Our Volunteer Project!
Our Project Committee
We are determined that the difficult situation in which we live and work will not cause us to give in to feelings of hopelessness. We aim to improve the lives of our children and the community where we live and work. Our desire is to help ourselves and our children and through them their descendants.
Our resources are personal effort and
the volunteers who come to help us. Our volunteers are treated with
respect and honesty. We care deeply that our new friends enjoy their
time with us at the same time as helping both children and staff with
their expertise. When it comes to our volunteers our first concern is
their safety, well being and happiness. Our aim is that when they leave
us to return home they will feel that they have helped our children
progress, perhaps passed on some additional expertise to our staff and
that during that process they will have developed warm friendships
with both children and staff.
We hope to attract people to
our school and community to share our lives and work with us to improve
conditions. Volunteers also gain from the experience and it certainly
gives them a real taste of African life. Volunteers come with their enthusiasm, ideas, innovative skills and organisation. Some volunteers also bring us much needed resources. Meeting such people is a blessing for us. Many
young volunteers have to fund raise in their home country for their air
fare to come to help us. It's amazing that they show such care for poor
people whom they've never met!
Our
Project Committee ensures all decisions are collective. Our Project
Manager feeds, houses and arranges transport for the volunteers. The
Volunteer Director, the Head Mistress, oversees the whole Project
including the deployment and assignments of the volunteers. She
discusses volunteers' ideas and feedback for school development to disseminate this to the staff. We now have a three signatory Project Bank account.
The chairman of the PTA, the Chairman of the School Management
Committee and the Chairman of Kyabirwa Village are also Project
Committee Members. Our aim is for management and accounting transparency
so everyone can clearly see what's happening and understand our
goals.
This
website is full of information so that volunteers are fully informed
before making the decision to come to us. We hope that when volunteers
eventually leave us, they feel loved, honoured and fulfilled.
The
help we have been receiving from our volunteers has raised the morale
of the entire staff. This has led to staff using some of their valuable
non contact, planning and marking time to help volunteers with carpentry
and painting etc. Photos may be seen on other pages of this website.
Our staff with two volunteers
Our
hope is that the lives of all of us - children, teachers and volunteers
are enhanced though this common effort to improve living, teaching
& learning conditions at our school and in the community, so that
our people will have a better future. One in which ultimately they can
help themselves.
Our Head Mistress and Project Director is Robinah Musakira. She works with new volunteers at the start of their placement, to listen and develop their ideas, assign them appropriately and help them with any difficulties they experience at any time.
Often, volunteers visit Robinah in her home to meet her family and share a meal with them.
Robinah is enjoying herself with some of the pupils during a dance in honour of a volunteer who was leaving to return home.
Our Project Manager is Moses Owino. He is amazing and incredibly patient! The Project would not exist without his dedication.
Moses was originally a pupil at the school and now he teaches here!
He lives a five minute walk away from the school grounds, in a
beautiful compound in a clearing in the jungle.
Volunteers live in purpose built accommodation in his compound,
next to his house. When they are not working, sightseeing,
swimming and generally enjoying themselves, they spend a lot of
time playing with his children and meeting his vast extended family
and neighbours as they drift in and out!
We like to say farewell to our volunteers as they
leave. It's impossible to do justice to their
kindness, but we do try. On the volunteers' last
day, in order to show their appreciation and
love for their foreign teachers and friends, the children perform dances, sing songs and make speeches that they have written themselves.
Some of the pupils enacting a traditional play about a childless woman and her unhappy husband. She eventually gave birth to a baby - with the assistance of the local witch doctors! (You can see them sitting - left, behind the green foliage.) And the husband rejoiced!
We hope that our volunteers won't forget us when they return home and that one day they will return to see us again!