Backwards Design Part 1

Or, Ugandan Education (un)-Explained

We have now spent a four days at Pope Paul IV Secondary School Anaka, an hour and twenty minute drive from Gulu on roads that are less developed than most mountain bike trails. (Think Rock Garden, Seven Springs riders.)

We are staying at the St. Francis Parish (Invisible Children is not a religious organization, but the rooms for rent at the parish are the nicest (and safest) in Anaka. Fathers Martin and Leoncio – two younger Acoli priests – live here as well, and two fantastic women, Grace and Maureen, cook our dinner and breakfast and do our laundry. We are spoiled here. The showers are cold, but the water is reliable and we have yet to run out. The entire parish is run on solar power, so we are usually good with electricity until we go to bed, though sometimes in the morning we have to get dressed by headlamp because we’re out of juice. The four of us girls (Sarah, Morgan, Kellie and I) share a room and Eric, the token dude, has a room to himself. If we weren’t living in God’s house, one or two of us would certainly have invaded his man-cave to give everyone a little more space. We also have our own sitting room with lots of space to sit and relax on doily-ed couches and chairs. Seriously. I haven’t seen so many doilies since Great Great Aunt Mildred’s house. And they come in MATCHING SETS and CHANGE on a regular basis. The early part of the week was mint green; today we’re white with embroidered red flowers. It’s snazzy. The sitting room has become our haven in the evenings – we’ve played Uno, hung out with Father Martin, watched a movie and several episodes of The Office, and generally just escaped into American Land for an hour or two every night. I’ve traveled quite a bit in my life, but this is the first trip where I’ve had this serious of a longing for my own culture.

Understandable, looking back at the events of the first week.

Monday, July 6, 2009

We arrived at the school on Monday morning after dropping our bags at the parish. At the school, we met with Sampson, the deputy head teacher. Nancy, Kellie’s Ugandan partner teacher, was the only teacher at school when we arrived, and would prove to be the only teacher to show up on our first day at all, despite their excitement at the weekend conference regarding our upcoming arrival. Sampson gave us a tour of the school and talked to us for a while in his office (a partitioned room with a desk and three small wooden chairs) about the structure of the educational system and the hierarchy of the school administration. Heirarchies and going through proper channels here seems to be very culturally important, though it seems that anything that needs to be accomplished gets clogged in one of these channels and never gets done. We said goodbye to Catherine – it was like saying goodbye to mom on the first day of kindergarden – and were directed into the staff room to have lunch and “wait for our teachers.” On the schedule for 12:30, we didn’t have food in front of us until 2:15. Lunch, to be blunt, is going to get old. Every day we have posho, a heavy, bland rice-like substance with play-doh consistency, and cabbage. Once a week we have beans in addition, and another day we have some type of meat, but posho and cabbage are a staple. (I just asked Eric to describe posho. His response: “That stuff is white death… every time I see it, I think for a minute that it’s mashed potatoes and I get excited, then son of a bitch, it’s posho… Ugh… freaking posho.”)

The staff room is crammed with unpacked boxes of books from February’s move back to Anaka from its displaced site in Gulu, and gets stuffy and hot, so we took our things outside after lunch and sat under a tree. We ended up talking to a handful of students throughout the afternoon who were brave enough to sit down with us. The rest just locked on their stares, or whispered “munp, muno” (white, white) with wide eyes – this village is clearly not a hot vacation spot for westerners. Generally, though, if you smile back or throw out a “afoyo” (hello/thank you used interchangeably) you can at least get a shy smile before they scamper off. That evening before dinner, after giving up on our teaching partners, we thought we would give our Frisbee it’s first introduction to Anaka. We walked to the football field (large dusty patch of grass) by the primary school and started tossing it around. Pretty soon we had a crowd of about 50-60 kids, some brave enough to try tossing the disc around, and some content to stay back and observe. A crowd of primary girls who speak very little English surrounded me and we practiced asking each other for names. I taught them to “high-five” and they giggled uncontrollably. If this teaching thing doesn’t work out, I’ll try the comedy circuit in remote African villages. We were pretty disappointed about the absence of our teachers, and felt that they were not demonstrating their investment in the program, though we are thinking now that this is more of a cultural issue than a personal one. The interaction with the children lifted our spirits some. Today raised the question (that I’m getting the feeling we will struggle with for the whole of this trip) of why we are here and what we are hoping to accomplish. This night, if nothing else, we let a group of kids from a country in need of outside help, know that there are people who know they are here, and who care.