Namataka and Namataka

When Nicole came to Buhugu in '08, she became Namataka, christened by the mums with whom she stayed.

Over the two months she was in Buhugu, she engaged with numerous young people through art, sport, reading and much more.

It was almost time for her to leave Buhugu, when Namataka crossed path with Namataka.

A young precocious girl, Namataka defies explanation. That she was bright was obvious. She figured her way around the computer with lightning speed. Though children in Buhugu are generally independent and self-assured, Namataka seemed to take it to a new level. However, in her disobedience we sensed a spirit that wanted to explore beyond the boundaries of her young life.

The two Namatakas connected almost instantly and became close in the short time they spent together. Did they recognise something of themselves in each other?!

When she left, Nicole left Namataka a gift - a pocket dictionary - a most thoughtful gift.

Young Namataka just graduated from P7, the final year of primary school, coming top of her school - Buhugu Primary.

Nicole-Namataka is now teaching in East Asia, currently Taiwan.

And the two of them are in touch, writing letters to each other.

And all of us are waiting in the wings, watching young Namataka's progress through her schooling. Her family background is such that, it is almost inevitable that she will struggle for fees and much else. And where necessary, we will do what we can to make sure that she gets through it.

Namataka in Buhgu

Nicole, and the Buhugu-Tee, in Cambodia.

It Takes a Global Village?

It was well over a year ago that we wrote about a young man who was causing a stir at the center with his skills on the computer and his spelling and reading abilities. It took us all by surprise partly because he was one of the most vulnerable children in the village, his basic needs barely catered for.

Last week, Namweru Abraham (aka Rogers) was taken by one of the volunteers to be enrolled at the Budadiri Boys boarding school, about 45 minutes walk from his home. All thanks to a good friend in Seattle who, when hearing Namweru’s story, immediately offered to look in to supporting his education.

Given Namweru’s adverse home situation, we looked for a boarding school that also provided better quality education and yet was close enough to his home.

Budadiri Boys was the leading choice. It was started by Catholic missionaries in the early 1900s. It was a day school for boys, until 2000 when a boarding section was added. It attracts students from around Sironko district (where it is located), and also from neighboring districts, such as Kapchorwa, which helps provide students with an environment that is inter-cultural.

We’ve had discussions with the headmaster, Nyereki Julius, and have confidence that the school will be providing Namweru with a more stimulating and healthier environment.

With the school taking care of his daily needs, the volunteers on the ground providing logistical and emotional support and financial support coming from a continent away, Namweru is now set to focus on things that delight him the most.

Thank you for all the support, everyone!

Namweru Abraham at Budadiri Boys on the day of his inteview.

Lunch or No Lunch

A couple of months ago, the volunteers in Buhugu put forth a proposal - to provide lunch for the children attending the nursery school, entirely subsidised by I Buhugu.

The deliberation was a difficult one. How does one quantify hunger, malnutrition or the general well being of children? How does it stack up on the priority list? Wouldn't it be better for the community to come up with a local solution? After all, agriculture is what Buhugu does best. However, we knew, instinctively and by studying other lunch programs, that sourcing the resources locally is not all that feasible given the logistics involved.

In the end, the vote was in favor of "sustainability" and the proposal was shelved.

Well, last week, this decision was seriously challenged by a couple of friends - a pediatrician and a pathologist. They stressed home the role nutrition plays in early childhood development. Even a temporary access to regular and balanced meals could potentially make a big difference, they argued. What more, they offered to contribute to the program if it were to be launched.

Grateful for their input, we are now reconsidering the decision. In the coming months before the next academic year, we will consult our advisors, have discussions with the parents and design program that addresses the immediate needs of the children, while challenging ourselves to come up with a more "sustainable" solution for the long run. Whether one exists or not remains to be seen.

Charles

As a co-initiator of I Buhugu, Charles has invested much energy and resources over the lifetime of the project.

Now, we are investing in him. Charles has been accepted to an evening MBA program at Makerere University and I Buhugu is contributing part of the fees.

Classes have begun and we wish Charles all the best as he juggles family, work (as Implementation Manager at Standard Chartered Bank, Kampala), studies and, of course, volunteering with I Buhugu.

As we expand our experiments with income generation in Buhugu, it is our expectation that Charles' newly acquired knowledge will be put to much use!

Sam

Sam, one of the core volunteers of I Buhugu, has just returned to university to start the final year of his degree program.

He is majoring in Development Studies at IUIU in Mbale (about an hour by road from Buhugu).

I Buhugu is partially supporting Sam's education through a scholarship.

We wish him all the best!

Education

Every volunteer has a story to tell about education and their struggle to have access to it. There are stories of not being able to afford pencils, years lost for lack of fees, cutting the journey short or putting dreams on hold. There are also stories of family, friends, strangers and even the government stepping in, lending a hand, in big and small ways.

The stories are by no means unique. Just about every young person in Buhugu, and numerous other communities around the world, has such a story. The difference is that the volunteers have gone further than most in their quest.

It is no surprise then that for each of us, education remains close to our hearts.

When looking at Buhugu through this lens, a layered challenge emerges:

• Literacy: statistics put the number at 30% - about 1 in three people, from children to those in positions of leadership, could potentially benefit from functional literacy programs

• Access to education: while primary education is now universal, only about 25% of those who complete primary education are able to advance to secondary schools, primarily due school fees.

• Quality and relevancy of education: Even where there is access to education, the quality and relevancy of the curriculum remains a challenge.

• Access to resources: especially in rural areas, students have extremely limited access to books, labs, computres and so on.

We started off by providing access to books and computers and then started tackling early childhood education in the form of a nursery school.

However, the challenge that is staring in our face is that most students are unable to afford secondary schooling. And the number grows even further when considering higher education.

Faced with a vast challenge as this, one has to prioritise and look for areas where the impact will be the most.

One such area, perhaps an obvious one, is emerging. It is to identify promising students (of all ages) and invest in them through scholarships.

This is likely to shape up to be a main focus for the coming new year.

Students as Facilitators

Paul, a Masaba Secondary School student, showing how it's done.
(Photo taken this week.)

"We are getting reports from Masaba SS that the students who come from this community are not learners but rather facilitators in the computer lab", said an elder (paraphrased here) during one of the community meetings held some months back.

He was presenting a case for why the community should continue to support the library and the computer centre.

Masaba SS, is one of the main secondary schools that students in Buhugu attend. It is impressive that the school even has a computer lab. However, the challenges the school faces are not unlike most other schools in this region:

• the computers are few, old, available during limited hours and rely on the unreliable power supply
• the teacher's knowledge of technology is limited (given the limited access to tools during teacher training)
• students spend most of the time copying down notes during class (given the absence of text books) which often refer to obsolete technology

With free access to the computers, and free to learn from the volunteers and each other, students who live in proximity to the computer centre are gaining practical knowledge that they then seem to be spreading in the schools they attend.

That in a way underlies the model of the centre: plant seeds of knowledge in the hope that they spread - exponentially.

On a related note: last week one of the leading dailies in Uganda, The Monitor, published an op-ed piece regarding the recently announced decision by the cabinet mandating Computer Science for secondary school students. It argues that "making the subject compulsory at school is a necessary first step, whatever the challenges".

Bi-Lingual Babes

A few days in to the launch of the nursery school, some of us volunteers dropped by - with a camcorder. We found the kids learning songs (in English and Lugisu) and learning to count (in English).

We thought we would share a couple of clips here:



And last week, Esther, the teacher, floated the suggestion that we organise an end of the year show with performances by the children. Now, that would be sweet.

Plotting the Future of a School

In launching the library, reading with the kids and helping students with their studies, we had uncovered much.

We were blown away by the talents of some. And were deeply troubled by the reading skills of a great many others.

Behind the scenes, some of the volunteers (especially Nicole) started to focus on those struggling. At the end of a long day, to sit down with a group of children, going over the alphabet and basic words, is not all that easy. Especially when one might feel that given the scale of the challenge, one's effort is feeble and fleeting. But, the children kept coming, and we kept improvising - flash cards, memory games and even alphabet pasta (which the kids started referring to as "organic" given the label on the box).

Charles, Wiki and Namataka in the foreground with the very popular pop-up Alphabet Book, sent by Bailey in Florida.

Well, recently we made the call to halt purchasing textbooks for the library. With over two hundred books catering to all age groups (from primary to tertiary) we felt that the library was sufficiently stocked for the time being, and resources would be better spent helping kids to learn to read.

So, we suggested to Prof Henk Monkhorst that we divert the remaining $500 of the library textbook fund to the Buhugu Education Centre aka the nursery school. He agreed and surprised us by matching that with another $500!

The bulk of the $1000 is earmarked for paying the salary of Namono Esther, the nursery school teacher till the end of next year (2009).

Currently we are exploring whether next year the Buhugu Education Centre could grow to include P1 - the first year of primary school.

The "Cult" of Encarta

Microsoft Encarta is quite the hit these days. Once school breaks, kids file in to the centre, and one by one the launching of Encarta is heard until just about every laptop has a group of kids huddled over flicking through the pages and watching multimedia clips - for hours.

Robina perusing the Kenya page on Microsoft Encarta.

We hadn't done anything to promote Encarta more than the other offline content that was available, which included:

• wikipedia (both a condensed version as well as the entire volume)
  
• podcasts and vodcasts downloaded from the web
  
• CDs/DVDs containing documentaries, movies, music videos and so on.
  

Ugandan music videos are perennially popular and we had to regulate when and how they could be played (only with earphones!) given their popularity. Rivaling this is the Encarta phenomenon, especially amongst school going children. It started with a few who discovered it on the laptops and spread fast.

We have some theories as to why it might have won over the other choices:

• Interactive: unlike watching movies/documentaries, they get to interact with the program, choosing for themselves what they want to read/watch. And if something doesn't capture their attention, they can move on to the next topic.
  

• Multimedia: many of the articles come with a multimedia collection. The video and sound clips are short and cover a range of topics. Listening to national anthems (especially the Ugandan one) is hugely popular.
  

• Language: Wikipedia articles, for example, can be quite technical and dry. Encarta by comparison is perhaps a bit easier to follow.
  

• Look and Feel: It's slick and allows for easy navigation of topics.
  

• Mutufu is on the map! Mutufu is the nearest trading centre, about 15 minute walk from the computer centre. You load up the world, zoom all the way in, and there it is. How much more relevant can it get? (For comparison, Google Maps, for example, doesn't go that deep.)
  

Some lessons to all of us who are trying to make content available offline where there is no/limited/slow connectivity - in short: make it easily navigable, relevant and interactive.

A special thanks to Oliver for adding Encarta to the mix.

A Story from Behind the Scenes

"Bank of Uganda" in big bold letters. Some charts strewn about the Excel page. Eyes peeled to the screen, fingers clicking about the menus, lost to the world around him. We got used to seeing Rogers this way. His name is Abraham, but he told us he prefers Rogers. He is nine.

In a village where many school-going children struggle to read and many of the adults never had the chance to go to school, his abilities simply caught us by surprise. We watched in shock as he read his way through most of the books in the children's section, figuring out words he hadn't seen before. English is, after all, his second language.

He relishes the challenge of spelling. Agriculture. His face tightens, eyes narrow into concentration as he makes his way across the word. He's an ace. University students typing up their reports half jokingly ask him for help with words.

The computers are playthings in his hands. Guys a decade older than him ask him to show them the way, trying not to draw attention.

He's a fixture at the center. Coming as he pleases and leaving usually when he is "chased out" because someone thought he had spent too much time in front of a computer. Or more often is the case, he hadn't taken a bath.

An only child, Rogers' home situation is dire. Alcoholism, abuse, neglect are all part of the story. Often tending for himself, almost always dressed in a pair of blue shorts that is missing large portions at the rear, taking a bath is something he'd rather dodge. So, from the policeman to the volunteers, we keep up the pressure.

After months of watching his rear-less shorts, on a recent market day, a couple of the volunteers picked out a pair of (denim) shorts for Rogers and made a home delivery. A few days later, his father dropped a comment to one of us: "please take care of him like he is one of your own children".

He receives school uniforms and school supplies through a community project that receives help from further afield. From the headmaster of his school, to many others in the community, people are watching out for him. He's adopted the centre as a second home, and gravitates towards older smart kids who like to read. One afternoon, sitting next to Saad, he tried to lay his head on Saad's lap. Saad resisted at first, and then let him. And together they read.

Yet, the stark truth remains. There is no one who provides consistent care and attention to his wellbeing.

Enrolling him in a nearby boarding school is a suggestion that seems to be rising above all others. Shall we support him? We don't know, but we are thinking about it.

A small compilation of photos and videos of Rogers we found on the hard-drive.

More than a Nursery School

The term has ended after three weeks of operation. It's time for holidays!

As the teacher and the kids head home for the break, the Buhugu Education Centre is not all that quiet. During the two week long vacation, which coincides with other schools in the area, BEC is offering a "remedial programme" for about ten students who are currently enrolled in a nearby primary school - Bumatofu Primary.

This is an experiment in using the resources at our disposal towards improving the quality of education in Buhugu.

It is also a way for both us and the community to think about whether we want to grow from a nursery school into a primary school - whether delivering quality primary education is a challenge we want to and feel capable of taking on.

Images from this Morning

Esther and Aidah

For more images from the nursery school, taken this morning, please visit our photo album.

A Small Beginning

As hinted in a previous post, we are starting a nursery school!

Why? Well, because we just can't get enough of the kids. They are so dang cute.

Well, that and a few other reasons:

• The quality of primary education in Buhugu needs to improve.
  


• The existing schools are inundated with children after free primary education was introduced in Uganda in the late nineties.
  


• While some students are being left behind, even failing to learn to read, others are being frustrated by lack of adequate stimulation.
  

The library and the computers have gone some way in addressing this challenge. However, children spend most of their time at the school, and the challenges they face there need to be addressed directly.

Well, we can't fix everything, of course. So, we are starting with what we can. A nursery school for 20 children.

The idea is the brainchild of Masiga Geoffrey Rogers, one of the I Buhugu core volunteers. As he moves ahead with his vision, the rest of the volunteers are right there with him helping in all the ways we can. it just so happens that our "senior volunteer" is a former headmaster with many years behind him as an educator, and his guidance has been essential.

Two rooms have already been painted and enrollment has begun.

It's a humble beginning, and the challenge a great one. But, the support the community has shown has given us much hope.

Art

Art continues to be a part of the library. The aligator is the latest offering by Saad, the master artist.

The seed Nicole planted is growing, though slowly without her presence. A big box of crayons sent to us by Noah as part of a care package has produced a myriad of animals (hippo, eland, rhino, springbok and a number of lions) which adorn the walls.

Needless to say, drawing on the computer, especially houses, continues unabated.

Sports and Games

We have so far initiated some games and sports at the Buhugu Initiative center. This helps us to keep all our dear students busy throughout the whole day.

Among these, we have Chess, Netball, Football, Volleyball, Frisbee, Etch-A-Sketch and many others. In the pipe line are other indoor games like Table Tennis.

All the volunteers are very ready to help those who don't know how to go about any of the games.

Buhugu Primary School

Yesterday we toured the facilities of Buhugu Primary school and introduced ourselves to the students who will participate in the pen pal program with Einstein Montessori School in Gainesville.

We took photos, videos, and answered any questions the students had about the American School.

On Wednesday we will deliver the letters and drawings from the American students to the Ugandan students so they can begin corresponding. The letters will be translated into their local language, Lugisu, since the students are not yet fluent in English.

Sharon

Sharon has been enrolled at Masaba Secondary school and boards at the school, which provides a better learning environment than home for most students here.

We visited her at the school during last week's parents' day. She is doing well, working hard to catch up on the missed years and is grateful to be back at school.

Sharon

Some members of the Buhugu Initiative and friends are coming together to provide a scholarship for Sharon.

Sharon has been through many challenges in her life, including losing both her parents a number of years ago. Unable to pay the fees, she dropped out of school.

Keenly aware of the need for education, especially for a girl, she dearly wanted to get back to school. The academic year is about to start and we are currently making the necessary arrangements for Sharon to start Senior 4 (the fourth year, out of six, of secondary education).