Head Master's Visit to Uganda

The following is an excerpt of Head Master Adam Pettitt's visit to Great Lakes High School in Uganda. His full report is available here.

In July 2009, my wife Barbara and I flew to Uganda at the invitation of the Rev’d Dr Hamlet Mbabazi to lay the dedication stone of the Great Lakes High School at a ceremony to mark the official inauguration of that school which opened its hastily built doors in February 2007. Many pupils have already met Dr Mbabzi – or Dr Hamlet, as he quickly became known to us – during his visit to Highgate in November 2007 when he came to accept the donation which made possible the building of the High School. As Founding Director of CHIFCOD [Child to Family Development Organisation], Dr Mbabazi has been responsible for the creation of a family of schools – primary, secondary and tertiary – which aim to break cycles of poverty and build a better, healthier and more prosperous life for young Ugandans (www.volunteeruganda.org)

Highgate School has enjoyed a link with CHIFCOD since October 2007 when the School raised £60,000 to help build a secondary school to serve the pupils of CHIFCOD’s four primary schools in Kinkiisi District, in the province of Kanungu, South West Uganda, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. This link came to us through one of our Governors, Michael Lawson, the Archdeacon of Hampstead, who, knowing of the work we had done in raising money for a community in Sri Lanka in 2006, suggested to Nigel Little, then curate at St Michael’s Church, Highgate, that Highgate School would be well placed to help CHIFCOD and its founding director, Hamlet Mbabazi, who had studied with Revd Little at Oak Hill Theological College. When Nigel and I met to discuss his request in the summer of 2006, I had no idea of the scale of the work which faces CHIFCOD and its trustees or the impact which our fund-raising could have on the lives of hundreds of Ugandan children.

This was our – Barbara’s and my – first trip to Africa, certainly as adults, but I knew of Uganda. My grandparents met there, married there, worked there and brought up their family there. Some of my earliest memories are of my grandfather talking about his experiences as District Commissioner in Kampala or my grandmother relating comic accounts of her attempts to run the household. Their lives in the thirties and forties are, of course, worlds apart from the Uganda of the twenty-first century, but returning to my late mother’s birth-place – and hunting down the house where she lived as a child (now an art gallery) – gave our visit an added resonance and intrigued our Ugandan hosts.  ASP

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