO, DU; etc, over and over again. This they do without error, but when he asks them to put WE, BA and LE together to make a word they simply don’t understand the instruction, and cannot make the comprehension leap to get ‘Webale’. It’s deeply frustrating, and quite surprising too, but we think it must be largely to do with the way they have been taught over the years, where both questions and answers are given by the teachers, and answers are then simply repeated back by children. As soon as any lateral or independent thinking comes into the equation, the kids are in uncharted territory. And however much Paddy shouts at them, they ain’t going to get it.

But maybe now they will.

Still on teaching, we had a enjoyable and productive week with the kiddywinks after the exams were finished. The teachers traditionally take a backseat role during the last week of term (although in fairness, one or two of them must have been in the boot given how backseat their normal teaching positions are), and so allowed us volunteers to plan and execute our own lessons, sessions and activities. We and fellow long-term volunteer Dan drew up a timetable for volunteers to try out different sessions in different classes, but left it up to them what they wanted to do. We were lucky that the group of volunteers at the time was pretty enthusiastic and threw themselves into the week’s work (well, we say ‘week’: it was only scheduled to be four days -Good Friday intervened- and then half of them went off on safari on the Thursday, meaning they only taught for three), but we think the children got quite a lot out of it.

Andy, doing time

In fact, we think the teachers got quite a bit out of it, too. You see, we moan about how their teaching ‘style’ merely involves saying things over and over until the (cleverest) children are able to repeat them back, or just writing stuff on the board for children to copy without any kind of learning actually taking place at all. But you have to remember: these young teachers have never heard of -let alone seen- any other kind of teaching method. So for them to see volunteers doing activities, breaking classes up into groups, bringing in colourful and interactive resources, and getting kids to work creatively and independently, must have been truly eye-opening. We think, from what they said afterwards, that they’d like to do more of these kinds of things themselves (they must be as bored of “This is pencili” as the kids are), but they have neither the training nor the resources to do it. On top of that they have a (particularly dull and rigid) curriculum to follow, and there simply isn’t time to do ‘fun’. 

But maybe they’ll be able to take a few ideas away from what we did, and maybe find time to stimulate the kids (and themselves) a bit more in the classroom. At the very least there’s a load of posters on the walls now.

Linda, drawing a crowd

Speaking of classroom walls, we have now finished painting those in P1 and P2, and have now also done all the doors and windows thorughout the school. Picking a particularly inappropriate shade of drab olive known as Army Green, we have now completed Stage 1 of the project’s decorating programme. What remains -Stage 2- is to plaster and then paint the outside walls of the classrooms, but since this is really only cosmetic work it carries a very low priority. What’s probably more important is the fair finishing of the classroom floors (the incomplete concrete ground is sharp on the children’s feet, and bits of jaggedy stone can loosen quite easily), although this will cost quite a lot of money. 

An Army Green door, as painted by Andy

But before any work starts on that, we’re going back on site to carry on building the classrooms funded by you lot. Construction stopped a couple of weeks ago when the builders started work on a new kitchen and a reception building over here at the Lodge. They did this after we decided it would be better to temporarily halt work on the classrooms while the kids were still in school: the next phase of the work was to involve a large amount of scaffolding going up, wooden shuttering being hammered together, steel bars being bent and shaped, and large amounts of roughcast concrete being poured to make a lintel. After that, huge unmilled timbers would be laid to make a roofing frame, and large sheets of heavy-duty iron roofing attached. So all in all, it probably wouldn’t have been the best Health and Safety environment for a load of particularly curious Nursery children to be around. But now they’ve broken up we’ll be able to start again.

Waving goodbye: our last day teaching

So amongst all this you’ll be pleased to know that we did manage to get away for a weekend. And what an amazing weekend it was. In fact, we think we might’ve found the world’s loveliest place: Lake Bunyonyi. We’d heard it was nice, all the guide books mention how nice it is, and some previous volunteers who went there said how nice it was. But it was much more than nice. For example, there was our lodge with its beautiful brick and grass bandas, landscaped with astonishing attention to detail; a stunning terraced garden, full of weird and wonderful plants and birds, sloping elegantly down to the lake; a little wooden jetty-cum-diving platform, a wonderfully restful place to sunbathe and look out over the water; the lake itself, as still as a millpond, dotted with dozens of gorgeous uninhabited islands and bounded by a hundred absurdly picturesque inlets; our very own dugout canoe, not immediately easy to direct, but once mastered just the best way to travel around; and the views, breathtakingly beautiful, which no camera will ever be able to do justice to.

On Itambira Island, Lake Bunyonyi

We stayed three days and two nights there. Days were spent drifting around the lake in hollowed out trees, alternately basking in the sun and paddling in the water like a load of scrawny pink hippos, and eating splendid (though less-than-punctual) meals. Nights consisted of beer, cards, games of spoons, and sitting out on the jetty staring at the extraordinary night skies and talking about nothing. As you can probably tell, we quite liked it, and we will definitely go back.

Lake Bunyonyi

So as we enter our final month here how are we feeling about our time? Well, we’ve met a bunch of good people. Over the last eight weeks we’ve shared our time here with -at the last count- twenty-seven different people, all with different backgrounds and all with different stories to tell. In fact, this is probably the part of the project which has been most different from the previous two: sharing time, ideas and conversations with lots of other volunteers, rather than being the only white people for miles in any direction. And it provides a completely different type of experience: in some ways, it brings a bit of Britain into your life; a sense of familiarity, what with all the British accents and conversations about things at home; a kind of island of undiluted Britishness in a corner of Uganda. And consequently, for good or for bad, you get a much less keen sense of Africa here. It surrounds you, of course, and fingers of Africanness touch and entice you all the time, but at the end of each working day we go back to the Lodge, and fly back to Britain.

We have a few weeks left to put a few more things in place, too. We’ve worked hard to try and get parts of the project a little bit better focused, and to try and make sure the volunteers are sufficiently well-directed to make the best use of their time here. As with all projects, it’s a work in progress, and there are always things which need reviewing and altering. But, as always, you eventually run out of time to effect all the changes you want to see put in place. Indeed, one thing the project lacks and needs is continuity, and we hope that the long-term volunteers of the future are able to provide this key component of what makes any project tick, and what makes any project sustainable for the long haul.

This particular project, as we have stated before, has grown exponentially over the last year or so, and it does undoubtedly need a much tighter, more robust organisational system to make sure all the things it does are recorded properly and developed efficiently, according to a powerful and coherent central policy. It sounds quite boring, especially when most volunteers (ourselves included) mainly want to play with African babies and have fun teaching in the classrooms, but actually these things do need to be in place, as points of reference if nothing else. After all, a project with a strong mission statement will always be steered more effectively than one without, because everything it does will have its origins and its aims in that statement. And that, perhaps above all else, is what this project needs to do most: to set in stone its aims and objectives; its short- and long-term policies; its ambitions and its dreams. The rest can then be teased out from these.

On a slightly more positive note, we have once again bowed to our consciences and decided to sponsor a child at school. Actually, hers is a particularly sad story, and there really wasn’t any way we could say no. Her name is Kirabo and she is a pupil in the Nursery Middle Class, making her something like 5 years old. When she was very young her mother abandoned her in a banana plantation, and it was only by luck, we suppose, that she was found at all. One of the women that works as a cleaner and cook at the Lodge, Justine, by some convoluted and circumlocutive chain of events ended up looking after her, despite having a number of her own and other adopted children. She’s a very quiet woman, but evidently a remarkable one too, given the amount of money she earns here and the responsibilities she’s decided to take on. Anyway, she desperately wanted Kirabo to attend the school here with her other kids, but because of her financial situation she simply wasn’t able to afford the 15,000/- (£4.20) per term it costs to send a non-sponsored child to our school (incidentally the random and illogical way the project has set up its admissions policy precludes Kirabo from qualifying for free schooling since all newly registered children are required to pay registration fees unless they have been sponsored, regardless of their background). Consequently, it was decided, if there was no money forthcoming Kirabo would be barred from attending school next term. If she wanted to come, the directive said, Justine would have to forfeit 15,000/- from her monthly salary (i.e. nearly half of it). Thinking the whole situation was ridiculous, we stepped in and agreed to sponsor her. We’re happy we did, because she’s lovely.

Linda; Kirabo; Andy

Incidentally, if any of you at home would be interested in sponsoring one (or more) of the children at the school, you can log on to www.sponsorachild.co.uk to see which children remain unsponsored. In truth, we’re looking to advise the project on slightly altering the way the sponsorship is done, and that’s something that we’re going to be working on over the next few weeks. For example, we want to include some of the children’s stories on the site, and perhaps explain a little bit about their backgrounds, because we think that would undoubtedly encourage more sponsors to come forward (there’s some pretty sad tales here, and some pretty needy children). But in the meantime we should stress that all the children are in need, and their parents could really do without paying school fees. Unfortunately, until all the children are sponsored the school has to rely on these fees to cover its running costs. So basically, the school needs lots more sponsors. It costs £3.50 per month and this pays for a child’s place at school, a couple of school uniforms for them, and a year’s worth of pencils and exercise books. The remainder contributes to paying teachers’ salaries, covering resource and maintenance costs, and keeping the expansion programme going.

Finally, now school’s out for four weeks (meaning that our time here as teachers is now finished) we suppose it’s time to review it all. It’s definitely been an interesting experience, although kind of like travelling back in time to a 1920s elementary school. Sometimes it’s a bit frustrating when you see the children locked into such a rigid and unimaginative educational system -it can’t provide especially great job satisfaction for the staff, either- but you soon learn that this is just How Things Are Done Here, and while changes can (and in our opinion probably should) be effected, they will happen only in geological timescale. Even in a new and little school like this it will still take dozens and dozens of volunteers to  introduce (let alone establish) new ideas, while on a larger scale it will take a government a good deal more genuine and broad-minded about universal free education to release the children of Uganda from the soporific and laborious version of childhood they currently experience. That said, it’d be difficult to find a bunch of happier, more enthusiatic kids than those round here, so what do we know?

Back row: Ian, Paddy, Jamil. Middle row: Marion, Eunice, Jenipher, Andy. Front row: Kedrine, Alinda, Mellon, Matron, Linda

Still, once we got to know the teachers, and saw what was behind that communally gruff and reticent exterior, we found a group of compassionate and friendly people, trying hard to make the best of a system lacking resources and direction, and staffed by people who lack training and stimulation. We also had to keep reminding ourselves that these men and women -our colleagues- despite their profession and wage, still live pretty close to abject poverty, and have a million different problems on their plate. And when reminded of that, you realise that the task these people are charged with -the process of  turning this country around- is going to take one heck of a long time. But by and large we think it’s in the right hands. 

Okay, that’s about it for this instalment, but we’re not done with Uganda yet. We’ve still got four weeks of playscheme activities to devise and execute, plenty of maintenance jobs around the Lodge to start and finish, more construction work at school to do, volunteering programmes and strategies to discuss and implement, other local projects to look around, and villagers to visit, as well a few trips to plan, and some more visitors to welcome. So it promises to be an interesting month.

Until next time,

Linda and Andy

Agandi, and welcome to our third installment from Uganda. It’s been another busy couple of weeks here in the southwest of the country what with our visit to a nearby refugee settlement, spending time around the region with our visitors from the UK, our safari around Queen Elizabeth National Park, some more building and painting work at the school, being in yet another video, and of course all the day-to-day stuff we do here at the Lodge. Time seems to be going past really quickly, and it’s mad to think that we’re nearly at the halfway point of this project. Moreover, we’re a fair bit past the halfway point of our entire year, and they say the second half always goes by quicker. So, we’ll be home in no time.

Porridge time

Meanwhile, we’ve got lots of stuff to do while we’re still in Africa, and we’re still trying to see as many different sides to this part of the continent as we can. So the weekend before last we drove over to Lake Nakivali, close to the Tanzanian border, to visit one of the largest -and oldest- refugee settlements in Uganda. We’re not exactly sure how long it’s been there -it probably dates from the early 1960s and the first Rwandan crisis- but either way many of the settlers have been there for far longer than you’d imagine refugees to be anywhere. It was also very different to the way we’d expected a refugee settlement to look. Indeed, you’ll notice that we’re using the word ‘settlement’ rather than ‘camp’, and that’s for good reason, because this wasn’t the field full of hastily-erected tents and bivouacs you might imagine, but a large, complex and fully formed town, with homes, businesses, and streets full of people. In fact, the only things which differentiated it from a regular Ugandan town were how very distinct districts have been formed along ethnic-origin lines (there are residents from literally all over East Africa and they’ve developed their own specific parts of town), plus of course the big fence around the outside of it.

The site is administered jointly by the Ugandan Prime Minister’s office and the UNHCR (the UN High Commission for Refugees), and as we said, it features a real mixture of nationalities. There are, for example, still refugees from Rwanda, who arrived following the apocalyptic civil war of 1994; there are Kenyans who came across the border after the post-election violence of 2007/8; there are Sudanese who have been driven south during 25 years of almost continual conflict; there are Somalis, some of whom fled here during the brutal civil war of 1993, and some who left during the near twenty years of lawlessness which has followed it; there are Ethiopians who came to escape the famous droughts and famines we’re all so familiar with, as well as the repessive and violent regime which we know a good deal less about; there are many Congolese from (especially the northeast of) the DRC who have drifted across the border, tired of how their country shows no signs of emerging from two decades of mindless ethnic conflict and self-destruction; there are a few Tanzanians left over from the war with Uganda in the mid-eighties; and there are a few internally-displaced Ugandans, forced south by the piracy of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the far north. In fact, a pretty comprehensive history lesson about how unstable this whole region has been over the last 30 years is provided by no more than a simple list of the origins of a handful of people from this one refugee centre.

Administration Block, Nakivali Refugee Settlement

And of course we heard some pretty sad and often harrowing tales. Of families wrenched apart; of loved ones ‘disappearing’ overnight; of desperate wing-and-a-prayer bids for freedom. But mostly we heard the same shoulder-shrugging frustrations of a population which is, by and large, stuck, probably for good, and hamstrung by a bureaucratic system which is almost imossible to negotiate. And while it is true to say that coming to Uganda undoubtedly saved these people’s lives, it’s much less clear where they go from here, what happens next, and what it is that they can now do with their lives. Walking around, it seems like one or two of the more entrepreneurial (or politically astute) refugees have managed to set up businesses, and there is an education system and a monetary economy of sorts within the settlement. But to be honest, the ethnic divisions are so deep, and the level of corruption is so high, that there is virtually zero opportunity for any kind of ‘normal’ social mobility. Plus, of course, they’re interred. And in such a state it’s almost like time has stopped for those who have been settled here, and we’re at a loss to see how it gets started again.

A Somali man we met, Abdul, who spoke five languages (including impeccable English) told us how he’d been living in the settlement since 1994. He escaped Mogadishu with his youngest son during the civil war of 1993, just before the disastrous American invasion, but only after having seen his wife and older sons gunned down by rebel militia. Over the years in Nakivali he’s studied languages, carved out a life in the camp for himself and his son, and after many intreviews finally convinced the UNHCR officials to take him on as an interpreter. He’s been working since 2006 (it’s a voluntary position and like everyone else at the camp he relies on Ugandan and UN aid for food etc ) but recently found out that his refugee status is to be revoked, and it’s likely he will have to leave the site. He doesn’t know what he’ll do next because he will be in Uganda illegally (so there will be no obligation for the government to look after him), he will no longer be a refugee (so the UN will have no reponsibility for him, either) and he has no papers, no money and no means of getting back to Somalia (which he understandably doesn’t want to do anyway). He seemed anxious, as you might expect, but at the same time he was peculiarly upbeat, almost as if this was far from the worst thing that had ever happened to him. We sometimes wonder if there are any people in the world whose lives are so consistently and unremittingly hard as the Africans’, but we’re pretty sure that there aren’t many who could deal with things so well.

Multi-ethnic friends, Nakivali

So we walked around in almost unbearable heat, talking to some of the settlers, past the shops and shacks of New Congo, the meat stalls and mosques of New Somalia, all the while followed by an ever-increasing gaggle of children. They and their elders were all eager to tell us their tales, to practise their English, and to bemoan the countless failings of the system they’ve found themselves wrapped up in. But however much you hear it, it’s simply not possible for us to imagine what it must mean to be a non-person: whatever your talents, your work ethic, your intelligence or your ambitions, you are literally fenced off from the rest of the world; safe from your past but prevented from realising any kind of future. Back home, we just don’t know enough -or think enough- about people and places like this, and because of that we aren’t doing enough about them. But then again if we did, when would we have time to watch Britain’s Got Talent?

Actually, the long drive over to Isingiro district also gave us the opportunity to see a bit more of Uganda. Staying at the Lodge is very convenient and all that, but’s easy to just stay here and insulate yourself from the rest of the country. And it’s always interesting to travel around a bit and see the differences between regions, be they sociological, geographical or (as they tend to be in Africa) climatic. We drove a large circuit (well, on the kind of roads we were negotiating it felt like a large circuit but it actually only covered a pathetically small portion of the south of the country) through towns and vllages which seemed, to the naked eye, to be a good deal poorer and less developed than the region in which our project is situated. We’re sure that it’s nothing more than a strange and whimsical coincidence that the President, his tribe and his most steadfast supporters are from here, and not from the south, and surely to suggest anything else would be deeply and unnecessarily cynical.

Crossing the somewhat unofficial-looking Tanzanian Border

After our trip to Nakivali, it was back to the project for some graft. Linda has been busy for a few weeks now teaching in Primary 1 in the mornings and making resources for pretty much all the classrooms in the afternoons, while Andy has been on buiding and painting duty, and between us and the rest of the volunteers we’re trying to help the school improve, both in its teaching methods and in its appearance.

When we first arrived the classrooms were all pretty drab -the two primary classes hadn’t even been plastered- but over the last couple of weeks we’ve started touching them up a bit and we’re not far away from finishing them. All the rooms now have doors and windows which we’re also in the process of painting, and most of the classes now have a number of different posters, charts and wall-hangings. By the time we leave we hope the learning environment will be a bit more interesting for the kids, even if their lessons aren’t (Teacher, holds up pencil: “What is it?” Children: “That is pencili”. Teacher: “What is it?” Children: “That is pencili”. Teacher: “What is it?” Children: “That is pencili”. Teacher, holds up box: “What is it?” Children: “That is boxi”… You get the idea, but if you asked them to read or write anything you’d be met by not much more than a few quizzical looks and stony silence).

On painting duty: Dan and Andy

So yeah, as we’ve mentioned before, the teaching style here is depressingly old-fashioned and ponderous in the extreme, with repitition and rote being pretty much the only ways the teachers are able to deliver a lesson. It’s boring for the kids, doesn’t even attempt to differentiate between the vast abilities (and sometimes age groups) in each class, and it often makes it difficult for volunteers to involve themselves. Now it’ll take time, and we know the school is pretty much brand new, but it seems eminently sensible to us to try and introduce something a bit more interactive, although we know the teachers will be a bit resistent, maybe even frightened of doing things differently. But given the level of sponsorship, the amount of external funds, and the many British volunteers who have come here with ideas and enthusiasm, it’s our view that this school can and should do a lot better than mind-numbing Victorian chalk and talk. It should be a beacon school, progressive, daring and open-minded in its scope. At the moment, that simply isn’t the case, and we’re yet to see a comprehensive long-term plan that suggests anything different in the future. But we do what we can within the current limitations, and we hope the children enjoy the time they’re able to spend with us.

On teaching duty: Linda in action in Primary 1

We’re also making good progress on the new classroom. Actually, make that new classrooms. For some reason we’re building two at the time, which is odd since our/your fundraising only covered the cost of one, and other streams of funding for the project are generally unreliable, coming only on an as-and-when basis. Consequently, the building work is sort of stopping and starting. Mind you, we’ve already managed to get both rooms built up to lintel (i.e. top of window) level, but will probably have to wait for a bit more money and a few days of dry weather to get the next bit done. Andy’s been working with fellow volunteers Dan and Francis alongside the local pro’s, just doing odd bits of labouring here and a bit of wobbly bricklaying there, so hopefully between us all we’ll be able to get close to finishing by the time we leave. The work isn’t urgent and probably isn’t top priority -children are due to move into the first room only in January 2012 when the present Primary 2 class moves up to Primary 3, and into the second class in January 2013 when they move again up to P4- but even so, since everyone has been so generous donating money (we’d like to add another special thank you to the staff and children of St Mary’s, Hyson Green here) it’d be nice to leave something tangible as a legacy of our visit and of your generosity.

New classrooms: the future Primary 3 and Primary 4

Things have actually quietened down around the Lodge over the last fortnight with a few volunteers flying home, and only a couple arriving. But then on Wednesday we were happy to welcome Graham and Flo (for those of you who don’t know, Graham is Andy’s brother and Flo is Graham’s fiancee) who flew over to see us and have a look round a bit of Uganda before they get hitched in September. As we write this they are still in the country but instead of having to share a cramped grass-roofed banda in Ruhanga, they are firmly esconsed up in some swanky Kampala hotel having left here on Tuesday. And although it was only a short visit, we managed to do quite a bit, like driving over to Queen Elizabeth National Park for three days of among some frankly amazing wildlife and some not-too-shabby scenery, climbing a couple of really quite steep hills around the Lodge and looking around the nearby villages, meeting a few of the locals and listening to their normal yet completely-not-normal life stories, and popping into a couple of local schools.

Halfway around the world. Our safari group: Heather, Flo, Francis, Linda, Graham; Andy, Denis

Now as you might have already read, we have already done a safari in Kenya, and this one in QENP was quite different. And that’s because Uganda really can’t compete with the likes of Kenya or Tanzania when it comes to density and concentration of wildlife. However, this was not always so. Once upon a time it was a veritable safari Garden of Eden, with an unparalleled abundance of birds, grazing animals, predators and primates. Even decades of British hunting parties made only the tiniest, almost unnoticeable dent in their numbers. But thanks to the unimaginably destructive upheavals of the 1970s there was an almost wholesale slaughter of Uganda’s wildlife, perpetrated first by Idi Amin’s macho, rampaging, bloodthirsty armies and, once they’d been humiliatingly defeated, by the bored occupying soldiers from Tanzania who replacd them. And we’re not talking hunting here. Hunting is a couple of colonial hooray-henry types shooting the odd rhino from an elephant’s back, and that is a world-and-a-half away from a brigade of drunk mercenaries using a herd of rhinos as target practice for their heavy-duty machine guns. It’s shameful, really, and it forced Uganda’s once thriving and diverse fauna to the very brink of extinction.

The good news, though, is that there are some animals left. They’re not always easy to spot, and we’re sure that for some people it would make game driving a frustrating, patience-testing experience. But what you do get in Uganda is tranquility, and a sense of aloneness; amazing, vast plains without five hundred other safari vans chugging around, getting in your way; views stretching for miles towards huge, sublime mountain ranges; and the pure, naked thrill of spotting something moving in amongst the bushes, crouching alone in the distance, or sihouetted against the massive, empty skies. Obviously, it’s nice to drive round a national park and see all the things your guide book says you’ll be able to see, although at times -in truth- the Kenyan reserves did seem a bit Windsor Safari Park-ish. Not so here. Here it’s about the waiting game, the tension, and a few, occasional moments of pure astonishment.

Crater Lake, QENP

On day one we were a bit spoiled. After a beautiful (although not entirely comfortable) drive across the southwest of the country, down dramatic valleys and over swollen mud-brown rivers, we arrived at the park and were greeted by three lionesses sitting in and around a picnic banda. We were very close with nothing between us but warm evening air (we travelled through the park on the roof of the jeep) but to be honest they looked more like giant pussycats than ruthless pack-hunting meateaters, rolling around on their backs and flopping down in the long grass like some tropical relative of Bagpuss.

Lioness, QENP

But it was getting late and, apart from the happily large numbers of Ugandan kob and buffalo, there wasn’t much else to see at this end of the park, so we headed to our camp to relax before an evening drive and dinner. But when we arrived we were intrigued by some rather loud burping sounds coming from the valley below us, so we wandered down, accompanied by a guide, and stumbled across a large school of hippos, bathing in the shallows of the nearby river. It was totally unexpected, and totally amazing, and hippos are much, much bigger than they look on the telly. We spent the evening warmed by the most enormous campfire we’ve ever seen, until tiredness overtook us and we retired to our round, brush-roofed bandas (which we shared with some other unidentified species of mammal).

Hippo, Ishasha River

On day two we were up early to try and catch some wildlife before the weather got too hot for them to be wandering around, but not before we had breakfast down by the Ishasha River which divides Uganda from DR Congo. On the opposite bank we could see Colobus monkeys swinging around among the jungle vines, and another family of hippos paddling, yawning and making rude noises in the water. And if that wasn’t a good enough start to the day, when we started driving we almost immediately came across two tree-climbing lions, perched lazily on their repective branches, looking unenthusiastically over a sizeable herd of kob. Once again, although this time slightly more worryingly, we were on the roof and so managed to get some wonderful shots. They’re quite rare, and to see them is a real privilege. And we saw two!

Tree-climbing Lion, QENP

We then drove up the west side of the park towards Lake Edward where we were to do a boat safari. It was quite a long drive along a dirt track, and in heavy rain, but we were escorted by some rather cheeky baboons, and arrived in good time for our excursion. Queen Elizabeth NP is famous for its large hippo population, and there were, accordingly, lots of them basking around the perimeter of the lake. But what we didn’t expect was the amazingly diverse range of birdlife, the many sunbathing Nile crocodiles, not to mention the two elephants playfighting in the lake shallows. Actually, our boat chugged up and down the Kazinga Channel, a narrow body of fresh water which connects the extremely colonial-sounding Lakes Edward and George. As we coasted around through water as still as the proverbial mill-pond, only the low hum of the boat’s engines, the squawks of the hovering African Fish Eagles, and the quiet belches of the hippos and buffalo broke the silence. It was truly beautiful.

Fishermen, Kazinga Channel

The elephants, though, provided perhaps the most memorable moments: we were able to get very close, so close that their shoving and splashing was almost frightening, and their deep, hollow trumpeting was heart-stoppingly loud. People talk about reserves and national parks as not being true natural habitats, but this looked pretty natural to us.

Elephants, QENP

There’s less wildlife in this part of the park, thanks to human encroachment and proximity to the still unstable and poacher-friendly Dem. Rep. Congo, and our searches for leopards and lions on our way back to the camp did prove fruitless. But we did see a hippo wandering through the grounds of a posh hotel, and we were well pleased with what we’d seen on the boat, so we decided to call it a day and head back to camp for an extremely satisfying dinner before pitching our tents on a cliff edge overlooking the channel, watching possibly the world’s most stunning sunset, and dropping off to the sounds of a nearby hippo birthday party.

Sunset, QENP

On the last day, we were up extremely early to try and find a few more animals, and we drove north out on to the savannah, a dreamy landscape sitting in the shadows of the mighty Rwenzori Mountains and dotted by crater lakes with surfaces like polished mirrors, and trees with afro hairstyles. It was a crisp, sunny morning, on reflection probably too cold to be sitting on a jeep roof, but the ordeal was worth it as, after an hour or more of searching, we found a lone hyena, his bloodied grinning mouth munching through a freshly killed kob calf. This is, apparently, an extremely rare sight since hyenas usually hunt at night, and in packs, so we were very lucky to see it. We did feel a bit sorry for the kob, though, but only because we’re sentimental and British.

Hyena, QENP

So we left the park and, just when we thought we wouldn’t see anything else we came across a wild elephant wandering down the high street in a nearby village, happily being fed bananas by disbelieving children.

An Escaped Elephant

There’s been another filmcrew around the Lodge this week. It seems the organisation that provides the project with most of its volunteers wants a video to put on its website to show prospective visitors the kinds of things which go on here. Some of us have featured in it, some of us have sadly been indisposed, but probably the most interesting thing to come out of it has been the conversations we’ve had with the camerman, Levi. He used to be a journalist for the Ugandan Press Agency, and when he was a young cub reporter he was sent to Kigali to cover the Rwandan genocide (he’s since, sadly, given up journalism to set up what you might generously call his own media business -he films weddings and funerals, and helps people to type up leaflets and documents- because in Uganda when you’re trying to get a promotion it’s not about what you know, but about who you know in the ruling NRM party).

But while it’s fascinating to hear about something like the Rwandan conflict first hand from someone who was there, it’s obviously also quite uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because, when you think about it, it’s actually quite recent; uncomfortable because the situation -although Rwanda’s was perhaps the most extreme example- has nevertheless become so depressingly familiar over the years; and uncomfortable because Levi and those Rwandan refugees in Nakivali remember how white people were practically nowhere to be seen while 800,000 of their countrymen and women were wiped off the face of the planet.

It’s now universally understood by the despairing but almost totally powerless British public that we generally only get ourselves embroiled in overseas conflicts when there’s something in it for us, and that seems to have come about mainly since the US learnt its lesson about humanitarian intervention the hard way in Somalia. But despite all the political ping-pong and nay-saying which surrounds the issues of unilateral and multilateral peace-keeping, there are surely times when intervention is not only justifiable, but crucial. Rwanda’s was the perfect, albeit tragic example. There, the West stalled, procrastinated and perhaps wilfully misjudged the situation, allowing the evolution of an episode so shameful in world history than barely a single individual, let alone agency or nation, came out of it with any credit at all.

In fact it’s probably the worst man-made humanitarian disaster to have happened in either of our lifetimes, and being so close to the epicentre here really does crystallise that fact. It also makes us ashamed of how little we still know about all the depressingly brutal things which have gone on elsewhere on this continent -to the people we have met, their friends, families and antecedents- and how we in the West with all our power and information and iPhone apps should really make more of an effort to at least read about them, if not investigate or challenge them. Inactivity, apathy and misinformation were arguably the major reasons why the scale of the suffering in Rwanda remained unchecked for so long once the violence had errupted, and it’s only through eliminating those that we will be able to fulfil our duty in making sure such events don’t happen again. However, from the snippets of news we grab from the internet and Ugandan newspapers, it doesn’t look like we’re making any better a fist of it right now.

We’re lucky, though, these days that we can travel around and drink in the different (although possibly decreasingly so) sights and sounds of The World Out There. But even having travelled around this small corner of Africa for such a short amount of time, it still seems so important to always keep in your mind the contexts and juxtapositions which surround you. For every sight you see, you must cast your mind around to see how it fits into the narrative of the place you’re visiting. You can open your eyes, look, and see stuff, but you must do more to understand it. When you’re travelling on a sealed tarmac road in a well- developed town, or on a rutted dirt track in a ramshackle slum, you should ask, “Why are they different?” When you’ve forked out to trundle around some national reserve, you might see a pack of lions being photographed by hoardes of tourists on luxury tours, or a solitary elephant in a sparsely populated reserve, and you should ask, “Why are they different?” For everywhere, on every street, on every building, on each face that you pass by, are written the signs of history. And if you don’t see them, you’re not seeing anything at all.

Till next time,

Linda and Andy

Ps many thanks to Graham and Flo for visiting, for bringing us Monster Munch, and for taking a load of stuff home with them.

 

 

Hello again everyone, and welcome to our second Ugandan installment. We’re actually using a laptop in our hut (yes! Isn’t this wireless technology stuff brilliant?) and are therefore able to provide you with a straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth update of our time here in Ruhanga. It’s been a while since our last post, we know, but we wanted to wait until we had a fair amount of stuff to report before we published this next bit of the blog.

And the last two weeks have been quite interesting, really. I mean, there was the music video Linda was in, the nightclub where we danced on stage for money, the engagement party where we sat doing nothing for four hours, the funeral of the man across the road featuring the world’s angriest pastor, the total reorganisation of the project we’ve helped to start undertaking, and of course the bike ride of doom. So it’s quite hard to know where to begin.

Outside Uganda Lodge

Actually, it isn’t at all. You want to know about the music video, don’t you? Well, to cut a reasonably long story reasonably short, some of the volunteer girls were in town a couple of weeks ago and bumped into a local music producer, Junior, a.k.a. the coolest man in Western Uganda. He told them that he was shooting a video for a record his sister Aisha Tash had just released in Rwanda. And yes, we know it sounds like your typical African tall tale designed to get Westerners to part with some cash, but in this case it was actually true. But just to make sure they asked him to come and play the CD here at the Lodge and, once they were confident, they started to learn some dance moves for the shoot.

Since there was dancing involved, Junior had little trouble convincing Linda and fellow volunteer Vicky to join the troupe, and the following day -a Tuesday- they drove up to Mbarara (a city about 50km north of the Lodge) to film their parts of the video. Actually they drove quite a bit past Mbarara and eventually stopped at a small tumbledown shack. Thoughts did turn to kidnap/murder, but it turned out to be no more than some suspect -but not atypical- Ugandan navigation. After finally arriving at the venue, the ultra-posh Lakeview Resort Hotel, dontchaknow, the girls changed into their traditional Rwandan costumes (think long flowy toga-type things) and started doing the traditional Rwandan dance they’d learnt (think side-to-side stepping action with some wiggly arm movements). They did some of the shoot in the hotel, some in the gardens, and after a couple more costume changes, went out into the streets of Mbarara to do some more filming. Eventually they got back to the hotel and indulged in some grim (but cheap) local wine. Incidentally (and we don’t imagine it’s been a massive hit in the UK) the song they danced to is actually okay, but anything played twenty times in a row starts to grind after a while.

Fame at last: Video models Linda; Lex; Vicky; Aisha; Beth

So after they all finished filming the video, Junior drove the girls back to the Lodge where they got changed, picked up the boys, and headed into Ntungamo to the best nitespot in town. In fact thinking about it it’s the only nitespot in town, but either way it was to be our first taste of rural Ugandan nightlife, something we don’t suppose many of you will have sampled. So we paid our 80p to get into the Sal Guesthouse Bar and Restaurant and were shown to our front row seats. It was a bit odd, actually. For a start, it was outdoors, and to get to the club bit we had to walk through the small bar, up some steps, and out onto a large terrace liberally covered by plastic chairs. These were mainly occupied by the local glitterati (ok, by any local people who could afford 80p for a night out, which is actually about a day’s wage) and we proved something of an attraction/object of completely uninhibited ridicule. Admittedly, it’s probably not every day that 10 very white and very dolled up Brits wander into their bar, and apparently we were quite conspicuous, but we held our heads high, took our chairs and ordered our drinks as if getting legless in an al-fresco Ugandan speakeasy was no more than second nature.

So a succession of club singers came out and sang along to high-energy Bugandan backing tracks, sometimes accompanied by amazingly athletic dancers, sometimes accompanied by amazingly drunk patrons. You see, you’re allowed to dance on stage if you tip the singers or dancers, which can result in some embarrassment, albeit extremely entertaining embarrassment, but if you’re too far gone the bouncers will eventually come and encourage you off stage. And this happened quite a lot, especially to the bloke in the grey suit jacket which was at least six sizes too big for him. Anyway, after a while it was Aisha’s turn to sing her songs, and she was mainly accompanied by some giggly white girls doing a kind of funny twirly dance, someof whom were generously tipped by a steady stream of slightly unsteady Ugandan males. Linda made an impressive sounding 800 Shillings (a slightly less impressive 25p), although fellow volunteer Tamara did manage to top the 1000 Shilling mark. And after that the night took on a more familiar bingey feel, with premium beer and gin competitively priced at 60p a bottle. We danced well into the wee hours, and although it was a quality night we felt a bit naughty because we know teachers never go out and get squiffy on a school night. Right?

On the tiles: Linda; Vicky; Dan; Andy

Last week we had another nice night, this time courtesy of our friend George. Now George is a top man: he’s the headteacher of the nearby secondary school, the secretary of the Community Based Organisation which oversees all the work this project does, and an (unsuccessful) candidate for the opposition party in the recent local elections. At the same time he lets rooms in his house to travellers, works as an educational consultant, and generally comes over to help us find our feet in all things school- and community-related. So the other day he invited all the volunteers over to his school to have a look around, and later to his house (which was really quite nice) for some genuine Ugandan grub. After we arrived at his place (it’s about a fifteen minute walk) and having obviously been shown his new fishpond, we went over to the school and met the sixty or so students there. It’s a secondary school: very new, only half-built, and still in its early stages of growing. And after George introduced us to all the children they performed some traditional songs and dances for us. It has to be said, we will simply never get bored of listening to and watching African choirs, and they’ll certainly be something we’ll miss when we head back to Britain.

Team College Choir

So once they’d finished we wandered up the hill to his house and met his family (including his ancient mother). They made us tea and chatted to us round a camp fire, and then insisted -as Africans do- that we stay for dinner. We were worried that there might not be enough food, but one day we’ll learn that that simply will never be the case on this continent. In fact, he proceeded to put on one of the largest buffets we’ve ever seen, and it had some really nice stuff in it. It might not have looked or even smelt very nice (there was all manner of stodge and gunge piled onto plates), but it really was one of the tastiest meals we’ve had since we’ve been in Africa (especially the chocolate bananas). So we sat and talked more, and George helped us formulate some of the ideas we’ve had about establishing a proper teacher-volunteer programme here, of which more later. But in any case it was really nice to get out of the Lodge and go and meet some villagers.

Which we did again a couple of days ago when we were invited to a local funeral. In fact, it couldn’t have been much more local as it took place opposite the front gates of the Lodge, and it was actually the funeral of the man who lives across the road. He was killed last Thursday night in a high speed car crash just a few hundred metres down the road. As we’ve pointed out again and again, African driving is amongst the worst in the world, and it seems that almost as soon as they get in a motor vehicle they seem to lose all perspective: they are aggressive, they are ignorant, and they really don’t seem to value human life very highly. This accident was no different: an extremely large and by all accounts extremely overloaded truck was driving down hill in the middle of the road and, because you have to be so macho when you’re driving here, refused to move over as it approached the small car our neighbour was in. As a result, with steep earth banks on either side, the car had nowhere to go and was crushed by the lorry. The only surprising thing is that two of the passengers survived, although one of them is still comatose in hospital. The driver and our neighbour both died. Perhaps even worse than that, there is no recrimination whatsoever for the lorry driver who was not injured and whose vehicle was virtually undamaged. Not entirely by coincidence his boss is a big cheese up in Kampala.

The funeral went on for three days. Or rather, someone played really loud music non-stop for 72 hours across the road. The middle day was the actual day of the burial, and unfortunately it was probably the wettest day we’ve experienced in the seven months we’ve been out here. It really chucked it down, and it didn’t let off at all, but that didn’t prevent more than 1000 guests from turning up. Yes, 1000. Over here it’s custom to attend the funeral of anyone who lives in your community. So while we might find it odd if everyone from our town turned up to our funeral, even though we don’t know 99% of them, here its the done thing. It’s the ultimate mark of respect for the individual and their family, and the invitation extends to anyone living nearby, even temporary volunteers. And when you factor in all the extended family who return from all over the country, you end up with some pretty big gatherings. Consequently, everyone who attends must make a small contribution towards feeding the hundreds who turn up, and nearby friends and relatives lend furniture, crockery, etc to help with the preparations. It’s a lovely communal event, and because of the way society is structured here -where family is at its heart- the older the person is the more people will attend. So you don’t get those heartbreaking services for elderly folk where nobody turns up. In fact, we’ve heard of funerals where more than 2500 guests have attended.

At this particular funeral there were lots of speeches, quite a lot of shouting by the pastor, and a fair bit of standing around getting wet. Probably because of the circumstances it was perhaps more subdued that we’d imagined, although there seemed to be a good amount of drinking going on each night. It seems that the men who died were popular -one of them was high up in the local agricultural union- so it was a very busy, and very sad occasion. It also turns out that his two daughters attend the project’s Primary School, and thanks to the total lack of a welfare system in Uganda they will now undoubtedly face a lifetime of struggle. But hey, the lorry driver didn’t lose face by giving way to a small car, so everything’s alright.

On a happier note, we were invited (on the same day) to a local engagement party. Well, we say engagement party because that’s probably the closest translation of what it was, but it’s hard to describe exactly what it was. From what we can gather, the carpenter who works here at the Lodge recently chose a young girl to be his new wife, invited her to come and see where he lives, and then everyone he knows went round to his house to look at her. We got there at about 8pm and were welcomed by his friends and family who led us to our front row seats. Again, it almost defies explanation, but we sat in rows of plastic chairs underneath a hessian awning, in an arrangement somewhat akin to a catwalk parade. The MC (one of the teachers from the school) then talked us through what the programme would be for the rest of the evening. In fact he talked through the programme about fifteen times during the course of the night, but he seemed to enjoy being on the mic so we didn’t mind (much). Said programme included trying a traditional apperitif, eating ‘local’ food, drinking beer, listening to some speeches, and finally watching some entertainment.

Which as it turned out wasn’t strictly accurate. Yes, we had to drink the world’s most horrble porridgey drink which looked like chocolate milkshake but tasted like cut turf and vinegar. And yes, we went into the groom Mandev’s house and ate some boiled goat and rice which tasted of paraffin (vegetarian option: a tomato). And yes, we had some rice & barley beer (6.5% by volume!) which tasted unlike any beer known to man. And yes we listened to a speech courtesy of an extremely short and extremely drunk man in a shiny hat who was supposed to introduce us but ‘wasn’t allowed’ (/couldn’t) because he ‘wasn’t invited’ (/was out of his box). But the rest of the four hours was spent sitting down looking at the happy couple and their unbelievably miserable entourage. In fact, the bride-to-be didn’t look too happy either, but we’re told that this is the local custom. It’s a mark of respect, apparently, to sit and pretend to look mardy for ages and not say a word to anyone, although it must be said that she was particularly convincing. Anyone less informed might think that she wasn’t especially thrilled about getting engaged to a one-eyed drunk three times her age. But as they say, you can’t choose who you fall in love with. Well, not if your marriage is arranged, you can’t.

When we are in the Lodge we’ve been quite busy these last two weeks. As we’ve mentioned before, the school has admitted new pupils so quickly that the pace of enrolment has kind of overtaken the co-ordination and administration, such as it was, that was in place. So something we as a group of volunteers (there’s ten of us here at the moment) have been trying to do, then, is to put in place all those tedious but essential things an organisation needs. We (Linda and Andy) have kind of taken charge of co-ordinating what is in place for volunteers to do, be it in the school or the wider community, because in the same way as the school has grown there are now many more volunteers coming here than there have been previously, and the challenge is trying to find them all something useful and/or interesting to do. Presently, there isn’t a particularly clear structure or programme that they can refer to which can help them get the most out of their stay.

Now, none of this is to say that it’s not worth coming here or there isn’t a need for volunteers here. But rather we’re trying to find a way of using the volunteers’ time and skills most effectively, and ensuring that they, the teaching staff, the school children, and the community are benefitting from everybody’s stay here. In fact all it is is an exercise in communication: we ask the teachers what they need; then we ask the volunteers what they’d like to do; we find other links around the neighbouring area; and we put it all together in a framework. The idea is that volunteers can bring whatever they want to the project, but that when they get here there is some way of  directing whateverit is they bring. And that’s someting that has perhaps been lacking since the project has transformed from a much smaller scale, much less busy place.

But if we’re not organising meetings, doing training days for the teachers, and interviewing volunteers (because obviously we know exactly what we’re talking about after, ooh, all 200 days of being in Africa), there’s lots of other stuff to begetting on with. In school, we’re helping in class, making resources for teachers, fitting windows, and building see-saws. Elsewhere, we might be building roofs, driving to Ntungamo to pick up supplies, or taking children to hospital who have fallen off our playground equipment (oops!).

The see-saw builders: Andy; Vicky; Linda; Dan

So we’re busy, and it’s good because we wanted to get our teeth into something here. But there’s a lot of work to do, and it’s tough because the things we and the other volunteers are trying to put in place are very unlikely to be completely up-and-running and making a discernable difference while we’re actually here. But as we’ve said before, being a volunteer isn’t about instant returns; it’s about investing your time for somone’s future benefit. Mind you, having said that we’re hoping to start work on a new classroom later this week, so there may be something tangible to take stock of in nine weeks time.

The classroom builders: Francis; Dan; Andy

So that’s it for this entry. It’s been much more of a doing fortnight than a thinking about stuff fortnight, and as we said, it feels good to be busy. Hopefully over the coming weeks we’ll get to grips a bit more with Uganda and our surrounding area. Right now, there’s much to do around our immediate vicinity. Volunteers are coming and going all the time, and friendships are being made all the time, too. It’s a nice place to be, despite its challenges, and we feel like we’ve settled in well. Next week we have the first of our visitors, so we’re really looking forward to that. Until then, we’re just going to keep on working hard and hope that the things we do are of some benefit, however far down the line that might be.

Kare kare from Uganda

Andy and Linda

Ps Yes, we know we promised the bike story at the start, and if you really must know Andy went for a long bike ride, got a puncture and then had to walk 7 miles home. In the middle of the day. When it was about 35 degrees. Up hill. He doesn’t really want to talk about it.

 Pps for those of you who enjoy writing to people in the middle of Equitorial Africa, there is good news. We have an address. But (and as much as we’ve loved receiving everything that’s been sent from home) we should probably advise against sending packets or parcels. Each one has ended up costing an extortionate amount of money -in addition to what it costs you lot to send it- and a couple have gone missing, too. But letters are very welcome, so please send any correspondence to: Linda O’Sullivan and Andrew Knight; c/o Denis Aheirwe; Uganda Lodge; PO Box 368; Ntungamo; Uganda.

So, you’re very welcome to our first post from Uganda. We’ve actually been here for a little while now, but we wanted to collect our thoughts a bit before we committed them to this blog. In fact, we arrived in Kampala (after a bus journey featuring surely the greatest number of interruptions by traffic police/the Ugandan army in history, making us nearly three hours late) last Saturday and after spending two nights at a hotel and doing a bit of sightseeing (kind of) we got a lift down to the project in Ruhanga with the guy who founded it.

So we’ve been here a week and have now probably seen and heard enough to expand on our initial impressions, and give you some kind of idea of what volunteering here is going to be like. And, again, it’s shaping up to be less straightforward than we might have first thought. But before we get into that, we need to tell you about where we are and what we’ve been up to.

Accommodation:

Well, we’re living at Uganda Lodge (a.k.a. the Ruhanga Resource Centre), which serves partly as accommodation for volunteers, and partly as a place where local people can come to learn some skills. For example, there’s a computer room, a sewing room, and a large room for showing educational DVDs etc. Mind you, since we’ve been there we haven’t seen much in the way of participation, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t happen. Anyway, the lodge grounds contain a number of bedrooms, some in the main block (which also has a bar) and some dotted around elsewhere. We’re quartered in a small banda (what you would call a hut) close to the entrance to the Lodge and handily placed for the aforementioned bar (a coincidence, we can assure you). We have our own shower, a couple of bits of furniture, and the bogs (squatting long drops again, but this time without giant mutant insects) are just behind the hut. There are also a handful of open bandas around the site which serve as places to sit and relax and to eat communal lunches and dinners.

Our banda

People:

We say communal because, unlike our last project, we have a few other volunteers working with us. At the moment, although there are almost constant comings and goings, the number is hovering around the 10 mark, all Brits and -with one exception- all female. So it’s quite a different experience, as you can imagine. In some ways it’s nice being the only Europeans in an entire district, but it’s comforting having other English voices around us, although of course it makes volunteering an entirely different proposition altogether. Fortunately, they’re all very nice, and we all get on extremely well.

Back row: Dennis; Linda; Andy; Bethany; Natasha; Aneta; Front row: Man whose boat we borrowed; Barbara

School:

We’ve also started working at the nearby school which belongs to the project. It’s funded entirely by sponsorship and donations, so doesn’t receive any money from the Ugandan government. There are seven classes (and astonishingly for East Africa seven teachers, too): five in the Nursery (three Baby Classes, a Middle Class and a Top Class) and two in the Primary school, P1 and P2. The idea is that as each class graduates to the next level a new classroom is built. However, it’s going through something of a transition stage at the moment because it’s recently grown beyond all expectation: last Easter there were around 30 children at the school; currently there are more than 240. As a result, some of the classrooms are only half finished: building work can only go on when money becomes available, and if fundraising is running low there simply isn’t enough money to complete them. At the moment the two Primary classes are being taught in buildings without windows and doors, and unfinished flooring. However, we think this is going to change this week, partly thanks to the money raised by you, our friends and family. So, thanks!

Ruhanga Schhol

Work:

We go into school between 8.30am and 4pm, with a break for lunch, but so far we’ve really just been helping the teachers out with a small amount of prep work and marking. We’d like to do more, but we’ve found that (probably as a result of this year’s amazing expansion) there isn’t really a programme in place which can help teachers and volunteers devise a structured plan of work. As a result, we have heard some complaints that there’s not so much for the volunteers to do. So we devised and initiated a project-wide consultation exercise to discuss how we could all work together best. The results were very encouraging, and we’re hoping that in a week’s time, after the children have finished their mid-term tests, there’ll be good deal more communication going on, and some really beneficial work resulting from it.

School playground

We’re also helping to extend the school playground, building two new see-saws and a climbing frame. It remains to bes een what our carpentry skills are like.

Playground construction duty: Vicky, Dan and Andy

 

Weather:

But it’s hard to know what to wear when we’re working: the climate here is extremely changeable. When we get up (usually about 7 or 7.15am) it’s totally freezing, as it usually is at night [remember, we’re living at more than 1500m above sea level]. But by around 9.30am it starts to get really quite hot. The middle of the day is boiling, but there seems to be a pattern that around 4pm a colder, wet front moves in and we get a torrential rainstorm. This usually only lasts about 45 minutes, and then the sun comes out again. By dinner time (7.30pm or so) the temperature starts to drop, and by the time we’ve finished eating we have to adjourn to the camp fire to warm our tootsies and crack open a Nile Special or two. Amusingly, we’ve already had six times as many days of rain as we did in the entire time we were in Kisayani.

Kampala:

So before we came down, we stayed in Kampala for a couple of days, and we think it’s quite different to the other big cities we’ve been to. For a start, it’s actually quite compact. It also seems to be a good deal tidier (or at least, more of it is tidy: there are still some areas containing a quite astonishing amount of rubbish, mud and sewage, especially around the bus ‘stations’, somewhat inauspiciously for travellers arriving into the city). But walking around the streets you get a strong impression that it’s a good deal better developed than, say, Nairobi or Dar-Es-Salaam. And when we say better developed we mean the infrastructure is better, pavements actually exist, the lighting is adequate, and buildings are much better maintained. As a result, it looks like a city which is much better cared for, with busy coffee shops and lively ex-pat restaurants all around. And at least partly thanks to the hundreds of military police and army officials who hang around the streets, despite their very large automatic rifles, it seems a bit safer, too. And unlike those two aformentioned cities, happily, it’s retained one or two colonial buildings, which provides the visitor with a greater sense of the city’s history. Even better, traffic actually stops at traffic lights, unlike Nairobi, where drivers do whatever they like. So we quite liked it and even though there isn’t a tremendous amount to see, we’re thinking of going back at some point in the next couple of months to have another look.

Landscape

Much, much lovelier than Kampala, though, is the landscape around Ruhanga. It’s very, very green, as you might imagine given the amount of rain it gets, but it’s also very beautiful. Our Lodge sits next to the main North-South road in Uganda, and this road sits in a valley flanked by ranges of hills of the type we’d only previously seen in children’s picture books. They’re ridiculously round, and green, and ludicrously steep, and they remind us of the animated landscapes you used to see on Monty Python. In short, they are exactly what hills should look like, and they provide a wonderful backdrop to the area. We’re also really looking forward to wandering up and down them during our stay here, to try and work off all those chapatis we were gulping down in Kenya.

Hills over Ruhanga

Project:

The project is around six years old. It started out as a kind of highway stopping off point, ostensibly as way of providing local people with employment. Since then, it has grown to include the school and the resource centre, as described above, but despite providing several jobs for local people, it is entirely reliant on the likes of us coming to visit, since none of its activities actually make any money. The only income it gets is from the volunteers’ board and lodgings, and the small individual contributions made to the school by sponsors and donors. Despite all this, the project has started a new initiative to get clean piped water to houses and schools in the surrounding area. So far it’s paid for a survey and the first half of the construction of the gravity-fed pipe, and in six months time, there should be clean tap water at the Lodge and school, with options to add a wider network as and when money becomes available. The area already has electricity, so it’s looking good for the wider development of the Ruhanga area.

Okay, we’d better head back to the Lodge now. It’s only a five minute drive (about 30 minutes by bike) from the little town we’re in called Ntungamo where they have such things as shops and internet cafes. We hope we’ve given you a little flavour of this new chapter in our year away: more blogging and photos to follow.

Linda and Andy

Ps we have a new Ugandan phone number for anyone who’d like to call or text us, It’s +256 700 159 115. Address to follow.

Road Trip Special

 

Hello all, and welcome to what will definitely be our last blog from Kenya: we’re off to Uganda on Thursday 24th.

So we’re back in Nairobi having just got back from our road trip-cum-safari around the Central, Western and Rift Valley regions of Kenya, and yes, it was very nice thank you. This isn’t a cheap country to go around if you want to avoid public transport, but we thought what the hell, we might not get the chance again. So we hired a car and a driver (it’s cheaper than just hiring a car, bafflingly) and we spent eight days driving around, camping at night, trying to see a bit more of the country. It wasn’t a safari in its strictest sense, but neither was it a coach tour.

Great Rift Valley

The Rift Valley is a gigantic bit of Africa which, due to the movement of surrounding tectonic plates, has sunk. It’s quite dramatic (as you drive south from Nairobi, the plateau it sits on just falls away) and features lots of interesting geological features (if you’re into that kind of thing). What you need to know is that it still has dormant volcanoes, lots of lakes lying on the floor of the valley, and plenty of wildlife wandering around. There’s also lots of miniature whirlwinds twirling their way along the plains, which are quite cool. Anyway, here’s a journal of what we did:

Day 1: Naivasha, where we did a bike safari

We set off in our very posh RAV4 (it’s a kind of jeep thing) with our lovely driver Paul, and the first port of call was Hell’s Gate National Park. It’s a slightly bizarre, almost prehistoric type of environment, and excitingly you can explore it by bike. Of course that means that there are no lions or other man-eating creatures around, but -you know- there’s more to National Parks than just big cats. There’s landscape, for a start, and the landscape here is cool: it consists of a wide valley, flanked by bizarre fluted volcanic walls, somewhat reminiscent of Giant’s Causeway or Staffa Island. In between is a rolling plain dotted with acacia trees and inhabited by grass- and tree-munching herbivores, primarily Zebra and Giraffe. About halfway through the park, the landscape narrows into a dreamlike water-carved gorge, punctuated by waterfalls and strange rock formations. It’s lovely, and our gentle, interesting and nature-loving guide Peter really brought the park to life, despite the two annoying local girls who insisted on becoming friends with us (as well as playing music on their mobiles and generally being a nuisance). We really liked Hell’s Gate despite the fact that Andy fell off his bike and Linda completely ripped her trousers. Camping in the evening in Naivasha, however, was freezing.

Andy, Hell's Gate NP

 

Day 2: Mount Longonot, where we climbed a couple of big volcanoes

Mount Longonot is a big, dormant volcano which dominates this part  of the Rift Valley, and on day two we climbed it. Peter came with us again, and made the climb easy and interesting. It’s about an hour and a half to the top, but once you get there it’s truly worth the climb, because the mountain doesn’t really have a top, it has a huge and breathtakingly beautiful crater. So we wandered around the rim peering into a scene from Jurassic Park or The Land That Time Forgot. It’s a really long way down, and it’s covered in forest, and it doesn’t quite fit into your brain when you look at it. And then the views the other way across the Rift Valley were pretty impressive, too. The only downside was the party of obese schoolchildren who spent the entire time lobbing empty water bottles into the wilderness and complaining about how steep the walk was. Which it wasn’t.

Mount Longonot, crater

We decided, as we had some spare time, to go and visit another volcano near to Lake Naivasha. Unlike Mount Longonot this mountain didn’t get its crater by blowing it’s top off, but instead the middle of the mountain has sunk into the ground. It’s amazing, and half of the crater has a picture-perfect lake surrounded by thick acacia forest. We wandered around the rim and were lucky enough to have an astonishing bird’s-eye view of the wildlife. A giraffe elegantly sprinting across the small plain; a herd of buffalo grunting and chewing; a startled hyena racing out of the undergrowth; a family of impala standing alert. It was a fascinating way of seeing nature, and one which neither of us had seen before. However, we chose not to stay at the $250-per-night Lodge, tempted as we were by its floating restaurant. Instead, we headed back to our Arctic campsite.

Crater Lake, Naivasha

 

Day 3: Lake Nakuru, where we did a game drive

This is another National Park but unlike Hell’s Gate, you have to stay in the car here because of the big, furry predators (and you have to keep the windows closed or you’ll be sharing your safari with a wild baboon). A game drive is an old-fashioned phrase for driving around shooting some unusual animals, but these days you’re not allowed to do that, so instead we just we drove around, in and out of some very distinctive habitats, looking at some living things you just don’t get in the UK (except perhaps in Whipsnade, and it just isn’t the same, is it?). As the name would suggest, the park encloses a large lake -this one is salty- and as a result it’s mind-bogglingly full of flamingos and pelicans. There is also a large population of lazy white rhinos, and Kenya’s only tree-climbing lions, two of which we were lucky enough to see. There are some very high cliffs in the centre of the park, and the views they afford over Lake Nakuru really crystallise some the problems Kenya’s wildlife has. On all sides the park is hemmed in by human activity: the ever-expanding city of Nakuru to the North, the main road and power lines (plus our posh hotel: there are no campsites in Nakuru) to the East; and agriculture to the South and West. And it really does feel like an island of wilderness -of preservation- in a sea of constant change. You can imagine that, one day, should East Africa become fully developed the only space left for its tremendously important animal heritage will be, well, the equivalent of Whipsnade. Here, in Nakuru, it’s already not a million miles away from that.

White Rhino, Lake Nakuru

 

Day 4: Lake Baringo, where we relaxed by the pool

Today, we did the long drive up the Rift Valley to Lake Baringo, a magical, mystical-looking freshwater lake plonked in the middle of the valley. The views around it are immense: the massive volcanic walls of the Rift rise up on either side as far as the eyes can see, miles in the distance, while the lake sits on the contorted, eroded and fault-ridden floor of the valley. Breaking through its calm, misty waters are several small volcanic islands. The whole thing looks like a scene from a beautiful Japanese painting. But once we’d taken in the view, we decided what we really needed was some fresh mango juice and a dip in the hotel pool. Yes, we did say hotel: they didn’t have any tents so we got a deluxe lodge room  replete with lakeview balcony and mahogany kingsize bed (we didn’t complain). And somewhat to our alarm, a large ostrich wandered into reception as we were checking in.

Fisherman, Lake Baringo

 

Day 5: Lake Baringo part 2, where we did a boat safari

We got up extremely early and set out onto the lake to try and spot some wildlife. Now, neither of us is what you’d call a serious ornithologist, but even we could see why this lake is prime territory for birdwatchers: there’s loads of them about, and very many of them are very attractive. We did learn all their names, but unfortunately we can’t remember them. However, we know we saw an African Fish Eagle catching a lungfish in full flight, because that was really cool. We also visited the lake’s largest island, Ol Kokwe, to see the bizarre natural sauna where a giant fault below the island’s surface allows super-heated water to bubble up from the depths of the earth, emitting boiling water and steam. If you stand in it you get very hot, and if you put a fish in it it’ll cook. If only geography field trips had been this interesting. On the return trip we saw the star attractions of the lake, a few (surprisingly small) Nile Crocodiles and some hippos wallowing in the shallow, reedy lake edge. And then it was our turn to have a swim, but we sensibly went back to the pool.

African Fish Eagle, Lake Baringo

 

Day 6: Lake Bogoria, where we took some rubbish videos of flamingos flying

The next day we did the short (but not entirely comfortable) drive to Lake Bogoria, a salt lake just south of Baringo. Here, a long sapphire-blue lake washes the bottom of a massive sheer rock escarpment, like some Highland loch but twice the size. Again, there are tonnes of flamingos to be seen waddling along the shoreline, but here they are showered by the hot water which emanates from an underwater geyser or warmed by the bubbling hot springs which blipp and blopp at the edge of the water. There’s not much wildlife around, but if you want to see Rift Valley scenery this is the place to come. It’s big and it’s impressive. In the evening, looking much less impressive with our pale skin and now ill-fitting bathing costumes, we waddled around in our own hot spa pool at the campsite, fed by volcanic waters roughly at body temperature. Even Linda didn’t complain it was too cold (a first for a swimming pool anywhere in the world).

Lake Bogoria

 

Day 7: Masai Mara, where we did a proper safari

An early, early start on day seven for the long drive south to the Masai Mara, the world-renowned reserve that represents Kenya’s part of the huge Serengeti ecosystem. It’s a gruelling old trek down there, and we’d be interested to see what all those rich safari tourists make of it, but it is totally worth it because the Mara is just astonishing. We got there at lunchtime, in time to drive around the park in the afternoon. And yes, it’s got loads of wild animals, everything you’d ever want to see, but what really impressed on us was the scenery. It’s indescribable. If the Mara ever disappears under the shoddy and litter-strewn shanty towns which encircle it, it will be one of the most shameful episodes in our already much-blotted copy book.

Masai Mara National Reserve

 

By now, we’d swapped drivers and were now under the command of Big Jimmy. He drove us round, mercifully avoiding the minibus convoy as much as he could. It’s a very popular park, and although the crowds do somewhat take away from the raw wilderness of the park, it is nevertheless quite funny seeing all the little white vans trundling around like a cheap re-creation of a second world war tank battle using dinky Nissan minivans instead of  Sherman tanks. But whatever you feel about all the other tourists there, you can’t argue with the face-slappingly brilliant array of wildlife. For a start, Giraffes are a deeply underestimated animal: they are totally cool. There are also plenty of other animals, some which we hadn’t seen in the other parks, and we saw a decent mixture of East African flora and fauna. We also got to stay in a tent which was easily as big as any flat we’ve ever lived in (it had a whole bathroom in it!), and were kept awake by the howling of a pack of hyenas (which was as amazing as it was annoying).

Elephant, Masai Mara

 

Day 8 Masai Mara part 2, where we did another safari

The first hour of our drive was incredible: first we saw a family of elephants very close up, and then, incredibly, a pack of lions feasting on a young hippo, which was a pretty astonishing sight, not to mention the growling, the big teeth, and the squabbling. We were glad we were in a big van/weren’t two young hippos. But then our luck ran out. It’s very dry at this time of year, and when you don’t have much time it can be a frustrating experience driving round looking for animals who just want to sleep under thick bushes and avoid the throngs of Japanese tourists with ginormous camera lenses. And  it’s notable that, whereas once the Mara was teeming with wildlife, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find animals which were at one time very common here. And we had one of those days, where the rhinos were hiding, the cheetahs were on holiday in Tanzania, and the leopards disappeared two seconds before we arrived. But as we said earlier, National Parks aren’t just about big predators. They’re not even just about preserving wildlife: they’re about preserving environments, too, and the Mara is just so worth preserving. We’re glad we went, and we’re glad we got served breakfast by a Maasai. That hadn’t happened before.

Lions, an ex-Hippo; Masai Mara

 

So it was an interesting experience for lots of different reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, it was great to see so much wildlife, but it was also great to see so much more of Kenya and visit places where people are quite different. For example, in Baringo the people were Tugen, part of the large Kalenjin tribe (probably the tribe you’ll be most familiar with: those very dark, very fast long distance runners are Kalenjin). We’ve written about it before, but tribe is an incredibly important facet of Kenyan life. We’ve been living among the Kamba. The Kalenjins, on the other hand, look completely different, they speak a different language, and their customs are totally foreign. So how on Earth  do you even start to know how to govern a country which is has such obvious divisions and distinctions? Answer, in Kenya’s case you just look after your own tribe, and suppress the rest. And there are as many environmental, financial and cultural problems in Rift Valley as there were in Eastern, where we’ve been.

And then there’s the Maasai, another totally separate group who want to preserve their way of life: they are herdsmen, and they want their land to remain as pasture. The government meanwhile has dollar signs in its eyes when it sees all that fertile, virgin land, just ripe for cultivation. Lots of minsters could get very rich indeed if they were able to get their hands on the Maasai’s lands. As a result, the people have been denied assistance, and the level of development there is quite pitiful. In contrast, the drive back to Nairobi goes through the heart of Kikuyu land. The Kikuyu make up a good percentage of the country’s elite and intelligentsia, and they wield most of the power in politics and business  (presidents, ministers and people awarded lots of lucrative tenders are nearly always from Kikuyu tribes). The level of development is roughly equivalent to what you might see in the new European countries, and it’s a disgrace that there is such a blatant imbalance in the use of federal funds. Yes, the UK has obvious iniquities in its regional development, too, but what we don’t have is blatant patronage along racial lines (although some Scots and Welshmen might disagree). Either way, it’s a real problem here in Kenya, because while most of the country is on its knees thanks to the drought, those who can do something about it are too busy squabbling about their entitlements in plush, air-conditioned government offices. While scrawny rural peasants cram into Toyota Corollas from 1984, tubby urban executives are driven around in Toyota Corollas from 2010. Yes, Kenya is a young democracy, and yes, African democracy doesn’t always match exactly what we in the West might define as democracy, but surely they can do better than this?

It was also an interesting experience from a personal point of view. It’s very different being a tourist when you’ve previously been a member of a local community (albeit a white one who doesn’t speak the local lingo). You’re treated completely differently, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, and you get to see the way Kenyans behave towards visitors from a totally new angle. Now, whether you’re a one-night-stay safari tourist or a long-term volunteer, Kenyans will try and charge you a bit more for stuff: that’s a given. But there are big differences. Differences in the way it’s done, and differences in the amount they try and rip you off. Of course, tourism is a giant industry, and there is some serious money to be made out of people who don’t know the value of the Kenyan Shilling. But for us it’s been a bit disappointing. We do know the value of the Kenyan Shilling, and we’ve been treated as if we don’t. It’s sometimes not very easy to swallow.

In fact, having lived, worked and then travelled around the country -and at the risk of generalisation- we’ve really seen the best and worst of African attitudes, not only towards the white man but also towards their own people, land and cultures.  We’ve seen the best of people: their genuine friendliness; their endless generosity; and  their morally-driven belief in the need for personal improvement and social development. Yet we’ve seen the worst, too: their snobbishness towards other tribes; their greed-driven exploitation of visitors; and their unending lack of resistance to the temptation of corruption.

We’ve seen the best of Kenya’s environment: an abundance of wildlife you just don’t get anywhere else; scenery that would make your eyes melt; and night skies so unpolluted it’s like an eternal trip to the London Planetarium. Yet we’ve seen that worst as well: unrelentingly grim, unplanned and chaotic development choking streams and burying ecosystems; land being gobbled up by a population whose growth is almost out of control; and a thoughtless nationwide addiction to littering which turns even the most gorgeous landscapes into scenes of desperate and depressing environmental poverty.

We’ve also seen the best and worst of their attitudes to us, as foreigners: they’ve been so, so welcoming in small communities, and hotel staff have fallen over themselves to make sure we’ve been 100% happy. Yet we’ve been  (understandably) treated like giant, white, walking ATM machines, and been (actually not unreasonably) hassled by touts and hawkers. We’ve seen the best and worst of their attempts to improve their communities’ prospects: some work so hard to uplift and assist, while others undermine all the good work with their petty fund pilfering.

In short, Kenya has been a confusing country, not only because it sits somewhere around halfway to development, but because its people display a kind of national schizophrenia: on the one hand they can be humble and optimistic, while on the other they can be greedy and cynical; while some try selflessly to drag their communities into the twentieth century, others are busy grabbing what material possessions they can of the twenty-first century; while some defend the rights of the vulnerable and do all they can to promote them, others simply promote themselves and care little about the consequences. And although you could write the same sentences about any country, or any community anywhere in the world, it seems so much more pronounced here, and that is precisely because the country is halfway down that road to development. The contrasts here are that much sharper, the divisions that much wider, and the obstacles that much harder to overcome. We should say that many people we have spoken to (this week and previously) are optimistic about Kenya’s future, what with its new constitution and forthcoming elections; but an equal number, maybe more, feel it has no future at all, with its lack of a unified cultural foundation, its rulers’ addiction to ‘graft’, and its almost overwhelming inequalities.

And we thought we were just going to see some lions.

Anyway, we had a nice week -a very enlightening week, too- and we think we will miss this country, despite the slightly uneven experience we’ve had here. We hope to return. How can we not when it’s every bit as intriguing as it is confusing?

Andy and Linda

PS for those naturalists (that’s naturalists, not naturists) among you who might be interested, here’s what we managed to tick off our nature list during our week away:

Mammals:

Lion; White Rhino; Elephant; Buffalo; Giraffe; Common Zebra; Hippo; Wildebeest; Spotted Hyena; Thomson’s Gazelle; Grant’s Gazelle; Eland; Impala; Bushbuck; Waterbuck; Reedbuck; Dikdik;  Baboon; Vervet Monkey; Rock Hyrax.

 

Cold-blooded horrible things:

Nile Crocodile; Monitor Lizard; Carpet Viper; Black Scorpion.

 

Birds:

Ostrich (tame and wild); Vulture; African Fish Eagle; Spotted Eagle Owl; Marabou Stork; Stork; Lesser Flamingo; Pelican; Hammerkop; Ibis; Goliath Heron; Grey Heron; Bee-eater (various); Cormorant; Great Egret; Little Egret; Pied Kingfisher; Weaver Bird; lots of other birds we can’t remember or never knew the names of.

 

 

First and foremost, many apologies to those of you expecting a blog entry last Saturday. We’ve been very busy making preparations for our departure and unfortunately last weekend got absorbed into that time. Today, however, we’re back, sitting in an insanely hot but insanely cheap internet cafe in Nairobi, and blogging once more (so it might be a long one!).

Yep, we’re back in the big smoke having left the project, and all our friends in Kisayani, early yesterday morning. It was a very tiring journey, amplified by the slightly confusing, mixed emotions with which we left. But more of that later. We departed the project at about 9am and got a lift to the highway in an extremely posh car (for Kibwezi, anyway) from the lady who owns Kibwezi’s only shoe shop. Having been dropped at ‘the stage’ we waited on the side of the highway for about an hour and a half for either a bus or a private car to come by. Incidentally, people regularly hitch here. Well, it’s not really hitching as drivers ask for money to go to and from Nairobi, so it’s kind of a half-taxi half-hitching thing. But either way, no-one stopped, so eventually we (and our nine items of luggage, some of which were v. large) joined a comedy bus driven and conducted by the least appealing men in Kenya. It wobbled and screeched its way along the good road, and then the not-very-good-road, to Nairobi and, having negotiated the simply unbelievable traffic around the city, finally arrived at about 4pm.

We took a taxi from the bus station back to Komarock, and the lovely house (they didn’t have to move out after all) of Maggie and her family. It’s brilliant having people to stay with: it’s sociable, you get to learn so much, you get to laugh so much, it saves you a bundle in hotel rates, and they look after you so well it really is a home away from home. So we’re happy to be back here, albeit briefly.

 

Maggie's Living Room

 

And we say briefly because we’re planning on disappearing on Monday on some kind of safari. We’re hoping to head up to the Rift Valley, among some of Kenya’s loveliest scenery, and maybe spot a lion or rhino or two along the way. For those of you who have been over here (or for fans of Google Images), our tentative itinerary includes Hell’s Gate National Park (where you can cycle – so hopefully no lions there), Lakes Nakuru, Naivasha, Baringo and Bogoria, Thomson Falls, and a day climbing Mount Longonot. The plan is to come back to Nairobi next weekend, spend a few more days with the family, and then head to Uganda. We’ll see what pans out, but that’s what we’re hoping to do.

But the big news is that last week was, indeed, our last week at the Ndiwa Project. It’s hard to say what kind of impression we’ve given of it because we just write what’s in our heads on a given day. Thinking about it, it’s probably been a quite confusing and contradictory narrative, but in a way that’s kind of accurate. However, if it’s come across as in any way negative, that’s misleading. We’ve had a brilliant time. We’ve had some amazingly emotional days, we’ve had a ton of fun, and we’ve met some wonderful people. We’ve done what we set out to do with the money you all raised -and lots more- and we’ve been supported by many members of the community. We’ve lived in a mud hut with two of the funniest people in the world, and we’ve been looked after by the nicest family in Africa. We’ve been so warmly welcomed, and so humbled, and incessantly worshipped by small African children, it’s been an amazing experience.

 

Kisayani Kids

 

And yet…Yet what? A subtle, barely detectable undercurrent of something. Of wariness? Maybe even suspicion? You know, being truthful, we’ve sometimes found it hard to know who to trust. If you’re a mzungu in Africa with some money to donate, you inevitably attract people who cannot resist temptation, those who want to ‘earn’ a quick buck, or those who are so desperate that they simply have to try and tap you for money, or how else will they buy food for their children? Solutions are thin on the ground so when the two white herberts turn up with a fistful of shillings, that’s the time to strike, right? Actually it doesn’t really feel like you’re being targeted -well, it’s not personal, at least- but Africa has very many problems that remain unaddressed, and Kenya in particular has suffered at the hands of unscrupulous authorities. Politicians have been especially to blame if you’re talking about lack of scruples or exemplary incidences of belief-defying selfishness and aggrandisement; but everyone’s at it, really. Anyone who can skim money off the bottom of the pile, anyone who can pull a confidence trick, anyone who can obtain kickbacks through nefarious means: they just do it, because for Kenyans it’s kind of become acceptable. Well, maybe not acceptable, but accepted. That’s not to say that everyone in Kenya is corrupt, because there are a lot of good souls out there: we can confirm it because we’ve met dozens of them. But you come across corruption in one form or another -big or small- every day of the week. It might be a policeman wanting a bung to make sure your motorbike doesn’t get impounded for that light that isn’t faulty yet but will be if he doesn’t get his 300 shillings. Or it might be the government protecting the six men wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for orchestrating the civil war three years ago. It’s everywhere, and it really hangs over the country like a cloud threatening rain, preventing you from enjoying the sunshine. And in that respect, our time in Kisayani was an incredibly informative, at times hard, but ultimately beneficial learning experience. We were never ripped off, but we could smell it in the air, and it’s taught us a lot about volunteering, poverty and human nature.

If that sounds a bit heavy, it’s a point that actually shouldn’t be overstated. It was only subtle, and it was sometimes only in our heads, but for anyone who might be planning on getting involved in aid work, charities or volunteering, we would say that it pays handsomely to maintain a healthy scepticism about certain members of the community you might be working with. Equally, if you stray too far and become hopelessly cynical about the people around you and their motives for helping you, the whole thing will quickly become counter-productive. It’s not an easy tightrope to walk, between naivety, trust and faith on one side, and jaded, overly suspicious cynicism on the other, over the Niagara Falls of need, poverty and desperation. But then again, no-one said this was going to be easy. What’s hit us during this project is that volunteering in Africa isn’t just a physical, environmental or cultural challenge: it’s a sometimes stressful, confusing and tricky emotional challenge, too.

Anyway, regardless of all that, we’re going to miss the place. On Wednesday we said goodbye to the staff and pupils of Kisayani Primary School. We’ve only been there a short while, and it’s hard to say how relevant or how much of an impact on a class full of goatherds and housegirls our lessons on drawing and sketching have had, but the staff have been very welcoming and the kids, with only one or two exceptions, have made our time there enjoyable. We wish them all success, especially our Standard 8s who take their big life-defining KCPE exams later this year.

We also bade a sad farewell to the children and adults in the Special Unit. Although it’s perhaps even less clear what we’ve actually been able to do there, we’ve really enjoyed working with the wonderful characters. We probably received the warmest welcome yet here: when we turn up each day the children are really excited. And although the stampede of a dozen kids with cerebral palsy or Down’s Syndrome coming to greet you at the gates does -if you were really cruel- resemble something out of Dawn of the Dead, we knew the smiles were genuine and we loved spending time with them. They do the funniest things, and they sometimes do the bizarrest things, but you can’t help being touched by the enthusiasm which really reaches through their tremendous -and tremendously sad- difficulties. And enormous kudos must go to the staff there who, despite sometimes using techniques straight out of the Miss Havisham school of child care, do a sterling job in very limited circumstances, and still make progress with children who you think just defy the word progress. It’s impressive and humbling  in equal measure. We will miss them.

 

Linda and friends

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A load of blocks

 

And speaking of school, we’ve had to say goodbye to the two boys who we decided to sponsor through their secondary school years. We’ve used some of the donation money, as well as some of our own, to fund two deserving students. Secondary education isn’t free in Kenya, but if you want to make anything of yourself you really have to complete it. It takes four years, and works out to be quite a burden on poor families. We think it’s unfortunate that education, and the opportunities it might eventually afford, are denied to the poor, and it’s a pretty damning indictment of the way the Kenyan government treats some of the most vulnerable and needy people in its society. Granted, it’s not a massively wealthy country like Britain, but surely the priority is to give your young people as much of a chance as possible in the now globalised world. Remember, the median age in Kenya is 18. Yes, half the population is under 18.

Anyway, one of the boys is a volunteer who has worked with us throughout our time here called Shedrack. His father died of AIDS and his mother is HIV-positive. She has no income and just works every now and then on other people’s farms for 50/- or 100/- per day (40p or 80p). He’s worked tremendously hard, and we think he’s an ideal candidate to kick start the children’s programme that might one day exist at the Ndiwa project. So we’ve provided him with all the books and clothes that he needs, and have agreed to pay his school fees for the four years he will be there. The other boy is Kiminza, the nephew of the family we live with. Both his parents are dead and he is looked after by Mary and Nicholas. They planned their own family to ensure that each of their children would have a chance to go to school (there’s four or five years between each child), but, despite it totally disrupting their plans, they agreed to take on Kiminza as well. He’s a really conscientious boy, and we think he’d really take the opportunity provided by attending school, and maybe one day he will be able to repay his surrogate family. But for now, the family are really struggling for money to put him into Form 1, so we (and you) have given them a little helping hand. Both boys started school on Monday and looked extremely smart in their new uniforms.

 

Linda, Shedrack, Kiminza, Andy

 

We were also sad to say goodbye to our fellow volunteers, the motley crew that are the resident characters at the project. We’ll miss Francis and his unending positivity (not to mention his ridiculous stories); Masumbuko and his permanent yet unintentional Richie Benaud impersonation; Shedrack and his tireless work; and Biki for her Fanta fetish and for just being Biki.

 

Francis; Masumbuko; Shedrack; Biki; Linda

 

Of course we will miss the widows at the project, too, many of whom we have become good friends with. We don’t share a single word of the same language (actually, that’s a lie: when the women say “Wacha?” we can say “Ah“. Not sure what it means, but it’s what you’re supposed to say. Actually, Kikamba is quite a funny language: it sometimes sounds a bit french -there seems to be a phrase which sounds a lot like “Il y a“- and it contains some seemingly too-easy words such as the above-mentioned “Ah“, plus “Eh” ,”O” and “E“), but despite not really being able to communicate at all, we felt like we were friends with each other, and were able to enjoy time with each other. In truth they were all a bit daft -silly dances, singing, fooling around- but it was so nice to see that people who have nothing, no visible means of support, and who are often very lonely, could come together once a week and find solace in each others company, and in each others shared experiences.

 

Some of the Ndiwa mamas

 

And nowhere was this more true than in the new HIV support group, set up by the twenty or so widows who have been diagnosed as positive. HIV/AIDS isn’t as astonishingly overwhelming a problem here in Kenya as it is in some (especially Southern) African countries, but it’s apparently on the rise again and, as we all know, once it gets a grip it can properly devastate communities, let alone families. As we’ve said before, Kibwezi is on the highway from Mombasa (East Africa’s biggest port) to Nairobi (East Africa’s biggest city). Truckers, delivery drivers and travellers represent one of the major contributors to the geographical spread of AIDS, and they’ve put Kibwezi right in the middle of the map.

But the HIV positive women from the Ndiwa group decided to help themselves by setting up a support group. The idea is that they can talk to each other, confidentially, about their issues (there’s no other counselling on offer in Kenya), help each other financially via a merry-go-round scheme, and raise money for the group through various income-generating activities (at the moment they make baskets, jewellery and souvenirs). This week they’ve received their official certificate from the Ministry of Social Affairs meaning that they are now a bona fide self-help group and are therefore entitled to support from local and national government agencies. And they’re going to open a bank account next week and are all tremendously excited about it. You see, it isn’t always about actually reaching your goal or finishing your plans; it’s sometimes just as valuable to know that you have something to aim for, that you are on the way there, that you might just have something to believe in again. And above all, that you are not alone. We wish them all the best, and we think they are among the bravest, most inspiring people we have yet met.

And then there’s the rest of the Ndiwa group, and all the weird and wonderful characters contained therein. The really ancient ones, the ones who fall asleep during meetings, and the ones who buzz around trying to get things done. Yes, we’ve sometimes felt a bit frustrated with them, but we’ve realised now that when a group of people have been let down so many times, and have been on the losing end of so many situations (remember, they are among the poorest people in the country, living in a place which suffers periodic drought, and they are widows) you can’t blame them for sometimes lacking motivation or optimism.

The news this week was that the women have decided to hold an election (only a year late!) and voting is planned for next week. We’ve heard from many of the widows that they are no longer happy with the work the committee has been doing: some members have been sloppy in their approach to the project, some never turn up, and some have been downright corrupt. We’re hoping a new committee which features the widows who do work really hard could just be the catalyst that finally drives this project forward. It’s been a long time, and practically all the promised development is yet to materialise. Surely it’s time that things changed for the better? And while we have heard that the partner charity Watoto wa Dunia is planning on starting up the construction work again (and although they did finally pay the builders their money -after much pressure, it had to be said) we’re not going to hold our breath, and we’re happy that the women seem to have resolved to look after themselves and not to rely on external sources of funding. After all, it’s not a sustainable way of keeping a project going and, as they have realised to their cost over the last seven years, is not always a reliable one either.

 

The Ndiwa Group

 

Even better than this news was the send off that they gave us. At Thursday’s meeting they gave us a bumper Kamba farewell featuring dancing, singing, present-giving and the longest prayer in history. We all sat round in a circle (around The Tree, the centre of activity at the project) and each mama then said a few words of appreciation. It seemed to all be positive (evidently we are pretty much the first volunteers they’ve had there who have actually done some work, rather than just bum around in the bars of Kisayani or jaunt off to the beach every weekend). Some of the things they said were very touching, and it seems as if we’ve left a positive impression. And this is important to us, because if a community is going to succeed, it needs to know that there are people who want to help them, and that those people are genuine, committed, and emotionally involved in the work the project is trying to do. We’re happy to have been accepted, and we are proud to have been appreciated. We’ve come to realise that something as simple as setting an example is a lesson and a legacy in itself, especially in communities where education and development are at a premium. But it’s nice to know that your work is making a difference, even if it is just to the way people look at their situation.

 

Yes, we had to dance. Spot the not-at-all stiff British person.

 

After the mamas spoke we were asked to do a little speech too, before they presented us with some small tokens of their appreciation. Now we weren’t expecting anything at all, because for these people the breadline is something you’d need a pole vault to get over. But perhaps we should have learnt by now that it’s the poorest people who are always the most generous. Even so, the gifts they gave us were amazing, as were the traditional Kamba reasons for giving them. Andy was presented with a carved wooden staff, ostensibly (and don’t laugh) because he has been dubbed the group’s shepherd, looking after and leading the members, although some wag suggested it was just because he did his back in whilst pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. It’s a lovely piece of work, and a really special memento of the project. Linda was presented with a beautiful hand-sewn basket because, as a woman, it is her job to fetch vegetables from the market and bring them home to her husband (!). More touchingly, they presented her with a basket for her mum, too. They did this because, firstly, they said they are so grateful to her for making Linda the person she is, and secondly because, since they are mothers and Linda is now a daughter of the project, they wanted Linda’s mum to be an honorary member of the group. So we have some lovely items to keep, and some lovely stories to cherish.

 

Andy gets some stick

 

Chair Lady Monicah; Linda; some baskets

 

After that we were given our certificates of volunteering by Charles, our volunteer coordinator from Malaika Ecotourism in Nairobi. They look dead professional and everything, and we’ll give them pride of place alongside our other gifts when we get back. Certificates are a big deal here in Kenya because they form a central part of a person’s CV if they’ve been out o work. We’re not sure what we can do with ours, but they’ll look nice framed anyway.

 

Andy finally gets certified

 

Linda with yet more paperwork

 

After that, a wonderful but unexpected moment. One of the local volunteers who had worked with us on the building site, Masumbuko, had made a little cement plaque next to the entrance to the new orphanage block, and Francis (another fellow volunteer, project caretaker and probably the nicest, most enthusiastic man on the planet) asked us to leave our handprints in it. We did so, even posing with all the Ndiwa widows for a professional photographer, and so our work on the project has been recorded for all time, on a wall, in concrete. It was such a nice idea, and so totally out of the blue, that we didn’t even think about how totally disproportionate it was to the small contribution we have made. And moreover, thinking about it, all of the names of the people who donated should be on it, too, because without them them would be no orphanage to attach a plaque to.

 

Linda; Andy; a plaque; Francis; Masumbuko

 

Literally giving the project a hand

Finally, we met with the HIV Support Group and they gave us some gifts, too: a carved wooden elephant, representing the strength they said they have drawn from us, and some necklaces which they made themselves during their weekly Monday meetings. The things they said were really lovely -far, far too effusive for what we’ve actually done, we’re sure- but it at last seems that they have finally gained the respect and recognition of the other members of the Ndiwa group, and they talked of having found once again their pride and self-respect. Which, after all, is all we could have asked for when we set out for Africa.

We also did a couple of visits this week to say a couple of goodbyes to friends. And really they couldn’t have been much more of a contrast, while at the same time being so similar. Let us explain. First, on Tuesday, we popped round to Jennifer’s house. She’s the lady who founded and who leads the Special Unit at Kisayani School, and she’s a larger-than-life Rusty Lee-type character who says impossibly funny things in pretty much every sentence. She’s addicted to food, driving to school (even though it’s less than 1km), and terrible, melodramatic, badly-dubbed soap operas. She made us a ginormous pot of the nicest stew that’s ever been made, accompanied by dozens of some of the best chapatis we’ve ever tasted. More importantly, she has a fridge which contained cold water. In fact, she lived a almost completely western life: a big house with a car, running water, electricity, TV, lots of comfortable furniture, and just about as many mod-cons as you’ve got in your own house. But more important than all of that, she has the biggest heart. The work she does, the compassion she has: it just overwhelms you. Then on Wednesday we went to visit Lena. She’s the secretary for the Ndiwa group and lives in an unfinished mud-brick ‘house’ with her elderly mother-in-law and her 11-year-old son. Her husband died ten years ago leaving her in abject poverty, and she’s struggled ever since. She made us some mothecoi (boiled corn and beans) and some tea. She has nothing, and her house was pitiful. There’s no other word for it. And yet we enjoyed both visits equally, simply through the force of their personalities. Their laughter, their funny expressions, and their outlook on life. So, we’re not exactly sure what the lesson is here, but it must be something to do with how what you have is much less important than who you are. It’s probably a bit of a schmaltzy message, but what can you do? It’s all true.

 

Linda; Jennifer

 

Lena & Family with Andy

 

Finally, we had to say our goodbyes to our host family. Now, we’re really going to miss this lot because they are our surrogate family here in Kenya. They’ve looked after us, done everything for us, given up so much for us, and still remain annoyingly wonderful and angelic. Okay, so Mutindi still cries a lot, but we’re going to miss all the squeezing and clambering, and the fact that she’s just the cutest and funniest kid. We’ll miss Caleb’s fantastic English and addiction to cuddles; we’ll miss Martha’s sublime sarcasm and gentle nature; we’ll miss Kiminza and his modest ways and impeccable manners; we’ll miss Naomi’s bolshi confidence and endless friendliness; we’ll miss Shosho (their Grandma) and her chattiness (even thought it was all in Kikamba!); we’ll miss Nicholas with his dry wit and warmth; and we’ll miss Mary, our mum, for her endless hard work, integrity and intelligence.

 

Back row: Andy; Mary; Mutindi; Nicholas; Naomi; Martha; Kiminza; Linda. Front Row: Shosho; Caleb

 

We spent last Sunday with Martha and Naomi, walking to a a local irrigation project (which was much more interesting that it sounds). Essentially a dam has been built across the Kibwezi river to create a kind of reservoir (and a very beautiful one at that) and then water, via gravity, runs down brick channels to the surrounding area for people to use on their farms. It’s a totally communal project, and no member is allowed more than one acre. The food they grow can be used to sustain their families or to be sold at market, and it’s a very impressive example of a sustainable project where a little investment at the start has given life to a district for all time. It was so green, and felt so… productive, sometimes you just wonder why it was that communism ultimately didn’t really work. Anyway, it was called Kwakyai (pronounced qwachai) and it was miles away, and the sun was almost too hot to walk around. But still, it was really nice to spend a bit of time with the two girls. They are very different characters: Naomi is all business, Martha very reserved, but when they’re together -as is usually the case with sisters- they fizz off each other in a whirl of laughter and activity. It was great fun watching them have some time off from studying. We also walked to where their other grandmother lives, and it was like walking into a 1940s book about African culture. Two small huts and a fireplace in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, yet this scene was less than a mile from the electricity pylons and motorbikes on the main road. And that’s Kenya in a nutshell, really.

 

Kwakyai Reservoir: a slice of England in Kenya

 

So it’s probably time to leave this week’s entry there. It’s hard to write a retrospective piece only one day after you’ve left a place: you need more time for thoughts and memories to organise themselves into a clearer picture. But we had an eventful time here. Maybe it won’t sound eventful, but because you’re here, in Africa, where it’s unbelievably hot and people are, at least on the surface, unbelievably different from the man on the Clapham omnibus, and when you’re doing things that have become everyday activities while trying to remember that what you’re doing isn’t normal, it does become eventful: from sleeping in a hut riddled with gigantic mutant insects to flipping chapatis on a burning hot charcoal jiko; from picking lentils in the equatorial sun to shifting tonnes and tonnes of building sand around a baking red field; from sipping sodas as a herd of cows wanders past to spotting a load of wild Giraffes by the highway (they were really close yesterday!); from chatting about charity work to the gay tailor in town to zooming along an indescribably bumpy sand road on the back of a motorbike; the experiences always exceed expectations simply by virtue of being so different from them. So who knows what’s next for us?

 

Wishing you all the best,

Linda and Andy

 

PS we’ve emailed the latest slew of photographs to all the people on our mailing list. We hope you enjoy them. If there’s anyone who hasn’t seen them who’d like to, please send Linda an email at elvisbabeontour@hotmail.com and she’ll add you to the list.

 

 

On the road again...

 

 

Karibu everyone, and welcome once more to our blog. We’re back in Kibwezi town, except this week we decided to walk here. Yes, walk. Now, it seemed like a good idea this morning when it was still relatively cool, especially as we wanted to take some photos of the surrounding area which you just can’t do when you’re hanging off the back of a motorbike or being thrown around the inside of an old banger, but by the time we got here -three hours later- it somehow seemed like less of a good idea. We’re quite sweaty, and have just downed quite a lot of water. And one of us (guess who!) is a bit sunburnt. But here we are, ready to write another installment in our year-long tome.

Actually, walking to Kibwezi today was quite a good idea, and it turned out to be much more interesting than we thought. For a start, it provided a time-machine-esque window on the pre-motorbike, pre-matatu Kenya; and, of course, moving through any area at walking pace always provides a completely different sensory experience, where you find yourself appreciating your environment in a much finer detail. And because we were moving much slower, we bumped into lots more people and were able to spend more time meeting and greeting them (the national past-time). We also had more time to drink in the really quite beautiful (and seemingly underrated) views around Kibwezi district: we could clearly see Kilimanjaro poking his snowy head above the surrounding mountains (it’s such an awesome view); we noticed how the lovely greeny-brown plains either side of the Kibwezi-Kitui highway are dotted with some really bizarre trees and some unrealistic-looking geology, somewhat reminiscent of Ayers Rock; and we were able to climb the small hill we’ve talked about climbing since we first got here, and there were some fine views from the top of it. Yes, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, but we think it was worth doing (even if the motorbike drivers -“Mine is the faster way, surely?”- thought we were insane).

 

View to the Cheylu Hills, Kibwezi District

 

 

It also gave us the chance to objectively and impartially observe and assess the various ways Kenyan people get about. Here’s the lowdown:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matatu

Pro’s: direct; cheap; can carry quite a lot of luggage (e.g. the entire contents of your house).

Con’s: compulsory (and very bad) Kamba music played at 140 decibels through speakers which are hopelessly unable to cope; worryingly high fatality-to-crash ratio; you might have to sit on the roof.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nissan

Pro’s: cheap; ubiquitous, even if you’re in what appears to be the middle of nowhere; nippy in traffic (undertaking, overtaking, taking a shortcut through someone’s shoe-mending premises: it’s all the same to them).

Con’s: you will be sharing your seat with two other people; the drivers and conductors are nearly always drunk; it’ll smash into about 5000 pieces in the event of an accident.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taxi

Pro’s: cheap; fantastic for those who still have an I-Spy book of saloon cars from 1974; could be considered/reminisced about as a genuine African adventure/experience.

Con’s: slight lack of comfort (i.e. it’s a very old car with more than 10 people in); slightly worrying aroma of petrol/noise from brakes/lack of windows/lack of MOT; driving ‘eccentricities’ not recommendable for those of a nervous disposition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Motorbike Taxi

Pro’s: cheap; very fast; fun.

Con’s: staying upright after heavy rains a challenge; bumpy roads can be problematic for those with back problems/large amounts of shopping/piles; the drivers are all off their faces on miraa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tractor

Pro’s: free; can easily handle even the worst Kenyan roads (and that’s no mean boast); often not many other passengers getting in your way.

Con’s: excruciatingly slow; unbelievably noisy; you might have to help unload two tonnes of sand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bicycle

Pro’s: free; ecologically friendly; good for fitness.

Con’s: hills can be hard work when your bike weighs half a ton and you’re carrying five jerry cans of water or a 50kg bag of charcoal; there will be high maintenance costs courtesy of the terrible road surfaces; lack of brakes/sharing the road with matatus, taxis and motorbikes will result in almost certain death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walking

Pro’s: free; ecologically friendly; good for sightseeing/sociability/having a good old gossip

Con’s: sunshine/equatorial location/temperatures of 35 degrees and above; it takes ages to get anywhere; sharing the road with matatus, taxis and motorbikes will result in almost certain death.

So, we hope that all helps

*

Anyway, on to more important things, and the big news around Kisayani this week has been the weather; specifically rain. And lots of it. It might have only rained twice, but when it rained, it rained. And it was strange because we hadn’t seen any in Kenya at all: dusty red pathways being transformed into broad, fast-moving streams of muddy water, giant puddles filling the potholes in the cracked mud roads, and dry fields becoming vast, stodgy quagmires. The whole experience was quite remarkable, but the thing we’ll remember most will be the noise. You see, when the house you’re staying in has only bare corrugated iron sheets for a roof, and you’re in the middle of the biggest rain storm you’ve ever witnessed, the noise is quite something. In fact, we were eating at the time, and it kind of precluded much chance of dinner table conversation. ‘Loud’ doesn’t really describe it.

But it’s been good news for the local villagers. Having watched their maize wither and die in the December and January heat (which sounds weird, we know, given the winter you’ve had), they’ve been struggling a bit, because maize is their main staple. But this short rain has enabled them to plant a few fast-growing cereals and pulses which should be ready in time for the big rains in March and April, which everybody seems a good deal more confident about. As a result, this week we’ve been mainly planting lentils on the farm. For the more horticulturally-challenged among you, this involves digging lots and lots of small holes in lots and lots of rows, and then sowing lots and lots lentils. Each hole should accommodate three or four of the little green fellas, and should then be lightly covered over with loose soil. In two-to-three months’ time, with a bit of luck and a bit of rain, there should be about three acres of lentils to harvest at 100-150 Shillings (about one pound) per kilo.

 

Kibwezi River: it's been quite dry here

 

The big news for us, however, has been starting work in Kisayani School’s Special Unit; what they call (and we don’t call) the School for the Mentally Handicapped. It’s been a really interesting experience so far, but one which is really difficult to describe. For example, on the one hand the school even having a special unit is unbelievably progressive for this country: we were genuinely shocked that a tiny (and in all honesty, quite backward) country town like Kisayani would have any kind of provision like this. On the other hand, it isn’t exactly in line with the kind of special needs unit that you might find in a British town. And while the provision is encouragingly inclusive and practical, it (somewhat understandably) lacks some of the resources and some of the enlightenment you would expect in your local unit. It’s a gradual, one-step-at-a-time process here, but it’s great that even that first step has been taken. And as a particularly positive consequence, it looks like -at least in this area- attitudes towards disability are changing. And the idea that children with even quite severe needs can grow up to play an active role in society really seems to be gaining some currency.

The problems the unit faces, however, are many. For a start, this is the only unit in the whole area, but there are –apparently- very many children in the district who have needs which cannot be catered for by the mainstream education system. Moreover, the needs of the children who are able to attend the unit are so different, and in some cases so severe, that there simply isn’t enough time to devote to each individual child. This is compounded by the fact that there is only one full-time member of staff, the unit’s founder Jennifer. And although she is supported by four part-time teachers/carers, there really should be more adults to help supervise and develop the children.

 

Classroom, Kisayani special unit

The children have very many different conditions. There are a few obvious ones: three kids have Down’s Syndrome, some have (varying degrees) of cerebral palsy, and some are mute or have speech defects. But when we asked Jennifer about certain other children, they were all pretty much undiagnosed. They were ‘not quite right’ or ‘funny’ or ‘not understanding anything’; what would have once been known in the UK as ‘slow’ or ‘simple’. Now, obviously there’s a huge gap between the desirable level of diagnostics that you’d like to see here and what there is in reality, but the result of non-diagnosis is that children cannot be treated according to their specific condition and must just be lumped together under a general term such as ‘mentally handicapped’. Like we said, it’s wonderful that they are being provided for, and Jennifer has worked wonders with them (she’s taught a boy with severe cerebral palsy to walk, and lots of the children can count to ten or read the alphabet), but the scope for developing each individual child is massively limited. Probably the best you can hope for, and what the unit appears to have achieved, is getting the children to enjoy themselves in a safe (if not entirely stimulating) environment, for these are without doubt the most vulnerable people in the community.

 

Counting fun

The unit contains 32 children, roughly half of whom stay at the unit as boarders under the supervision of two matrons, while the other half are day pupils. It is also divided into two classes: first, there’s the Pre-Primary class which is for younger children who aren’t yet able to do much in the way of practical work. Here, the children mainly occupy themselves with what you might call educational play: the class has a range of nursery-age resources such as building blocks, puzzles, and counting games, which allow the more needy children to develop their dexterity and manipulation skills, and the more able children to develop their cognitive skills. Once they have shown sufficient progress (although some never do) the pupils move into the Pre-Vocational class, where they start to develop mainstream educational skills alongside courses in tailoring. The class has half a dozen sewing machines (which are seriously old-skool) and the children practice dress-making and embroidery, the idea being that their skills will not only help them to become a little more self-reliant, but might even offer them a way of starting a small business or cottage industry in the future. We think it’s a tremendous idea, and we’ve been genuinely impressed by some of the results.

 

19, Green

The unit was funded by a charity called Advantage Africa, and members of the local community donated time and skills to help build it. It has two classrooms, two dormitories (one for boys, one for girls), and kitchen and toilet blocks. They have been extremely well built (which is not always the case with institutional buildings in Kenya!) and have also been supplied with their own water tank and connection to the local electricity grid. It’s a great place, we think, and really stands out as an example of how western donors and members of the local community have been able to come together to create something really worthwhile. It is state-funded but relies heavily on donations and tuition fees, too. Jennifer told us that they charge 3000 Shillings (about 240 GBP) per term for a family to send their child there (which is loads of money in Kenya), but she rarely asks for the money from families who are in arrears. And that’s because it’s a resource for the community, and it’s brilliant that they’re fighting the perverse and damaging trend in this country whereby ‘free’ universal education usually ends up costing Kenyan parents many hundreds of thousands of Shillings.

 

Residential block, classroom block and playground

So we’ve been in there for a week. It would probably unfair to say we’re totally out of our depth, but it probably would be fair to say we’re pretty out of our depth. Obviously Linda has lots of experience of teaching, and some experience working with children who have additional needs; Andy, on the other hand, can only rely on the observations he’s made over the years of the two specials who used to sit behind him in the West Side at Orient. So we try our hardest to help amongst the chaos, and Jennifer seems to think that having two mzungus in the classroom is making the children’s experiences much richer, apart from the simple fact that we’re two additional pairs of hands. For us, it’s a glimpse into a different world; one, for example, where severely disabled children still sit at Victorian-style desks and face the front. But it’s also one inhabited by some great characters: some of the children are real live-wires, some are heart-breakingly gentle and patient, while some are just in a world of their own, for better or for worse. The good news for us so far, though, is that only one child has done a poo in class (although in fairness it was a corker).

 

Developing dextrous skills

 

Work at the project is still at a standstill, which -as the half-built buildings which absolutely litter the countryside will tell you- is very common in Kenya. The situation hasn’t changed much since last week, but for those of you who might not have been closely following the events of the last few weeks, here’s some background. Firstly, we should say that the building which was funded by you (yes, you lovely generous people back home) is 100% finished and ready to be moved into. During its construction, however, we were visited by representatives from Watotot wa Dunia, an American-Kenyan charity who, among other grand gestures, promised to complete (at least) the next phase of the orphanage. However, work stopped two weeks ago after the funding they had been providing dried up. Most unforgivably, they failed to pay the builders for ten days work they had done. The founder, a seemingly ultra-sincere Kenyan-American, flew back to the US on January the 15^th without providing any explanation or excuse, and since then no one from Watoto wa Dunia has been able to be reached. This has happened before (you might remember we told you how the orphanage had been started some seven years ago, but stood unfinished until we came) and it looks like it’s happening again, leaving the project on the horns of the proverbial two-horned dilemma. On the one hand, it could really do with some other donor-volunteers to come and finish the work and co-ordinate the group. Ask anybody and they’ll say they just aren’t sure about Watoto wa Dunia anymore, nor whether it’s carelessness, corruption or just plain incompetence which has brought this situation about. On the other hand, it might be more advantageous for the women’s group to just stand alone, as a self-financing, independent and sustainable entity.

Either way, while we wait for the answer, there’s a slightly confused, annoyed and frustrated atmosphere surrounding the project (because things really looked to be heading in the right direction), and partly as a result of this, we’ve decided to call an emergency general meeting for the whole Ndiwa Group. Now, it’s not really in our remit to do things like this, but we feel like it’s the right time –a crucial time- to discuss with them exactly where they stand, and what they can do to bridge the significant funding gap left by Watoto. We’re hoping to speak to as many members as possible on Monday 31^st, so we hope to let you know what happens next weekend. In all of this we should say that, regardless of Watoto’s ill-advised intervention (some might say interference) the Ndiwa group continues to be a really worthwhile project which has enormous potential to assist and help succeed a large number of otherwise highly vulnerable people around the Kisayani area: some very elderly widows, some homeless and opportunity-less orphans, and a number of men, women and children with HIV/AIDS. We wish we could stay longer to help them devise and implement another way forward, but all we can do is make some recommendations on Monday, and keep our fingers crossed for them after that.

Okay, that about covers it for this week. We should mention that we hope you’re all keeping well, and that we love to hear from you. Texts, emails, comments, letters, carrier pigeons, we don’t care. It’s just great to hear from home.

So, until next time, all the best

 

Linda and Andy

Ps we should point out that, during almost the entire duration of writing this week’s blog, someone nearby was repeatedly playing the theme tune to Z cars. They have just replaced this with the Best of Kenny Rogers. Kenyans are odd.

 

 

 

Welcome once again, everybody. We hope you’re all keeping well wherever you might be reading this.

It’s been a relatively quiet week here in Kisayani. The main reason is that it’s too hot to do anything, but also things on the project have slowed down almost to a standstill. We did spend a couple of days harvesting the last couple of fields of lentils, and there are a few young trees which need watering each day, but pretty much all other work has stopped. And that’s because the money promised by Watoto wa Dunia hasn’t materialised, and the CEO who came to visit us has slunk back off to America, refusing to answer his phone. Behind him he leaves a number of extremely poor, and now almost completely helpless women to whom he had pledged so much and who continue to have so little. None of the cows or chickens he promised to buy have been bought; none of the houses that he promised to repair have been repaired; none of the school fees he promised to pay have been paid; and the orphanage which he promised to finish, remains unfinished. For our part, all we can do is carry on helping out, and try to keep the women’s morale up. We’ve talked to them and explained that, after all is said and done, they’re no worse off than they were before he came, that they have to continue to rely on themselves, and that they need to provide for their children regardless of what ‘guarantees’ of support they might have been given. And to this end, we’re going to try and help organise them: they need to come up with an efficient and fair way of making the project work, for them. For example, they might want to form work parties to help on the farm, or to devise a long term plan to maximise the productivity of the land they have, or to try and hold an election to restore faith in the committee which has, in truth, failed to provide adequate leadership.

So we reckon this is a watershed moment in the project’s life. It has so much potential, and so much going for it: as we’ve mentioned before, it has 5 acres of fertile land; it has, crucially, access to a reliable water supply; but more than that it has a decent number of members. Yes, they need to commit themselves more, but between them and the resources they have, they should be able to come together to make the project work. They just need a couple of breaks and some broad-minded, coherent direction. We’d love to stay and shake things up, to provide the leadership that has been lacking, but it’s not our project –it belongs to each and every member, and no-one else– so we must leave them to deal with their own affairs, and in their own way. The most we can do is offer them some advice, and hope that they overcome some of their many challenges.

So in the meantime, since there’s not as much to do around the project as there has been up till now, we’ve decided to change our focus a bit, and so this week we’ve been teaching in the local school, Kisayani Primary School. It’s about 20 minutes walk from where we’re staying, situated on the main ‘road’ from Kisayani to Kibwezi, and accepts children aged between 7 and 14. We’re teaching Standard 7 and Standard 8 (roughly equivalent to Years 8 and 9, or in old money, 2nd and 3rd Year Secondary, in the UK), so the children are (in S7) 12 and 13, and (in S8) 13 and 14, except for the children who have had to repeat years, of which there are a few. Some of the ‘kids’ look about 20.

The school has a slight shortage of teachers so between us we’ve been given our own subject, Creative Arts. Yes, it sounds like the ultimate wishy-washy, beard-and-sandals topic, but it’s quite a step forward for the Kenyan education system having only recently been introduced by the government, presumably in a drive to stop school being such a mind-numbingly metronomic experience. You see, school here is very much like school was in the UK and Ireland in, say, the 1940s or 50s. Children are mainly required to copy things off the board, or repeat things back to the teacher which they have memorised. There’s very little room for individual thought, and most of their work is of the basic read-remember-regurgitate variety. The children sit in rows, two or three to a desk, and are required to face the front and listen to the teacher at all times. There are no class discussions, and if you ask the children for ideas or suggestions they still just sit in silence, because they’re not used to contributing to class. Consequently, school is quite dull for them, especially as some lessons aren’t covered by teachers and the pupils just have to sit in silence until the next lesson. So Creative Arts has been brought in to try and help them learn how to express themselves, and we’re the trendy teachers to help do it.

Kisayani Primary School

 

And this week we’ve been doing Drawing. The reason we chose this was because all of the other topics, as ridiculously set out in the curriculum guidance, required a similarly ridiculous number of resources. In Kisayani Primary not even every child has a pencil, let alone screen printing machinery or woodwork tools. So drawing was pretty much the only option (although admittedly still tricky for the kids without pencils) and so that’s what we’ve been doing, although it still requires quite a lot of copying off the board. There are around 70 children in either year, but each year is divided into two classes to make an extremely reasonable (especially for Africa) 35 kids per class. The classes are named after the orientation of the classrooms, and so while Linda teaches 7-East and 8-North (the brainy classes) Andy is lumbered with the artistically-challenged kids of 7-West and 8-South.

Kisayani Primary Schhol classrooms

The kids aren’t quite like the stereotypical teenagers that we’re told inhabit British schools, either: Kenyan kids are polite, they only speak when spoken to, and they don’t spend all lesson texting. The only similarity is that they quite often carry large knives or machetes into class with them. But seriously, it’s a world away from our state education system: the first –at least visual– things you notice are how the school buildings have a makeshift, almost rustic nature; how the 14-year-olds (not to mention the even older repeaters) still wear shorts; how only a handful of the hundreds of children have shoes; how the classes are bare, Dickensian rooms containing no more than a few ancient desks and a blackboard; and how the sports field is simply an expanse of red dirt, like a bit of the Serengeti with some rusty goalposts in. It’s school but not as you’d know it, except oddly we’re totally used to all this, and go about teaching our lessons as if we were extras from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or something. We’ve so far taught 1) how to draw portraits in proportion (ha!), and 2) how to draw people performing activities. The results have been… mixed.

Kisayani Primary School sports field a.k.a. the Serengeti

As we mentioned at the beginning, it’s still absurdly hot here. Mercifully there’s a place we can go to buy cold sodas, and they’ve been doing some serious business thanks to us. The heat is draining, and even just walking to school really takes it out of you. The only respite is the occasional (but wonderfully massive) baobab trees which line the road, and the difference in temperature between sun and shade is genuinely amazing. Thankfully, on arrival at school the classrooms are generally quite cool (since they lack windows and have big gaps everywhere), but by that time we’re already as sweaty as any human can ever be. According to Nicholas, the father of the family we live with, it’s been above one hundred degrees every day this week. It feels like two hundred.

Sometimes it's just so hot, you need to relax with a cold beer.

 

One unexpected delight of all this sunshine and clear skies happened yesterday. We’d heard a rumour that you can see Mount Kilimanjaro from where we live. To be honest, we were a bit skeptical: it’s over 100 km away, and Kibwezi is surrounded by hills on all sides. But when we were walking to school, and later when the sun was setting, we saw it. In daytime, it was a broad, snow-streaked peak, just popping its head over the nearby Cheylu hills into a completely cloudless sky; at sunset it made a bold, squarish outline, totally clear against the orange sky. It looked pretty big from where we were standing, so it must be massive when you’re near it. And as we wondered about how amazing nature is –and there are constant reminders of that here– a few minutes later a full moon rose, blood red. Nice.

Mount Kilimanjaro, dusk

 

This week we also found a very small –and very tame– bird in our front yard. He did this slightly weird thing where, when he was sitting on your hand, he’d just slowly fall forward, like you probably used to towards the end of Double Maths. But I doubt anyone has ever come across anything as soft, cute or fragile. From the majesty and vastness of Kilimanjaro to the modesty and preciousness of a baby bird, African nature rarely fails to impress you.

Small bird

 

And talking of animals, one thing that’s been a bit more noticeable here in rural Kenya than was the case on our mountaintop in Tanzania, is the wildlife. And by that –sadly– we don’t mean there are lots of lions chasing wildebeest around Kisayani market (although we did see a herd of wild giraffes when we were travelling along the highway to Nairobi), but rather we mean that animals feature quite a bit in life here. For example, as we’ve mentioned previously, our host family keep cows, goats and chickens. They also have a pet dog (who also seems to have quite a lot of pet fleas himself). In Kisayani, you’ll quite often see large herds of goats wandering around, donkeys pulling carts, and cows sneaking up on you when you’re drinking a Coke. There’s also a bull we have to walk past if we take the cross-country shortcut back from town (he’s blatantly plotting our downfall: you can see it in his eyes). And again, we’re very used to this, but you’d probably find it slightly odd if you found a baby goat in your room. So when we get back, and people ask us what’s different about the UK and Africa, we need to remember that these ‘normal’ things actually aren’t ‘normal’. In the same way, you probably don’t excitedly point and shout “There’s a traffic light!” when you see one. But we do.

Andy; small goat

 

You also see a good deal more Western sports shirts here than in rural Tanzania. Kenya is a bit further down the development road, and as a result a few more of them have access to TV. We don’t know anyone who actually owns one, but we’ve seen plenty of people watching the one in the pub, and plenty of kids hanging around outside the barbers, who has a small telly in his shop. Consequently, quite a few people are able to watch European sport, and so -as in Europe- sports shirt culture is everywhere. Except here it comes with a bit of a twist. You see, clothes are quite often donated or second-hand here, and as a result the sports shirts are quite random. So if you’re a Kenyan, and you obviously want a cool football shirt, you might not actually have a choice which cool football shirt you get. For example, it might not be a team you’ve ever heard of, i.e. not Chelsea, Arsenal or Man U. Now this doesn’t matter, because it’s a cool football shirt, and that’s what’s important, but for your average minor league sports connoisseur, it makes life infinitely funnier. I mean, did that bloke in Nairobi bus station really follow Shrewsbury Town’s 1998/99 campaign?

So, we (or one of us, at any rate) have been waiting, praying, hoping that it might happen. The holy grail of travelling the world. The slimmest, most infinitesimal, almost impossible moment of chance. That rarest, most preciously fateful occurrence. The once-in-a-lifetime hand. The meeting of perfect timing and perfect location. A unique, never-to-be-repeated quirk of fortune. The pure, unadulterated unlikelihood. But it happened this week. Yes. We bumped into a Kenyan man, in a backstreet of a tiny market town, in a remote region of sparsely-populated Eastern Kenya, who was wearing… a Leyton Orient shirt. It was a moment of pure joy, and even though he thought we were a bit odd asking to take his picture, he finally bemusedly agreed. Enjoy.

And so the quest for the elusive holy grail ends. A genuinely brilliant moment.

 

Actually, what’s even odder than spotting an African man wearing an obscure third division football shirt (actually, is anything odder than that?) is the bizarre pervasiveness of (perhaps even more obscure) Gaelic Football shirts. So far we’ve seen locals wearing Counties Cork, Tyrone and Dublin around the district. Okay, fair enough you might think (well, perhaps not fair enough, it’s still pretty unlikely), but at least they are relative giants of Gaelic Football (it’s true, look it up!). What was more bizarre, however, but wonderfully random was the man wearing… a County Roscommon shirt! And like Orient man, it was the sort of moment you live for, and can die happy knowing you’ve witnessed. Marvellous.

Right, we’re nearly done. One last thing to mention is that, if anyone was thinking of sending us anything by post, you should now no longer use our Nairobi PO Box address. In truth, it’s been a bit of a nightmare anyway since: a) quite a few things which have been sent to us (in Tanzania and Kenya, actually) have gone ‘missing’ courtesy of the not-at-all-corrupt postal workers of East Africa; b) it seems to cost loads of money to send stuff from Britain; c) we have to pay even more to collect it; and d) collecting it involves either physically going to Nairobi (a five hour journey) or waiting for someone from Malaika Ecotourism to deliver it on their way past Kibwezi. As a result, we haven’t actually received anything that’s been posted to Kenya yet for one or more of the reasons above, although we have managed to spend more than £20 on import and collection duties. We’ll let you know if it’s similarly not-worth-it when we get to Uganda, but in the meantime we thank everyone for sending stuff anyway.

So we’ll sign off. We have about three weeks left here in Kisayani, after which we hope to travel around Western Kenya for a week or so, maybe see some lions and wildebeest after all, before heading across to Uganda. The plan is to get to Project 3 (how fast is the year going?) on February the 28th, although we are of course always at the mercy of African public transport.

Best wishes, as always.

Linda and Andy

 

 

 

 

Greetings everyone.

We’re back again after another extremely hot week. We’re also back in the best cybercafe in Kibwezi (i.e. it’s better than the other one) and glad to be blogging again (even though it still takes 5 hours to write).

We’ve been buoyed this week by the news that we might be getting some visitors in a couple of months. Nothing is definite yet, but we’re excited that some of our friends/family might be coming to see us once we get to Uganda. But while we wait for confirmation, and since you can’t all come and visit us, here’s a sample of our life here in 2011:

Dealing with the Weather (or as Africans call it, the Climatic Conditions): at the moment here in Southeastern Kenya the weather is really, really hot. And very, very dry. Which is unsurprising really since we’re in the middle the hot, sunny season, and as we mentioned on Monday there hasn’t been any rain at all since we’ve been here. And although the countryside still looks quite green from when there was rain (the plants and trees are unbelievably hardy and resourceful) it’s now mainly beginning to look like the arid area we were told to expect. Apparently, it’s not likely to rain until the long-rain season starts in April either, so the locals have been told to expect some serious drought. There are already areas in East and Northeast Kenya which are already experiencing food and water shortage, and districts such as Kibwezi look likely to be next. Fortunately for us -and the onions we’re about to plant- there is a reasonably reliable water supply at the project. What is less clear is how the project is going to be able to pay for it.

The Kisayani landscape: semi-arid land and the occasional baobab tree

Which brings us neatly on to:

Whether or Not to Trust African Charities: the reason there’s some doubt about how the project is going to pay for its water is down to the umbrella organisation Watoto wa Dunia. Although they have helped the project for a number of years in a number of ways, for example donating the 5 acres of land back in 2005, we think they’ve been patchy at best in their support. When we arrived in November the project seemed to be in a state of stagnation and appeared, in truth, to be all but unsupported. Building work on the orphanage has been habitually stop-start and halted for good in 2008; many of the fields have been intermittently left fallow and some are not much more than bush; and the morale of the women is more often quite low than quite high. The project has taken so long to get going that the orphans we’re trying to help are still nowhere to be seen. However, when we arrived with a fistful of shillings generously donated by you -our friends and family- things really started moving: construction work began with renewed gusto, the women started to come to the project to work in the fields, and we even had an impromptu visit from the founder of Watoto. It looked like the situation had really changed, and that the project would go on to properly rejuvenate itself.

But this is Africa where everything is much more complicated than it needs to be, and where everything takes much longer than it needs to. Now don’t get us wrong, we fully understand that as volunteers we should not and do not expect to see any big changes during our brief stays at each project: it’s enough for us to know that we’ve tried, that we’ve shown that we care, and that we might have perhaps made some small difference somewhere, at least as part of a much greater whole. Which is why it’s hard not to get excited when you’re working on physical things like buildings and fields, because things do change, often very quickly. But things at the project have now pretty well stopped changing and we’re not entirely sure why; our questions to Watoto wa Dunia remain unanswered.

For instance, the things that we saw them promise the women during our very emotional visit to some of the most vulnerable members of the community, those things which we felt were so vital, have, without exception, failed to materialise; cows haven’t been bought, school fees haven’t been paid, and houses haven’t been repaired. We feel that the women have been let down by Watoto wa Dunia. And we feel that those life-changing promises shouldn’t have been made if their fulfillment could not be guaranteed. Meanwhile, at the project the builders at the orphanage have had to down tools because materials have run out and wages have not been paid. And the hard work which has gone into preparing the fields for sowing might yet go to waste if the water supply is cut off. So we continue to do what we can, but we always have to remember that we’re up against organisations and institutions that might not always bee what they seem, or might not always be as enthusiastic or as honest as we are. We don’t know exactly what the situation is with Watoto, or how it will unfold, but we know there are people who need desperate help who are not getting it. It’s frustrating but, like all Africans, we’ll just have to continue to wait and see.

Construction: was going fantastically; is now in hiatus

 

Which brings us less neatly onto:

Trying to Describe Kenyan People: they are basically a funny lot. Some of them are the nicest people you’ll ever meet (like the almost literally larger-than-life Pastor we met this week), some of them are the dodgiest people you’ll ever meet, and some of them you just can’t tell which they are. And it varies from place to place, because Kenya is a geo-sociological oddity: it is a singular nation but it is one which is riddled with tribal division, and this very significantly affects the way people seem, and how the country is run. There are many dozens of tribes, but there are a handful of powerful ones, each of whom represents -in the narrowest terms- its region of Kenya. So if the President is Kikuyu, which he is, then most of the important ministers, army chiefs and judges will be Kikuyu, which they are. And the majority of the money available for infrastructural investment will be spent in Kikuyu areas, which it is. It was this situation which led to the very terrible and very bonkers inter-tribal violence three years ago, when the non-Kikuyu tribes basically demonstrated that they’d had enough of tribalism and cronyism, and how it had become completely institutional here. But even now, no-one is really ‘Kenyan’; instead, each family or individual is identified by their tribe or traditional tribal area. They speak their own very distinctive languages, follow their own cultural customs, and generally don’t like each other very much. It makes it an interesting country to travel around in, but no doubt a very hard country to govern.

Andy; Pastor John; Linda

 

 

In their day-to-day lives, though, most Kenyans do pretty much the same things: try and make money by selling small amounts of cheap stuff; eat and drink very little; travel around on ridiculously overcrowded buses; and kick dogs a lot. Their English is good, but funny (they like to add the letter ‘y’ to the ends of words, so your journey will have been goody or you’ll have been wearing socksy. They also pronounce –ur– as –a– so a visit to church becomes a visit to chatch), all of which makes them sound like someone doing an  impersonation of a stereotypical Nigerian conman.

They love their mobile phones so much (it’s odd seeing a goatherd dressed in rags and wandering across the savannah with his animals, while texting) and it is mainly through this medium that they seem to communicate/argue with each other. They love loud shirts: Western dress is universal for men, although women (in the countryside, at least) still wear khangas. All men love the English Premier League, or rather the top four teams of the English Premier League, to the ridiculous extent that a fortnight ago a bloke was beaten to death outside a pub during an Arsenal v Chelsea game. Now it’s one thing having a football-related punch-up outside the ground, or in a nearby boozer, but to kill someone because he prefers watching a team on the telly more than watching your team on the telly? Now that’s just pathetic. And it is a fact that Kenyans are bigger drinkers than even the Brits or the Irish (no, really!). And since quite often the stuff they’re drinking is lethal locally-brewed stuff, travelling on the roads at night is not to be recommended.

Mind you, travelling on the roads during the day isn’t much better: Kenyans move around the country in two main ways: by Nissan (a small, wobbly, officially 14-seater but quite often 24-seater minibus, confusingly not always a Nissan) or by matatu (a large and always unbelievably overloaded and overcrowded bus, which plays the world’s loudest -and therefore most distorted- bongo flava ‘tunes’, and whose bodywork is invariably daubed with meaningless or bizarre graffitied English buzzwords such Internet or Mourinho). On the upside, both are ludicrously cheap. On the downside, 3000 people die in them each year. We’ve been on both and would recommend their use only in necessity, and definitely not if you’ve just eaten.

Which brings us to grub, and:

How to Describe Kamba Food: Pretty bland, but when cooked correctly, very satisfying. Since we’ve been at our homestay house, we’ve been sampling some more traditional African cuisine, which we thought we’d share with you (not literally). Now it’s not easy taking clandestine photos of your dinner, especially at night, but we’ve done our best. Our daily menu could be described as follows:

Breakfast is still usually mandazi or chapati. Both are extremely filling, not to mention extremely full of (100% vegetable fat) cooking oil. It’s hard to motivate yourself for work after eating half a dozen of either, but you find that once you’ve finally got going you can easily work till lunchtime, even in mega heat. Breakfast is served with extreeemely sweet tea, or Dorman’s coffee, which we recommend most highly. Illustration: mandazi, a kind of Doughnut-cum-Yorkshire pudding triangle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lunch will usually be ugali with boiled greens, boiled lentils or boiled cabbage. It sounds grim, but it’s a testament to Mary’s cooking that it actually turns out to be really tasty. The advantage of ugali is that it literally sticks to your insides (sometimes literally sticks to the inside of your mouth, or the inside of your eating hand: it’s like polygrip) and contains such a humongous amount of carbs you will not be hungry for hours and hours. Everything else served with it is nice because it comes swimming in oil, and is cholestorol-tastic. Illustration: Ugali with cow-peas and cow-pea leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner: dinner is served between 7pm and 9pm, outside, where it’s cool but also where it’s dark. So while it’s nice not to have flies and sweaty clothes to deal with, it’s also not always possible to see what you’re eating. But so far it’s all tasted very nice. Recently we’ve been having lots of mothekoi which is the local ‘speciality’ and consists of boiled maize and beans. It’s a pretty potent mixture for two people sharing a small bed enclosed by a thick mosquito net, but it’s much nicer than it sounds or looks. It’s known nationally as the staple Kamba food, and tastes something like a tin of kidney beans mixed in with some popcorn that hasn’t popped. Except probably nicer. We also occasionally have some bananas (which are ginormous) or some mangoes (which are impossible to eat without covering your face in juice) if there’s enough money. Illustration: mothekoi (yes, we know it looks like dog food, but it’s actually okay)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So you don’t need to worry that we’re not eating right. And, in fact, we do need to eat right because of what we do during the day, which brings us extremely neatly onto:

Working as Volunteers: This week we’ve been doing lots more digging even though the weather has been even hotter. And the tiredness problem is compacted by a little equation which we worked out: the more you work, the blunter your hoe gets. And the blunter your hoe gets, the more you get tired out. The more tired you are, and the blunter your hoe is, the harder the work gets. Therefore by the end of the day we’re usually pretty exhausted. But we’re proud to say we’ve finished preparing (that is, turning over the topsoil, flattening it, ploughing lanes in it and laying drip-feed pipes) three quite large fields, and they are now ready for the baby onions to be transferred from their nursery. We should say that, pretty much most of the time it’s just been us working out there, and it’s frustrating that there isn’t more enthusiasm or support from the widows. Yet at the same time we understand that they are pretty despondent, having been promised so much and having to still deal with their chronic tiredness and poverty which comes with living so far below the breadline.

Ain't nobody come between me and my hoe

 

 

Volunteers and locals alike also have to contend with:

Insects which might one day take over the Earth: Now, insects in Africa -as we have mentioned before- are not like your common-or-garden insects in Britain. As we’ve explained, they are much bigger, much nastier, and much grimmer. Our toilet block at Mary’s house, for example, is a haven for the world’s largest cockroaches, which Linda isn’t especially happy about. And although we no longer have to contend with the Centipedes of Death or the Maggots of Massiveness in the hut, we still have unrealistically large wasps, crickets and spiders to deal with, as well as the occasional scorpion (which actually aren’t big at all). Worst of all, though, is the really annoying tapping thing which keeps awake at night. We don’t even know what it is. But while the variety (and size) of du-dus is quite impressive, all-in-all we could probably do without them.

A large (and poisonous) centipede. Length: approx. 9"

 

 

A large (and disgusting) maggot. Length: approx. 6"

 

Thinking about life here: So there’s a snippet of our life in Africa. Probably the biggest difference to life in the UK is time. It is true that time in Africa is based around daylight, so it’s limited what you can do, but it’s also based around heat. That means that things get done when they get done: there’s no hurry because actually it’s impossible to hurry. It’s too hot. But what that means is that, at least here in the country, there’s no stress, no deadlines, no hustle and bustle and fighting to get things done. Life is only dictated by the length of time between seasons, so consequently there’s pretty much always time to get things done. Getting your shoes mended is done there and then, because you can afford the ten-minute wait; taxis are shared so they leave town when they’re full, and no-one minds the wait because there’s no rush to get things done; and people stop and talk to each other -even spontaneously invite people over for tea (which takes ages to make)- because no-one is desperate to get home for EastEnders or is hurrying to catch the tube home.

Yes, it’s a hard life here what with the drought, and the heat, and the constant lack of money; but in some ways it has a much richer quality: generations share time and space together; neighbours share stories as they work together; people are part of a much greater entity, which gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of perspective. Perhaps their experiences of inequality and hardship have given them a greater understanding of what it means to ‘have’, and what it means to live positively, always in hope. It’s hard to say, and of course it’s far from perfect, but we’re yet to see anyone stop and say “God, I hate my job. What the hell am I doing here?”

Best wishes,

Andy and Linda

 

 

The Shoe Clinic, Kisayani