Y11 Visit to Uganda

This summer eight boys from Year 11 went to Uganda to do a week’s teaching at Kirima Primary School in south-western Uganda, near the Congolese and Rwandan borders. Highgate has links with a local charity called CHIFCOD, and does a huge amount to support it; the school raised thousands of pounds last year to build Great Lakes High School from nothing but a field of termite nests.

After a nine hour drive on potholed roads, constantly dodging oncoming cars, motorbikes and even livestock we arrived at the Joy Guest House, a basic but comfortable place on the outskirts of Kanungu Town. The next morning we visited Kirima Primary School, where we would be spending the next few days teaching. Although the school compound is quite large, the only buildings are a long block of classrooms and dormitories, the head office and the toilet, the rest is taken up by a large dusty playground. After sitting in on a few lessons to get a feel for how we should go about teaching, we visited Great Lakes High School, to see what Highgate pupils had helped to build. I won’t deny that seeing the basic but clean classrooms, the cramped but tidy dormitories and the huge grin on everyone’s faces when they learnt who we were made me feel proud of what we’d achieved. The pupils there were all boarders, and spent their spare time either studying, playing football, volleyball, or tending to the small agricultural project they were running; they had two pigs, banana and pineapple fields, and a small coffee plot. Upon leaving, the headmaster challenged us to a football match the next day, a test that would prove to be one of the highlights of our trip!

The days we spent teaching were fantastic; the children were happy, enthusiastic, friendly and generally eager to hear what we had to say, even if it was about how to make paper aeroplanes as Gabriel Henry and I ended up doing! Lessons took the format of us walking in, introducing ourselves as ‘Mr Harry’ for example and then, depending on the age of the class, either telling them short stories on a certain topic followed by some learning games, or us giving presentations with crudely drawn pictures on the blackboard accompanied by crosswords, quizzes or word searches. At the end of each class somebody would call for a song and the entire class of around thirty people would rise and serenade us with traditional songs about Uganda, often with a dance to go with it. Our lessons ranged from Dinosaurs taught by Tom Manuel and Alex Pavitt to the reception class, to basic maths by James Curry and Rhodri Williams. The children eat at school; every meal is a sweet maize porridge called posho, that, despite looking like yellow semolina, was surprisingly edible, but having it at every meal time would soon prove monotonous.

The aforementioned football match took place a few days into our stay in Kanungu. We turned up at the ‘pitch’ very casually passing a ball around when round the corner, in two perfect columns, jogging in step, like something out of the film Zulu, came the opposition. At this point we all realised just how far up a certain creek we were. The pitch was slightly larger than our first club, but covered in ant hills, dips, humps and it even had a road running down the left wing; never again will I complain about the state of Highgate’s pitches! After a full 90minutes in 30 degree heat the match ended in a nil-nil draw, but it wasn’t without its incidents- a cow ran on the pitch during a corner, a motorbike drove down the touchline, and James Curry played a beautiful through ball, skilfully bouncing it off an ant hill into the path of Tim Sheppard Garcia. Elliot Leen was announced Man of the Match for his tireless work as a defensive midfielder, and we returned home, exhausted, but glad to have given a good account of ourselves, and taking home a truly unique experience.

What did I learn from the experience? To tell you this I have to describe the ‘thank you’ ceremony the primary School held for us. We all sat down in the school hall, the headmaster stood at the front to say a prayer, then he gestured to his left and in filed around 40 children. Silently, this group filled the stage. They started to sing a slow song, then the rhythm quickened, the song turned into a dance, and a drumbeat was added, more and more people started to dance, and more started to sing, until what seemed like the entire hall was joined together in one swirling, soaring song. The music faded and a girl stood at the front of the stage and thanked us for all we had done, for coming there, for teaching them, for showing them that someone outside Uganda was making an effort, trying to give them a future other than farming; their choice in life was essentially ‘go to school, or spend the rest of your life in the fields’ , so by sponsoring them or building the High School we had given them a chance in life. Then she said something that made us realise just how little these people had, and made us feel that even though we had gone and done what was by our standards very little, to them seemed like a whole lot more. She said: ‘In Uganda we dance to say thank you when we have nothing else to give‘. What she said had a profound effect on the group, that night we were all quietly proud of what we had done and touched at the reception we had been given, and when Mr Stenning and Mr Jones asked us at the end of the trip what our best moments had been, every one of them involved our time at the school.

After a week teaching we went back the way we came to Jinja, source of the White Nile for a week of white water rafting, kayaking and recovery from the illness that struck down all but three of us. The grade five rapids tossed us around a bit to say the least, but we all survived what was definitely the best school trip Highgate pupils have ever seen.  Harry Ashman

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