Our Volunteer Project

Our Volunteer Project!

Our Project Committee

We could just sit back thinking that our situation is hopeless and that there’s nothing we can do about our lack of funds to use to improve our school. There's so much need everywhere in Uganda. Where and how do we begin to change it all?

We don’t have the resources to help Uganda as a whole, but we can make a change in the lives of our children and the community where we are living and working. This is our thinking and motivation. We have to do what we can to help ourselves, our children and through them their descendents. Universally, this is where everyone must start and those with greater financial resources can reach out from there.

Our resources are willing hearts, minds and personal effort. Our resources are also volunteers who come to help us, including the kind people who have been moved to help us initiate this project who aren’t named because this is their wish.

So, to help ourselves, we set up this volunteer project! We hope to attract people to our school and the community to share our lives and work with us to improve conditions. We like to think it helps the volunteers too and certainly gives them a real experience of African life which they can share more closely by living at the Project's volunteer accommodation. Volunteers come with their enthusiasm, ideas and sophisticated skills of innovation and organisation. Some volunteers bring us much needed resources. Recently two

volunteers donated a store room and a huge water tank. Most simply bring us their caring, skills and love. All our much loved volunteers are equal in our eyes. Even just to meet such caring people is a blessing to us.

Every day, we ask God to bless all our volunteers and donors for their kindness. Many young volunteers have to fund raise in their home country for their air fare to come to help us. It's great to show such care for poor people whom you have never met!

We have a Project Committee to ensure that decisions are made with the benefit of many minds and ideas. We have a Project Manager who 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 developing the school and takes this information to the Committee to keep them in the picture and inform decision making. We set up a Project bank account with three committee members as signatories. The Village Chairman and the Chair of the School Management Committee are Project Committee members. Our aim is that Project management, decisions and accounting are transparent so that everyone can clearly see what is happening and where we are headed.

And we have this website to communicate with people worldwide! Technology is a wonderful thing!

We have everything in place to ensure that volunteers are fully informed before making the decision to come to us, to care for them when they are here and to use them meaningfully. We hope that when they leave us, they will feel loved, honoured and fulfilled.

Already, 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 on this website.

The staff recently thought it would be a nice idea to start improving the appearance of our grounds so we bought some plants and Mr Majid spent a long time working with the children edging a path and teaching the children how to plant the seedlings and care for the plants afterwards. The plants have all taken and we now try to prevent the children from drowning them with love!

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.

Our Head Mistress is Robinah Musakira, who is also the Volunteer Director. She works with new volunteers at the start of their placement, to listen and develop volunteer's 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 go home.

With a large school and working in difficult circumstances, this was a rare moment for Robinah to let her hair down!

Our Project Manager is Moses Owino. He is amazing! 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 in helping us, 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 like to 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!

Please don't any of our dear volunteers forget us and please come back to see us again!

Volunteer Uganda School

Kyabirwa Primary School near Jinja in Uganda