Wednesday 15th July

Wednesday 15^th July

Today there is still no internet access and it appears to be affecting most of Masindi. After a fruitless conversation with someone from the Ugandan Telecom Hot Spot help line I decided to give up and go shopping! Anyway, if this is now posted internet has either been restored or I’m back home!

This morning the four of us in our car share finally resolved the death trap that has been our daily transport. It came to a head with the petrol bottle in the open boot jumping around and giving us such awful fumes we were arriving feeling sick. A short call and a replacement car arrived with Julius the new driver. The difference was amazing and only topped by the sighting of the chimp running across the road!

We arrived to find the school deserted and wondered for a moment what had happened. We then noticed the children spilling out of a nearby building and realised they were all in the church. We walked up the hill and were ushered into the front of the church to hear the sermon being preached in Kiswahili, Runyoro and English. It was lovely to see the school coming together first thing in the morning.

We had a very productive morning with James our HT fleshing out the rest of the development plan. Three out of the five priorities for the School Development Plan come under Teaching and Learning or Leadership and Management and the remaining two have a community and parents focus. The school decided to work on improving the quality of the teaching and learning process, improve climate and relationships (to improve discipline) and increase the range of co-curricular activities (we might call them extra-curricular). The remaining two areas concern the strengthening of parental links through the SMC (School Management Committee) and the PTA and building houses for teachers as many of them have a distance to travel every day.

We were then given a snack of a hard boiled egg and a cup of coffee before being taken into the Budongo Forest on the back of James (the HT) and Nelson’s (the DHT) motor bikes to meet some researchers at the conservation field camp.  Fortunately a very accommodating researcher called Kat was available to speak to us as the person we thought we were meeting had gone to Kampala. Kat, who is based at St Andrew’s University, is completing her PHD studies on the gestural behaviour of chimps and explained how she has to gather lots of video footage and then analyse it all. The forest has been given a grid system with numbers and letters a hundred metres apart marked on trees so they don’t get lost. They all wear gum boots to help avoid snake bites although I was reassured to hear that there is some anti-venom available at the Kinyara Sugar works clinic.

Kat explained that there had been a very large saw mill in the forest which had cut most of the mahogany found in Europe at one time, including the interior of the Royal Albert Hall!

Unfortunately a lot of the mahogany and hard woods have been destroyed and chopping down trees in the forest is now illegal. Part of the forest is in the research area and they operate a policy of quarantine in order to protect the population of 75 chimps from coughs and diseases that humans carry. The nearby Nyebeya Forestry College has planted pine as an alternative to use in building and furniture making.

The field station has an interesting collection of specimens including a couple of chimp skeletons. It is alarming to see how closely they resemble humans!

Budongo Primary School was located in the forest to serve the children of workers at the saw mill but since it has closed most of the children were having to walk into the forest every day.  The children regularly had to pass groups of fearless baboons who would steal their lunch. After seeing the sharp canine teeth on a baboon skull in the field station museum I could understand their fear!

The school has now been relocated outside the forest, which is much better for them and means the researchers have some peace to observe the chimps.

We thoroughly enjoyed our walk up the ‘Royal Mile’, which has world renown as a bird watchers paradise. We saw lots of amazingly colourful butterflies and enjoyed the coolness and smell of a rain forest. It was a real privilege.

We stopped by the Polish Church on the way back to school, which had been built between 1943 and 1945 by Polish prisoners of war during WWII. It was so sad to see the rows of graves marked with the same year. It turns out that many were killed by a fever, probably malaria in 1947.

We were returned safely to the school on the back of the motorbikes (I’m relieved to say!) and given another delicious lunch of potatoes and g nut sauce (ground nuts or peanuts).

We had our regular meeting together at 6pm when Mr Jim did the relevant announcements and then enjoyed a delicious vegetable curry in the hotel.