A primary school with Little

Monday’s highlight was the visit to a small school that has an interesting history. Four years ago the government decreed that the village children must attend a school about seven kilometers from their home as they had no school of their own.

The reaction of the community was swift and totally cooperative. Kiiza George, (the same Kiiza George who is headmaster of Kasenyi Primary School where we were on Saturday), donated a plot of land right next to his home. He also led a community group of parents to develop a plan for the physical structure. Grass thatch was collected in large quantities and lumber was purchased. A school of sorts went up, and then the government employed teachers to work in the Universal Primary Education program that provides free schooling to youngsters. Over a hundred children were enrolled, some fifty of them AIDS orphans being cared for by relatives or neighbours. We visited the school in 2007 and found mud, sticks and thatch divided into three rooms. No desks, no tables, not much at all. We gave each child a toy and some writing materials, as well as a ‘t’ shirt and left behind sufficient cash for some metal roofing to be purchased.

Meanwhile all the parents made bricks in their own or neighbour’s kilns and in later 2007 and early 2008 a brick building was standing. For mortar the local mud, which they call murram, was used, and another donor helped with metal roofing for this building as well. More toys arrived, including a whole bunch of knitted teddy bears made by the Saskatoon ladies group Teddies For Tragedies and some football uniforms for the school 1st XI. Our cash was used to buy desks.

This year we sat and enjoyed a super concert and some traditional dancing. Leighton again wowed the audience, pupils and staff alike, with his rendition of his composition “Uganda Is the Pearl Of Africa”. His guitar was a big hit with this little boy,
who could hardly tear himself away form the instrument and spent a long time strumming it as Leighton changed the fingering.

Gift highlights this year were teddies for the very youngest, who had not been at school last year, cloth tote bags for all the children and letters from many primary school children in Canada.

Then the soccer match. This time just ten minutes each way, but still enough to lose by 1-0, although Leighton came really close with a long range blast that shaved the cross bar. It was fitting that George’s eldest son scored the winner with a scorching header. Man U look out!

This little school needs so much that it is difficult to know where to start. George gave us a list of the most pressing needs so we will have to see what we can do once we have our donations totted up.

Uganda primary schools fund raising

Things are moving ahead with the preparations for our 2009 Uganda trip. Most of the students who were not on duty at the clinic were able to come to the house for a curry supper. This gave us all a chance to meet in a less formal setting than the vet college. One of our recipes comes from an old book that was given to us by house guest Dr. Elizabeth (Becky) Manning many years ago when she visited Saskatoon. The book, written by S.N.M. Khan in 1934 is called The Finest Indian Muslim Cooking and Becky found it in a used bookstore in her home town of Madsion, Wisconsin. The recipe, which is for mutton, can be seen here, but of course the paper is a bit faded, so you may need to enlarge the image. The other point is that we used venison, but that will come as no surprise to those who know us.

One of the main activities that is ongoing, and which we discussed, is a big fund-raising effort for support of the two primary schools we have supported in past years. One of them is located in the village of Kasenyi, on the shores of Lake George in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. The other is an AIDS orphanage located at the edge of the park. It is called Equator Highway Primary School. Her are a couple of pictures that show some of the efforts we have made in past years. At Kasenyi the children surprised and delighted us with a concert using the musical instruments that they had purchased with the funds we donated the previous year. There were drums, a large xylophone and several hand harps. At Equator the children were delighted with the teddy bears that had been knitted for us to take to Africa by our local Saskatoon charity Teddies for Tragedies as this photo by Tessa Leena shows.

The big news on this fund-raising is that we are able to go through the Canadian branch of Veterinarians Without Borders/ Vétérinaires Sans Frontiéres. This means that donors who need them will be able to get charitable receipts.

Teddies for Uganda

We are setting up for our Uganda trip in several different ways.
On Monday I spent time with the ladies of Teddies For Tragedies, a group of women who have knitted little Teddy Bears for kids in many countries. Last year that gave us a bunch of Teddies for the schools we support, and of course we sent them a thank you note along with a photo. This year they have outdone themselves and asked me to come and collect what they had. Not unreasonably Edna Jennings, the group's coordinator, asked me if I could show them a few pictures & tell them a story or two. Of course that was a pleasure, and so I did.
Imagine my delight when I came home with 157 Teddies, with promise of 30 more to come. That evening I had a call from Edna's sister, who loves in southern Saskatchewan, in the town of Weyburn. Guess what! There are 50 more Teddies on the way by bus. The good news did not stop there. Edna had asked the Saskatoon Star Phoenix newspaper to send a photographer, and the next day this image appeared. That evening I had a call form an old friend, Lesley Avant of the Saskatoon Zoological Society. We now have a bunch of 't' shirts to take as well.