2012 | seroma

Nsula Ku Uganda, 2012

After a sixteen hour journey we landed at Entebbe Airport and were driven to our night quarters two hours away near Mukono – 30° C, 1200 metres above sea level, near the White Nile.

Welcome to Gilgal

The welcome commitee was waiting – 523 children, 15 teachers, two cooks, two matrons, the guard, a local member of parliament, village elders and village people. Drumers, dancers, laughter and singing accompany us down the path to the school entrance. Four sponsors are with us. We are here to photograph and check on all our new projects and have meetings with the school commitee and the teachers. The school is attractively laid out with bushes, hedges, trees for shade and well swept paths. Toilets and showers are clean and tidy, the buildings freshly painted after the last rains and the new nursery block is decorated with numbers and lettering, and pictures of fruit and animals.

There is a long waiting list for a place in the primary school, but our capacity is ideally 500 children. Education is the best form of development aid. Industrially successful countries should aim at supporting and developing such projects, which must be run by citizens of the country. We only employ Ugandans. We pay the usual teachers’ salaries and always have good teachers because we pay punctually and we are known to be reliable partners. The results of the last national examinations were very encouraging. Gilgal Primary School is now one of the six best in the Kayunga region. We are proud of the progress made in the Gilgal Primary School. That’s a long way from the poor school we visited eight years ago with a few teachers, 220 children and a handful of schoolbooks. This change was made possible not only thanks to our capable teachers, but also to the regular support of our Swiss sponsors. We know that not one franc has been misappropriated or wrongly invested.

The largest project in the last 12 months was the new nursery school for four to six year old children. Holzpunkt.ch in Wila, Switzerland sponsored this building. The second big project was guttering. All the school buildings have been fitted with guttering and there are now seven watertanks with a combined capacity of 70000 litres of rain water. Ground water is used for drinking purposes and rain water for showering, washing clothes, cooking and watering the school vegetable garden. The farm is doing well. We have pineapples as our cash crop. What is not needed for school meals is sold on the market. The profit is used to buy beds, mattresses, mosquito nets etc. We are determined to use only organic fertilizer and manure.

Buildings and fittings suffer under the extrems of the tropical climate. Repairs and renovation work have been completed and the school is clean, well kept and tidy. Trees and bushes provide shade, the hedges and flowers add a touch of colour, and elephant gras on raised beds helps to keep the red earth out of the classrooms during the rainy season. Simple methods can be used to make the suroundings attractive. Villagers rebuilt and extended the school kitchen in hours of voluntary labour. They made and formed the bricks themselves and enlarged the original construction adding to the roof and groundplan. Their interest and commitment kept the costs to a minimum.

The future education of Gilgal’s children is always in our thoughts. An inquiry in Uganda in 2011 showed that parents with basic schooling had only two or three children in comparison to illiterate adults with an average of eight births. Uganda is a beautiful, fertile country, but suffering from overpopulation – the population increases by one million a year. Literacy programs and schooling can help to reduce this tendancy. Uganda needs competent tradesmen. We have contacted a vocational school, Vision for Africa, where we want to place some of our older pupils after secondary school. In addition we are organising stipends for pupils who go to Seroma Christian High School.

Unlike other African countries nobody in Uganda speaks of emigrating. They want to make a living in their own country. Strong family ties and family support mean more than a few extra dollars elsewhere. After eight years work in Gilgal Primary School we are convinced that our Swiss-Ugandan concept has proved itself. It is a joy to see the bright, interested children in class.

Our last day in Uganda consisted of meetings from early morning till evening. We and our sponsors measured buildings, checked all the electrical equipment and considered how to extend the headmistress’ quarters. There were questions concerning the practical side of the solar energy project: Was the main roof strong enough for twelve large panels? Could it take the weight of a person responsible for maintenance? Can the batteries be stored in a cool place? The panels should be set at an angle of 10° on the Equator. Do we need a special construction?

We decided to buy a plot of land directly next to the school. There are five advantages:

We can build the sick bay we have long wanted and separate the children with infections from the rest of the school.
The headmistress’ quarters can be enlarged giving space for her and her four children.
We can build several single rooms for teachers who are still sharing.
We would have a safe room for schoolbooks and school material, using it also as a kind of library.
The unhygenic open toilet on this plot can be removed.

Before leaving we bought a collection of necklaces, bracelets and earrings made by local people who sell them in order to pay their children’s school fees in other schools. These will be offered for sale in Switzerland and the profit will be used to support the orphans and half-orphans in Gilgal.

The Chinese, Indians, and many firms, involved in high finance carry out development aid for their own benefit. That’s a new kind of colonialism where profits are often shared with the ruling classes. Young, educated and ambitious Africans rightly oppose this kind of corruption. Good development aid is interested in solving problems not in enriching a privileged few.

We are enthusiastic about our work in Uganda. It is versatile and we learn a lot. For each one of us the centre of our interest is the place where we live. It is a privilege to get to know a new culture, a different mentality, and to participate in other people’s hopes and expectations.

Maureen und Peter Schnyder