Today I had a pretty slow day, just two drum lessons. But I did have a long talk with one student, Fred, as we had to walk up to our house from town. I enjoyed talking as it gave me a better idea of what life for local middle class Ugandans is really like. Fred is in a family of nine children, with three children in secondary, three in primary and three in nursery. The children in Nursery are not too bad as they cost around 15000 shillings to school, but when a child starts secondary the fees go up to at least 70, 000 shillings and keep going up as the years go by. (i.e. S1 is 70,000 and S2 may be 90,000) He was saying that to go to university, after completing S6, the cheapest course would be in excess of 1 Million shillings. To bring this into perspective these figures are per term and our employee’s wages range form 60,000 to 100,000 a month. After paying for food and rent and other essentials there is not much left over for schooling. Fred said that it is mainly children whose parents work for the government that get to go to university or even higher grades in secondary.
