"Green meals" help 170 kids in Uganda study

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to get back to you with the latest news about our Bondeko School. In my last update I mentioned that the kitchen is fully operational and we are now able to provide daily morning porridge and lunch from a clean place. You may have heard about rising food prices, well I can tell you that this is very true and we experience this directly. At the start of term 1 in January I bought one bag of 50 kg of maize flour for 50.000 Ugandan Shilling (23 US$), the same bag was 71.000 UGX three months later when I bought food for the second term (32 US$). The price of beans too went up with a whopping 47%!

Our system is such that the contribution of the parents or guardians of our children cover the variable costs of food and scholastic material. We are discussing an increase of their contribution but you can imagine that it would be unfair, if not impossible to recover the entire increase in costs. We hope that prices will come down a bit once the new harvest is in, but there are many things that we do not understand. Before prices would never fluctuate this much throughout the year. It is only thanks to support from abroad, your support, that we can meet the costs without jeopardizing the quality of what we offer our kids.

On a more positive note, I am happy to tell you that we found the funding and have started the construction of our pre-primary class. One of the challenges we face is that the kids we get in school often lack some of the basic notions. Their home situation is rarely conducive; many parents have to struggle to get food on the table and striking poverty reduces family expenditures to the bare minimum. Most of the parents and guardians are themselves poorly educated. So in primary one we see kids that have not developed their fine motoric skills, i.e. they cannot cut out something with a pair of scissors. Concepts like behind/ in front, up/ under, tall/ short are unknown and many children have poor letter and number recognition. We have been struggling for long to make their start at school easier. And as we have experienced on several occasions in the past, if you believe in what you are doing then a supporting hand will be reached out to you. So we are really happy that we found the funds to build, equip and run a pre-primary class.

We hope to get started in September of this year so that kids that will enter primary one next year will at least have had some first support. Next year two students in primary education from the Netherlands will come to help us for three months to get our pre-primary up to standard. One of the things we hope to start using in our lower primary is a TV screen and DVD player so that we can expose kids to English much better. I remember how children in the Netherlands would be glued to the screen to watch their daily show of Sesame Street and how it helped them develop. We think that 30 min of a good kids program on a daily basis will expose our children to the English language in a way they do not get yet. So if by any chance you are able to help us out with small kids DVDs that can be used in our context, please get in touch. Last time I promised to post a video on YouTube to show you our kitchen. I am sorry it is not yet there, but the promise still stands. I hope you bear with me!