Our weekend was pretty standard, Friday night we went to Two Friends and I realised that darts is not at all my forte in life, and my motto is now that fluke shots are the way forward!
Saturday we watched the boys play rugby and, in true BCS style , lose…
(This is not cool, I just saw a mozzie fly in front of my screen UNDER my net… DEET TIME)
… but the evening we were invited to another Graduation party. Luckily we skipped out on the speeches because “we’d already promised the boys we’d watch the rugby” so we rolled up just in time for free food and party, only to realise it wasn’t a Graduation party but a Jinja Rotary Club party which at some point we had been invited to by Mark Malinga, Headmaster of Lords Meade, anyway so it was fine :) Then on to Rendezvous and Sombreros for a night of boogie-ing on down!
Four girls I live with: Marianne (also half French!), Livvy, Soph and Rach :)
Naturally Sunday was a write off and we treated ourselves to Chinese food at a local hotel for about £2. AMAZING.
Monday was fairly standard, teaching then Sonrise. At this point I was finding teaching a little difficult, my S1 class are really boring and my S2 class just laugh at me the whole time so I was set on finding a way to win them over, more on that later!
TUESDAY HOWEVER was well interesting!! I spent my first proper day at ASCO which didn’t involve painting or cleaning or anything like that. The morning I taught Lomer how to spell his name and him with another boy called Michael how to write the numbers 1 – 10. Will (my brother) gave me the awesome idea of teaching them to make devil sticks and learn how to demonstrate them so we could sell them on at arts and crafts fairs that happen occasionally in the high tourist seasons, so I took them along and showed some of the kids how to chuck them around and they proved to be really popular! So when ASCO’s up and running officially we can start fundraising.
Kalisto mastering the sticks! :
In the afternoon, we went to Massesse where the street kids’ families live. Many of them have parents or guardians and ASCO needs their permission for them to come to the project as it’s treated as a youth club for now, and also their opinion on us finding them sponsers for schools: so far Thomas and Paul have been sponsored by Rachel’s parents and Miles’ parents to board at their link secondary school! Massesse is a fair few kilometres out of Jinja and the kids usually walk there once or twice a week but we took them on bodas, some of them for the first time! It’s basically a village of mud. It’s EVERYWHERE. The huts are made of mud, the tracks are mud, the kids are covered in mud etc. Think poorer than the poor – I peeked into one of the huts of a family of four and inside a tiny room was a fire with 3 straw mats on the floor and a pile of about 4 pieces of clothing. That was all their worldly possessions. Within the first five minutes of us arriving, we were surrounded by 70+ children which made our visit turn into a bit of a mission! We found most of the street kids’ mothers - some were cooperative, others not so much. Our main responses from parents were:
1) I would love him to go to school and live at home but I can’t afford another mouth to feed.
2) He can go to school but not live at home.
3) If he goes to school, he can’t get me money and I can’t feed my family.
4) Why do you think he’s on the street? It’s because I don’t want him, I’ve never wanted him, do whatever you want with him, I don’t care.
That last one in particular was hard to hear, Kalisto is about 14 years old (none of them are sure of their age) and he was so ashamed and embarrassed that his mum was shouting this in front of a crowd.
Overall, it was one of the days which really stands out so far. It totally opened my eyes to people living with nothing, although you know it’s there in some communities in poor countries, you can’t fully appreciate it until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.
Wednesday was not so full on (thank god) and I went with Sophie and Rachel to the antenatal outreach. Luckily we weren’t sat under a mango tree for that one, it was at the clinic in Bukeeka, because I haven’t ever seen more rain in half an hour, let alone the a solid 4 hours of the morning. All in all it was a bit of a fail day as there weren’t any women braving the rain, or enough natural light in the ‘lab’ (there’s no electricity) to use the microscope to be productive.
Thursday HOWEVER was very eventful. First of all, I won over my classes by using them as volunteers which I think was a first for them and taking a pineapple to my S2 lesson to explain fruits better, they even named it Prosper the Pineapple!
So as I knew ASCO feed the kids pineapple every day, I took Prosper along after my teaching only to find Moses being arrested. I couldn’t have arrived at a worse time saying ‘Guys, meet Prosper the Pineapple!!’… So Sarah, an English social worker who’s all set to live here now, and Liberty, one of the gappies at the Guest House, got dragged down too as their names are on the CBO paperwork. The details will be for another time when I can give an open opinion on it but it’s all sorted now, we’re just not allowed to go to ASCO until it’s registered and the CBO stuff’s gone through which is turning out to be quite difficult when you see the street kids on Main St asking why ASCO isn’t happening and that they miss Uncle Moses and Auntie Liberty. Yesterday, I bumped into Luka who seemed pretty upset and was asking for Auntie Liberty, so I called her she brought with her some bananas and toothpaste. Luka had been saving up and bought himself a toothbrush so Libs gave him some Colgate and it literally made his day! Then a Ugandan man who’d seen us with the kids came over and said thankyou for the love we were showing the kids and gave them a football from his car to play with. That was definately one of the best feelings so far, and just shows that ASCO is needed even if it seems that everything is going against them right now…
And Friday couldn’t have been more opposite! I spent the day at Sonrise but in the afternoon I got locked in their toilet for 2 and a half hours as the lock broke on me! It was a pretty solid door so Connor and Joseph’s (a volunteer) combined effort to break the door down failed miserably so they had to get a friend of Joseph’s who owns a hammer to chip away at the door, break the lock, pull it out, all that business, in order to get me out. In the mean time, I had a nap in the bath, it was really quite comfy :)
After a fairly chilled weekend, today is Women’s Day, a national bank holiday here, so no teaching for me! Instead the boys are just making us cups of tea and tonight we’re allowed to watch Twilight: New Moon :)
GOOD TIMES!
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