Butterfly space, nkhata bay

We arrived in nkhata bay about 3 weeks ago now and are living in a tired looking paradise right in lake Malawi.

Butterfly space is a resort for volunteers which offers a variety of projects, or you can come and stay if you are just travelling through.

I am involves in little leapers, the nursery school attached to butterfly. I work 8 - 12 Monday Friday with 12 delightful and highly energetic children aged 4 to 7. I've been continuing to embrace the jolly phonics programme that I learned and taught in Tanzania and have also been using the many tricks learned in our Uganda teacher training session with Ali and Nikki.

We also do swimming lessons for them, as some of them have never been in the water, despite living next to a lake! Lots of spare volunteers are needed for this!

What I also implemented in our first week was a business plan for the FAWN HIV women's group that come to butterfly. Rich and I cooked Ugandan roleggs for them, (the common street food of Uganda that we loved), of chappati wrap of egg and veg omelette). I took them shopping for the starting ingredients and set them up in town and they have since been continuing to sell to mzungus and locals in town.  Its great for us its its a cheap delicious lunch in a place where there's not much else to buy but  bread, beans and rice, dried fish, deep fried goat and chips!!

Rich cooking Chappati

Necky enjoying her roleggs!

Butterfly has an amazing kitchen and staff and we enjoy a communal dinner each night and either breakfast or lunch all included in our volunteer package. The food is delicious! We have started to increase our exercise accordingly!!!  Our hut is right on the edge of the water with amazing sunrises and we are able to enjoy a swim at the end of the day!

our hut

the sun deck

balcony

view from bed

sunrise

Rich has been busy too. He has written a proposal for nkhata bay council regarding the construction of numerous bins in a rather untidy town. He has met with various council members and environmental officers to get this underway.

He has also been building tables and shelves for little leapers and the other butterfly nursery school up the road.

Butterfly has had many volunteers through July and had a big school group for 2 weeks and world race mission group for 3 weeks. Water has run out regularly, the lake and my soap have become good friends and the poor staff have been busy in the kitchen that I've often helped out with dinners.

Now it is quiet again and there are less volunteers to spread around the jobs that need doing in the community, we may have to spread our wings and help out with youth club each day, disabled club on Fridays, sewing on Wednesdays and the new HIV women's nutrition group on Mondays that study a years course on healthy eating and natural medicine.

Lucille Flood also visited us for 5 days which was amazing. We played netball on Chikale beach when Butterfly ran a sports day, and had a good old catch up!

the beach

Lucille and I washing  in the lake, Rich rinsing!!

view from the toilet (compost toilet!)

Uganda Lodge May - June 2014

The kids enjoying their playground

Rich and Edd testing out their swingball

 We’ve been at Uganda Lodge for a month now.  Work and play continues.

Rich and Edd have been working like troupers and their playground keeps getting bigger and better.  The kids are loving what they’ve created and Kim and I painted a plaque for their Playground so they have marked their territory.

Kim and I made a volleyball court and net.  The boys were laughing at us saying we could never dig a hole.  Well we did – but it was the kids at playtime that came out and did a lot of the digging! They seem to love getting involved in the hardwork – we are happy to let them! 

 

We used some rope and string to get the outline and then some banana bark fibers braided in order to get the strength down the middle of the net.  Now we are awaiting some volleyballs from volunteers arriving this week.

There is always something to do and you can go to classes if you want, and I spent a day or two in the classroom and have made some timetable suggestions to the headmaster which has now placed PE on the timetable as it should have been! This has meant that more volunteers can get involved in the PE classes and helping out here which is a bit more enjoyable than sitting in the back of the classroom. This mean the students can now enjoy our completed volleyball court:

I also intend to so some phonetics teaching before I leave, as this is not in the program and it should be.  Otherwise, it’s been little jobs here and there, like making coat hangers out of waterbottle tops for the classrooms, milking cows and making posters.  I taught a small group how to play kickball this week too which was fun.  Then we turned into into kickdodge ball!  I've also written a list of games that can be played on our height adjustable volleyball/tennis net and court.

A common game here played at breaktime is a form of dodgeball.  The ball is made of plastic bags tied tightly together to make the ball, and then a set of stones on the floor.  The aim is to pick up the stones and hold in your skirt as the ball is thrown end to end with the aim of hitting you! If you pick up all the stones without being hit, you win! It’s really good fun, but these kids are brilliant at it and I felt like a fool!!!

Tuesday this week was a  public holiday and Jordan (volunteer coordinator), Maria (long term volunteer from Spain) and Rose (coordinator) put together a treasure hunt which was a bit of fun, and as Maria is from spain, we fired up the pizza oven and I made her Spanish Tortilla which was delicious.  With the oven still hot, we made flapjacks too!.

Uganda Lodge, May 24th

View from the School

So we've been at Uganda Lodge now for 3 weeks and have been working at small jobs like getting teacher resources ready, however, Rich has taken on a challenge of building a playground for the children.  This weeks task, A swing:

Rich, Ed and Will lifting up their creation.
 Next job, digging holes and cementing into the ground.

At the moment, this see-saw is two planks of wood which are not nailed or anything, they play on this with pure balance! OHS would have a field day here!!

 I busied myself with finishing off the Mural, although I can only take credit for the Title and the green at the bottom.  A previous volunteer did the rest, based on pupils drawings.

During this week, we had a lodglypics - which involved various fun games in 3 teams, in fancy dress.  For once, this was NOT inspired by Petch and I, but some other volunteers.  Needless to say - we were in our element! We played musical chairs, relay races and protect the egg to drop off a high water tank!!

The Big 5 - winning team

 
Afternoon teas have been interesting.  The other day we ate grasshoppers:

 

They actually tasted a bit like fried shrimp!

We also took an outing to a students grandparents place.  They run a pork joint.  Eating out is always very interesting.  We ordered 4 kg of pork on arrival which was served deep fried and with some Matoke - a form of Banana that is served at every meal! It is not too bad and tastes like mashed potato - with butter and salt added!! Otherwise, it's a little bland!

chopping up the pork with his machete

deep frying the pork

kitchen area for preparing the sauce

The School has now been back a week, and I haven't yet done any teaching, although, the whole purpose of Uganda Lodge is to let the Ugandan Teachers be the ones that run the show.  There is a new Headmaster this term and he has asked me to sit in on the interview panel for some new teachers which will be interesting.  There are about 250 children that have enrolled this term, and they are hoping for more, but a lot of it comes down to money of course!

The day is quite long for the children.  They start at 7.30, have porridge at 10.30 and wash their cups

Then at lunch time, they get Posho, (or Ugali as it is known in other parts of africa) with beans.  They finish their school day at 5.30pm.  

The school kitchen.  Very similar to our lodge kitchen too

Posho cooking for lunch

Beans cooking for lunch

We have taken a weekend away to a lake nearby for 2 nights with other volunteers and so far swimming and eating nice food and having 3G has been a blessing!

Ruhanga Development Centre, Uganda

It has taken an hour long trip in the back of a pick-up truck next to freshly slaughtered pigs to get to an internet cafe! We really are in rural Uganda at our new project... there was a power cut in town so I couldn't access an internet cafe! To get 3G we have to walk up a hill - and it's sooo slow! Anyway...

After a long and tiresome trip from Zanzibar, and a 7 hour bus journey from Kampala, we arrived at Ruhanga Development Centre, situated between Mbarara and Ntungamo, the main to Rwanda.

The centre was opened approximately 5 years ago by an English woman and a Uganda man, Denis, and they started by placing 20 taps around Denis’s home village.  They then surveyed the village to find out what else was needed, and a school was decided.

We live in a beautiful valley and regularly take a walk up the hills. I feel like we are surrounded by the Malvern Hills covered in banana plantations.  It is very green, lush and the people are very friendly with a reasonable command of English.  We do, however, want to keep speaking Swahili out of habit as we’d got so used to speaking bits each day.  We will slowly learn Runyankole, but teaching is all instructed in English, so it may not be needed

The school currently has classes from nursery to P6, although the ages in class vary and can be as high as 16 years.  The school has been very well resourced by donations and fundraising continues.  A medical clinic has just been finished, and volunteer doctors have been giving family planning advice and nutrition advice.  New classrooms and a library have been built and the next project in construction is a boarding section and a sports field, as well as more volunteer accommodation.

On our first day, we took the hour trip to the larger town to get sorted with phone and stock up on extra food (as meals here are very basic and mostly vegetarian, much to Rich’s disappointment!)  The Matutu ride home, however, took over 2 hours!

Our first day of work involved moving desks to new classrooms, removing irrelevant posters, washing down desks.  Rich busied himself mending broken shelves, and I worked on the sports equipment inventory (much like my normal job of cleaning out the sports storeroom!!).   We have also whittled signs out of wood for each classroom.

             

                                 

At the start of the second week, we had 3 days of teacher training.  This was fantastic and run by two primary school teachers from the UK.  They taught the teachers here how to make their classes more interactive, rather than the traditional way of teaching that they are used.  This has lead to us being very busy and we have spent the rest of the week making learning charts and interactive games and activities from old sacks, cardboard, water bottles, beans, bottle tops.

 

Most evenings we sit in an open room with a fire and a pool table.  There is a small bar available for all types of drink purchases, which turns into a dance floor on Friday nights! When you sip 100ml of gin or vodka from plastic sachets, these nights can get messy!

School begins again on Monday 19^th May and then we will become very busy after our Gorilla Trek!