What are we even doing here in Uganda?

We get the feeling that some of our dedicated readers have no idea whatsoever as to what we are doing here in Soroti. First of all, we are here representing a Belgian NGO (godgerdarsamtok) called International Friendship for Development (IFD.) The NGO is relatively new and still very small. IFD is headed by Pamela Anoyti, who is originally from Soroti. IFD has two main operations in Soroti and surrounding areas; Lalle Primary School and Chili Production. We are involved in both these projects as follows:



Lalle Primary School: We are teaching there as volunteers. We are however not teaching in the conventional sense, as the school already has a number of teachers. What we are trying to do is introduce new methods for both the teachers and the students. We will be having special groups for different topics with the agenda to fish out the individual talents and interests of the kids. As the school has some 1000 children and only 16 teachers, there hasn’t been much room for the individual, which we wish to change.



The Chili Production: IFD, in co-operation with another company, has been supplying loans to local farmers in Soroti to finance chili production. The situation for farmers here is pretty desperate, they have no money to cultivate the land properly, no money to buy proper equipment, no money for fertilizers, they have little or no access to external markets and most of their labor is spent on growing their own food. IFD has and will supply money (interest free) for plowing, growing and harvesting and will buy the chili back from the farmers. This process is, however, plagued with many difficulties and needs to be supervised constantly. The people have been burnt on many occasions by NGO’s with good intentions and bad management and "NGO money" has therefore been turned into "free money" in the minds of many. Our job is to monitor the farmers and encourage them to continue with the project.


Here are some pictures from the school:

The classrooms.
The children playing a game we introduced. The kids were so excited, but initially failed to grasp the concept of the game, so there was a lot of running around in the beginning.
Harpa managed to get things going and before we knew they got it. They were singing, clapping and yelling during the entire thing (even though I suspect some had no idea why.)
The kids are very dutiful and lower the flag after school every day.

Music club was interesting, the teacher spent most of the time tuning the thumb pianos, but we mangaed to jam to the chords of Neil Young's "Helpless" way past schooltime. After some time I expect to hear a choir of children singing: :"And leave us helpless, helpless, heeeeelpless."

The kids find us very interesting and crowd around us at all times. Not strange given the fact that one of the teachers said that the last time a Mzungu (white person) was seen in Lalle was in the 70's.