Tuesday, July 13 Kanyawara Primary School

Kagaba Joshua arrived for breakfast this morning. Joshua is a “piece of work” as the saying goes. He does a hilarious American accent. His phone rings at least every 10 minutes and he answers it wherever he is. He told me that I was in charge of the sacrifice for tonight’s dinner. So I told him that I would sacrifice some pizza, but that was it.

Janis, Christie and Steve walked to Kanyawara this morning. It was only a short walk along the road that leads to the Field Station so we were pretty comfortable with the walk. Chris took the van that was going to Fort Portal, and met us at Kanyawara. We had heard a lot of good things about Kanyawara Primary School and are happy to report that we found those things to be true.

The students at Kanyawara did the best work in our lessons that we had seen at any of the five schools. The teachers were very involved in our lessons and the HM, Josephine, was the perfect host. Chris and Christie report the same thing in their lessons. They taught two P1 classes and a P2 class as well.

After lunch Josephine showed us around the school grounds. First we viewed the lunch program. Kanyawara is also serving a porridge lunch to its students. They are using a temporary shed, but are building a new kitchen next to this temporary one. After this we were shown a demonstration of the P6 students tending to a number of banana trees. They were mulching the plants with elephant grass and spear grass. We were given the opportunity to prune the banana trees; Janis with a large hook on the end of a 10 foot pole, and Christie and Steve with a machete (yes a real machete). The students then demonstrated a highly organic method of fertilizing the plants. They dug a trench with large digging hoes and then they proceeded to put manure in the trench. This they did by hand. The manure was quite fresh. It was wrapped in banana leaves and the students had brought it from home. It was a little difficult to watch children with their hands in manure, but we were told they would wash later. Another TIA (this is Africa) moment.

We were then shown another area. Last year the teacher group had brought the book “One Hen” to use in their lessons in the schools. Josephine had the vision to put the message of that book into reality. Starting with one hen they began to expand their flock, acquired a rooster, built a hen house and kept on adding to the area. The result is an entire chicken raising area complete with its own goat (based on the book “Beatrice’s Goat”). Students supervised by teachers tend all of these agricultural areas.

We then met in the HM’s office with the entire team of teachers, who spoke with us and thanked us for our work in their classrooms. Josephine completed the perfect day in their school by giving us T- Shirts that said, “Kanyawara Loves You.” All in all it was a great day at a school, which is doing some innovative and important work.

We walked home and found that Pam and Cindy had brought us pizza from Fort Portal. Alice and Scott had found it at this little place in the city that makes excellent pizza and it was still warm. After almost 3 weeks away from American food it was a great afternoon snack. We devoured it.

At about 4:00 we heard some strong rumbling and Chris and I came out of our rooms. Chris said, “What was that?” I said that I thought it was thunder. Chris said it felt like and earthquake. It turns out that Chris was right. It was an earthquake. The researchers from the Chimp House knew exactly what it was and evacuated their buildings. However, we were oblivious to this and went about our business as if it was a thunderstorm.

In the afternoon Chris pointed out an activity taking place over to the side of our dorm rooms. It was a man butchering a goat. Apparently, that goat was to be dinner later on that night. Kagaba Joshua had, indeed, donated a goat to be slaughtered and roasted for our dinner. So we had two different kinds of pasta, yams, potatoes, rice, and goat on a stick. It was a very interesting and ceremonial dinner, with lots of speeches and emotional thank you messages from the Africans and from the Muzungus.

We hear that Barbara Stevens is coming here late tonight. However, we will likely miss her as we have an early wake up call for the 6 hour ride to Entebbe tomorrow. It’s just the beginning leg of our 36 hour travel towards home. I’ll post more as we get access during our travel.