Friday, July 9th Rweterra Primary School

We were all off to Rweterra this morning; the teachers to teach, the Krimsky/Kee family to paint blackboards and Alice Bator along with (yankee fan??) Scott to do some work with the P7 girls for the health initiative. Rweterra is the primary school furthest from the Field Station. Located about 8 kilometers south of the FS, it borders a different part of the Kibale Forest.

Rweterra is also the school, which is the most needy in a number of ways. The students are the dirtiest we have seen, and they have obvious signs of ringworm and other health issues. The infrastructure is the worst of any school in the Kasiisi Project. The students are the least well mannered of any school that we see. This is very surprising for Uganda. The headmaster is also very harsh with the children, and that may be part of the reason that the students are aggressive with each other at break.

Despite all this there are still some students that end up doing well and becoming Kasiisi scholars. We saw some of that today, as the students in P4 did some excellent work for our “Quiet Place” lesson. One little girl by the name of Gloria had such good English; she was translating for the students around her. The teacher in the P4 classroom was also very involved in our lesson and when that happens, the students do much better work.

Chris and Christie’s lessons in P1 and P2 showed the difference and problems in the buildings at Rweterra. Recently, the Kasiisi project installed new floors in a portion of the buildings there. In the first P1 class students were being taught in the section with a new floor. The other P1 class was taught in an older building with a broken concrete and dirt floor. These dirt floors have insects in them that infect feet and most students come to school without shoes. Christie also reported that students were sitting or kneeling on the dirt floors in that classroom to do their work. The irony of this is that there is a portion of the new construction that is not being used. We don’t understand why those children are stuck in what is a dungeon-like classroom when they could be moved across the way to a building with a new floor. When we asked, we received explanations that made no sense.

Christie also did a pant hoot in the middle of her lesson today and the children at first were not sure of what to make of that. A pant hoot is basically a structured chimpanzee scream. We learned how to do this at our chimp talk. Apparently one of the unsuspecting children told Christie that they might see a chimpanzee on their walk to school in the morning. Because of that Christie wanted to make the sound that that animal might make. It’s safe to say that the children had never seen a teacher do a pant hoot before, and they are not likely to see it anytime soon again.

As we talked about the problems we saw a Rweterra, Alice Bator mentioned some research she had seen that indicated that schools who were located closer to the forest and in third world countries did significantly less well than those closer to the main road. This is certainly true with at least some of the Kasiisi project schools. It is also true that the headmaster makes a huge difference in each school. When a new program begins at Kasiisi, it is highly likely to succeed, because HM (head mistress) Lydia Kasenene will make sure it is successful. Koojo Mathew explains that when teachers or headmasters are underperforming or do something wrong they are shipped off to places like Rweterra instead of being let go. This is sort of the Ugandan version of the “dance of the lemons.”

Despite all of these disadvantages and difficulties, we found Rweterra students to be the most grateful of any students we taught. The receive so little in terms of resources and they are so thankful for what they receive. As we were leaving at lunch time they showered us with gifts of eggs, avacados, sugar cane and popo (what they call papaya). A visit to Rweterra can be overwhelming in so many ways.

We had a restful afternoon catching up with Pam Bator and Cindy Mahr who have now joined the growing group at the Field Station. We all went to the Kasenene’s for a wonderful dinner and then early to bed for a 5:30 wake up call for chimp tracking in the morning.