Starting with the boys in their donated football strips and the girls playing netball in their new kit – thanks to all the donors who made this possible.
The water engineer who met Chris to undertake the site survey for the water collection project expressed concern that a number of the children were barefoot – all the sponsored children have shoes although they don’t always seem to wear them… He was concerned that there is a risk of them contracting jiggers – a very nasty infection. Whilst concreting the school floor would help the best solution is wearing shoes which would protect them everywhere they go. We will look at buying 200 pairs of sandals – which will cost around £250 – initially.
The good news is that the water collection project is moving forward – although the bad news is that with water levels very low only one borehole is working and people are collecting water from the river again. Hopefully the new project will ameliorate this issue and we will also repair one pump in due course – it will cost another £1,700 which wasn’t in our budget for 2019 – but this would be for stainless steel pipework which should last longer than the galvanised metal used previously.
Whilst in Uganda Chris took three people who are interested in helping 3H with their work in Kyemula to visit Kyemula. Pictured left to right are: Diana Musenya, Milton Makambila, Jackie School headteacher,Timothy Munialo, Sylvia Mutonyi and Martha Wagar Wright.
Diana is the Scholarship Co-ordinator at Livingstone International University supporting and enabling the students to make the most of their time at university. She is taking the lead introducing menstrual cups to the older girls so that they do not have to miss school during their periods. Whilst the initial cost of the cups is quite high they last up to three years and are very discreet. We have some funds towards this thanks to one of our sponsors who gave Chris some funds for unexpected problems he encountered on his trip – this was not one he had anticipated!
Sylvia will be graduating from LIU this summer having studied Business Administration and Accountancy – she is going to undertake some monitoring for 3H. Sylvia’s first project will be to analyse the Jackie School budget with Timothy Munialo, hoping to increase sustainability
Martha is a lecturer at LIU and has kindly offered to look at how we might improve the learning outcomes for the pupils. We plan to start by introducing a reading scheme based on phonics locally produced by the charity ‘READ for life’ in Gulu, Northern Uganda which should help children gain fluency in reading. Martha is also looking at developing some training for the teachers to support them using the new materials. Subsequently Martha thinks it would be useful to introduce some text books for each of the main subjects - English, Maths, Science and Social Studies, which includes geography, history and religious studies. The cost of this would be substantial – if we bought just 15 books in the 4 subjects for each of the 7 classes it would amount to around £1,250 – an amount we have not budgeted for but would like to spend. Maybe we can find some schools in the UK who would be interested in raising funds for this?