Dan and Jodes… in Gulu, Uganda

When you are in a land-locked country and it’s impossible to take a leisurely stroll as a form of relaxation; or drop down to your local pub for a pint or a plate of bangers and mash, what do we do to relax? Watch DVD series. It’s sad but it’s true. But even this past-time takes quite a bit of co-ordination. Most of us don’t own a television, but we watch DVDs on our laptops. We are spoilt for choice with our local DVD shops stocking the latest and greatest, often at the same time they are released at the cinema 🙂

Here’s a quick guide on how to get the best our of your DVD series watching in Gulu:

1. Always make sure your laptop is charged, if power is on – charge it! If you are using solar and the sun is shining, charge it! You never know when the power is going to go out.
2. When your DVD ends abruptly and you are missing the last three episodes to that series, write it down NOW! Write down the number you are up to. You are not going to remember what episode number you are up to in 2 months’ time when you take a visit to restock your DVDs, and you are certainly not going to scan through the episodes whilst the lady in the shop kindly pops iton for you to have a look at each one to ‘jog’ your memory.
3. If you end up purchasing several movies instead  of a series which you know is a safe bet, have a quick search for a review before watching it. Rottentomates.com is usually quite accurate and it is hard to judge one word on a white disc in a clear packet when there are so many of them…

Me: How is your garden going?
Friend: The elephants are disturbing there.
Me: The elephants are in your garden?
Friend: Not my garden, the neighbouring gardens. Causing a lot of damage! But they are not in mine yet. At least the farmers there are very wise. They have made what is like a bomb. It explodes, makes a big noise and scares the elephants away. It doesn’t hurt the elephants though.

Just one of your everyday conversations on the back of a boda (motorbike) whilst travelling in to town.

Jody

Everyone in the A&E department had malaria, apart from those who were in there with arrow injuries…

Dan’s comment after returning from the local hospital, taking a mate who had an injury from a whipper snipper/strimmer (after the blade snapped and imbedded into his foot).

This week I was expected to train teachers from three schools in a neighbouring district but instead I training two schools. The reason why the third school didn’t come: the director thought the training would only benefit the teachers and not the school. And if the teachers gained new skills, they may leave the school and transfer somewhere else. How sad.

Tonight I returned from Lira (a two-hour drive) where I was doing some teaching. I took an eight-seater Noah van home (you could almost call this public transport: 12 of us crammed into the eight seats). Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers boomed through the speakers for the first part of the journey. The guy sitting next to me started chatting. Our conversation centred a lot around DVD series, particularly Vikings: ‘What do you think is going to happen now?’ He was asking me. ‘Do you think Ragnar’s sons will go to Wessex? What about Lagatha?’ For a moment I forgot where I was, could have been anywhere in the world. Then I realised my leg was numb from balancing my backpack on my knees containing my prized possessions and I had no room to reshuffle my legs; one bum cheek squeezed onto the seat (the other hung off); I recall my position then return to the conversation.

This is why we do what we do:

My 13-year-old neighbour bought me his P3 (third year of primary school) exam paper for first term. One year ago he couldn’t read anything. Now, he is a struggling reader, slowly on his reading journey. When you can’t read, you can’t access other parts of the curriculum, including word problems in the maths paper. His maths is actually not bad, but reading and writing is a barrier to performing well in maths.

I walked into a classroom yesterday where the contents were still left on the chalkboard from a weekend class, possibly a secondary school class or a Diploma level class.

The subject was ICT. I chuckled a little when I saw some of the headings: youtube, whatsapp, Facebook, features of Word, pornographic contents…

Can you imagine teaching about the internet without the internet? Or without a computer or even electricity? Then I stopped chuckling. And just stared at the board for a while speechless.

Hitting the news today is: “Ugandans have been ranked as the laziest people in East Africa with the lowest labour productivity in terms of value-added per worker.”

Thankfully, I work with some extremely hard-working Ugandan teachers – possibly I caught the ‘Pearls’. However I can say that this certainly rings true with many employees we encounter in the field, just part of the mix of everyday challenges 🙂

If you want to read the full article click here

There are two things that made my day today. This first is this message below from Katie, one of the two incredible Peace Corps volunteers working with me. The second is that I taught today at the local Primary Teacher’s College and when I arrived I found a student teacher cutting up cardboard boxes to make his own set of flashcard resources. For the message below: EGRA means Early Grade Reading Assessment, it’s a reading test we are conducting in 20 government schools in Gulu. We do it at the end of each term. Today Katie was in a new control school (school we are not working with yet) with Caroline (a local teacher who is now working with us – she was a star phonics/reading teacher in her former school at Layibi P7 Primary School).