The Rainbow Schools

As we set off from Soroti to the Dokolo District, about 80kms away, we saw a lot of schools – and children in brightly coloured uniforms streaming towards them.  The first lot we saw were dressed in a deep, imperial purple – the girls in voluminous dresses to their knees and the boys in navy shorts with purple shirts.  And as we kept going we saw pink, yellow, a couple of shades of green, blue, orange and an infinite variety of combinations of the colours.  Interestingly, no red – maybe it fades too quickly.

The other fascinating thing was the modes of transport.  The road is quite good so we saw some boda-bodas (motor bikes) but there were even more bicycles.  They seldom only have a driver – there is usually a passenger and if she is female, she is sitting side-saddle.  We even saw a schoolgirl reading her book as she sat on the back of a bike – catching up with homework, maybe.

The first school we went to, Adwoki Primary, had pink and blue dresses – pink with a big blue sailor type collar.  This school did have desks, but woefully big classes – 106 in the first class, and 20 of them were absent.  Where those 20 would sit, I don’t know!  A really interesting thing was that many of the P 1 – P3 teachers are male – we saw a number of them in action.  The other strange thing is that there are often two teachers for a class.  However, we didn’t see much co-teaching – they just seemed to teach alternate lessons.  Now if they had another classroom, they could split the classes and have 60 in a class!  Sounds horrific but it would be so much better.

The Project team are so keen for us to see everything, that they had crammed far too much into the programme.  Apart from all the travel – some on really bad roads – they wanted us to travel to three schools each day, observe the lessons, meet and interview teachers and head teachers, meet Department officials and interview parents and children.  On the first day we tried going to 3 schools, but didn’t have time to observe any lessons in the third as we arrived at lunch time.  The teachers were so disappointed so we put our foot down and said we would only go to 2 schools – one before break and one after.  The first day was aggravated by the fact that we hadn’t had any breakfast and only got to eat at about 12 o clock for the first time.  Hopefully we have managed to organise things a bit better for the rest of this week.

The schools we saw today had no desks for the children in the lower grades – 110 kids squashed onto the floor in tight groups.  Their books are filthy – dog-eared and dusty, if not downright muddy.  The evaluation team before us complained that the teachers weren’t taking enough care of the books – but how can they?  With these huge classes I am amazed that they achieve anything, but we have seen some great work and especially some wonderful learning and teaching aids.  It is so impressive to see a class full of big books the teacher has made on cardboard from boxes.

A fascinating part of the trip has been looking at the crops.  Sunflowers are grown a lot in this area as is sim-sim – sesame seeds.  I never thought about how they grew – they are on a plant with little blue flowers that grows to about 60cm tall.  I will try to buy some in Lira on our way home on Friday.

Tomorrow we go to Amolatar - the other school district in the project.  Bad roads, we are told, so a six o clock start.  The adventure continues.