Back to work again school visits

September 17, 2018

Back to work again school visits

Sorry another long blog...

Our final community activities were to visit two schools - one for the 'normal' children and the other for children with disability and trauma.

We went to the first school with a man from the Great Apes Film Initiative where they talk to the children about respecting the gorillas and chimps and conservation aspects of their homes and surroundings. It is a great to get the kids learning all of this as they are the future, we cannot change the attitudes of many of the adults so we have to start young. We were told as it is not school term yet not to expect many children so when we arrived and 250 of them were there it was a bit of a shock.

This was a bit daunting....

Improvised learning as the dvd was so shaken up from the journey it didn't work

The school holds 753 pupils and there are between 75 and 103 to a class..... The next photo shows what a class room looks like (without the bench desks, see photo above of the benches). The school is only 2.5 km from the DRC and when the fighting gets more intense they have to close the school as they fear for the children's lives as they are sitting ducks in the school. They also have to lock all the furniture and anything that isn't fixed down as these could be stolen or set alight in the fighting. We took books, pencils, pencil sharpeners and chalk for the teachers, but nowhere near enough to cover the whole school. But to buy one book for each pupil only costs £70..... We spoke to the headmaster to ask how much to run the school for a year (without building maintenance) and it is £1,900, they get £1,100 from the government so you can see why the school is in such a state. These kids don't stand a chance......

After the talks on the apes we were given 'friends' to help us plant indigenous trees in the school to help the environment and keep reinforcing that they can live outside the national parks and still survive.

The next day we went to a special needs school. ‘Special needs’ in Uganda are spectrum of deafness and blindness, autism and trauma children i.e. kids that have suffer abuse of some sort in their lives. The majority of the kids are deaf or blind. The headmaster told us that the families in Uganda see having a disabled child as a curse and often will stop the children entering the house as they are cursed so that they live outside with the animals. These children are boarders at the school as their families don’t want them back. The children are in a school with other 'normal' children and this school has 97 disabled kids out of 653.

The picture below shows one of the dorms that the boarders live in, there are so many disabled kids in the school now they are sleeping two to a bed as the school will not turn away a child that they find in the villages being treated as outcasts.

The trauma kids are kids that are either abused by their families or as in the case of the boy below that their mother had been caught stealing the other villagers' food so they burnt the kids as punishment to the family - what monsters would do that? The scarring that you can see on his face is mild compared to the injuries to the sides and back of his head that's why he wears the hood when out. We saw the full extent of the injuries before we left the school, it broke my heart.

We took the disabled kids, along with 46 able bodied, trying to get normal kids used to interacting with them so they will learn that this is normal life, to one of the national parks where there is wildlife. The cool dude below did a thank you speech to us for coming with him and his friends and helping them enjoy the national park.