Yay, this week has been a little cooler and rainier! (Hmm, I never thought about the fact that rainy-er, or rainier, is the same as Mount Rainier in Washington State….is that where it got its name from?)
On Tuesday, I started a new volunteer opportunity. We have an office “granny” (mother-in-law of a former office director), who works part-time for the office, and invites the interns over for homemade breakfast, etc. She has a Ugandan housemate, Florence, who also has 2 daughters in their early 20s who have become our friends. Anyway, Florence teaches at a nursery school (aka pre-school) just down the hill from us near a low-income/slum-like area. I’m going to go there every Tuesday morning to help her out with the kids. She has 25 kids, mostly ages 3-6, but she also has a couple 2-year-olds and a couple 7-year olds! Talk about a wide range of abilities! At first I thought I would just read books to them, which would be easy, but she would really like me to come up with activities to do with the kids since most of what they do otherwise is reading and writing. So it seems a little daunting, but I’m also excited about the possibilities.
Tuesday was my first time, and I worked with what they call the “baby class,” that is, the 2-3 year-olds. In the mornings, they typically split the class into 3 groups based on age and abilities and Florence and her 2 daughters each take a group of kids. This week, Rachel was busy taking university exams, so I took over the baby class for her. I had a lot of fun, although it was sometimes challenging to get them all to pay attention, especially since most of them don’t understand that much English yet. (Typically, schools are taught in English, but Luganda is spoken at home, so kids don’t usually know English until they’ve been in school for a couple years.) I did a math worksheet with them, which meant counting and writing down numbers. By end, I had learned all 10 names, and had taught them “I’ve got the Joy Down in My Heart!” Florence was SO excited that I wanted to come and give the children exposure to other ideas and activities, so I am excited that I can help out in this way. I just hope that I’ll be able to keep thinking of activities to do each week!
One of our in-house EMI projects (“in-house” meaning we don’t recruit volunteers to come for a week-long design project, we just use the staff and interns that we have in the office) is to design a wastewater treatment plant for the Watoto Children’s Village. Well, we’re actually getting a volunteer in the US to design the plant, but we’re doing all the necessary ground work here ourselves. Dan will be surveying the property, and I will be collecting wastewater samples to be analyzed by a lab. On Thursday, Dan, Pat (a staff member from British Columbia), and I went out to the site to get an overview of the campus and a better idea of what we’d be dealing with. We’ll be coming back and staying on campus for a few days to do our work sometime in the next couple weeks.
Watoto Children’s Choir is one of those African children’s choirs who tour North America to raise awareness of issues facing Africa, to expose the children to new cultures, and to raise money to support children in and outside of the choir. The Watoto choir is made up solely of orphans who live in the Watoto Children’s Village in Uganda. They have a pretty neat model that is starting to be replicated by other children’s homes around Uganda. I think Watoto currently cares for 1-2,000 orphans! (See www.watoto.com) They have a family-based model, where 8 children live in a house with a house mother. The houses are then arranged into clusters of 8 houses, which becomes the child’s community. There are over a dozen clusters of houses in the “village,” along with a primary and secondary school, a clinic, and a church. There is also a separate babies’ home, where orphans under 2 stay until they are ready to be incorporated into the housing system. Each house mother is also someone who needs a place to live, and is often an AIDS widow. The mothers really become lifelong mothers for all the children who live in their houses. The program is also trying to recruit men to volunteer to be a “house father” and visit the children in their assigned house once a week so that the children can have male role models. Watoto was started by a Canadian pastor who started a church in Kampala that is now known as Watoto Church, which is where I have started attending.
By the way, if you ever get a chance to see the choir (or any African children’s choir, for that matter), you should definitely go! Right now Watoto is doing a choir tour to raise awareness and support for the activities they’re doing in northern Uganda to help rehabilitate former child soldiers! http://www.watoto.com/restoretour/ This tour will be in LA on October 23 and Seattle on Oct 30, then they’ll be off to Canada, the UK, and Australia! (This blog was not intended to be a promotion for the choir, but I just got excited that you guys might actually be able to see them! They never perform here, although one day I accidentally stumbled into a dress rehearsal, which was really cool!)
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