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School in a very Remote Outpost

IT WAS still dark when my alarm went off in the morning. I was quite stiff from having slept in such a lumpy bed and I was reluctant to get up because it was quite cold outside, being perhaps seven or eight degrees.

I finally motivated myself to get up and turn on the light. I looked outside through the bathroom and saw the sky was beginning to get light somewhere above the foliage. I got dressed in time for breakfast. By now it was getting light. I was the first to arrive as usual, but Sandra (a lady in my group in her early 50s from Canada) arrived shortly afterwards. Our tour leader and driver Travis and Jeremiah showed up a few minutes later, followed by the boys - two best friends from Amsterdam travelling on a gap year. The six of us had met in Kampala and travelled across Uganda together.

Emma arrived taking our orders for breakfast. Essentially it was eggs (the choices were fried, scrambled, or omelette) with toast. I ordered scrambled eggs with toast, assuming it would be one piece of toast under scrambled eggs. He returned a short time later giving us a plate each of banana, pawpaw and pineapple.

Finally my scrambled eggs on toast arrived, and then he produced another plate with two pieces of toast on it. The top piece was a regular size, but the bottom one was a good three centimetres thick. I seriously wasn’t hungry, so I offered my spare pieces of toast to the others. I think someone took them – one of the boys no doubt.

Once breakfast was finished, we collected our gear for the day. I made sure my washing was hanging outside under the awning to ensure it was going to be dry by the time I get back.

I met Sandra back at the dining room, and the boys came shortly afterwards. Travis arrived and led us out to the front of the lodge to where several other people were waiting. Our guide for the day arrived. Peter was very short and for a while I thought he may be a pygmy. He was wearing a chequered blue and white shirt with a denim jacket on top, and long cream trousers, and running shoes. He had a long triangular face and was carrying a book “birds of Africa”. Peter was quite well presented definitely looking the part as a tour guide.

He led us walking through the small village, consisting of a few shops along one stretch of gravel road, once more reminding us that we were in a very remote area. The lodge had its own generator and one or two of the other shops may have had their own generators as well, but otherwise there was no electricity in this village. We passed one shop which seemed to be the general store, called “Monday and Sons Shopping Centre”. It was little more than a corner store. I imagined the owner of the store was perhaps born on a Monday.

Further along the road in the direction from where we had come from yesterday was another shop where the road turned a corner. It didn’t have much of a sign out the front, and upon entering we came to a rather dark and bare reception area where a lady asked us to sign on for the tour. There were a few old posters hanging up, but otherwise the setting was very basic.

Once we were all signed in, we walked a few doors back down the road to the entrance of a small school – Rubuguri School. The school’s principal arrived. Marie was an overweight lady in perhaps her late forties. She was carrying a very small baby on her back held on by a cloth wrapped around her body. The baby was asleep.

Before entering the school, we looked up at the trees to watch some large grey birds with white faces building their nests. They brought in large twigs they had found and lined them in their nests. I did a quick change of lenses to my telephoto to get a few good shots. At least that will justify me bringing it.

We entered the school yard. The buildings were all unpainted and rather derelict giving a sense of abandonment despite concrete plaque on one of the classroom saying it was built between 2004 and 2005. The building standards here were obviously very low. There were a few schoolish propaganda signs around such as “Stay safer”, “Say no to gifts”, “Mission – bind together our efforts and place the pupil at the centre of event”, and “Avoid indiscipline”. I thought perhaps these would work well in a socialist urban society, but were they relevant here in this remote wilderness?

There were several shrubs all surrounded by a fence of thin logs to keep the children from harming them. Looking beyond the school was a very attractive valley it was a very picturesque setting.

Marie the principal led us into her office. Now this definitely wasn’t what one would normally expect with a principal’s office being large and exquisitely furnished. This office was perhaps five or six square metres, with just a single door entrance and a small window. It was furnished with just a single small solid timber desk that had obviously seen many years’ service and a basic wooden chair. The walls were plastered with large pieces of butcher paper with school results going back to the mid-1990s, mission statements and all sorts of other things that you would normally see printed off a spreadsheet. There were no computers here though. It was all hand written and pasted to the wall.

The office seemed to double up as a music storage room, with several very crudely built guitars and drum instruments, which I had guessed had been made at the school. They couldn’t afford real instruments.

She then led us into the next room, operating as a classroom. It was pretty dark inside with no indoor lighting, though there were plenty of windows around the room. The smell was a bit ripe as well. There was a group of young students obviously of different levels in the classroom. They were all very happy to see us – these strange foreigners from around the other side of the world.

We were only in the classroom for a couple of minutes before heading back outside again and further through the school into one of the small fields behind the classrooms. We crossed the short distance and our guide approached a high fence loosely constructed from timber poles with wire in between them. He reached a log frame and removed a couple of horizontal logs so we could walk through. Once we had passed through, he put the logs back to keep any livestock unseen out of the school.

Beyond the fence was a small orchard. We walked along a path in between the orchard trees for about a hundred metres before reaching a clearing. On the right hand side of the clearing was a small round thatched hut. Further down the gentle slope was a large semicircle cut into the ground ready for something else to be constructed here.

We gathered around in a circle and the principal told us about the village, and more about the school. Here we all introduced ourselves. There was obviously the five of us from our group (including Travis). There was also a young couple perhaps in their mid-twenties from Germany dressed in very bright contrasting clothes. They mentioned they had just arrived here to work as volunteers for nine months. Today was their first day in the village. Now that’s one way to experience a culture!

There we left Marie to return to her school and continued on our journey through the village. The baby on her back hadn’t stirred in the whole time that we had been with her.

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