Buikwe, Uganda

So last Sunday night I was lucky enough to meet an Irish Fly fishing guide while at dinner. What was he doing in Uganda you may ask? Volunteering. Pretty much everywhere we have been, we meet volunteers, people working for NGO’s, and a variety of other folks in the charitable organization business(believe me it is truly a business out here). Well Brendan, my new buddy from Ireland was telling me about the volunteer program he was involved in and I was intrigued. We exchanged numbers and he was going to give me a call in the next couple of days if there was anyway they could find room for me.

Side note on volunteering in Africa. I spent quite a bit of time researching this back in the states and whilst in country, and pretty every opportunity I found can be classified as volun-tourism.  You pay $100-200 per day plus pay for your airfare to most of these organizations and they get you in some program where you can “volunteer” for a week/month etc. Unless you find a program through word of mouth that fits what you are looking for, you may be disappointed with what you finally end up with. I have run into a few people like this. The economics of the deal is also rather disturbing, that $100-200 helps fund lots of middlemen, who are generally not African and a large percentage of those dollars don’t really benefit the locals. By my math it is up to 50% in many cases. In any event they are more interested in your money than your help. The whole point of this is that I had not been impressed by many of the opportunities I saw until I met Brendan and heard about the work he was doing.

So I got the greenlight from Brendan and headed out to a village about 50km east of Kampala. I was to be hosted with a local family and the plan was to teach school in the am, and do village projects in the pm. It turns out I ended up staying with Paul Mulamira, who is a local pastor and community organizer who set up this program in his community. 

Paul, his wife Rosemary and newborn Patience

Staying in the village and at Paul’s place with his family, was a fascinating cultural exchange. On top of that, the teaching was amazing and seeing Paul’s grassroots community organizing was truly inspiring.

Lunch, Matoki, steamed green banana’s

A little about rural Uganda, underdevelopment and overpopulation is the issue. There are no basic services - medical, water, electrical, let alone a govt that seems to be doing anything to help or educate these people. Education is big business and it is entirely privatized or charity run. My lasting impression of this place and rural Uganda will be old women (grandmothers) living in mud huts taking care of little kids (orphans). That’s all you really see, old women and little kids. The nuclear family that we know in west was rare.

So basically I was in the heart of $1 dollar a day economy, most of the people are eeking out an existence on subsistence farming on their little plots of land. They have no money, I mean none.

By Paul’s count in his village there were about 250 cases of malnutrition annually among the kids and that was one of the impetuses of his community organization. Basically his organization “Buikwe Village Care” was established to create some community safety net for those who are unable to take care of themselves. So he has managed to organize numerous members from the surrounding villages who get together every afternoon to work on a community selected project that will help some member of the community who is unable to do it themselves. Typical projects were digging ditches, composting holes, latrines, making drying racks for their dishes, etc…

So teaching school was amazing. I had a class of 8 seven year olds. Whom I taught basic English, Math, Drawing, PE etc..everyday from 9 to 1. This is in Paul’s charity school. There is one headmaster and one teacher for 80 kids in 4 classes, which is augmented by any international volunteers. The kids are great.

This is the actual school house. No one gets paid, not even the headmaster. Paul tries to pay the rent and keep the headmaster Eric fed and sheltered through donations.

After the first day Paul revealed to me that most of the kids were lucky to get one full meal a day. Day two I was packing a couple pounds of banana’s, candy and chapatti. This was very well received.

Henry EricHasireth, Eric and Patience

Marianne Patience Ruth and Linnet Correa

The schoolroom was a dirt floor, the kids sit on benches and I teach on a old school blackboard. Everything is in English. They have little bluebooks and I would basically write out a lesson and they would copy it down and we would go from there. They don’t have books, they don’t even have pencil sharpeners. They use a dual sided razor blade. Watching a seven year old sharpen a pencil with a dual sided razor blade will make the strongest man tremble, however, they were better at it than I.

To be continued….