My Week With Madungu Primary School

• Paul_dulais's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Sigomere

Trip Start Apr 27, 2009 Previous
Entry Trip End Aug 25, 2009 Next
Entry

  Sigomere, Nyanza, Kenya
Friday, June 26, 2009

I left Uganda on Sunday morning to join a group from Swansea College at Madungu Primary School in Nyanza Province, Kenya. The Swansea College Kenya Project is a scheme that I helped to set up in 2003 that sponsors the primary school in a number of ways. It was my first chance to see the school and witness how the project worked on the ground so I was really excited. The journey to the school was a pretty long bus ride but I slept through most of it thanks to my night out with the Dutch boys I had met in Bunyonyi!

I actually arrived in Sigomere before the Swansea College lot so wandered about a bit before being found by one of the local teachers and taken to the local compound where we were to stay. Everyone else turned up fairly quickly though and it was a fairly chaotic evening.

We all went up to the school on Monday where we were greeted by 700 excited children who were obviously delighted by our visit. It took quite a while just to get into the school as were were mobbed for photo opportunities continually. After meeting with the new head teacher we were greeted by the school with a fairly formal ceremony with national anthems and flag raising. The morning was taken up with presentations of equipment and musical instruments that had been brought to the school by the college. In the afternoon we had the chance to play some sports - we got humiliated by their football team 3-0, who have become the best primary team in the area. We got our own back a bit in a very disorderly game of rugby that was incredibly enthusiastically met!

On Tuesday I visited two local secondary schools that have some pupils who are sponsored by the SCKP. Secondary education is still fee-paying so individual sponsors have been found by the project to help some children with the fees. The first school we visited was just a local secondary with very basic facilities available. Classrooms were fairly bare and the school lacked equipment. That said, some children (only a few) do manage to progress to university from there. The second school was a provincial school that is both expensive and demanding of a strong academic performance in primary. The difference in standards was utterly staggering. The school had a well equipped library, science laboratories and two brand new computer labs. There were sports teams for football, hockey, rugby, basketball and more and the teams travel extensively to play. The school wouldn't have looked out of place in the UK...

I fell sick on Wednesday with a bug that is passing through the group. It seems fairly typical that I've been away for two months with no problems and then I meet up with people from back home and catch a bug! I spent the day being ill and recuperating but it was only a 24 hour type bug so nothing too serious.

I was back at the school on Thursday helping to decorate some of the schools and even tried my hand at teaching some science to primary four in the afternoon. Its a pretty difficult task because standards vary wildly withing each class, you have 70 pupils to deal with and in my instance, there was a little girl called Prisca who desperately wanted to impress me so wanted to answer every question. When i asked someone else for an answer she would sit there clicking her fingers trying to get my attention! We had a big meeting int he late afternoon to decide on the path of the Kenya Project from now. Its not really any of my business any more but I sat in and contributed where I could. A lot of emphasis is being placed on trying to find a way to make the school somehow sustainable in the future, particularly in terms of the feeding program that has been established that provides 150 vulnerable children with lunch each day.

Friday was a very hectic day with rushes to finish the decorating and more presentations. Pupils from Madungu Secondary came to perform a dance they are learning and the primary gave a demonstration of what they had learned with the musical instruments. We had a big meal at the house in the evening with teachers and a number of the sponsored secondary teachers which was a really good way to finish the week. We are all sticking around for the next two days but its essentially free time so we'll get out around the area a bit.

Share

Previous Entry Next Entry