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.
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