07/04 - 18/04 Back to Basics...

Firstly, I do apologise for the lack of blog entries but my laptop's died on me... And secondly, I apologise in advance but this is going to be a looooooong post!

So since the Ssese Islands, we had the not so smooth arrival of Morgan, Joe's best mate from London. Joe stayed true to African time and picked up Morgan from Kampala not a few hours late, BUT A DAY LATE. Classic.

As for me, I went with HYT to Kaso Kosa, a small rural village about an hour and a half away from Jinja, and lived there for a week. HYT is the Haileybury Youth Trust with two gappies at the Guest House, Tom and Marianne, and they’re essentially builders. This year they’re trialling the ‘One village at a time’ scheme where they spend one week every three weeks in the same village doing work at the local school. In Kaso Kosa, the school is called the ‘3 Rs Secondary School’, the Rs representing Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic…even if it is a phrase used at home I still think it’s silly because they are CLEARLY not all beginning with R!

ANYWAY, the HYT trainers, Philip and Henry, are training full time the HYT trainees, around eight local Ugandans from Kaso Kosa, to build using ISSB bricks – pressed bricks instead of burn bricks which are not only eco-friendly but also cheaper. HYT supplies the pressing machine from Kenya, and then leaves it in the village to encourage the community to build with ISSB bricks and use the newly trained builders. As the gap year students, we were just extra sets of hands. So the trainees were working on two new classrooms and a library, and Marianne and I were working with the Ugandan gap year students, James and Winnie who’re former students of the 3 Rs, on a new kitchen and school hall. Tom slacked off the week because he’d broken a knuckle at the weekend and was now in a plaster. TYPICAL. However, we managed to finish the kitchen so that it was fully functioning by the Friday, instead of using an old chicken coop to cook for 400 students!

As for living there, we had no running water and no electricity. It was definitely back to basics! By 7:30pm it was dark, we had dinner at around 8ish and after that we had not a lot to do but to sleep, but quite frankly after a long day that’s all you want to do! Our meals consisted of posho and beans, posho being boiled solid maize flour…it’s not very inspiring, but occasionally in the evenings we had a chicken or beef stew as well. Washing facilities was a half open wall of concrete and a tub of water to splash yourself, needless to say hygiene pretty much went out the window that week and my hair was not a pretty sight!

On the Wednesday of that week, Tom, Joe and Morgan arrived to do a bit of building and to finish organising a football tournament. Once school had finished that day, the students cracked out the traditional drums and skirts and taught us how to dance African style! Needless to say we were rubbish in comparison, somehow their pelvis seems to be totally detached to any other part of their body so they can wiggle it any way they want, it was amazing!

Thursday, all the Busogies descended on Kaso Kosa! The teams competing in the tournament were Team 3 Rs, Team HYT, and Team Mzungu. Our Team Mzungu was made up of the twelve Busogies, Dom’s little brother, two AV friends and Morgan. The girls, having never played football in our lives, were only allowed to play half a match each…and for very good reason! Tom had supplied us with our strip – bright yellow shirts from the market at 60p each with our names and numbers marker penned on the back, something that will stay in my wardrobe forever! After losing 2-1 to the school’s B team, we didn’t hold much hope for our match against the HYT builders who’d been the school’s A team, but somehow we won 2-1! In the end we came second! In traditional football spirit, we cracked open some beers with HYT builders and out came the drums so we showed off our lack of bum wiggling skills. After the builders well and truly showed us how it’s done, we did some traditional Ugandan wrestling – you lower your top half until you are shoulder to shoulder with your opponent, grab the back of their shirt with one hand, the other going behind your back, and then move in a circle jump pushing the other person until someone’s head hits the floor whilst surrounding spectators throw grass over the wrestlers, it was awesome! Somehow my contact lense disappeared behind my eye when I wrestled Rachel, and they still called it a draw! In the evening we entertained ourselves with a bonfire, barbeque and the worst camping experience of my life. At 2am the heavens decided to open on our poorly-pitched-in-the-dark tents for the next ten hours leaving us with two flooded tents, two other very wet on the inside tents and six people sharing two single bunk beds (I was not one of the lucky few…).

Tired, grumpy, soggy and in desperate need of a shower, the last thing I wanted to do was camp another night by some waterfall, but that turned out to be one of the best camping experiences! When we arrived by Ssezibwa Falls late Friday afternoon, they helped us pitch the tents in daylight, cooked us desperately needed chicken and chips after a week of posho, and let us build a bonfire and we sang the night away thanks to Morgan’s ukulele skills! Plus it didn’t rain :D EXCELLENT.

02/04 – 06/04 SSESE ISLANDS!

Honestly this weekend was the best weekend of our trip!

On Friday there was a ‘Fun Rugby’ tournament at Jinja Rugby Club so along with our local Nile team, there was the Ugandan National team, the Rwandan National Team and the Kenyan National team… So our Nile boys did pretty well to get to the semi-finals (although apparently, because Nile Special was sponsoring the tournament the most, there was some blatant fixing of the groups competing!). Some were even invited to play for the Rwandan team for some reason! About six companies were sponsoring the tournament, putting in about 25 million shillings, around £8000, so there were loads of freebies and in the evening there were some big names of Ugandan music like Chameleon performing in the evening! We took the ASCO kids along with us for the day which they really enjoyed too which was really nice.

Getting in the spirit with the freebies! :

The ASCO kids joined us for the party afterwards in their new clothes donated by Livy and Liberty’s parents! :

9:30 the next morning we were packed and ready for our Easter break in the Ssese Islands! Because we had to get to Entebbe to catch our 3 hour ferry, we hired a matatu for the ten of us to bypass Kampala and avoid the horrible taxi park and go straight to Entebbe – BEST IDEA EVER. We rocked up to the ‘port’…

…and bought our £3 tickets for the ferry ride. That ferry ride was one of the best parts of the trip! Even though we were following what everyone said about being there an half an hour before, there were still no seats anywhere so we were on the top deck in the blistering sunshine for the whole trip…

…but luckily we had the Factor 50 to hand so none of us got sunburnt. The views on that boat were stunning, the clouds, the islands, the still lake, it was all AWESOME…

We arrived on Buggala Island around 5ish to see these views…

…it looked like tropical English countryside! Until of course sunset when our views were more like this…

…and then came the night sky – I’ve never seen more stars in my life, it was absolutely stunning. We spent most of the night like this…

…on our campsite beach – bliss.

On the Sunday we woke up to torrential rain, so naturally we decided to go for a walk! It was really good fun actually, I was totally sodden in my very un-waterproof waterproof. We walked up the hill to the other side of the island to the ‘town’ by following our noses through Ugandan forest/jungle, only to remember when we got there that it was Easter Sunday and it was DEAD apart from singing coming from the church. I’d have loved to have joined in but considering there were kids playing outside in their Sunday dress, we could barely rock up soaked to the skin and half the boys had no shoes on, we honestly looked like street kids! But after a cup of tea in an ‘cafe’ we braved it back through the jungle to the campsite just as the sun was coming out.

Sunshine obviously led to the first ever Busogie Ssese Island Games involving Midget Sumo…

…Agressive Wheelbarrow Races (one armed slapping was allowed)…

…and finally, the Bridge Competition which was a team effort so unfortunately no pictures were taken of this game. Obviously Team Nelson won (Nelson was a dog that followed us for the whole trip)…

…and we’re eagerly awaiting next Easter where we’ve all vowed to hold Busogie Easter Games wherever we are, so parents, WATCH THIS SPACE!

The journey home however was probably one of the most unpleasant I’ve ever had – we were up and packed by 6:45am, ready to leave at 7am for our ferry which was supposed to leave at 8am. 7am SHARP, the torrential rain starts on our walk to the ferry so we all got soaked. Dom, who was a few minutes walk ahead of us, rang us to say the ferry was leaving within the next few minutes and that we had to run! We hopped on just in time at 7:10am and off we sailed at 7:15am – EARLY!!! Stuff happening early in Uganda is pretty much unheard of!!! Turns out that the boat was so full that the captain had no choice but to leave otherwise people would’ve climbed onto the boat etc. At first we were shoved back to our spot on the top deck but this time in the torrential rain for the first hour of the trip, although eventually we found shelter in the corridor of the toilets – classy, eh?!

As a result, half the group (somehow not including me even though my bag was a puddle) have lost their phones, cameras, iPods and chargers to water damage but overall, the weekend was one of the best ever :)

<3 BUSOGIES 2010!

22/03 – 01/04 We’re daaancing in the rain

Well the last week or so have been pretty standard to be honest! Last week there were six people in the HYT village so that meant only six of us were at the Guest House – Rachel and I took advantage of not having the boys who only eat meat around and had a veggie week, amazing!

On Tuesday I realised that teaching kids how to write is NOT my life calling… I was trying to teach two young ASCO boys, George and Michael, how to write numbers and failed miserably! Flicking through their exercise book it was obvious many had attempted to teach them and failed before, but I was determined! With inspiration from the film ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ I made them repeatedly trace one number I’d written, then join the dot-to-dot numbers, then trace a very faint numbers – and they both did it so well! – but when it came to writing it on their own, ‘3’s become ‘m’

We were invited round Brook’s house last Wednesday – he’s one of the AVs but went to school with 3 Busogie boys so he practically lives with us! He lives with 2 other girls and 1 boy, all are really lovely. They live on Wangange Primary School grounds so they are constantly surrounded by kids and the teachers’ children who also live on site. Our guest house literally looks like a PALACE! They have 2 tiny bedrooms, their kitchen consists of one gas plate, no running water and only electricity between 7pm – 12am, it was actually really cosy though and because it’s a constant AV gap year house they can write what they want on the walls etc. But to be honest, I’m happy to have running water instead!

On Friday, Connor, Rachel, Joe and I went to Valley View. P4 have definitely become MY class, they seem to like me and there’s one little girl, Grace, who honestly comes across as crazy! She’ll repeat what Joe and I say like ‘Minutessssssssssssssssss’ and then pull a face for no reason, or she’ll start to cackle when we write the sentence ‘The girl runs to school’, and in assembly she’ll stand up and dance when no one else is! I actually love her! Plus she’s recently had her head shaved so she looks even more crazy now! Here are more Valley Views pics…

Joe and P4 class (although you can’t really see, crazy psycho girl is the one he’s marking the book for):

A few years back someone donated the money to construct 2 brick buildings for classrooms but, as is the story for a lot of things, the money mysteriously disappears… Imagine health and safety issues in this baby! :

The rest of the week has been pretty normal, Livy’s parents were here for five days so they were just touring the projects. At ASCO on Tuesday, they got involved in our Good Samaritan sketch: the kids had asked to learn about Jesus so an American lady came and read them a shortened story about Jesus, and they came up with some pretty challenging questions that she couldn’t answer so we decided to do some drama sketches of Bible stories to help them understand, and they went down a storm!

Other than that, today was my last day teaching at St James’ this term as exams start next week! I marked their last exam papers and they were TERRIBLE so hopefully I won’t have made things worse, I’ve given them some exam tips which may help… Now I just have to be able to read their writing!

The netball court and my classroom:

My 23 pupil strong S1 class! :

My 45 pupil strong S2 class…remember, this is half the size that the other Bosogies are teaching at their schools! :