To Kampala and back

Has it really been a week?

I seem to have been slacking on the blog writing front. Rest assured this is not the case for my other activities. Last Wednesday I was making sure all was prepared for the meeting with Global Care leaders in Kampala and waiting to hear that Barbara landed safely at Entebbe that night. Tom and I also paid a very enlightening visit to a local primary school that has pupils with disabilities. We were allowed to observe an English lesson in primary 6. Future perfect tense was the subject. There were about 150 children in class, though the roll includes over 200. It seemed to be mostly girls that were absent, and even those girls present hardly participated. The impression of significant gender issues is growing stronger. The teacher did a pretty good job, considering, apart from that point.
Thursday morning early Michael drove me with Fred, David and Bishop Job to Kampala. It took almost eight hours. We did go the long way round via Lira to the northwest but those roads are pretty good, whereas the clockwise route via Mbale is in an atrocious state. Ugandan roads also have lots of extraordinarily large speed bumps to make sure even the most robust trucks and 4x4s have to slow right down.  On this section nearly all of them have warning signs, but not elsewhere, so drivers need to be very alert. Driving’s a bit scary at times, particularly when passing pedestrians. When you are near a school early in the day there are hundreds of unaccompanied small children walking or running along the side of the road to get to school, usually in magenta, blue or yellow uniforms. However the only casualty we caused was a small pink pig that chose the wrong moment to cross the road.

I was very pleased to meet my wife Barbara at the conference hotel, as well as other Global Care friends old (from UK, Kampala and Rukungiri) and new (Kampala again) and to join in some discussions.

I was a little unsure how the presentation of the research findings would go down on Friday morning. I had looked at childhood disability very much from a social and community perspective in the qualitative study I was doing, and many of the actions that had been proposed by the research participants were to support household livelihoods, to empower people with disability in social and political arenas, and to address social attitudes and public services. This rather contrasted with the vision of the charity which has received funding to set up a day care centre. However everyone was very interested in the work and engaged in a lively discussion as to how it should influence the project planning and delivery. There is not necessarily any conflict between these visions. My main concerns are that people with disability should be involved in planning and delivering the project, following the mantra “nothing for me, without me”, and that it should not just implement a “medical” model of trying to help children to function better in an unfriendly world, but should support people with disability in on-going research and campaigning to change attitudes and services. In our discussions we also emphasised the importance of gender - the vulnerability of girls with disability, and the fact that the burden of care falls very disproportionately on women, many of whom are single.

Barbara and I had a bit of time off on Saturday morning and visited the lake of the Kabaka (king) of Buganda. More details of some of these activities on Barbara's blog here.

 

Saturday afternoon we drove back to Soroti and arrived about 8.30 pm.

Sunday we went to church with Sam and visited Michael’s house where he was playing parachute games with over 100 children. Not all of them could participate at once so I decided to see how many tunes I could play on my battered old red tin whistle. I sat on the ground and was nearly submerged by a press of small ragged children who clapped along and also sang one or two songs in Ateso whose melodies I could manage. Again see here for more details.

Monday Tom and I prepared for the meeting on Tuesday with key informants and local officials and representatives. I also had a long conversation with Simon, who is deaf. As we didn’t have a sign language interpreter this was done in writing. It was very informative to talk to a person who is starting to make contacts on the national political scene to do with disability. It is striking to see where Global Care has reached through the children it has helped who are now adults, and how they are now motivated to help children in their turn.Barbara's blog reports some of his story here.

Barbara and I went shopping in the little local market in Pamba to get some vegetables for our meal. This is a lively spot and people were pleased and amused at us wandering around trying to see what was there and find out how it was supposed to be prepared. I am getting used to women suddenly starting to breast feed their babies in the middle of other activities as well. This is a universal thing and does not call for discretion here. My next blog will give details of the feedback meeting on Tuesday.