Our Week in the Village


Two weeks have passed since my last post. These weeks have been full, giving us plenty to discuss today.
Beginning here in Jinja, we have greatly enjoyed the visit of Sally Flanagan, Treasurer to HYT. Being Sally’s first visit to Uganda, she benefitted greatly in terms of her own personal understanding of HYT’s work and of Uganda more widely. Her visit reinforces the close relationship between our UK and Uganda offices. On a less official note: the real reason we have “greatly enjoyed and benefitted” is that she very kindly paid for our ‘return to civilisation curry’ following our week in St Andrews!



Over the course of the last week, we visited Mutai Secondary School three times and were delighted to see how far work has come since our last visit two weeks ago. The classroom and laboratory are nearing completion in terms of structure, with work on the roof well underway. This puts the project well ahead of schedule. In recognition of the fantastic work being done, on Friday HYT and the Bujagali Trust presented the team at Mutai with savoury bananas (called ‘makoke’) and chickens, which the team were absolutely delighted with and hugely grateful for.


With the Rotary Projects completed, HYT have been able to officially open our independent project at Makoka Primary School, one of the Rotary sites. Here we constructed an energy-saving kitchen and two accommodation blocks able to house six teachers. The school and local community gathered on Thursday for a ceremony to mark their opening, about which Harry has blogged.

Our Trip up in a Matatu

Moving north, we are tremendously pleased with the first week of our fifth ‘One Village At A Time’ (1V5) project at St Andrew’s Senior School in the village of Namanage. I doubt that you are familiar with this establishment and so I shall give you something of an overview: the school has just five classrooms for four-hundred pupils and only a handful of staff. The project here aims to train eight Ugandans drawn from the local community in the ISSB technology via the construction of a double classroom block, with potential for further developments thereafter.


Now that you know what we are doing at St Andrews, I shall tell you about our week on site! Following the weekly meeting on Monday morning, Freddo Koire (the ceaselessly excited and ever-smiling senior ISSB trainer and project manager) chaperoned Harry and I on our journey to St Andrews. At mid-morning, the three of us departed for Jinja bus station. When I say ‘bus station’, what I mean is matatu station. A matatu is a Toyota minibus, which carries twenty people – complete with bags and chickens – as a minimum, despite only having a dozen seats. Our journey north was accordingly somewhat cramped. We continued to a trading post some forty minutes from the site and took a boda (motorbike taxi) the rest of the way. All in all, the journey took about three and a half hours – a long time to be spent on Ugandan roads! With numb bottoms, we made it to the school whereupon we enjoyed a very warm reception from the staff, eager to introduce themselves. We were invited to sit down with the staff in the staff room. Well, a table and a few chairs under a vast mango tree. Here we were treated to posho and beans, Uganda’s staple meal. We were bombarded with questions about ourselves and about the UK and our thoughts on Uganda and on St Andrews. The staff were just as eager and curious as their pupils. Many hours of conversing later, having eventually extracted ourselves, we headed over to our house for the week.

Henry and Freddo get to work

This is a small bungalow nearby which has been provided by the school for HYT to use as the site office and accommodation for Freddo and his number two, Matthias. Harry and I settled ourselves in and sorted out our bedrolls. Life in the village is refreshingly basic: no electricity or running water, a bucket for a shower and a solitary table our only furniture. The evening was spent playing football with children who flocked to the field outside the house on hearing that Mzungus had arrived. As it grew dark and the children dispersed, we competed amongst ourselves at chess and chequers, with Freddo and Matthias employing rather questionable Ugandan rules...

Harry challenging Freddo to a game of Chess

Tuesday arrived with plenty of sun and HYT’s latest batch of trainees drifted in so that by mid-morning, work was ready to begin and ground was broken. We cleared the area where block construction would take place and where we would dig the pit necessary for extracting the marram (subsoil) from which we will make the blocks. We broke for lunch and Freddo discussed site rules with the trainees and, with the aid of Freddo as translator, we all gave a brief talk on who we are and what we want to achieve over the course of this project. The work which we did in a day with hoes and spades could have been done in an hour with one man in a digger back in Blighty, but without the newfound comradeship or satisfaction at a task well done which our toils brought us at the close of day. Mercy, a history teacher, then invited us to her house so that we may try Ugandan foods and learn some Lusoga, the language native in this part of Uganda.


Getting the Murram For the Bricks

This came to be the pattern of our week in the village: an early start, breakfast of a milky Ugandan equivalent to porridge, work until a lengthy lunch break as we waited out the hottest part of the day, often discussing the differences between the UK and Uganda with staff, before returning to work until five o’clock. We then relaxed at our house for perhaps an hour before trundling over to Mercy’s for sugarcane, cassava, avocado, and plenty of other native fruits and vegetables. For her efforts to show us Uganda we are both extremely grateful.

Evil Kenevil

The days were long but tremendously enjoyable. Harry is now a promising off-road motorbike racer and I am delighted to say that the children of Namanage now can perform an outstanding conga as well as make a valiant attempt at the Macarena. Most importantly, however, HYT’s fifth ‘One Village At A Time’ project is off to a wonderful start, with brick-making underway this current week. We are both eagerly awaiting our return to this very promising project.