Getting started

I am easing into work! Last week I visited the two schools along with the CEO and several Board members from Australia. It was all very hectic with too many people wanting to talk with the same people I wanted to talk with so I hung back and listened and waited. It was good. I need to get right back into listening mode, for the first month at least. Otherwise I will have very little worthwhile to say.

The students here are much more used to white faces than my children in Bukoba. There are often visitors from Australia and several Kampala office staff, who visit the schools regularly, are white. There is also a young American Peace Corps volunteer resident at the Katuuso school so it is only my age that makes me a novelty – everyone else is so young!

I am currently trying to understand the mysteries of the Ugandan primary education curriculum. It has all been rewritten over the last 5 to 10 years to make it more relevant and less content dense. It is still very academic with lots of memorisation of facts. The lower primary years should be taught in local language but with the overriding imperative for children to speak and understand English there is compromise. Upper primary is all in English but there is still far too much memorisation of definitions with no real understanding. This is all a major headache that has no easy solution. The children certainly don’t get enough time to play.

I am still to get to know the teachers at Katuuso. They are so busy with classroom and extra activities. Steve keeps reminding me to be patient – I’ve only had 3 days at the schools! But I am so keen to get on. I have done one lesson observation, at a teacher's request, already and given feedback. I need my Tanzanian colleague Josiah Karwihula in my ear saying “Slow down Madam, it will be fine Madam!” I will let you know how we progress.

On the home front we now have a car – a 1998 RAV4 four door with an alarm that reacts to loud music. The car makes us far more independent. So far Steve has done all the driving. I will need to psych myself up to brave the Uganda roads and traffic police.

We are staying at a guest house in Buloba while we wait for our house to be ready. The place where we are living – Forest Park Resort – was host to a wedding with 1200 people on Saturday and a Uganda Independence Day party on Sunday. Both occasions saw locals dressed in their finery both traditional and modern. We were the only white faces in sight. There were many cars in the car park with ours not the only one to have its alarm set off by the booming sound system.  We hope to move to our new home next weekend. It is a newly constructed two-bedroom unit in a compound with five others. Ours has been put on a “hurry up” and will be finished before the rest. So we will have the compound to ourselves at night to begin with and fundis working on the other units on tap during the day to get anything fixed that isn’t working as it should.

Sorry, I took no pictures, so I've put in a couple of Steve's. I will try to remember to take some for my next post.

Best wishes and I hope you’ll make a comment, Jenny.