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 the 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. Our thinking and motivation is that we have to do what we can to help ourselves, our children and through them their descendents.

Our resources are willing hearts, minds, personal effort and the volunteers who come to help us.

To help ourselves, we have 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 believe it helps the volunteers too and it 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. Most simply bring us their caring, skills and love. All volunteers are equal in our eyes. Just to meet such caring people is a blessing.
Many young volunteers have to fund raise in their home country for their air fare to come to help us. It's fantastic to show such care for poor people whom they 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 school develpment to disseminate this 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 Chairmen of the School Management Committee and PTA are Project Committee members. Our aim is for Project management, decisions and accounting to be 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 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.

Mr Majid and some of the children, recently spent a long time edging a path and planting seedlings to improve the look of the grounds. 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 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 go home.

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, 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 none of our dear volunteers will forget us and that they will come back to see us again!

Volunteer Uganda School

Kyabirwa Primary School near Jinja in Uganda