Challenges

Dateline: Friday, June 28, 2012 It has been quite a while since my last post. Life in Uganda has a much slower pace and thus I have fallen into a more relaxed mode. After I left Katwe I went back to life in the village and the school. The second term had started and there was much turmoil at the school. We discovered that our Director of Studies had been stealing money from parents who had paid him their school fees. He had decided to keep the money instead of turning it into the office. Not only had he been stealing money, but he had also helped himself to school furniture, aluminum sheeting, sports equipment, etc. Well, needless to say we fired him and made him pay the money back and return all the other stuff he felt he was entitled to. After he left we had yet another meeting with the remaining teachers to RE-inform them that we were paying them to teach which meant that they had to be in their classrooms teaching or we would dock their pay. Well, this proved to be too restrictive for some teachers and they chose to leave. Honestly, I don't know where they will find a job where their employer says, "go ahead do what you want and I will still pay you, even if you aren't here at workget to ." This left us with 5 less teachers, so I hadd to hire more. The process of hiring someone here is a bit different than in the USA. When you advertise for a job people show up and may or may not be qualified for the position. This does not seem to matter here because people obviously are hired to teach who have absolutely no experience and may not have even gone to university. In Uganda you are eligible to teach primary school as soon as you finish high school. I'm thinking this is why there is such a problem with education here. After many interviews I was able to find find 5 new teachers who started immediately. Fourof them were just out of high school but from northern Uganda and appear to be hardworking. So, I'm praying for the best results, here. Another equally frustrating issue has been the use of corporal punishment as a disciplinary action. Here in Uganda, children are caned not only by their parents but by the teachers at school. A student can be caned for any reason such as having dirty fingernails. At our school it has been a policy that we DO NOT use caning as a form of punishment or discipline at all. However, most of the teachers have still continued to cane the students in spite of having Re-informed the teachers of the no caning policy many tìmes since I have been here. This all came to a head when the school took its mid-term exams. One evening after exams one fo the teachers who boards at the school as well, decided to cane the boarding students one lash for every blank answer on their exam. When she began to cane one of the boys who had 28 blanks on his exam, the girl boards ran away from the school (in the middle of the night) and came to the house where I live in the village crying and screaming that the teacher was caning everyone. Thus, I had to go back into the school and handle the conflict. The following day, I had the older sister of one of one of the boarders in my office angry because her sister had called her and said she was being caned. Handling angry parents, when they speak a different language, is a delicate skill and requires a good translator or at least one that will honestly translate what the other person has said. After an hour or so I was able to smooth things out with this person and she left. I then called a meeting with all my teachers and really came down hard on them. I reminded them that we do not cane at this school and that if they caned a student for any reason they would be fired immediately without question. I also reminded them that if they weren't in their classrooms when they were supposed to be teaching, they would also be fired without question. This is a hard line to take in a country that has a policy in their ministry of education that says a teacher can can a student up to 5 lashes as a measure of discipline, and also an area where they don't really believe they should have to work hard to be paid. Needless to say, it was a frustrating meeting trying to get them to understand that the policies the director had put into place when he opened the school were going to be enforced whether they liked it or not. Well, I have only three more weeks here at the school with this NGO and I'm pretty confident that things will go back to the way they were before I came. It's frustrating to know that all the positive things I've worked so hard on all these months will be forgotten when I'm gone and are really for nothing. On a positive note, the director (who became a Christian after hearing my testimony) has begun having Bible study and prayer at the school with the boarders. The kids have really enjoyed it and even non-boarding students have heard about it, as well as our new teachers and have all asked to attend too. The director has even started a Sunday worship service at the school which has become very popular with both the day and boarding students. So, there are positive things happening here, too. Other than school conflicts, I have been enjoying my host family very much. It will be very hard to say goodbye to them when I leave. They have asked me to stay with them forever. I really love them they are such a great family and we have become very close. I know that I will always have this adopted family here in Sitabaale, Uganda. Well, what next? I have exciting opportunities coming up. I have met a great group of expats here when I am in Entebbe on the weekends. We have been germinating some ideas which I will share in a future post when I have more concrete plans. In the meantime I will finish up my work here at the school then do some traveling and planning for the next steps here in Uganda. Much love to all from The Pearl.

Of Elephants and Injustice

Dateline: Sunday, May 20, 2012 The last three weeks I've spent in Katwe have been a great time of relaxation and refreshing. Rural Uganda, at least in this area of the country, is very peaceful and beautiful. Waking up to the sound of hippos laughing is much more pleasant than hearing the screeching of the rooster back in Entebbe. I have seen lots of wildlife here including hippos, elephants, water buffalo, Ugandan Kob, bush bucks, water bucks, crocodiles, warthogs, mongoose, baboons, all kinds of birds, and even a Green and a Black Mamba! Seeing these animals in their natural habitat is much more thrilling than viewing them in a zoo. The people who live in this area really don't seem to pay much atttention to the wildlife. I guess if you live with them every day you sort of take them for granted or at least think it's normal. Just as those who live in big cities take skyscrapers for granted, yet to someone from rural Uganda they would be an amazing sight. The other evening we were going to meet up with other internaitonals, working here in western Uganda, for dinner in a town called Kasese; which is about 45 minutes from Katwe by car. We left at dark and headed down the dirt road from Katwe through Queen Elizabeth National Park to get to the main road. Suddenly three elephants ran across the road in front of our car and we almost hit one of the babies! (It was a mother elephant and two babies.) Well, I'm quite sure that we would have been the loosers in that confrontation. Plus, if we had hit one of the babies the mother would have charged at the car in defense of her young one. I was very glad we did not hit them. Then just a little further down the road we saw a bull elephant walking on the side of the road. He was very big with long tusks. Love the up close and personal view of these extraordinary animals! Besides enjoying all the wildlife and beauty of western Uganda, I have also had the great privilege of observing the local justice system here in Katwe (and I use the term justice very loosely here). Almost all the people who are brought to the magistrate's court for trial do not have a lawyer, do not understand the legal system of Uganda, do not understand the charges or procedures they are taking part in and do not know their rights. If they were in prison prior to their trial, they were herded in like cattle chained together and made to sit on the floor until their case was called. If they do not have money to pay for bribing officials then they most likely will be found guilty and sent to prison for 6 months to several years simply because they do not understand the system and what they can do to defend themselves. Case in point - a man had a verbal argument with his neighbor and told the neighbor that his mouth was like a vagina. The neighbor was offended and proceeded to pay bribes to several officials and police to have the man charged with common assault. The man did not think he did anything wrong and so did not appear in court for the hearing. So, the man was arrested for failure to appear and thrown in jail for a week until the next trial date. The neighbor who had filed the charges paid officials to keep him in prison. When the next trial came the man was brought into court in shackles. Fortunately my good friend, Miriam, was there to defend this man and spoke up in court. The neighbor had asked for this man to be put in prison for two years! Yes you read that correctly, two years for having a verbal argument in which no threats of physical violence were made. Miriam said to the magistrate that because this was a civil case he could not send a man to prison on this charge and that the whole thing was ridiculous because it was simply an argument between two neighbors and not a physical confrontation. The magistrate then asked the man to apologize to the neighbor for his remark and then asked the neighbor (who filed the charge) if he would consider less prison time. Miriam again spoke up stating that it was not for the plaintiff to decide if the defendant should get prison time or how much, it was for the magistrate to make that determination, which in this case could not apply. So the magistrate finally agreed to dismiss the charge. Well, that was not the end of the story, because the neighbor then filed a lawsuit against the man for reimbursement for the bribes he had paid to the officials to get the case heard in the first place. Thus we went back to court to answer this new charge, which by the way was not even filed correctly because it did not state what the money he was requesting was for. Again the absurdity of this whole process was incredible! This neighbor admitted in open court and had written down in detail what the money was for - the bribes he had paid people. Well, this man should have been arrested himself for this illegal act but he was not. We had provided written evidence from Uganda law how this was illegal and why the magistrate should dismiss the claim. The magistrate finally said he wanted to dismiss the whole thing but the neighbor would not let it go, so the magistrate postponed it to another date. This whole experience made me think about all the people, not just in Uganda, but all over the world who may be illiterate, not know their own legal system, not know their rights and not have the means to pay for legal defense. I'm sure that here in Uganda, as well as elsewhere, many, many people are thrown in jail because of this or because they don't have the money to bribe officials. I think it is tragic and it started me thinking about a topic for my PhD - human rights and justice. Something more to think and pray about. Well, it's back to work for me now, back to Entebbe and Sitabaale. Enjoyed my vacation in western Uganda and the new friends I made while there. Love to you all from The Pearl.

Old Friend, New Experiences

Dateline: Monday, April 23, 2012

It's been a couple weeks since my last post and I've gotten many requests for an update. I have been very busy working to finish things up at the school for the end of term. Many long days and headaches trying to sort out the mess of the finances! But thankful for the end of term and a much needed break!

Break started for me on Good Friday, April 6 when I met up with my dear friend, Miriam Hagen from Norway. Miriam and I met while doing our Masters of Peace and Conflict Studies together at the University of Sydney in Australia in 2010-2011. We spent a lot of time together that year and even took an epic road trip up the eastern coast of Australia from Sydney to Caiirns to the Great Barrier Reef. Miriam decided that she, too, wanted to work in Uganda and applied for a job with the Norwegian Peace Corps when she returned to Norway. She got the job and is working near the western border of Uganda, near the Congo, in a small village called Katwe. It is located right on Lake Edward and surrounded by Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Miriam and her coworker, Anna Maria, met me in Kampala on April 6. From there we took a bus to Jinja to go rafting on the Nile. Jinja is the source of the White Nile ( the source of the Blue Nile is in Ethiopia, I think). From this point in Jinja, the Nile travels 4000 miles to the Mediterranean Sea. Saturday we woke up and met the other rafters for our safety briefing then boarded buses that took us down river to where we would begin our adventure! Yes, I said down river. The Nile is the only river in the world which flows from south to north! We were put together in groups of 6 rafters and one guide. Each group selected whether they wanted to go easy, medium or hard core rapids. Our group chose hard core of course. We were fortunate enough to get the leader of the trip as our guide - Bhupi - a guy from India and an expert rafter. He saved our lives many times! Rafting the Nile is a great experience and a death defying one, too! The rapids are class 3 -6 and depending on where you hit them you will either have an easy trip down each rapid or a hard one. Our guide was true to his word, and gave us an experience of a lifetime! We flipped out 5 of the 7 rapids! I lost both my contact lenses by the 2nd flip and thus traveled down the remaining rapids pretty much blind, which made for an even scarier ride! Bhupi's excellent instructions saved us from nearly drowning several times as the water is relentless and continues to pound over you and suck you down once you fall into the rapids. It was the most thrilling experience I've ever had and don't regret it one bit! Everyone survived and we had a great lunch at the end of the day. Later that evening we went to the nearby campground to watch the video they had shot of our trip up the river. It was pretty cool to see how many times we flipped out and how well we recovered.

The next day we decided to take a much more sedate walk to the source of the Nile where we boarded a leisurely boat cruise with a guide who described all the historical and scientific information about the Nile. The Nile begins where Lake Victoria joins together with fresh water which bubbles up from underground. It is interesting to see the big round circles of water mixing with the flow of the lake. After a relaxing cruise we walked into Jinja to check out the town. It was very quiet because it was Easter Sunday and most everything was closed. We each bought a locally made and traditional styled dress. We the took a bus back to Kampala and spent the night in a hostel. I said goodbye to my friends and headed back to Entebbe.

Back to work in the village for the last week of school before term break. My host family finished their new outdoor kitchen. It looked pretty nice. On Thursday I said goodbye to the family and told them I wouldn't be back for about 3 weeks. Back in Entebbe I met up with Miriam and Anna Maria again. We stayed in a luxurious hotel where many of the NGO workers stay on their way in or out of the country. It was nice to relax by a swimming pool and have delicious western style meals for a couple of days! Yes, I spoiled myself. It felt very weird to be living in such luxury when just outside the gates the locals don't even have electricity or running water. On Monday, the 16th we hired a van to take us to Kampala so they could shop for things they can't get up in Katwe and then to drive us the 6 1/2-7 hours back to Katwe.
We arrived just after midnight so I could not see the area. When I awoke in the morning to the sound of hippos laughing, I looked out the window to see a beautiful view of Lake Edward. Katwe is actually surrounded by Queen Elizabeth National Park. There are many wild animals around the area. Ugandan Kobs, waterbuck, bush buck, water buffalo, warthogs, mongoose, snakes, many bird species, crocodiles, hippos, elephants, and lions can all be seen wandering around. It is so beautiful here and such a difference from where I am working! I would love working up here! I'm glad I get to stay 2 weeks, not just because it's beautiful but because I get to spend time with Miriam!

On Saturday we met up with some other friends of theirs and went on a game drive in the national park. This was amazing!!! We saw all the animals I mentioned above. The highlight was the lioness we saw who was in the process of hunting Kob. We watched her for over an hour but didn't see a kill. She was very patient as she crept and prowled. Finally it started to rain and she took shelter under a thicket. Lions don't like to get wet. Oh well, it was thrilling none the less. We also took a boat trip down the Kasinga Channel, which connects Lake George and Lake Edward. We saw lots of hippos, crocodiles, elephants, water buffalo, kobs, warthogs and birds.

This has been a completely different experience than my first two months here. I'm really enjoying the beauty of Uganda. The people here in Katwe are lovely, too! I fall more in love with Uganda every day!

Much love to you all from the Pearl!!!

A week of learning opportunities.

Dateline: Saturday, March 31, 2012

As we close out the month of March, I mark 1 1/2 months of time here in Uganda. It has been a rewarding, enlightening and enriching experience thus far. I'm still adjusting to the culture, climate, food and bacteria. I've had a few rounds of intestinal disturbances, an upper respiratory infection and some minor skin irritations. All and all, I've fared well. I think the biggest challenges for me are missing my children and the lack of a nutritionally balanced diet. Case in point, for lunch every day at the school we eat posho and beans (see picture above). Posho is just maize flour and water cooked to a gelatinous mass. It has no nutritional value and no taste! Ugandans do not cook with spices at all so most all of their food has no flavor to it. They concentrate on filling you up not on nutritional content or flavor. The good part about the seriously deficient diet is that I'm loosing weight! I could stand to loose a few pounds anyway.

This week I stayed in Entebbe and worked on the school's budget, or should I say lack thereof. The school has not been using any kind of budget to operate on and consequently has not been running very efficiently. This seems to be the case with many organizations and institutions here in Uganda. Organization is a weak point in Ugandan culture. So, upon examination of the school's cashbook and cash envelope I found that nothing added up or balanced! This will require some major changes in the operation of the school program and lots of teaching to the current school administrators. Now, anyone who knows me, knows that mathematics and figures are NOT on the list of my strengths and so this week has been a major headache for me! However, I know it will all help in the end to make the school run more efficiently and be able to provide the students with many more learning opportunities.

This week I also met with the mother of one of our students whom I mentioned in last week's post, little Nabante, who is crippled. We met with her and her mother to discuss the possibility of taking Nabante for a consultation with an orthopaedic surgeon to see if her problem could be corrected with surgery. The meeting went well and Nabante's mother, Florence, said she would be willing to meet with a surgeon and discuss what options there would be for Nabante. All of this will only take place if we can secure funding for her and for the surgery. If anyone is interested in donating to this cause, please let me know. I will also be posting a link to a fundraising site we will be using for this purpose.

While in the village, I stopped in to visit my host family to see how they were doing and to see how construction of their new kitchen was coming. Last week when I left the village, they had torn down the old, outdoor kitchen and were ready to construct the new one. This week, Wednesday, they had the new one completed! It is constructed of wooden poles woven together by other thinner lengths of wood and filled with mud brick pieces. It is really quite a feat of engineering as you can see from the photo above. All this was done without the use of power tools, safety equipment, or modern construction techniques. Everyone here seems to have a little knowledge about how to do anything.

This week's prayer requests are that we get funding for Nabante's surgery, that I can help the school learn to budget their money and keep track of their expenses, and that I can find a variety of nutritious things to eat.

So long for now. Love to all from the Pearl!

A World Away and a World of Suffering

Dateline: Friday, March 23, 2012

It has been a long but good week in Uganda. I have seen so much and learned so much from the people of Sitabaale - the village I am working at. Sitabaale is a remote village located about an hour north east of Kampala (the capital of Uganda). Sitabaale has no running water and no electricity. Most of the people in the village farm, work in the stone quarry hammering rock by hand or work at one of the large flower farms near the village. Most of the villagers are extremely poor and survive on less than a dollar a day. They walk long distances to collect water from a bore hole or a protected stream and also to chop firewood from the forrests nearby. Both adults and children work from before sunrise to sundown every day. The children not only rise early and do chores before school, but they then attend school from 8:30am to 4:30pm and go home to do more chores until bedtime. Bedtime usually isn't until 10-11pm, after they have eaten a dinner of posho (corn flour and water) and beans or sometimes sweet potatoes or matooke (mashed, cooked green bananas).

Some children walk several miles in the hot sun to and from school every day. Classrooms are not at all like the comfortable classrooms in America. The school I work at in Sitabaale, Tasaaga OVC Primary School, is a building made of cement with rudimentary benches with attached board-like desk tops. These "desk/benches" are not nicely sanded but are in fact quite rough. No comfortable chairs here! If there are not enough benches, the children must sit on the dusty, dirty cement floor. In spite of these conditions, the children do not complain, but sit obediently, eager to soak up new information. Many of the children at Tasaaga OVC School come from single parent households or live with grandparents or other relatives because both of their parents have died from HIV/AIDS. Some of the children board at the school because they have no one to live with or care for them. These children need and rely on sponsorship money so that they can stay in school and have a meal of porridge or posho and beans each day (which the school provides for those that can pay the meager $10 per term). Sadly, most families cannot even afford to pay this amount and so their children do not eat all day.

One of our boarders at Tasaaga school came to us from Jana Island (one of the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria). There she attended the government school on the island. Unfortunately, this school, being located on this remote island, is not monitoredby the education department. The teachers, who are paid by the government, do not actually attened the classes they are supposed to be teaching and are off fishing or running a shop on the island instead while still collecting their teaching salaries. Thus, the children in this school are not being educated. This brings me to Maymuna Mugide. May (as we call her) is approximately 15 years old and was in a 5th grade class on the island. One day when the director of Tasaaga was on the island checking up on the HIV/AIDS program there, May's mother approached him and asked if he could please take her to the mainland to the Tasaaga OVC Primary School in Sitabaale because she said May was not getting an education at the school on the island. She said since the teachers were not in the classrooms and off fishing the children were not learning anything. She said she could try to pay something toward the fees for May's education and boarding at the school but could not pay the total. She begged the director to take may so she could have a chance at getting an education and a chance at making a better life for herself. Well, Bruhan, the director, said he would take her to Sitabaale and find a way to get her a sponsor so that may would have a chance at an education.

Well, this week, the teachers asked me to do an evaluation on May because she had failed all of the mid-term exams, in fact she got every single question wrong! The fact is, she can't even read! She had not learned anything at the island school! My heart just broke for her! Here she was, the oldest child at our school and not even at a first grade level! May is a beautiful, bright, young lady, with the sweetest smile! She is shy and quiet and having a hard time adjusting to her new environment. She is also very embarassed about not being able to read and keep up with her peers in class. So, I will be tutoring her, one on one, for this term to try and bring her up to a level where she can at least read; it will be a long hard road for her though.

We had a new student come to school this week. Her name is Nabante Barabwa. Nabante lives with her mother and her grandfather about 3/4 of a mile from Tasaaga school. Nabante is a beautiful, precious little girl who suffered with a severe case of polio when she was born and thus has a deformed leg and uses a stick to help her hobble around. Nabante was previously walking approximately 2 1/2 miles each way to a government school because there were no fees to attend that school.It took her hours to walk to and from school each day! Our nursery class teacher was alerted to the plight of Nabante and spoke with her mother about Nabante coming to our school. Nabante's mother said she could not afford to pay private school fees and so she could not send her to our school. (Our fees are very low compared to most private schools because we serve orphans and vulnerable children. The fees are only about $21 US dollars per term, plus $10 per term for breakfast and lunch, plus approximately $10 for the uniform.) So for only $130 little Nabante could get and education and eat two meals a day for a whole year! We told her we would take her at our school anyway and find her sponsorship so that Nabante wouldn't have to walk so far each day to school. So, Thursday Nabante used her stick and hobbled only 3/4 of a mile to our school instead of going the 2 1/2 miles to the government school. She is a beautiful but shy child, but I'm sure she will warm up as she makes new friends. Her life would be so much easier if she had an adjustable crutch to help her walk but her mother can not afford to buy her one. (Even better for her wold be surgery to correct her deformed leg, but there is no way her mother could afford that.)

Life here seems so unfair, especially for the disabled like Nabante. There are no disability services available to help her, no handicap accessibilty and no compassion for the disabled. In fact, most times they are shunned and feared because people here believed they have been cursed by evil spirit or are possessed by evil spirits to be deformed or disabled. There is no understanding of birth defect or illnesses which cause birth defects and so people like Nabante will lead an extremely hard life of much suffering.

My prayer requests this week are for those suffering with disabilities here in Uganda; for a sponsor for Nabante to be able to continue at Tasaaga OVC Primary School; for someone to donate for a crutch for Nabante and possibly even surgery for her; for a sponsor for May, for all the other orphans and vulnerable children at Tasaaga who need sponsorship; and for grace, mercy, wisdom and strength for me to help these children in every way possible.

Love to all from The Pearl!

Greetings from The Pearl of Africa!

Friday, March 23, 2012

Hello and welcome to my blog about my journey and time spent in the beautiful country of Uganda. Being new to the blog thing and new to Uganda things may be a little rough at first, but I hope in time to smooth out the rough edges so you can get a good picture of what life in Uganda is like. I hope that by sharing this amazing journey with you, too, will come to love the people and culture of this beautiful country!

This journey began for me over 25 years ago when I first learned of the conflict taking place in Uganda in which children were being abducted by the rebel group the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) lead by Joseph Kony, and forced to fight as soldiers in his misguided attempt to overthrow the government of Uganda. At that time thousands of children were being kidnapped from their villages in northern Uganda, villages were being burned to the ground, people were slaughtered, women and girls raped or taken as sex slaves for the rebels and many other atrocities. God placed a burden on my heart for these people, these little children and their suffering and He would not let me rest until I fulfilled His plan for me to come to Uganda and be His hands and feet here.

Since that time, 25 years ago, my life has taken many turns. I've had many different occupations, gone back to school, completed a Bachelors in Social Work at Eastern Michigan University and a Masters of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Sydney, Australia. throughout this journey, God has been preparing me for the day when I finally set foot on Ugandan soil - on February 16, 2012. It was with much sacrifice and mixed emotions that I arrived at Entebbe airport. I left behind in America my two most precious gifts - my adult children - Charlotte and Carl. They are my whole purpose for living and have been my rock and greatest supporters! I love them dearly and miss them so much every day! But I know that we are together in spirit and that we will be together again when I return from Uganda.

So, as you read the posts, I hope you get a feel for the people and country of Uganda and the heart that I have for them. I hope you enjoy the posts and feel free to send comments to me or questions you have about anything I write here. I only ask that you keep it clean, polite, unpolitical and not degrading to anyone else. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.