"Green meals" help 170 kids in Uganda study

Three months have passed, yet again! Time to give you, our dear friends and supporter, an update on where we are at the Bondeko School.  In Uganda we are now in the first term of the year and it’s well underway. In total we have 216 children in school, in most classes the number has crept up to 35 instead of the 30 we were aiming at. Absolute maximum, mainly due to the fact that our admission board found it hard to refuse kids. And it is difficult to refuse; the very good results we got last year with the national exams made the star of our school rise high. Nowhere else do kids get such good education at such a subsidized price and we are surely proud that we can offer less privileged kids this great opportunity.

The kitchen is performing well and we can already see a serious reduction in the quantity of firewood we use. No scientific research yet, but it is close to 50% less. This is a great improvement for our budget as well as for the environment.  The smile on the face of Justine, our cook, has never been so broad. Instead of being hidden in a shack behind the building, she is now shining in her new kitchen visible to everyone. A wonderful woman who manages to get porridge and hot lunch for all the kids every day again. Food distribution remained somehow time consuming. Kids bring their own plate and cup so every plate has to be served when the child presents him/herself. These leads to long queues in the sun, not ideal. We tried to collect all the plates in advance so that they would find them ready, but this didn’t work, kids couldn’t recognize their plates anymore, the small ones started crying. So back to where we were. Solution is in sight though. From a teacher friend from the Netherlands who came here to help us for some time, we got the money to buy plates and cups for everyone.  For 140 $ we now have school cups and plates in three colors for lower, middle and upper primary. Children have themselves organized a system of washing up and counting. It’s all going to start next week. It was interesting to see how kids came up with ideas themselves; they all know that if you don’t count daily, things will disappear in no time and they are so proud of their school, they don’t want that to happen.

This year we had already a couple of visitors from other schools who came to see how we organized the kitchen, the ecosan toilets and the classrooms. For sure they were all impressed and the kids just love it to explain everything to them. We are now working on a ‘meet and greet’ committee of kids who can take visitors around and explain the in and outs of the school. All this helps to create new levels of ownership.

The video is in the making, never realized that making a short DVD would take so much time. Mainly because there are still so many things I need to learn in editing. But I hope to get it on air as soon as possible, let’s say before Easter! I’ll keep you posted. A delaying factor is that the administrator left our school and I am spending (too) much time sorting things out and getting things on the rails again. On the other hand a great opportunity to get into the nitty gritty of the admin and to realign a number of things. I will do the admin myself this term, get everything in place and then hope to find someone to take this on with the start of term two.

Well, that’s it for this time. We appreciate your support and for all those to whom I didn’t respond personally when they made a donation, my apologies, but I hope this will make up. I hope you understand that  I do this next to the many other things I am involved in and that I wished that a week would have 8 days; perhaps I try the Maya calendar then I get a 13^th month!

Kind regards,

Theo