We’ve come to the end of our year. Twelve sometimes long and sometimes short months, living sometimes in and sometimes outside the comfort zone, surrounded sometimes by amazing landscapes and sometimes by desperate deprivation, it has without doubt been a year of contrasts, as the cliche would surely have it. In fact, a year is a very large amount of time to try and sum up in a few paragraphs. Moreover, the year has been so diverse, so confusing, so wonderful and so exhausting that it hardly seems worth trying to put it altogether in some little online box of words. But we feel the year deserves a footnote, and some of the things we’ve discovered a brief review. For fuller analysis, you can (re-) read the other 2 million words written elsewhere on this blog.

In Tanzania we were in such a wonderfully different place, so beautiful and so peaceful, such a throwback and full of such innocence, that it was easy to forget that, at the the end of it all, people really shouldn’t be having to live in those conditions. Yes, we’ll keep the views, and yes, we’ll keep the strong, deeply intertwined sense of community, but we could do with more food, and fewer nights down at the moonshine shacks. But here, in Yamba, we found the question of What Happens Next? to be a particularly hard riddle to extricate: to develop or not to develop? In some ways we’d like to see it preserved forever, a kind of oasis of beautiful naiveté in a continent mainly full of horrible stuff, but that would be to condemn generations to illiteracy, to poverty, to back-breaking work, and to the world’s lowest glass ceiling. On the other hand, what good will money bring them? Jealousy, covetousness, acquisitiveness, naked greed? Then again, aren’t we all entitled to food, transport, information, enlightenment? How on Earth do you make the right decision in a place as precious as this? To make things better without driving a road digger through the very heart of Eden.

In Kenya we came across a similar situation of neglect, but here it was both of place and of people. Question: who cares about old people in the Third World? They’re not the future. They can’t benefit from all those programmes that help educate young people and furnish them with skills to compete against the might of the West. The can’t even work the land. What use are they? Well, when you’re talking about human beings it isn’t relevant how ‘useful’ someone may or may not be. Only in the coldest of capitalist systems. There’s more important, higher things to take into consideration: dignity, happiness, quality of life, freedom, empowerment. So if someone isn’t productive does that mean you can just write them off as As Good As Gone? And because they live somewhere where crops just don’t grow very well, and rains just don’t come very often, it means only they are more vulnerable still: they need to be cared for, but not cossetted. After all, these are the people who built towns like Kisayani, who first bludgeoned the earth into submission, and kept the ever-hungry bush from devouring yet more productive land. They are the grandparents of the nation, and yet they are left to fend for themselves as if they were still young and able for endless hard labour. Of course, they are able to do plenty of things: in Kenya eighty year old women can dance and sing and sow and harvest, all on a handful of maize flour a day, and they are awe-inspiring. But they need support: simple things like friends, food, a purpose.

In Uganda we found communities on the road to development, albeit in the state of most of the actual roads in Uganda, i.e. bumpy, pot-holed, full of corrupt police officers and riddled with all kinds of dangers. Of course not all the country is enjoying these first tastes of modernism, but the places we lived had definitely started the journey. The intervention of Western NGOs and local CBOs was a theme in both places. Ideas have been born thanks to extraordinary individuals within the community who have been inspired and dedicated to improve the world immediately around them, and the wheels of this process have started to move thanks, in part, to the efforts of white visitors, primarily volunteers. Their main area of assistance is in providing income for the community projects; an extra benefit is the kind of idealistic cultural exchange that should accompany a (well run) project. We broadly support these efforts because there is literally no other way a community can move towards a more enlightened, more skilled and more socially elastic future.

But the big question remains: is modern, 21st Century, Western-style development really appropriate for these communities? Is there another way? A better way? A kind of development that isn’t based around aggressively (and often misleadingly) marketed materialism, debt- or capital-based consumption, and the total triumph of monetary currency over the perfectly adequate small-scale barter trade that exists at the moment? The answers to these questions are only likely to appear once the mistakes of the current version of development have been made, as they surely will, when countries and communities will have already become over-relaint on imports, national borrowing, and oil-producing neighbours. It’s a slightly self-deflating question, but if such development does turn out more problematical than beneficial, what good would there have been in us helping it in the first place? In addition, what will all these lovely new educated children do, exactly, if the capitalistic development their country has dived headlong into produces not much more than the calamitous debt and the ludicrous level of unemployment that they have now? Nothing, probably, just a less egalitarian and more divided and competitive society. In a region whose population doubles every 15 years but whose productive land does not, it’s hard to see, admittedly, how subsistance agriculture can survive. But it’s equally hard to see how industrialised or commodity-driven development will help much either. Poor people can’t buy much, and governments with poor GDPs can’t borrow much. Wouldn’t some kind of self-sufficiency and sustainability be that better way forward?

So apart from blabbering on about the rights and wrongs of what’s happening here in Africa, what did we actually manage to do while we were away? Well, we hope the blog has given you a flavour of what we did, where we did it, why we did it, and what the consequences are liely to be. We also hope we’ve been able to interpret some of the issues we’ve seen -and sometimes faced- while we’ve been away. We’ve certainly enjoyed writing all of it down, and it’ll be a great aide-memoire for when we’ve forgotten all the details in the years to come (actually, it’s already started), and we sincerely hope it’s been of some interest to someone, somewhere out there.

What we really want to say though, is “Thanks”. A really big thanks. A number of people have made it possible for us to do the things we’ve done, and indeed to be here at all, and to them we are deeply indebted. We would also like to wholeheartedly thank the people who donated time and money so generously before we left, and those who have continued to raise extraordinary amounts of money for these causes throughout the year. Your generous gifts have made a real difference to the lives of many individuals and families in the places we have stayed, and on behalf of them we thank you humbly. We didn’t keep an overly rigorous inventory of every penny we spent, but we did kept an updated list of donations we were able to give during the course of the year. We even got receipts for some of them! So, here’s what you gave:

Tanzania

£800 towards the Village Africa Ambulance Appeal

£400 towards materials and labour, new volunteer house, Yamba

£160 for 11 new school desks

250 exercise books

250 pencils

100 pens

10 blackboards painted

50 jumpers and t-shirts for local families

25 colouring books and pencil sets for local children

Kenya

£800 towards the construction of Ndiwa Group orphange, Kisayani

£140 sponsorship for a half-orphan Shedrack, son of one of the Ndiwa Group women, to attend Kisayani Secondary School

£120 sponsorship for an orphan Kiminza, adopted son of one of the Ndiwa Group women, to attend Kisayani Secondary School

£50 towards the foundation of Ndiwa’s new HIV Positive Women’s Group

£40 food and bedding for MaxFacta Rescue Centre, Nairobi

2 mobile phones for staff at MaxFacta Rescue Centre, Nairobi

Uganda 1

£1000 towards the construction of two new classrooms, Ruhanga Development School

£400 towards the construction of a clean water supply for the village

£100 towards the plastering of two existing classrooms

£25 towards painting and decorating walls and doors at the school

£50 secure boxes and locks for classroom resources at the school

£50 sponsorship for an orphan, Kirabo, to attend Ruhanga Development School

10 colouring books for the Nursery

10 sets of writing and colouring pencils for the Nursery

20 sports training cones for the school

2 wool and sewing kits for the women’s sewing group

Uganda 2

£1000 towards construction of a new school library and resource centre

£300 to install electricity in the new building

300 writing and colouring pencils for the school

2 folders of school resources

2 reams of card and paper for a new school Art Club

20 sports training cones

10 colouring books for local children

We haven’t added it all up, and we’re not sure if we donated things correctly everywhere we went. but we went on gut instinct, tried to decipher need, and attempted to negotiate that difficult tightrope between handing out stuff for the sake of it, and incentivising and gift giving when the circumstances seemed right. We’re sure we’ve made mistakes this year, and we’re sure there are some things we’d do differently if we did it all again, but at the end of it all it’s not really about us and the very realistic limitations of what two people can achieve in such a short space of time. All we can say is that you, through us, have been thanked time and again: great big genuine thanks, sometimes embarrassingly so given what little we feel we’ve done, but always thanked all the same. It feels nice, of course, but more importantly it shows that if even a few people do only a little for only a short amount of time, a little difference can be made.

But it’s that difference, or rather the analysing of it after the event, which is often the big obstacle that trips volunteers up: can you really “make a difference”? Is it appropriate to make only what you yourself might consider a difference? Will the difference you make be the one that the people you’re helping actually want? Does it matter if you don’t make a tangible difference? What does making a difference actually mean? And so on.

In the final analysis, we’ve discovered that often it isn’t actually what you do, or how you spend money, or in what ways you intervene in the story of a community, which brings the greatest impact. In fact, the only difference that you can ever truly make, and often it’s the one you can never actually measure, happens just by you being there. Even if you don’t feel you’ve helped, you probably have. For people in remote places, often forgotten by central government, often neglected by local government, and often feeling like no-one in the world actually knows or cares they exist, it is -we’re sure of it- an uplifting thing to have someone fly halfway round the world just to spend some time with them; to talk to them; to be made a figure of relentless fun by them; whatever. That simple act of recognition -done by one human to another- is so incredibly powerful and important in places where recognition has rarely, if ever existed, that no volunteer should ever feel that their work or their time has been fruitless. The kid you played with; the old lady you smiled at; the soda you bought at the grocers; they all made a difference, tiny and beyond measurement as it may have been in your eyes. But help isn’t always about building classrooms or delivering sacks of maize or handing out exercise books: it can be psychological, too, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance this can have on an individual, or sometimes even a whole group of people.

And then, of course, you can look at it from the other way round. Countless people have touched our lives, have changed us for the better, and have burned into our minds memories of amazing things. And wouldn’t that have been worthwhile on its own?

Andy and Linda

Welcome to a special edition of our blog, this one not devoted to modest musings about volunteering, but instead to a completely indulgent report of our brief travels post-volunteering. Our projects lasted a total of 48 weeks, being roughly 12 weeks each (with a few other activities wedged in between them), which allowed us a spare month at the end of our year away to count up our remaining pennies and see what we could do with it. The basic idea was to get from Jinja where our last project was, to Dar-es-Salaam where our flight home leaves from. But we had four weeks to play with, and it’s not that far, even on an African bus.

As you already know, we’d spent a couple of days in Kampala to plan our trip and relax after finishing our project, and our last entry saw us in Bukoba, a small port just the other side of the Tanzania border. So we’ll take up the story from there.

Lake Victoria, Bukoba (not our ferry)

Week 1:

As you may remember, we were due to catch a cargo boat from Kampala’s Port Bell directly across ginormous Lake Victoria, to Mwanza, and start heading towards Dar from there. We missed that, but we did manage to catch the ferry from Bukoba to Mwanza, a shorter distance across about a quarter of the Lake but missing out the terrible roads which we would have had to no doubt negotiate on some bus from the 1970s. And speaking of decades gone by, the ferry (an old steam packet from God knows when, although our guess would be the late 50s) was an interesting experience.

MV Victoria, vintage uncertain

Like something straight out of a scene from A Night to Remember, it chugged its way through the night ferrying passengers and a simply incomprehensible number of bananas, while we relaxed on some appropriately starched sheets in our little wooden-panelled cabin, dreaming of how life must have been when the quickest way of getting anywhere was by steamship. Except, of course, in Tanzania it still is. Still, it was fun, apart from the 200 zillion lake flies which made life distinctly uncomfortable when walking up and down the promenades (yes, it had promenades!).

Cabin deck of the Marie-Celeste, er, MV Victoria

Week 2:

So we arrived safely in Mwanza, a large port town on the southeastern shores of Lake Victoria. From here we spent a couple of days having a look around, planning the remainder of our trip, doing practical things like changing money, and booking a safari to the Serengeti (I mean, how can you come to northern Tanzania and not do a safari to the Serengeti?). Mwanza is a workaday town, and there aren’t any particular sights to speak of,  but it has lovely views out over the Lake, and we found a particularly fancy restaurant (where we felt way out of our depth) but which did excellent food and beer. Hey, we’re on holiday!

Mwanza

So the next day we set off on our safari: two days in the Serengeti, one day in Ngorongoro Crater, and a day in Lake Manyara. And we have to say, the Serengeti certainly lives up to its billing. It comes from a Maasai word meaning “Endless Plains”, and you know what, they knew what they were talking about. It’s just enormous, bigger and more vast than you can possibly imagine. It stretches for mile upon mile upon mile, covering 12,000 square miles of Tanzania’s northern territory, with a hundred different environments. There are great swathes of savanna grassland, full of giant wild animals -dozens and dozens of giraffes, countless herds of zebra, wildebeest, buffalo and antelopes, and families of elephants, all trudging slowly across the horizon, watched diffidently by prides of lions lounging around. And they are all engaged in a slow, methodical migration, slowly plodding their way north, to water holes and breeding grounds, not knowing why but simply compelled by nature to do it. We didn’t see any great thundering armies of grazers, charging their way across the plains, but instead a tired-looking wander, as if the weight of time was on all their shoulders.

Wildebeest, Serengeti

There are also great forests, dried up rivers, strange other-wordly areas of bizarre rock formations, as if some bored giant decided to just pile a load of boulders on top of each other in some ancient game of Kerplunk; and there are areas full of absolutely nothing, not a tree nor an animal to be seen. Great outcrops of rock are the only things punctuating the huge nothingness. The whole thing just takes your breath away.

Kopje, Serengeti

After two days exploring probably about 1% of the Serengeti (believe us, you’d need a lifetime to cover even half of it), and camping in what must be one of the world’s most stunning campsites, we drove along what must be one of the world’s most ridiculous roads, fifty miles or more over unforgiving corrugated bedrock, to the Ngorongoro Crater. It’s a big ex-volcano up in the Highlands east of the Serengeti, home to Tanzania’s elusive (and unique) population of black rhinos, among the most endangered species on Earth. We did see some, although they could equally have been large moles in the distance, but we’re pretty confident we saw some nonetheless. You see, black rhinos are notoriously shy and for some reason aren’t keen on hanging around roads full of Western tourists in Land Cruisers, taking pictures with their oversized cameras and hollering to their wives “Hey honey, did you see that? What is that?”. We did, however, see most of the other animals which live within the steep walls of the crater, protected pretty well from poachers, and easily photographed from the comfort of a 4×4. The crater itself is beautiful, with a great salt pan on its floor, the remnants of a once-mighty lake now all but evaporated in the relentless equatorial sun, although the drive in and out, down and up the rim, was hairy to say the least. We wouldn’t be fans of doing that in the rainy season.

Ngorongoro Crater

Finally we drove over to Lake Manyara, a bleak and seemingly inhospitable expanse of mainly nothing, but which had a fine dramatic quality to it. Here, there is a thick jungle-like forest, home to elusive (in fact entirely invisible) tree-climbing lions, disturbingly human-like Olive Baboons and Blue Monkeys, a hundred insane-looking birds, and great families of elephants. In fact we had a close (but not as close as the jeep behind us) encounter with a family of elephants, and it must go down as one of the most memorable moments of our entire trip. We spotted a family eating right next to the small track we were driving down, and our driver, a very experienced safari man, manoeuvered our jeep so we wouldn’t come in between the mother and her calves. He knew what he was doing, and we eventually parked up and started taking some snaps.

Elephants, Lake Manyara

By and by a jeep came up behind us and parked next to a young elephant who was munching some bushes by the side of the road. He and his sibling must have got spooked, because they started trumpeting (it’s so loud, and not a little unsettling) until mum came over to intervene. She was massive, absolutely massive, with ears bigger than any cartoon elephant might have, tusks which must have been five feet long, and a huge age-wizened frame. But really all you need to know is that she was not happy. Great thunderous bellows and rasps of angry sound filled the air around the clearing as the family of elephants approached the jeep behind us, brushing along side it, shouting and blaring and shrieking all the time. We were a good thirty yards away and we were shaking like nobody’s business; God only knows what the young couple in the jeep were thinking. But finally, their point undoubtedly made, the elephants wandered off, crashing through the undergrowth, giving us all a glimpse of their sheer power, their unstoppable force. Our driver later told us he’d once seen a matriarch push a jeep over onto its side with her tusks as if it was a toy car. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to see that happening. The spectacle left us impressed and overawed. You often think of animals -especially herbivores- as cuddly and friendly, placid and peaceful; you forget they are wild, and infinitely stronger than us.

Lazy lion pride, Serengeti

So we left the National Parks and headed on to Arusha, from where we would catch a luxury bus (ha!) to Dar-es-Salaam. We didn’t do much in Arusha as we were only there for an evening and a night, just a stop-off really, but we did have one of the nicest curries in history. We woke up early the next day for an early departure to Dar, walked the half a mile or so to the bus station, and it turned out that the bus was a luxury bus, every bit as comfy and safe as a brand new National Express coach, and it absolutely ate up the ten hour journey. It felt more like three or four. Which is interesting, because normally in Africa a three or four hour journey usually feels like ten.

We arrived in Dar ready for the next part of our trip: Zanzibar.

Week 3:

Zanzibar. Zanzibar. What does that word conjure? Well, like us prior to this trip, you might not have known that for all its Middle-Eastern-style exoticism and wonder, for all its spices and sagas, beaches and bazaars, it actually sits off the coast of one of the poorest countries in Africa, and is by turns Arabian, African, uniquely Swahili, and not inconsiderably touristy. And you can get a ferry across to it in two hours from the port of Dar.

Dar-es-Salaam

The boat is modern, fast, and distinctly not what we expected, and it deposited us in Stone Town harbour after a glorious sun-drenched and sparkly journey. And Stone Town is genuinely one of the urban wonders of the world. A literal maze of narrow streets and alleys, always colourful, always noisy, always hot and often spicy, and we really, really like it. It’s been such a brand new experience, like nowhere else either of us has ever been before, that it’ll live with us for all time. Moving through it is a wonderful assault on the senses, for one part of it will seem like a sleepy medieval town in Tuscany or the Dordogne, with winding streets, ancient whitewashed houses jostling each other for space between the threads of human movement; quiet but busy. You’ll be walking down one of these lanes, thinking about how European it all is, and suddenly you’re in North Africa: a sprawling market, full of life, full of the racket of exchange, full of the a thousand different smells. You wander, half-blind down bright alleys, then half-blind down dark alleys, moving more through Africa with its street kids and its guttural Swahili soundtrack, until you’re disgorged at the harbour, a pleasant Mediterranean embankment, whose elegant geometric masonry holds back a vast blanket of gently undulating blue ocean, the sun sparkling off it like a million tiny flashbulbs. The buildings here are lovely, too; really atmospheric, and each architecturally telling a surprisingly intricate story (Zanzibar’s history is violent and complicated), and it’s just a cool place to be, coming to life even more after dark.

House of Wonders, Stone Town

So after a couple of nights in Stone Town we headed north to the more touristy resort town of Nungwi. It sits at the very top of the island (Zanzibar is shaped kind of like an upside-down Y), and it has a fine beach, some lovely (though insanely priced) boutique hotels, where we could just about afford some lunch, let alone a night’s stay, and a calm, azure-blue sea. In truth, the weather wasn’t amazing: we had a day of cloud (and some rain: I mean, come one. Who comes to Zanzibar and gets rained on?), but it got better, and we were able to watch some simply breath-taking sunsets from our vantage point at the tip of the island.

Sunset over Nungwi Beach

After two days here we moved to the east coast to a small fishing village called Matemwe, whose long, wide, snow-white beach left us breathless and half-blind. The weather improved here and we could start doing some serious nothing on the beach, which, incidentally, we had entirely to ourselves. It’s supposed to be peak season here on Zanzibar, but we haven’t seen much evidence of it. That’s probably bad news for the very poor economy here (it’s as corrupt as everywhere else, and you wouldn’t think, looking at the houses the locals live in, that this is a place which brings in such a vast amount of foreign exchange. So someone must be doing alright out of it, and where haven’t we heard that before?), but it’s good news for those of us who want to loll about self-indulgently on a massive, tropical beach getting slowly sunburnt.

Matemwe Beach

Week 4:

After Matemwe we headed down to the far southeast of the island to a village called Jambiani, where the beach was just so perfect and the water was a truly belief-defying shade of turquoise. No, not turquoise, more like an electric aquamarine, but deeper in parts and lighter in parts, striped like an unbelievable air-brushed poster advertising trips to Paradise. Bobbling up and down in this vision of heaven were a few impossible romantic old out-riggers, making the whole thing look so staged that you almost couldn’t believe in it. Suffice it to say, we were pretty happy here, and we decided to stay seven nights.

Swahili dhow, Jambiani Beach

The only thing we’d say about Zanzibar, if we are to continue analysing our journey through Africa, is that it isn’t always a comfortable place to be. We don’t mean the sand, which is like flour, and we don’t mean the beds, which are huge Zanzibari beds made from the best hardwood available. No, it’s the juxtaposition of extremes of wealth which is so stark here. There is so much wealth, so many top end resorts, so many wallets bulging with cold, hard dollars, and yet still so much want among the local population. Remember, this is still Africa. And there are still huge social and political problems here (Zanzibari politics is among the most volatile in the region), rendering huge cracks in people’s lives, and making, if the truth be told, the relationship between locals and tourists often tense and uncertain. It’s not like other places we’ve stayed, and we’re not being treated like we have been in other places we’ve stayed. Obviously it would be naive of us to think that we could be anything other than tourists, walking ATMs primed to be fleeced, here on the ultimate tourist island. And of course no-one knows our back story-how could they?- of what we’ve been doing here in East Africa or how we’ve been welcomed into communities by people with big hearts and open arms. Nope, here we’re just two white (actually increasingly red) visitors, ripe for conning, ripe for ripping off; two wallies who’ll probably buy any old piece of rubbish made of wood.

Even the children are different here. There’s none of the boisterous excitement you normally see, none of the innocent friendliness, the unconditional acceptance, the happy exchanges in pidgin English. Just a tiny handful of kids have even smiled at us. Mainly there’s just a kind of emotionless vacuum behind the eyes, not even registering another white, followed by a rehearsed begging line, often spoken by children way too young to even know what they’re asking for, or why. It’s a shame, but it seems we Westerners have trodden all over their world, rudely and insensitively, so that it’s probably too much to ask them to love us and welcome us. There’s a blank diffidence behind people’s eyes here, and probably not far from being an outright hatred. We can’t offer any explanations, or even really quantify it that well, and it isn’t more than a very subtle undertone, but it’s sometimes jarred with the sheer natural beauty of this place. Someone has the answer somewhere, but to us it seems like Zanzibar is just a place where exposure to Westerners has (at least sometimes) been destructive and divisive, and the hospitality we’ve enjoyed everywhere else has been all but subsumed by a kind of jaded cynicism. It feels a bit like being in the Highlands of Scotland: you fall in love with the landscape because it’s so astonishing, but it hurts to find out that there once were people living here, and the sadness of their stories blows through the beauty of the landscape with a saddening, regretful air.

Then again, when you’re on holiday you can’t (or more likely won’t want to) fill your head with all this. Even after our year here where all these issues have been so pertinent, sometimes you just want to switch it all off. It’s actually hard to do that here given the raggedy children who often hang around the beaches, and the hawkers trying to earn a few shillings here and there, but it’s probably important to divert your attention elsewhere once in a while. Now there’s not really that much to do on Zanzibar -a few tourist trips here and there, and a bit of diving and that- but despite all the social problems, it’s still an amazing place to be, and it’s a pretty nice place to do nothing. Read a few books, swim a bit in the not cold but not hot sea, wallow on the beach, and eat copious amounts of coconut curry. So this is precisely what we did, and now we’re back here in Stone Town, we feel sufficiently recharged for the long flight back to Britain, and a week of catching up with all the people we’ve really missed this year.

So hopefully we’ll see you all in just a few days.

Regards,

Andy and Linda

Kwa Heri, Africa

Hello everybody and welcome to our last installment from Uganda, and the final chapter in our volunteering year. Actually we’re cheating a bit with the title because we’re already in Tanzania at a little port town called Bukoba, just a few kilometers over the border. But we’re sure you’ll forgive us.

We arrived on Monday night after a tiring and not particularly blog-worthy journey. It might have been, since we were planning on travelling direct from Kampala to Mwanza (a port on the south shore of Lake Victoria, in Tanzania) using a cargo boat, but unfortunately we missed the sailing by one day, and no-one at the Marine Services office in Kampala seemed to know when (or perhaps if) the boat would be back. So it’s possibly for the best that that didn’t work out, but what we did manage to do was catch a bus from Kampala across the border to Bukoba, with the usual unexplained lengthy and many stops, so that’s where we’re at right now. But before we start with all things Tanzanian, we have our last week in Uganda to write about yet.

Our last day at Kyabirwa School

The first thing we should mention is not about our own school, but about our visit to Lord’s Meade Secondary School. It’s a pretty swanky, privileged-looking school just the other (western) side of Jinja, and caters for pupils between Senior One (15 years old) and Senior Six (anything from 19 upwards). It’s a boarding school, with lovely grounds and a good academic reputation, so why, we hear you ask, did we go there if we’re meant to be volunteering in Africa helping underprivileged children in rural communities? Well, it’s simple. A previous volunteer at Kyabirwa who did some teaching in Primary Seven (the top class) apparently felt saddened and frustrated that, even in the cases of the brightest kids that she taught, very few of the local children are able to attend Secondary School. And it comes down, inevitably and exasperatingly, to money. A good percentage of the children that we, too, have seen in P7 are more than capable of passing their Primary Leaving Examinations, and perhaps getting good enough ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels at Secondary School to go to University. But with Secondary fees starting at around 300,000/- per term (about 80 pounds), there is simply no way families who have just a few hundred Shillings to their name can afford to pay for their children.

So our volunteer decided to invest her own money in Kyabirwa’s children, and she sends money to fund thirteen children to attend Lord’s Meade School. Now Lord’s Meade, as we said, is not a cheap and cheerful school. Fees start at around 1.2m/- per term (around 300 pounds), and when you realize you need thirteen times that amount, three times a year, for six years, that’s a pretty hefty financial commitment that she’s made. But she’s determined to help these children, and we were happy to go and visit them in their school (they’re in their first year), and talk to them about some of their stories and aspirations.

They are all from poor, subsistence farming families, and a couple of them are orphans, too. They are manifestly needy cases, so without this funding there is absolutely no doubt that they would be out of school and back at home tending to the farm or the children, if not married with babies and goats themselves. Now we’re not saying that family life isn’t right or proper, or an acceptable course for these children’s lives to take, especially in these very traditional rural communities. But when a child is so patently gifted it stands to reason that they should be given the opportunity to at least try and exploit their talent, and use it to help themselves and their families. We’re stating the obvious, surely? But it’s a more problematical situation than it first appears. For a start, where’s the sustainability in a foreign individual paying the exorbitant cost of funding just a few children from one year group? What about the current year of P7s: what happens to their aspirations? What about the pride, self-sacrifice and lesson-learning that comes from parental input, work ethic, and struggle, when instead you don’t need to do anything because a mzungu is paying for everything your child needs? And what about the collective responsibility for children’s education that should be being shouldered by the government and the local community: how does that get the kick up the backside that it needs?

On the other hand, it’s hard to disagree that it’s a wonderfully magnanimous gesture, and a good example of how an individual from our world can make a tremendous, life-changing difference to a handful of individuals in this world. It’s not perfect, and it’s not the answer to Africa’s problems –in fact it might even be the exact opposite of the answer to Africa’s problems- but while we’re waiting for someone to come up with a better, more sustainable answer, it seems like a worthy and meaningful thing to do.

Children and parents at Visitation Day, Lord's Meade School

The bigger news, of course, is that we too have left Kyabirwa School, our very last volunteering project. But before we left we had a few more things to do.

First was Linda’s Phonics Training for the teachers. Now you might remember that she did a similar thing in Ruhanga School, giving tips and advice on how to introduce Phonics (that is, reading, writing and pronouncing words by breaking them down into their letter sounds) into the Primary (and Nursery) Curriculum. The idea is that it helps children sound out words even if they don’t recognise them, thus aiding their Reading development. Well, she ran a similar programme here, since all the teachers she’s taught with have been so impressed with the way children have been able to pick up the basics of reading by creating the sounds first in their heads.

She started by introducing some of the concepts and sounds, went on to do a demonstration lesson with some P3 children (introducing Pop the Rat), and finished with some more complex ideas which allow teachers to use Phonics for writing and listening exercises, too. And it’s quite funny to watch, because you can actually see the light bulb appearing over people’s heads -it’s as much of a breakthrough for the teachers as it is for the pupils- at that moment when they realize they can actually read virtually any word just by figuring out which sounds it’s made up of. And that might sound a bit patronising and trite, but it’s something that the teachers are very conscious of, especially with all these English-speaking volunteers about. They want to get pronunciation right, and they want the children to be able to read and differentiate words more easily. So they’re very happy to have a generally reliable shortcut way of doing it.

So the session was quite a revelation, and a few of the teachers expressed a real interest in continuing implementing Phonics, as they feel it has really started to accelerate the children’s reading, if not always their immediate understanding of the meanings of words. We’re very encouraged by that, because sometimes when we think about what we’re doing out here, or about how useful we can possibly be to a society that seemingly already has all the skills we have but which often applies them in a way that is so utterly foreign to us that it makes us feel irrelevant, it’s great to experience a moment when something you have done has been of immediate and tangible benefit. We all like to feel useful, but sometimes we need to see it to believe it.

Phonics Training with Teacher Linda

The rest of us have also been quite useful in school, albeit in a slightly more prosaic, mechanical way, during this exam period. Exams are a pain in the posterior for teachers: they can’t get any teaching done, they have to hang around in sweaty classrooms invigilating interminable exams, and then they have to mark loads of mistake-ridden, barely legible papers. And it’s even more ridiculous here. Firstly, you can’t fit a whole class of children into one classroom (they need to be a bit more spaced out than the normal four-to-a-desk to a) prevent cheating, and b) to make sure they all have enough room to actually write stuff), so you need more than one teacher to invigilate each exam. And secondly, you have anything between 100 and 200 scripts to mark per exam, with each year group you teach taking exams in four separate subjects. So it’s quite a big workload, and one which the teachers seemed strangely happy to share with us willing (read: gullible) volunteers.

So the British signatory of the 1900 Buganda Agreement was...

But it’s hard to gauge how the children did. At first glance their scores seemed disappointing, especially given the extra input they have here at Kyabirwa. But then again, at all times you have to remember this is a village school with huge numbers of children, depressingly few resources and woefully inadequate facilities, and which is surrounded by a largely illiterate population. Accordingly, the tests results weren’t what you’d call electrifying. While there were more papers in the 1-10% than you’d ideally like to see (although no-one got zero), and there were only a tiny handful who scored above 60%, the average was probably around the 20-30% range. So there’s a fair way to go for Kyabirwa, but we’re told things have improved, despite the challenges brought by those ludicrous class sizes and criminally modest numbers of textbooks and teaching aids.

Marking time

Of course the big question is: is formal education necessarily the right approach, at this time, in a place like Kyabirwa. We’ve looked at this issue before, but unfortunately we’re still none the wiser. The answer seems to be, irritatingly, both yes and no. For those who are academically gifted there obviously needs to be a place and a system which can help develop and nurture their talents, where the government invests in them as individuals who will one day give their service to the country, or develop economy-assisting entrepreneurship.

On the other hand there are those who, despite the opportunity and the encouragement, aren’t going to gain much from even the most basic elementary education, especially when everything’s taught in English, which they can’t understand or which they refuse to learn. Our instincts tell us that, whatever you think about a child, they should be given every chance to improve, to learn, to discover and to make mistakes, and that is surely the underlying principle of Uganda’s Universal Primary Education policy. But at some point it surely makes social and financial sense to throw in the towel. Or at least, that is, to throw in the towel on formal academic education, and explore other –perhaps more experimental and experiential- ways of developing children’s talents, interests and abilities. We’ve mentioned it before, and it’s something which is as relevant in the UK as it is out here, but it remains something which governments (and blog writers) seem to talk about a lot, but never actually get round to devising a policy about. In Kyabirwa School it’s something the governors want to look into, as we wrote about last time, and if they get the funding, either from central ministry funds or from donors and fundraisers, it’s something which we think will bring very real educational benefit to the community, for both young and old alike.

Kyabirwa School: the key to community development?

But all these ideas and improvements will be for other volunteers to implement and evaluate, because our time here is up. But not before we were able (with massive, unwavering support from fellow volunteer Nik) to leave our mark on the Kyabirwa landscape. Yes, the new Library building is all but complete, with just a few cosmetic touches remaining, an astonishing achievement by the building team. It was great to see it raised from rubble heap to roof hip in the time we were at school, and the jaw-dropping swiftness of its progress stands as a great testament to the tireless work done by the builders and labourers. We’re very proud to be able to give something to the school which we know will be of tremendous, instantaneous benefit to the children and staff, but of course not a single brick of it could have been laid without the very generous support of our and Nik’s friends, colleagues and families back home in Britain. So from us, and on behalf of the Kyabirwa family, here’s a gigantic THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Kyabirwa School Library: open for business (nearly)

You know it’s not all work, teach, build and handwash here. There’s time for a bit of relaxation, too. And last weekend Linda decided to relax (if that’s the right word) by going white-water rafting down the incredibly powerful rapids which characterise this stretch of the River Nile. We were supposed to go a couple of months ago but a not entirely un-African series of misunderstandings and miscommunications meant that we couldn’t. But she took the chance this time and had enormous fun hurtling herself down a series of ridiculously fearsome waterfalls and cataracts, falling out the raft and being swept down the river on more than a few occasions. For those of you reading who might be worried about the level of peril she encountered (eg Linda’s mum) you should rest assured that the local company she did it with were supremely professional and very safety-conscious. And she’s still very much alive. Still, that doesn’t stop it being an adrenaline-rush, and a great way of passing an otherwise sleepy afternoon in rural Uganda. So Linda says “Hi” to Rachel, Majdi and Tarik, her fellow rafters, and a big “Thank you” to the Speke Rafting crew for making it a great day.

At the same time, in case you were wondering, Andy remained high and dry in the village. This was partly because he played in his last football match for Kyabirwa FC (a thrilling 3-2 win over local rivals Bujagali) but also because he goes deaf if he gets water in his ears (stop shouting “Wimp!” It’s serious!).

So after our sporting weekends we had a week of exams and marking before we had to bid farewell to everyone we’ve met and made friends with in our little village. We’ve met so many wonderful people that it’s hard to know where to begin, but suffice it to say that, although we know it’s fresher in our memories than the other places we’ve been, we really do think the people here in Kyabirwa have been the friendliest we’ve met. And that is some boast, because we’ve been warmly welcomed wherever we’ve been.

First up, we should say that it was sad but lovely to say goodbye to our friends in the Source internet café in Jinja. We’ve spent an awful lot of time (too much) in there, but it’s never been a chore because of the wonderfully friendly staff. We’re going to miss the smiley milkshake man, the very model of quiet, gentle customer service. We’re going to miss the gift shop lady, and we send her all our sympathy as she tries to keep her hyperactive 2-year-old son occupied and pacified in a small room full of expensive, breakable souvenirs. We’re going to miss the lovely IT staff, most notably Noreen who we became really good friends with, and their warm smiles and friendly manner. But most of all we’re going to miss Restituta, the baby we first met when she was 2 weeks old, who we’ve got a bit of a soft spot for, and who we very nearly ended up bringing back with us in a rucksack

Linda's new laptop

Then there’s Steve, our boda-boda man. Not only a safe, careful and 100% reliable driver, but a thoroughly, thoroughly lovely man, who deserves all the luck in the world. And he deserves it because of his wonderful nature, his honest work ethic, and his clear-minded thinking. In a community where, quite often, young men and fathers don’t always take their responsibilities that seriously, shunning hard work and struggle for the modest thrills of shanty town pool halls and late-night bars, and rejecting family planning for the questionable kudos of producing dozens of children, Steve has done things differently. He works every day from dawn until dusk, and sometimes later, to provide for his wife and three children. And although his work is hard -and scarce- he always does it with a smile on his face. We wish him all the best and, should any future volunteer be unfortunate enough to be reading this blog but fortunate enough to be going to Kyabirwa, we wholeheartedly recommend him for all your motorbike-based transport needs. Times are tough and villagers like Steve need your help.

Getting into some boda: Andy, Linda, Steve and Danny

Then there’s Kyabirwa FC, that motley footballing crew of local lads, all built like Hercules and all capable of delivering a free-kick to the privates with such alarming force that the Government should think about employing it as a new weapon in the Ugandan army. They’ve been exceptionally friendly, accepting and encouraging, despite the modest talents served up to them by their British contingent. Some had great conversational English, some just had the words “Hey, British”, usually followed by a snigger, but all of them were always welcoming. It’s a lovely feeling, being accepted into a village and its social network, and it’s been great fun training and playing alongside them.

Then there are the local kids. We’ve had so much fun getting to know them, and we’ll miss them terribly. We never wanted this blog to turn into a slideshow of cute African children without any kind of analysis of their surroundings, their backgrounds, and all that other boring stuff we’ve been writing about for so long. But at the end of it all, we’re human beings and we just can’t help being disarmed by those really beautiful, really gentle-natured toddlers who come around our house with their big eyes and their holey, muddy t-shirts, with no sign of a pair of trousers. I mean, how could you not sit and take a million photos, or want to run over and mercilessly squeeze their cheeks?

You've been framed: Danny; Kenneth; Jonah; Tibi

Then there are the teachers. They’ve been 100% supportive of our efforts in the classroom, and we thank them deeply for letting us invade their territory and (in at least one of our cases) attempt some sort of amateur teaching. With the help and guidance of Robinah (the head) and Moses (the Volunteer Coordinator) we’ve enjoyed a smooth and always interesting programme of activities to do and lessons to teach (we’ve both taught three or four lessons a day, so we’ve always been busy), and we’ve developed some great relationships with our class teachers, who we’re going to miss a lot. A term really flies by, especially when you have to fit so much into it, but although we’re gone the teachers will stay here, and will continue to do a remarkable job in really quite difficult surroundings. But despite the challenges the school maintains a genuinely impressive and refreshing atmosphere and ethos, and the teachers are always friendly with each other and always welcoming to us interferers. We wish them the very best.

The Kyabirwa family. Back row: Mary; Ronah; Majid; Linda; Robinah; Moses; Emma; Andy; Christine; Deborah. Front row: Johnson; Joy; Irene; Mary; Prossy; Ruth

Linda has taught in three different classes: two P3 groups and the P5 group. As we have mentioned, the teachers have been impressed by her Phonics sessions and her class lessons (remember, few children in P3 understand much English, so no-one really knows how they’ve been understanding her), and it’s great that they want to try and imitate some of the stuff she’s been doing. The class teachers have always been happy to have her in their class, and her well-known work ethic has made her Volunteer of the Week ten weeks in a row (NB Linda isn’t writing this).

The P5 Team: Deborah; Linda; Majid; Irene

Then again, she is the pro. Andy, on the other hand, is very much not a pro, but in tandem with Teacher Johnson, P6 class seem to have made some sort of progress in English. It’s been gratifying to see them pick up some of the ideas and grammar they’ve been taught, but what they could really do with is some time to do some creative things. They’re a great class, full of characters and always lively (no, that’s not a euphemism for “a nightmare”!), but in truth they need some serious stimulation because the curriculum just isn’t bringing out the best in them at the moment. Perhaps some future volunteers can provide an answer? In Social Studies progress has been, shall we say, less evident, while in P7 it’s impossible to tell what’s going on in their heads, so we can’t say whether or not they’ve experienced any benefit from having us here. But regardless of all that, it’s certainly been a great experience: some of the topics have been really interesting to research and teach (especially, and most emotionally, the history of the slave trade) and it’s rekindled at least some interest in teaching again for Andy (time for another degree!), although a class with less than 115 children would be preferable.

The P6 Team: Majid; Andy; Johnson

Then there are the children. All 1300 of them, from the smallest P1 sprog to the biggest P7 yob. They’ve been a blast from the first day we arrived. Never rude or sarcastic, although sometimes a little bit cheeky, they have been great ambassadors for the school, and have made our time both rewarding and enjoyable. As for the classes we taught, well, P3 (180 children) are lots of fun, always enthusiastic and always willing to take part in lessons. We think they’ll probably miss Pop more than they’ll miss Teacher Linda, but that’s okay with us.

Linda and Irene with one sixth of Primary 3

P5 (140 children) are a tougher nut to crack –a real mix of pupils, with some taking their work really seriously and some who are, well, your typical teenagers- but they are always up for a laugh and a joke, and seemed to enjoy having a volunteer in there with them.

Majid, Irene, Linda and Deborah with one third of Primary 5

P6 (115 children) are mainly mad, but in a lovely way, and it’s impossible not to have a great time in there with them. Then again it’s impossible not to have a day when you just think “Right, I’m ringing BA and changing my flight. I leave tomorrow!” Actually, they’re a funny lot: one third you’ll love, one third you’ll want to hit with a big stick, and one third are so quiet that you won’t realise they’re in your class.

Andy with the P6 girls (and boy)

You could call P7 (50 children) quiet, but we think they’re just a completely unknown quantity, like a class full of dark matter. Teaching in there is like talking to the cast of Dawn of the Dead: you might as well give a lecture on astrophysics to a particularly lethargic group of deaf and dumb puffins. But when (or if) you do finally get an answer out of them you’ll realise most of them actually know their stuff. And you know, given the right topic, they can actually be quite entertained and enthused, though it probably only happens once or twice a year.

And finally, there’s the family Owino, our hosts and, now, our friends. Question: how easy is it to share your home and your life with a succession of complete strangers from far overseas, for anything between a few days and a few months? We’ll never be able to tell because they have shared theirs with such kindness, such friendliness and such unquestioning politeness that they’ve never given anything away about how hard (or how annoying) it might be. It’s hugely impressive, because we’re guessing we volunteers are not always easy to live with, but we have been looked after so well, fed so much, and welcomed so generously that we haven’t had to worry about anything. We know Moses actually works long and hard to be the ever-gracious and effortless host, and we have really appreciated what he’s done, enabling us to come here, supporting us while we’ve been here, and helping us with anything we’ve asked to do. In this respect he has been ably supported by his whole family, from the very young to really quite old. Florence, Moses’s wife, has always been friendly and helpful, regardless of the amount of work she has faced, and she has cooked up some wondrous feasts for us. But she is not just a chef: we should appreciate, too, all the behind-the-scenes work she has done for us. Flowers, too, for Agnes, who deputized for Florence many times, and who gave Andy the most talked-about hairstyle in the District.

The Family Owino: Moses; Linda; Danny; Winnie; Florence; Andy; Big Isaac; Agnes; David

But it’s probably inevitable that we’ll miss the children most. We’ve written about them enough before, so we’ll just finish by saying how endlessly lovely and loving they have been, and how much we want them to be our kids (except, that is, when they’ve had a soda each). We will miss them sorely.

How many can we fit in our rucksacks? Linda with Danny, John and Winnie

So another chapter in our year-long adventure has finished. So what can we glean from it all? Well, this project was different from the rest, yet shared a lot of similarities. Like our time in Kisayani and Ruhanga, everybody spoke English, so we were able to form really strong, really normal relationships with all kinds of people, from small kids and school children, to fellow teachers and Sunday league footballers. It makes a big difference to how much you can find out about a place and a culture, and how much you can participate in everyday activities. But at the same time, perhaps more surprisingly, it always keeps you at arm’s length, because the people you are conversing with are using a foreign, formal language, so you’re not necessarily getting the full inference of what they think or feel. To be honest you have no right to really expect to, but it’s one reason why whoever you are, and however long you stay here, you’ll always be a slight outsider, looking in on local matters, and only involved in selected conversations. It’s not as sinister as it sounds, and it’s not really ever a problem, but it’s something that you can’t really overcome. You are a visitor, and that’s the way it is.

Another similarity: like our project in Ruhanga there were other volunteers here with us for most of the time we were here. We’ve met Nik, Rita, Sav, IJ, Sarah, Clare, Rachel, Chig, Eric, Alex and Joe, and we’re happy to have spent time with all of them, because it’s sometimes nice having other Brits (and Yanks) to talk to when you are a visitor. We wish them all well and hope to meet up with some of them once we’re back in the UK.

Like all the projects we’ve worked at we’ve been surrounded by varying degrees of poverty, deprivation and a population struggling to make ends meet. Of course, it’s not all starvation and HIV: there are many pockets of success, too. In this land of bizarre and thought-provoking contrasts, it’s quite normal to see a wealthy businessman in his bespoke suit driving a brand new 4×4 through a shanty town full of filthy, malnourished children. You hate yourself for it but you do find yourself getting completely used to it. Except the balance is hardly 50-50: for every yuppie you see with his Blackberry glued to his ear, you’ll see a dozen penniless grandmothers sitting glumly and silently on the street, seemingly just waiting to die. For every Flash Harry in Kampala pulling off deals to buy huge plots of land for swanky housing estates, there are twenty hungry young men sitting about on the side of the road, waiting for the construction work to start so they can earn 50p a day labouring. The realities are pretty stark, but whichever way you look at it this is the trail that King Capitalism is blazing through the East African region.

For most people, though, the trail is a far-off dream, clouded by dreadful day-to-day realities like inflation, corruption and the crippling national debt. The Ugandan economy is in an absolute tailspin at the moment: the Shilling has lost a quarter of its value since we arrived (although we don’t think we’re to blame), the price of commodities has spiraled out of control since the election (that one probably isn’t a coincidence) with the price of sugar more than doubling in the last month, and unemployment now stands at over 50%. The government is unbelievably unpopular, especially since it is widely perceived to have stolen the election in February, although its reaction has simply been to threaten and bully any dissenters into submission. To be frank, it’s hard to have genuinely high hopes for Uganda’s short-to-medium term future. There seems to be a simmering but quite fierce discontentment all over the country, especially among young unemployed men; and in a nation whose post-independence history has been coloured by violence and blood-letting many people seem to think there’s a fair chance of some trouble flaring up at some point in the not-too-distant future. We all sincerely hope that won’t be the case, because what Uganda needs now is a good twenty years of peace, unity and economic investment, under a benevolent, selfless government, and propelled by fair, democratic political processes. Under such circumstances it’s possible that the people we have lived among will see some kind of tangible improvement. Even then, the question of population growth continues to cast a heavy, very dark shadow over any mention of optimism.

In the case of Kyabirwa, we hope the school continues to go from strength to strength, and the community derives some benefit from it, both now and in the future. It’s probably fair to say that volunteers are a bit of a difference-maker for the school: parents want to send their children there (although that’s been a bit of a double-edged sword: it really doesn’t have the room), the children get a lot out of having strange-looking, strange-sounding Western folk there, and the project provides the community with some kind of symbolic focus to rally around. It seems to say: here is a place where things are trying to be improved; where lives are trying to be changed; and where people are trying to do things differently, for the benefit of all. It’s a very worthwhile mission, and it’s one we’ve been very happy to support.

We just wish they’d shoot that *@$!*# cockerel.

Netball in the sun

So we’re off on our travels now. Eleven months of almost continuous volunteering is over, and we have a few weeks left to explore a bit more of East Africa. It’ll be great to have a bit of a holiday, although it seems a bit cheeky since a lot of what we’ve been doing has felt so much like a holiday, but it’ll nevertheless be nice to just be able to relax for a few days and take a break before turning our minds back to the UK and whatever the next chapter has in store for us once we return. We’ll try and keep you up to date as much as we can, although since we’ll be in transit and in the middle of nowhere we’re not sure how much internet will be available. Either way, we’ll take this opportunity to sign off from Uganda, wish all our readers the best, and say how much we’re looking forward to seeing you all when we come home next month.

Next month?!

Till then, you have our warmest regards,

Linda and Andy