7 weeks and counting……

Seven weeks and counting until Christmas and along with most nurseries and primary schools, ‘preparations’ have started in the Nursery. But while most nurseries and schools in the UK are knee-deep in toilet roll middles, cotton wool, green tissue paper and glitter, no such creative activities are planned for the Namuwongo children!

However Mary, the teacher of the younger children, is planning a Nativity play and the children are being informally auditioned on their ability to say, ‘Mary, Mary, Mary, you are going to have a baby!’ and other traditional lines. They are learning Christmas songs – I am teaching them ‘Little donkey’. We learnt the first verse today and in the absence of the usual coconut shells to simulate the clopping of the donkey’s hooves, I used two wooden blocks and then the children clapped their hands! They will also be singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, so Rita and I are making 50 stars which we will put on unsharpened pencils (H&S – we don’t want any eyes poked out!) so they can have one in each hand and wave them about. Limited resources mean we will have to use the cardboard covers of colouring books covered in cooking foil (thanks, Mark!) now we have used all the silver card we could find. Hopefully dark blue card with silver and gold stars on will look suitably impressive and add to the general over-all effect! Finding and/or making suitable costumes is next week’s challenge!

Dawn, a volunteer from London, who is here for a year to do music at the slum school, is busy forming a choir and teaching them Christmas songs. Today her class were washing, hammering flat and then making holes in bottle tops ready to make tambourines. She is also making shakers in the tried-and-tested way of rice in plastic water bottles. I suggested she bring the choir to perform for the Nursery children. I’m just sad I won’t be here to see it all! Hopefully someone will take some photos and e-mail them to me.

As the roof is in place and the inside is painted in white gloss – I guess it could now legitimately be called a library and not a container! The whole area where the library is will be roofed over so that the latrines and potties will be undercover and guttering will take the water, that up-to-now has dripped off the roof and made its way in to Mary’s teaching room, to the drain.

Rita is our librarian and started work on Nov 1st doing the Saturday reading club when I was away in Murchison. She has a degree in Social Work, but hasn’t been able to get a job in that field, but I’m sure, along with everyone else, she will get involved with the wider community. Rita will be involved with the Saturday reading club as well as the library, but at the moment, she is helping me with Christmas stars and costumes etc. Today she came to the slum school and, although appalled by the general state of the place, enjoyed the experience of working with the children. Melissa was back as well, so there were three of us and we had more time with the children. I had written lots of words from the L1 books on pieces of card and the children were using them to make sentence, which was a bit of a challenge for some of them.

I need to initiate Rita into the vagaries of my book cataloguing system when we get time, electric and a computer all at the same time. Library books are now bar-coded and the whole system is computerised, but I needed to revert to the old-fashioned system of library cards (which can only be bought from one supplier – and I only found them with the help of Nicky, a great College librarian!), and a date stamp etc. I brought the database out with me and a sample book and since I’ve been here I have bought some books produced in Uganda about HIV/AIDS prevention for the library, which will need cataloguing.

Everyone I saw on Wednesday had a big smile on their face following the Obama win! In the guest house we all had breakfast in front of the TV and watched the news at 7.00am and saw the result declared. I saw McCain’s speech but missed Obama’s as I had to go to work. An interesting comment in the paper stated that a satirical newspaper in the US, The Onion, had the headline ‘Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job!’ They’ve probably got a point considering the high hopes Africa and especially Kenya has for the impact he will have on the continent. You get a very different perspective when you read the Daily Nation, an East African paper published in Nairobi.

Well it’s reading club again tomorrow and then on Sunday evening some of us volunteers are going to have a meal and see a show of traditional dancing and drumming. It’s an outside venue, so we’ll have to apply lots of eau de Deet and wear long socks under our dresses – very glam!

I understand it’s been quite cold in UK – so just to cheer you, it’s quite chilly here in a morning, I need to wear a cardigan when having breakfast on the veranda!!