Qualifications

It makes sense that a disproportionate amount of my time might be dedicated to work. It is, to address things in the most factual way, the reason why I am in Uganda. For many reasons, mostly to do with concerns of my own personal sanity, I like to suppose that I have this entire existence external to work that makes my life complete in a gestalt sense. And while there are things like traveling, friends, some small numbers of external events like the Gulu marathon or the Champions League finals, there is mostly, in my life, from just after working until around eight for dinner and even after that on occasions, little in my head except for work. I’ve tried a fair job of keeping my ramblings here only distantly related to the doldrums of my office life, omitting whole passages of my life consumed with the struggles for proper furniture, fair contracts, and accurate assessments. I suppose recent events, however, allow for a celebratory overview of my more corporate life.
(Be warned, a good part of what follows may sound like organizational propaganda or possibly even bragging. It just feels that since I seldom discuss what I’ve been up to, this could be a good forum to unleash all of this.)
This last week, the fundraising campaign for Schools for Schools completed. Over five hundred schools in the US (and one in Uganda) where gathered into ten clusters, each supporting one specific Northern Ugandan school. As we have issued in press releases and radio programs all over (and one full-page spread in the Daily Monitor to arrive later this next week) the sum total of their efforts for the last semester comes to 1.3 million US dollars. (This translates, impressively to around 2.1 billion Ugandan schilling.) The fact that this staggering figure has been raised by high school and college students, through bake sales and car washes, rock concerts, sporting events, hundreds of creative events and merchandise sales, raises numerous prideful considerations of the youth and their dedication to a cause.
As impressive as their efforts have been, the focus of my attentions is now drawn to how in the next two months, I have to finalize my efforts to plan the spending of this amount. For the past months, I have been talking with contractors, engineers, development specialists, teachers, headmasters, and anyone I could trying to come up with the best method for distributing the cash. With Sarah, the program coordinator spearheading these efforts, and my staff of Frederick—a indomitable engineer—and Peter Paul—my tireless procurement specialist—we have tried to create an outline. Long discussions with each of the participating schools have created a list of their priorities that we will follow and as many efforts as we can make to involve the schools, the students, the staff, teachers, and everyone in every possible aspect of the process.
Just the other day, we divided the schools into phases and selected the first projects to tackle (pending final approval from the schools, but seeing as it’s their list we are working from, that should not be difficult to obtain.) I’ve discussed the projects with a man who is introducing us to a compressed brick technology that will decrease the costs of all of our projects. In addition to the reduced cost, the compressed bricks remove the use of clay-burnt bricks which require firing and destroy vast acreages of forest in Uganda every year. And everything is going forward. In not much more time, we’ll have plans and bills of quantities and contracts for new classroom blocks, laboratories, libraries, and those are just the major construction projects.
At the same time, we have completed work on our pilot program. The ground floor of the girls’ dormitory at Gulu High School is finished and the people pouring through the site heap praises upon it. The 96 girls slotted to move into the building which is so vastly superior to not only their current housing but also to the huts of the Internally Displaced People’s camps where their family lives are over eager to bring in their small supplies. However, in great news, we are delaying their move in because we are securing most of the funding for the second story (“first floor” if you count by Uganda/British standards) from an external source. In similar news, we are awaiting final reports from another external agency that has accepted a proposal to provide all the costs for drilling the needed boreholes in our schools to provide adequate amounts of clean water to the students.
And that only begins to touch on the grant proposal I’m working on submitting to USAID. There is no way of knowing how they will react to it, but we have given hopeful indications. Combining the environmentally friendly brick making technology with efforts to move back schools that have been displaced by the war, we are hoping to engage a seriously large amount from the US government. The distressing situation occurred where a number of schools (three of the ones we have chosen included) have been forced to move from their original locations to city centers in flight from the violence. One school, Awere Secondary School, is celebrating its silver anniversary next year and has spent around twenty of those twenty-five years removed from its home. We are inching towards the possibility of moving them back. (For those not familiar with some aspects of development theory, this move not only accomplishes that great feat but also provides the drastically needed social service of education without which there is little incentive for the people to move away from the IDP camps and back to their homes.) We are currently working on combining those efforts with deals worked out with the Ugandan business community to further decrease the costs of constructing the buildings without which their will be no schools. I have already secured an offer from Tororo Cement for discounts and that combined with in-kind donations from Sadolin Paints.
Of course, there is more than construction as well. One program for an exchange of ideas between American and Ugandan teachers will begin next month. We are working on developing curriculum and psychosocial training for the staff. Soon we will have compiled the lists of books, supplies, and laboratory equipment that we will be providing. We have been in contact with technology experts who have designed low-power using computers that can do everything required by secondary schools including providing internet. We are conducting power assessments that will evaluate the benefits of solar power versus diesel-powered generators.
I have just started many of these projects. Before I leave, less than half of them will have even begun. As much as I would love to see the raising of the buildings, classes be conducted, students move in, books fill shelves, all of these things, my task was to begin. From the outlines we’ve sent off detailing the requirements for my replacement, that person should be able to do even more. Free from the constraints of starting everything, they should be able to develop the program, create new initiatives. It will be hard to let go of it all, hard to think about it expanding and being realized once I’m gone. But it will be great, assuming competent hands take over, to think about everything unfolding even while I sit in a classroom, to think about how schools moving home, education improving, and in some distinct levels, the quality of hope increasing.