Our first day at Ngaara
What a welcome!
We had waited SO long to visit Ngaara Primary School, and finally the day arrived. The school is about a 25 minute drive from the convent where we are staying. It’s a long dirt track up to the school gates, where you pass many little dwellings and businesses along the way. It’s an extremely disadvantaged area, and there are many kids hanging around who don’t even go to school.
We’ll never forget when we turned to enter through the school gate and saw the entire school standing around in the yard waiting for us. So many little smiling faces, the poor things forced to be out in the sun waiting for the pink Bazungus. We jumped out of the truck into the welcoming arms of Josephine, the head mistress, who we’ve been in contact with for a while. The children started to sing a song that they sing to welcome visitors to their school, and it wasn’t long before some of the pupils had us awkwardly dancing along to the singing and clapping. It was SUPER overwhelming, and I don’t think any welcome could ever beat it.
The goal of our first day at Ngaara was to introduce ourselves to everyone (the head mistress, the teachers, the kitchen staff, and to the children), and to get a tour of the school grounds. We wanted to come away with a good feel for how things work there, who is who, explain our plans, and figure out who needs to be involved in the food program. We were super impressed about how well the school is taken care of. The staff keep it extremely neat and tidy, and the chairman always ensures the courtyard is well kept. It is obvious that the staff working there really value the school and make the effort to keep it as pleasant an environment as possible for the kids. The children also seemed to be extremely happy there, and were so proud showing us their work or their drawings & crafts.
Teacher Wellen made a great impression. He’s very friendly, forthcoming, professional and extremely passionate. Wellen just finished his “teacher upgrade” diploma with a distinction, and his goal is to have completed a bachelor and a masters by the time he’s 40 (he’s now 32). That’s a goal of someone who had to work to pay for himself to go to primary school - pretty impressive. However, to achieve his goal he would need good computer skills. So Dominik will be spending time with Wellen teaching him computer skills on a tablet that Wellen received from a lady in Ireland. We could absolutely imagine Wellen being a headmaster at a school someday!
It was great to get to know headmistress Josephine who is a lively young lady and has her own children at the school. Josephine is very supportive of our plans to improve the food program at the school and we explained to her that we would be registering a charity, building a website, and looking for regular donors. Dorothy the secretary of the school will be the one to do some book keeping for the food program. We will be introducing a simple accounting system and creating templates for Dorothy to record their food expenses in. We also met John, the engineer and chairman of the parents committee.
We ate lunch with the staff and the parish priest in one of the classrooms. The school doesn’t have a lunch hall, so the children and staff tend to eat in their classrooms or in the courtyard. Of course they pulled out all the stops while we were there, and threw on the tablecloth. We briefly got to see the process of how lunch for the children is prepared and dished out - we will focus on that during the next visit. They start with the youngest kiddos, and the the oldest get fed last. It was so cute to see how the older ones look after the little ones, helping them wash their hands before eating and showing them how to queue up for food. After lunch we attended a mass in the church beside the school. The church has a tin roof, and felt like the closest thing to being inside an oven I have ever experienced. We sweated our way through 2.5h of mass, singing, preaching, and endless speeches. One thing’s for certain sure - the Ugandans live for a speech and they do not know when to stop. At least the singing was good craic.
After cooking in the church shaped tin can, it was home time for the kids, and it was also time for us to leave Ngaara for the day. But we didn’t leave without many impressions stuck in our heads, including one particular song… The kids must have sang it a hundred times during the day, it was so funny and went like this - “mister Dominik you are so cute, you are so nice, you are so clever. A cake, a soda, for youuuuuu!”
