Dan and Jodes… in Gulu, Uganda

Today our friends in Gulu threw us a beautiful ‘Welcome Myron: Once Upon a Time’ party. We had so much fun! We are tremendously blessed to have a lovely community of ex-pats here in Gulu – they threw us this party in our own home 🙂 Book-character dress-up theme, can you guess which characters we dressed as? Only took a few pics, but here’s a taster of a lovely day to mark his arrival with us.

We (Jody) decided to extend our family again this week – today welcoming this little beauty into our home (still to be named). She is certainly a hit with our regular neighbourhood visitors. I quite liked when I caught them reading outside so thought I would take a sneaky snap, however this soon turned into a serious photoshoot!

We can assure you that the photoshoot below was composed completely by our young visitors (and this is just a small sample of the snaps taken, and a small sample of the ones in-focus).

I went to town with one of my regular boda drivers to get a few things. We stopped for paraffin (kerosene), and bought an old plastic bottle from outside a petrol station. I only had to go a few metres back into the petrol station to fill it. I said to my boda driver: “shall I just walk and I will meet you there?” He replied: “You sit. This is a busy road. What happens if someone knocks you and not me, Daniel will not be happy. But if someone knocks both of us together, then that is ok.”

I caught one of my regular boda drivers to town this afternoon. He is the ‘vice captain’ of our local boda stage. We turned the corner, went past his stage, and observed one other boda driver sitting on a motorbike waiting for a customer. My driver then proceeded to go extremely slow, and was looking around. He told me a little later that the driver we passed at the stage was suspended from driving and he was looking for another member to go and confiscate his bike. Why was he suspended I asked. His answer: for drinking, not bathing and not brushing his teeth. Fair enough really 🙂

We put down our pens, pencils and books yesterday and picked up buttons, needles and thread to make sock puppets. Thanks to the guidance of lovely Rosalind from The East African Missionary Society (our special guest instructor) about 30 early reading primary teachers and nursery head teachers spent the afternoon making a new learning resource. We had a lot of fun and the teachers were excited that they could take their sock puppets back to school with them. One expat teacher sent me this very beautiful message this morning: ‘Denish came back all smiles, ready to show me his puppet and all the ways to use it! Thank you so much!!!!’

Excited that these teachers will have an engaging resource to use. Looking forward to seeing some interesting puppets in use during future school visits.

Last Tuesday, October 25, became a landmark day in our lives: the day our family grew. We are super stoked to announce that we are now the foster parents to little Myron Kimara. To some of you this may be a huge shock and (hopefully) a pleasant surprise; to others you may know we have been in this process for over a year now and will share our excitement to be finally here! Nothing ever happens as you anticipate it though. We had become guarded, accepted how long (and slow) things take, so were caught off guard when we were given five days notice of Myron’s arrival.

Myron is about two years old and has a huge amount of energy! His last home was St Jude’s Children’s Home, which is just around the corner from us, so he hasn’t moved very far. We are learning a lot on this journey together and have jumped into the deep end of ‘parenthood’. We are so blessed with how quickly it seems Myron is settling in and bonding with us. We are truly thankful to the awesome community in Gulu around us who have been so incredibly supportive and encouraging to us (particularly to the fantastic cooking team who have delivered us home cooked meals and the faithful servant Dr Nick who has made two house-calls so far); thankful to our dear friends from afar who have prayed for us, loved us, counselled us, and been on the other end of whatsapp for on-call advice; thankful to Myron who at the moment is of course the brightest, funniest, cheekiest, cutest little toddler we have ever seen; and of course thankful to God for making all things possible and for giving us the opportunity to give Myron a loving (yet somewhat crazy) home. He hasn’t got a good an Aussie accent yet, but give us time. And we thought maybe this week was too early to teach him how to read – maybe next week…

With much love,

Dan, Jodes and Myron

Yesterday I learnt there is a private boarding primary school in Gulu where the children in P7 (year 6) get three hours sleep at night. They wake at 4am and begin lessons at 5am (I spoke to one of the teachers who taught from 5am). They have three practice exam papers a week which begin at 10.30pm. These exam papers often go for about two hours. Then the children can expect to get to sleep by 1am. That, to me, is a form of child abuse (or more aptly, torture). This is a relatively new private school and this is their first P7 class to sit for national exams. There is enormous pressure for this school to perform well… but torturing them to get there?

‘Teacher Jody is ever disturbing us. She wants us to do a lot more work and she is not giving us any motivation to do it”.

That was a comment from a local primary school teacher to her head teacher – a little complaint about me. Now let me explain what the word ‘motivation’ means in that sentence – it means I am not giving her money to teach.

Context: This comment came from a teacher in one of the worst government schools in Gulu. Her children are about 8 years old and they can barely read. Results at this school are pretty shocking.

These comments came from a government-employed teacher. Each month her salary gets paid into her bank account. The teacher also decided not to teach ‘extra lessons’ because she hadn’t been paid for teaching extra lessons last term. Extra lessons began years ago as ‘remedial lessons’ (lessons that are earlier and later than the government timetable) to help children catch up on any missed learning. These days I have been trying to encourage teachers to teach specific reading skills during these extra lessons because it can be difficult to find time to do this during other lesson time – and all schools have them!

Since the term began, this teacher has not taught any reading lessons.

I’m not giving up though. I am still going to ‘disturb’ this teacher. After all, she is there for the children (apparently so, however I have never heard her mention the word children when she talks to me).

Fortunately this teacher is not the ‘norm’. However I couldn’t have you all thinking that life was all roses…

I found out this week that the ‘tooth fairy’ also exists in Acholi culture here in northern Uganda. Well, not quite a fairy, more of a ‘tooth rat’. When a child loses a tooth they are instructed to put it under the pot for drinking water for the rat. In the morning they will find that the rat has taken the tooth and put a coin under the pot for them. The jury is still out on what exactly the rat does with all the teeth, but this is the cultural story. Interesting…