Yesterday, we spent the day traveling to the Teso region of Uganda. It was a 6 hour drive from Kampala with a stop in Jinja for a meal. Jinga is a town very close to the “scource” of the Nile river. (The Nile flows out of Lake Victoria up through Egypt to the Mediterranian Sea.) We will visit schools that Nancy Williams has been working with over the past few years.
We arrived at our hotel around six, checked in and had a meeting with Patrick, the man we will work with here. Our rooms are on the 4th floor and there is no elevator. Good exercise!
Panorama from our balcony in Mbale:
Today was an amazing experience for us. We visited four of the twelve schools Patrick is involved with. They are all part of an organization of ‘born again’ schools, and are supported by churches in the area.
Even though all of the schools in Uganda are on holiday until June 1, each of the schools we visited had their teachers and students come to school for our visit. We were able to observe classroom instruction at each school and to hear the children sing and recite poetry for us. One school had a very organized program with speeches from several leaders in the school as well as a group of the students that sang for us. We were welcomed so very warmly to each school, given soft drinks and water, and the last school even fed us chicken and rice. It was not easy to be eating this food knowing that the children at the school had only eaten probably one meal of porrage today and were hungry. It would have been incredibly rude of us not to eat the food. They had killed a chicken for us! Speaking of chickens, one school gave us a gift of two live chickens!
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Here are a few more pictures from our day, but I took many and wish I could share them all.
Patrick’s father & wife. We went a bit out of our way because he wanted us to meet his father, who used to be a witch doctor, but is now a Christian.
Kindergarten class:
wow!