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 8^th and 9^th 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.

 2 types of houses: the traditional round thatched roofed and the newer style with framed walls and metal roof

 David in front of his almost finished new house