Thursday, June 27, 2013

Sweat, Tears and Nyo-yo



            Monday was the first official day of work in the schools. I’m stationed in Namasagali, a forty-fie minute to hour and a half drive from where I am staying. This drive allows a lot of time for thinking, napping, and listening to American country hits from ten years ago that our driver plays on repeat. If we’re lucky, we get some excitement from being pulled over by Ugandan police. This never fails to make me nervous, but most of the time they see a foreign person in the vehicle and hope they can make some money.
            I have mixed feelings about my experience at Namasagali throughout this week. Each day is divided into gardening, teaching, and projects. Gardening is always an adventure. I saw my first snake on the first day (promptly beheaded) and are constantly finding termite and ant hills the size of a large tree stump. African flies and insects also love hanging around which drives me insane. Not only are they annoying, but they carry a lot of diseases that may affect me and the American members of our team much more severely than our Ugandan counterparts. Three of my coworkers have fallen ill with Malaria and I plan to stay clear of that. So far we have transplanted tomatoes, raised nursery beds, weeded eggplant, and planted banana trees. All with a hoe.
            I teach four class periods a week of fractions and crop growing with Juliet and Liz. So far we’ve made a pretty successful team in our Primary 5 and 6 classes, and by we, I mean them.  My accent and appearance in their classroom has caused a distraction to say the least. Even though the students are taught in English, for students to actually understand what is going on their native language has to be incorporated. I may explain a lesson in English, then Liz and Juliet may interpret for the students. This exposes a large problem in the rural schooling community. In order to advance from Primary to Secondary school, students must pass a national exam given in English after completing Primary seven. Of the approximate fifty students in primary seven at Namasagali, on average only two will pass. We struggle teaching in the native language because the students have become dependent on the translation, yet at the same time we know that this information is important for them to understand. For once in my life I have really appreciated math, as it is easy to teach a subject that has a universal language.
             The school feeding program at Namasagali is often my favorite and biggest headache of each day. This is a unique program at a government school that is made possible through VEDCO, Makerere, CSRL, ISU, and the community. Our goal is to create a sustainable program in an area that often struggles with food security. At Namasagali, each student is supposed to receive a mixture of beans, maize, and vegetables called nyo-nyo each day. Often this is the only meal students receive a day. In the past years the program has been closely monitored, yet much of the responsibility has shifted to the school. As in most cases, the teachers are overworked and underpaid, therefore this extra bit of work is often hard to suggest.
            The culture shock of arriving in Uganda hit me this week. Hard. This is the first week I have truly lived in a community and attempted to understand traditions and my role. No amount of research could have prepared me for my reaction to seeing such poverty. My love of people, specifically children, makes it difficult to see malnourishment and injustice daily. All I want to do is give them some of my food, fix up their houses, and take them to a clinic. Yet doing that for some 300 students at a school is improbable and defeats our goal of establishing sustainable development. Charity and development are not the same. There is a place for both, but it is a delicate balance I am struggling to find.
            Thankfully, I am not experiencing this alone. I am so grateful for the group of friends I am traveling with and those that have greeted me here. It has been nice to share frustration, but more importantly joys during dinner and into the night. At the end of the day it’s the positive stories that keep me motivated. Most of those surround funny things students at school did or mistranslations. My recent favorite includes a boy named Steven who has received some extra help from our program because he showed up to school severely malnourished. After a week of eating lunch with him and hanging out with him, we discovered his name was actually Brian. We now understand why he never reacted when we called his name.

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