The stifling morning air churns with excitement, energy and the sweet smell of homemade hooch. The road is coated with drunken pilgrims seeking refuge, dancing and chaos inside the gates. A sea of blue and green monitors the scene ready with cattle-herder’s sticks and AK-47s to beat any civil unrest – which might be detrimental to the elite minority -into the muddy dust at our feet.
Filed under Observations
There’s a strong and unmistakable feeling of pride that one gains as a teacher. The feeling when you teach a student a new concept and watch them apply it. It’s truly wonderful and one of the greatest perks of the job. However, with training teachers, I experienced something even greater. The feeling when you teach a teacher a new concept and watch them apply it. You can then watch the students become more engaged in the lesson and learn more. It is a truly rewarding experience and one that I find incomparable.
Filed under Observations
The nineteen year old headmaster – with a second level qualification – leads me to our shelter from the morning sun. We sit in the shade of a pine tree, around a locally-produced wooden table and chairs. I am warmly greeted by the other members of staff, a man in his late-teens and an eighteen year old mother nursing her baby boy, as I take a sit at the rather delicately-placed table. The school – a cobbled concoction of mud, concrete and bricks – sits almost apologetically beside some eavesdropping cows and goats. This was my first experience of being a ‘teacher-trainer’ last week.
Filed under Observations
I am, and have always been, a staunch atheist with a respect and fascination with religion but a firm belief that it shouldn’t be aggressively re-enforced or alluded to, publicly. Personal experience has dictated that people who vocalize their beliefs are the same people that disregard those of others. Further being raised in the semi-rural Ireland of the 1990’s, I had a Catholic-immersed childhood. The most positive result of which having ample imagination-developing time at Mass each week. However, peculiarly I don’t find the reality of religion seeping into every facet of life in Uganda as abhorrent as I thought I would.
Filed under Observations
Scribblings and Broken Glass 