Aloyo Christine

Saturday - June 20

The past 24 hours have been momentous. Last night amongst much energy, nerves and excitement we all got ready and very dressed up for our usual standards to meet our partner teachers. We arrived for dinner and waited as teachers arrived. We talked and took dinner with our teachers.

My teacher is Aloyo Christine. She is a friendly single young female and lives on campus at Sir Samuel Baker the all-boys school she has been teaching at for only two weeks. She began teaching when another teacher had a baby and left on maternity leave. PTAs are very large stakeholders in schools and often do things such as hire and pay additional teachers. Aloyo Christine is not on government payroll. She is a PTA teacher. We said that we would learn together. She also shared how she was apprehensive about teaching all boys and had the perceptions that all the boys would be stubborn. She said it is not so and that she has found the boys to be well disciplined. This was very comforting to me because I was feeling similar.

The meet the teacher dinner made me 100 times more excited about getting in the classroom – and excited for the morning.

So, this morning we visited Sir Samuel Baker School, which is about a 15-20 min boda ride from Katharines. We were suppose to be meeting with Catherine the IC teacher exchange assistant director along with all the Ugandan partner teachers and American teachers at Sir Samuel Baker. We arrived to find none of our teachers. Since Catherine had to leave we did not meet. However, a special ceremony was going on at the schools that we were able to observe. The hand off ceremony is the switching of prefects, which are lead students. It became quite long after many speeches and awards. They fed us lunch which was our first eating with our hands experience, which what is the case with all school lunch. We had our most interesting (read: horrendous) latrine experience, which I feel should be censored, yet feel free to ask me about it. It has become the source of many laughs since.

Then I got my partner teacher’s cell phone number, teaching schedule, and arranged a time to meet on Monday. As I was doing that the head teacher, began to talk with the other American teacher and joined in as soon as Christine and I were finished. He discussed the effect of the war on Sir Samuel Baker.

A few interesting things about Sir Samuel Baker:
They have a reputation of having student strikes, especially over the food.
There are around 800 students.
For many years during the war, students would sleep in shifts.
In 1995, 25 students were abducted by the LRA from Sir Samuel Baker. ¼ of them have not been accounted for since.
The main assembly hall was destroy during war and has yet to be reconstructed.
300 students are government sponsored.