Saturday, July 27, 2012
was a very long, busy day near Tororo. It is now Tuesday as I write and
I’m several hundred kilometers and about four kingdoms away. (An elephant and
several water buffalo are visible from where I’m writing) I need to write
everything down before I forget.
None of us will forget the rooster who woke us long before
we needed to rise. We all met in the dining room of the hotel to eat breakfast.
David apparently rose very early and had already been planting trees on his
property a few kilometers north of town. Unfortunately, he had torn through a
water pipe which he had to repair before coming to town to meet us. He insisted
that we visit his home before we headed over to the school we were to visit.
He soon arrived on public transport and we piled into our
Kindervan for the ride to his home. David and his two young sons live with
David’s parents who are both retired school teachers. Uganda’s mandatory
retirement age is 60, after which a small pension is paid. The family was
waiting for us when we arrived. They invited us into their home which was of
clay block construction. Immediately, David’s brothers and sisters showed up
with their spouses and children followed by an aunt and others, all curious to
meet the American Mbazugus. House design and architecture is changing slowly
across Uganda. There are still countless homes of the traditional design: round
structures made of stick construction covered by mud and a thatched roof. The
slight majority of houses are now built with clay brick with or without rebar. Clay
is abundantly available under a thin layer of topsoil. Makeshift kilns are
built to bake the bricks. The wealthier families have their bricks covered in
stucco and their floors of poured concrete. But more typical are bare bricks
and dirt floors. Corrugated metal roofs are replacing thatch. Most people are
squatters and build on government-owned land they do not own. David’s family
has a deed to their property.
No one can visit a home in Uganda without being fed by the
host. A hefty sum of scarce money was used to purchase a case of soda just for
this occasion. We drank our soda with peanuts (which they call “ground nuts”)
harvested from the backyard.
The custom in Uganda is that the father’s land is divided
amongst the sons who then build their houses on the property. Construction on
David’s house is well under way next door.
To mark the occasion of our arrival, young sapling trees (mango,
avocado, papaya) had been purchased and holes dug for their planting. We each
took a turn planting the nine or ten trees.
As we planted the trees, the other “grownups” gathered
outside in chairs that encircled a small caldron of alcoholic beverage
fermented from millet, which they each sipped through separate long straws. We
surmised that this was going to be the beginning of a very nice relaxing
Saturday for them.
David and his father came with us to the school which was
only a few hundred meters down the street. We arrived at 11:00 for our 10:00
appointment, which is pretty much right on time (African time). We were greeted
by an assortment of teachers and administrators and then guided to the main
office for a briefing. Again, we were guests and guests must be fed. We were
given tea, dinner rolls, and cookies. The school (Nagongera) was founded by
Franciscan nuns back in the 1930’s. The head mistress is a nun. The school
occupies several buildings that sit on land owned by the local Catholic Church.
A nursery school/ kindergarten has been added and earlier this year a high
school, which so far has two grades (the equivalent of our 8th and 9th
grades). Altogether, almost 1200 students attend, one-quarter of whom are
boarding students.
Like Lweza school back in Mukono, the campus is littered
with signs, most of which admonish students to be respectful and abstain from
sex. Unlike Lweza, Nagongera is relatively free of corruption and the
headmistress is very transparent with the school’s finances and operations. The
results are obvious. Almost all of the students wore smart blue and white uniforms.
All of the students were fed lunch. There was a library stocked with books,
albeit old, tattered books (There were virtually no books to be found at
Lweza). Nagongera boasts of some of the best test scores in the Tororo area.
Students take a total of 14 different subjects, including Latin. There was a
computer lab with 40 new desktop computers. We were told they’d have Internet
access soon. The school even has an infirmary in its own separate building. And
most impressive, there were plans to build a new high school on church land
adjacent to the current campus. At the end of our tour we were herded out to
the proposed site to imagine what the new school would look like. The school
gave a definite impression of moving forward.
We were treated like royalty at Nagongera. We were led into
a large assembly room where the head teachers each gave us a prepared speech. There
was something a bit disquieting about each address. We were given the universal
complaint that parents weren’t invested in their children’s education. We were
told how no one reads enough, that Ugandans are much more interested in
football (soccer) than school work. Much ado was made of the macho culture in
which males were favored over girls and that boys were smarter even though test
scores and GPA’s told a different story. If a child gets bad grades, he’s said
to take after his mother, but if he gets good grades, he’s just like his
father. A couple of the head teachers talked about a culture of violence
against women. This is a theme on billboards along the highways. Nagongera’s
charter claims it is a school that advocates women’s equality.
There was much ado about how we were “led” to Nagongera.
This was somehow our (both ours and their) destiny. Then there was a steady
litany of the remarkable accomplishments of the school followed by another
litany of needs sounding a tad bit too much like God-ordained entitlements. Understandably,
the vast majority of Ugandans have no idea of American demographics. I showed
some pictures of my summer class to a few teachers and I could tell they were
quite surprised that very few of them were white. But more importantly,
Ugandans do not realize that there are vast areas of the U.S. that could be
compared with the Third World. The biggest difference is in population density.
If you drive down Clinton Avenue in Rochester, you will see people milling
about at any hour day or night, congregating in doorways of bodegas and beauty
parlors or selling chicken from charcoal grills made from 55 gallon drums. This
is exactly what you would see in the marketplaces and towns of Uganda times 50.
Or maybe more. The traffic clogs the street and spills onto unpaved shoulders
of red clay. Instead of bodegas, there are kiosks slapped together with any
building materials available from old crates and pallets to corrugated sheets
of metal.
But there are schools in the U.S. in neighborhoods of
poverty that are in states of need almost as desperate as Nagongera with its
twenty-year-old paint and children who wear the same clothing day after day (in
Uganda the clothing are called “uniforms”). It is depressingly apparent that we
cannot save everyone. Uganda understands this better than Americans. But that
doesn’t mean we do nothing. We need long and short-range strategies with clearly
articulated goals. We need to find better ways to marry the culture of schools
with the culture of the neighborhood. We cannot keep throwing good money after
bad or creating curricula that have little relevance to people’s lives. And we
have to be inquisitive as to what marginalized cultures can teach us.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Ugandan curricula is the
quality of respect for the greater good. This is instilled upon children of all
ages with positive results. Students are challenged to think about how their
behavior (including their schoolwork) benefits their family, community, God,
and nation. There is a civility among students and between students and
teachers (and all elders) that is manifest in virtually all aspects of the
daily routine.
On the other hand, curricula are based on skill and drill
exercises which more often than not have little relevance to students’ lives.
Curricula are clearly test-driven and tests would struggle to satisfy the
ultimate question: “So what?”
There are good, vital conversations to be had between
students and between teachers around the globe. This will be our hope as we
enter into the Digital Age.
Speeches were followed by class presentations of songs and
dances that the students had obviously ardently rehearsed for this occasion.
Speeches and presentations lasted almost two hours during which students, all
1100 of them, sat respectfully. Ceremonies were only disrupted briefly when it
started to rain and students had to go out and rescue their laundry, which was
drying on some rocks.
When all was over, the six of us, four professors, Carly,
and Ron were taken to the library where we were fed a very large lunch of fried
dough, rice, potatoes, assorted vegetables and fruit, and a variety of stewed
meats. We were clearly being courted for a long-term relationship. I dutifully
exchanged e-mail addresses with each of the head teachers to at least give the
appearance of hope. One of the nuns asked me to call her brother (a priest) who
now lives in Canada, just to say hello. It was a warm, cordial reception and
good-bye. No promises. It was, overall, a worthwhile visit that brought
together like-minded people from across the globe.
We piled back into our Kindervan for our two-hour journey
across some of the worst roads we’ve traversed so far as we headed up the
mountains to Cipi Falls. We have an excellent driver (Ron) and our van has
four-wheel drive. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Noah and I have plans to hike through
the back country to stand at the edge of the falls.
Another African morning and another African evening has
passed. All is well.
