Day 10:

Today was dubbed ‘Naked Monday’ by the three British girls who are fellow IVN volunteers. In an all too common miscommunication, the girls were brought in to volunteer in the health program, but when they arrived the health clinic thought they had medical training. Turns out, they are recent psychology graduates who were hoping to do counseling work, so with little to do at the clinic, they did a mixture of things at the clinic, the school and out in the field. Anyways, back to ‘naked Monday’. As I sit in the teacher’s lounge preparing my lessons each morning I often find myself gazing out the door watching the young P1’s, 2’s and 3’s who for some reason are always running back and forth across the school grounds. However, on this day the boys were running around without their shirts and the girls had removed their dresses, now running around in just their underwear, shoes and socks. It was very cute because the kids don’t always wear shoes that fit, so every few minutes a tiny girl would run by with giant shoes on that appeared even bigger without her dress on. BTW…as in Asia, there is no such thing as modesty here in Africa because when every day is a struggle it seems that body image simply does not matter all that much. Turns out that a couple of times a month the students get a rudimentary health check up to make sure that they are not suffering from something that could possibly be treated. This gave them an excuse to run around all morning half-naked, which by their screams of laughter is the way they prefer to run around. I don’t blame them, as it is bloody hot here unlike Mbarara.
Unfortunately, the bi-monthly check up does detect, nor could it solve anyway, the fact that many of the students at this school as well as the rest of the country do not get nearly enough food to eat. The insidious part of supposed “Universal Primary Education” (UPE) in the Uganda is that the only rule for the school is to not charge for tuition, which is subsidized, however poorly, by the government. Knowing that they cannot charge for tuition, but are always far short of funds, schools tend to charge for everything else they can think of, such as uniforms, books, exams and lunch. Lunch costs 25K shillings ($12) per term, which consists of a daily bowl of posho and beans (same for the teachers). Sadly, many of the kids’ parents or guardians cannot afford the lunch fee, so those kids go hungry all day usually only getting one solid meal per day at night at home. In fact, Wilson informed me that 75% of the students at Seguku Primary failed to pay their lunch fees this term, which was many more than I had guessed. Because of this, I don’t even bother to wake the students who are sleeping in my afternoon class knowing that their energy level is probably very low by that time of day. It is also quite possible that I bored them to sleep, but I’ll stick with the hunger excuse.