Friday 31st August 2007

We headed down to Akanyijuka when we dropped Kathryn off to do a little bit of manual labour for a change.  When I told Henry yesterday that we would shift the truck load of soil ourselves he just laughed at us.  For some reason Ugandans think that all white people are rich and do nothing for themselves.  Now was our chance to fly or burn.  We got going and it was good to get in and do a little bit of work, but when a local (named Rodgers Davis) came along and asked if he could help a bit, I was glad to say if you like you can.  So his little bit turned out to be helping us until we finish.  We gave him a little money so he could buy lunch, which he reluctantly took.  It was nice to have someone help and offer us something instead of being asked for something all the time.

 So we managed to knock over that before lunch and went for what we thought was a well deserved lunch at “Little Ritz In Africa,” a local restaurant.  After lunch Erica was taking the Matrons to the Women’s Conference, and I picked up Kathryn from Akanyijuka, and took the opportunity to get some photos of the children in her class.  You can check them out on my flicker site by clicking on the link on the right, or view just the new ones in a slide show at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98141030@N00/sets/72157601789036037/show/

While she was at the Women’s Conference Erica also met a perspective new matron also, who she will interview tomorrow.

Thursday 30th August 2007

Today Phil and I talked about going to be involved in Kathryn’s class on Friday and we were just getting excited about it and then we ran into Henry.  We have been trying to track him down so we can organise to get some soil delivered to Akanyijuka to flatten out the front ground a bit so the children can have somewhere flat to play.  After talking with Henry tomorrow was probably the only time in the near future that we could arrange that suited him was tomorrow, so unfortunately we had to put crashing Kathryn’s class back for a bit. 

We had our normal lessons this afternoon, but came home to a little surprise.  A girl named Sarah had shown up at our house and Fred (our night watchman) had asked if she could sleep the night.  The best story we could get out of her was that she was from Kampala and had come to Kabale with here sister on Wednesday, only to have her sister meet her boyfriend and then disappear.  The story is that she spent the night sleeping at the shops.  We were not sure how to handle the situation, and with Edward away in Kampala we called on our next point of contact, the Manzi’s, before we went to the police to help.  After interrogation from Henry and Harriet, as well as a little bit of driving around by Quinton we found out that she was actually from a house not very far from us at all, and that she had run away from home.  She lived with her aunty and we think that she was just not happy with the situation, which quite possibly she may have had reason to not be happy.  As she is a little old for us it is not practical for us to take her into Akanyijuka and she at least has had a good education as she spoke better English than our night watchman.  It made for a very interesting evening though.