Holiday Camp

For the past three days we’ve been running a holiday camp for children at ‘Treasured Kids’, a school some members of the team have been working at these past few months. We’d turn up at 8ish, have a meeting with the teachers who were helping us there about what the day would involve, then start setting up. We served porridge at 9am for the kids breakfast, tho Ugandan porridge is nothing like English porridge, it’s completely liquid with granules instead of oats. Then we’d have 2 meetings a day with the kids with singing, games and a short talk, with an hour of sports and activities inbetween. Then at the end of the day we’d serve them rice and squash. We had about 300 children at the camp, divided into age groups that we were in charge of in pairs. JC and I had the oldest – Year 7, who were almost fluent in English which was great. Way more than 300 would turn up for the food at the end tho and we always ran out of drinking water. The water at this school is so disgusting, I drank some on our first day and it tasted rough. I asked a teacher why it tasted so weird and he told me it was because it was filtered through a graveyard, and not many families can afford coffins… The school is desperately saving to build a well but it doesn’t even have enough funds to pay its teachers so clean water seems a long way off. The rice on the other hand was delicious tho and I’ve become very adept at eating with my hands!
Other things this week have included seeing Chrissie, a friend of mine from school. She came out to Kampala for 10 days so I got to see her quite a bit and stock up on some English chocolate and shampoo and conditioner for Westerner’s hair! It’s been really fun showing her round the city and bringing her to my school. School was very boring towards the end tho, just marking and doing reports, spent an entire day hole-punching and putting things on folders. On the last Friday the kids all came back tho and we had a brief assembly where the teachers gave us some presents – big straw hats and African shirts for the boys, and massive African dresses and straw bags for me and Phoebs. We’ve another visitor as well, Pete Alston, a friend who knows most people in the team, turned up out of the blue last Friday night. He’s been living in South Africa for 8 months and decided to visit us before heading home. He’s been living with us which has been fun but is heading off tonight.
That’s all for now, hope everyone’s well at home. Looking forwards to seeing people in 3 weeks time!