Go Getta-Young Jeezy

Thursday, June 16:

Pastor Francis and his "assistants"

For the next week, our group will break up into smaller groups of 3-5 to work on immersion projects with local partner organizations.  There is a group working with special needs kids, a group working with a women’s organization in a community library, and my group working with a local community organizer named Pastor Francis.

Pastor Francis is a Ugandan mover and shaker, but his passion lies with with the people in the slums of Lugazi and he lives and works there on various projects.  He hosts a school for children of the slums in grades preK-Primary 6.  They are not a sanctioned boarding school but are experimenting with boarding some students whose parents cannot take care of them due to work or health, so about twelve students are living at the school

In the evenings, he offers a wide range of classes that support community development goals as part of what he calls the Canaan School of Project Management and Development.  One of his more popular classes is project management but he also offers counseling classes, HIV prevention, nutrition and hygiene, family and marriage counseling, and many more.

The conditions of the school and boarding rooms were pretty striking.  Four students stay in one room and eight small children stay in another with one older student and a care taker. 

There was a classroom for each grade level P1-P6.  The class sizes ranged from 10-25.  The school recently lost about 25% of its students because two other local schools got more sponsorships and were able to allow more students to attend on scholarship.  The school systems here are very interesting and hard to figure out.  There are public and private schools and all schools cost something, although the price ranges vary greatly.  Pastor Francis told us it costs about 150,000 shillings (about $50) for a student for a term.  However, he only charges parents what they can pay and tries to get sponsorships and donations to cover the rest of the costs.  Some parents pay as little as 20,000 shillings (about $6.50).

There are three terms each year that last about 2-3 months each and they have a two month break in December and January.

Most of the schools teach in a pretty traditional way with students copying down notes from the board.  Pastor Francis encourages more interactive teaching styles, which is pretty unusual for the area.  However, there is still a lot of copying a daily exercise from the board. 

Although the national language Is English, Lugandan is still the unofficial and most commonly spoken language.  It is prestigious to send your students to a school where all instruction is in English.  However, what we have observed is that often students just copy what is written in English without really understanding what it means. 

Pastor Francis asked us to observe some classes to get a sense of the teaching style so we could provide some instructional tips.  It was fun to see the students’ enthusiasm as every student in class would raise their hand to answer a question.  Our group divided up and each of us visited different classes.  I observed the pre-school and P1 classes and listened to the students sing some songs and work on their numbers and counting.    Each student has an exercise book in which they write down the daily lesson.  The teacher corrects these at night and sometimes writes in each book (by hand for each student!) a kind of work sheet type thing for students to complete.  As students are working there is typically one pen or pencil for every three students.  In the pre-school class, the students were so distracted by having a white person in their class that they just swarmed me and the teacher could hardly get anything accomplished.

At one o’clock it was lunch time and we played with many of the students on the playground before having a lunch that Pastor Francis’ wife had made for us.  We had cooked bananas with ground nut stew, pumpkin, a green vegetable called bugga, and pineapple.  While we were having lunch, Pastor Francis told Michael that “real men finish food.” And served up an entire second plate of food-it was pretty funny.

We made plans for the following day-when Pastor Francis wanted us to teach the class.  Then we toured more of the grounds.  Pastor Francis has been working on a vision to mix compostable garbage into the soil to create more fertile garden areas and then grow vegetables for the community.   He had a plot of pumpkins right now and was hoping we could help sort garbage and bury compost in another area the following day.

The rest of our group arrived and quickly toured the facility.  Then we all headed off to visit some of the microenterprises Pastor Francis has sponsored.  We first visited a man who grinds millet.  He sells millet at a roadside shop and has also expanded to sell to some local grocery stores.  What often happens in Uganda is that one person starts a business that is successful so others follow suit and set up the exact same business in hopes of making money as well when they are, in fact, creating competition for each other.  Pastor Francis tries to teach his project development students to come up with new ideas that meet a community need in order to create their own niche which this millet grinder has done.

buying some millet

To get to the next microenterprise, we walked through the slums of Lugazi.  As we walked, every child came running and waving shouting “Muzungu”.  Many just wanted to touch our skin and many would grab a hand or an arm and walk along with us.  It was like a processional of white people and an interesting experience.

 

The final microenterprise we stopped at was a husband and wife who are bagging yogurt for sale.  They began as a small roadside shop and are now selling from a location on the main road where they also wholesale to grocery stores and other shops and also sell juice and drinkable water in small bags.

Products for sale at a roadside shop

We loaded into our van and drove back to Mukono where we had dinner and a debriefing meeting.  It was so interesting to hear about all of the different projects people are working on during our stay.