Non fiction

Eden, Uganda

As our plane touches down at Entebbe Airport, Uganda, I can glimpse a small corner of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake. The runway is surrounded by dense forest, a far cry from the concrete wasteland of Heathrow we took off from nine hours earlier.

I’m here because my school, Herts and Essex High School, has forged a partnership with Eden High School in the town of Kasangati, Uganda. Every year around 20 students from our sixth form visit Eden for three weeks, bringing with them donations of clothes, books, funds and building materials that the school has managed to raise throughout the year.

 We collect our bags and head for the doors – and watch as a class of kids from Eden run to greet us in a blur of bright blue uniform. They gather eagerly around us, giving us hugs, offering to carry our suitcases and chatting away in English with various levels of fluency. We are led to stand outside a rickety minibus whose paintwork proudly proclaims it as ‘Simply the Best!’. (We will quickly come to realise that the bus is a liar.) As I am beginning to wonder whether anyone has ever been so happy to see me, the children burst into a song complete with choreographed dance.

 We all cram ourselves into the bus and set off towards Eden. The landscape we can see through the dusty windows is much greener than I expected – Uganda has a more tropical climate than much of Africa. It doesn’t take long for us to make our first encounter with the stony, potholed tracks which make up most of Uganda’s road system. When I’m not being thrown from my seat I watch the towns and villages we travel through along the way. Buildings face the road on either side, a mish-mash of aluminium shacks, wooden and mud huts and concrete blocks brightly painted with the logos of paint companies and telephone networks.  Chickens peck at porch steps where people sit chatting leisurely – at least until they see us. White people are a rare sight in Uganda, and over the coming weeks we will soon become used to people running alongside the bus, waving and shouting, “MZUNGU MZUNGU!” Mzungu simply means ‘white person’ and is derived from a word which originally meant ‘one who moves around’, used to describe European traders in the 18th century. It doesn’t take long for us to embrace our new name and we will later make a stallholder very happy with our purchase of 18 t-shirts proudly emblazoned with the words ‘UGANDA’ on the back and ‘MZUNGU’ on the front.

 After about an hour of being jolted around we arrive at our accommodation right next to Eden High School. We unpack and are given a tour of the school and the girls’ dorms. The classrooms and hall are painted bright blue and white, surrounded by carefully-tended lawns and flowerbeds. The dorms are dark, with bare concrete floors and crowded-together triple bunkbeds. Some of the girls have mosquito nets, but most are peppered with holes. Fortunately, this year we were able to raise enough money to buy every child their own net. The girls keep chamber pots under their beds so that they don’t have to venture out to the latrines, concrete shafts 40 foot deep, in the dark. After the tour, we go back to our own dorms, which seem incredibly spacious by contrast, even if we do soon realise that a working shower is the exception rather than the rule.

 The next few days are spent getting to know the students of Eden. The first thing you notice is that they’re all fiercely ambitious – as we are guided around the maze-like streets of Kasangati, I chat to Esther, who wants to be a teacher; Lillian, a future lawyer; and Martha, who plans to become a neurosurgeon. They’re friendly yet frank: if they think you’ve said something stupid, you’ll know about it. But their teasing is affectionate and we hold hands in a line as we troop through winding passages I would never be able to negotiate by myself. We’re following a route which the students themselves take to the market, and our taste of Ugandan student life continues later in the week. We visit the well, where I struggle to heave a 20 litre jerry can up the hill – a task often undertaken by children as young as seven. We take part in a history lesson, have a debate with the students (‘Is money the root of all evil?’) and prove the stereotype that white people really can’t dance when we learn and perform a song, accompanied by dance moves, to the hilarity of the Eden students. We paint buildings, dazzled as the sun bounces off the blinding white paint, and make bricks, feeling the clay ooze between our fingers as it squelches into the mould. The staff and students make us feel like we belong – a particularly young and excitable teacher, Bob, goes so far as to invite us to become members of his tribe. Our time at Eden tumbles by and soon it’s time for us to venture further afield.

 We climb onto the bus with trepidation – it seems to have crumbled away even more, and doesn’t look as though it could support our weight when stationary, never mind get us anywhere. Sure enough, a window promptly falls out as we set off down the road. We’re heading west, and the further we travel the poorer it gets. We see more and more groups of children without any adults – unsurprisingly as over half the population of Uganda is under 15. At one stop we make we see a little albino boy. He has a disintegrating cloth cap jammed on his head, sunburn on his arms and neck, and is being teased by the other children. My teacher gives him a bottle of sunscreen and he looks at it in confusion.

 We’re on our way to visit Nabikabala Primary School. As the bus judders towards the school we spot a dust cloud on the horizon, which eventually proves to be a crowd of 300 children sprinting towards us. It’s gratifying, but frankly quite scary, to be greeted with such awe and urgency. The children are excited not only to see us, but because today they will have the rare treat of getting lunch at school – a bowl of rice each. This only happens annually, thanks to donations from Nabikabala’s partner school, Thorley Hill. We all eat together and afterwards are told to get into groups and play games with the children. Because most are so much younger than the pupils at Eden, the language barrier is much more apparent, but it’s amazing how much the children are able to learn when the sole mode of communication is body language. We play Duck Duck Goose, Hide and Seek, and with a circle of about two hundred children, do the Hokey Cokey. By the end of the day most of the children have learned the words and actions to ‘Heads, Shoulders Knees and Toes’. The kids are clearly loving every moment and it’s very difficult to leave. I reluctantly walk back to the bus with a chain of children holding onto each of my hands. As we pull away, they run alongside for what seems like an impossibly long time until I’m scared that they’ll be run over.

We begin the journey back to Eden. On the way we visit the family of Patrick, a geography teacher at the school. They treat us to a fantastic dinner with them and their friends, which we eat under a brightly-patterned canopy, helping ourselves to an array of food including goat and matooke (green bananas which are peeled, boiled and mashed). Patrick’s family is full of big personalities – his mother bursts into song every few minutes, and clutches us to her huge bosom one by one when we have to leave.

As well as a vibrant array of people, Uganda is home to several famous landmarks, and we are lucky enough to visit a few. We take a trip to the Equator, marked by a large white ring representing the globe. A tour guide shows us the Coriolis effect. Three swirl-painted basins are filled with water, into which the tour guide drops a flower. The water is let out, and we can see by the movement of the flower that in the northern hemisphere it flows anticlockwise, in the southern hemisphere clockwise, and at the Equator, straight down. (Our science teacher later tells me that the effect is nowhere near strong enough to be able to affect a basin of water, but I am determined to believe.)

 Two weeks since I saw Lake Victoria from the air, I am able to visit it by boat, as we take a trip to the source of the Nile. We watch elephants and water-buffalo gather to drink at its shores, and pass herons, kingfishers, African darters and a slithering black cobra coiled in the branches of a tree. We reach the trig point for the source and clamber over stepping stones to scale it and take obligatory photos. The next day we visit the rainforest and look at medicinal sausage fruits and oversized insects whilst monkeys swoop overhead. I resolve to keep a closer eye on the path when I am held hostage by a seemingly endless column of ants, each as big as my middle finger, marching across my shoe. Finally, we visit Queen Elizabeth National Park. On safari we see gangly-limbed hyenas, elephants taking casual mouthfuls of tree, Uganda kob (a sandy-yellow antelope with exquisitely curved horns), and trotting warthogs whose tails stick straight up in alarm like radio aerials. In the night, I am awoken by a rustle like static. I rush to the window and for a full half hour watch two hippos sashaying slowly through the grass and ponderously chewing at leaves with rubbery bites. They’re barely six feet away. In the morning, nobody else has seen them and everyone rues the fact that we aren’t staying another night.

 We return to Eden for all too brief a period. There is just enough time to catch up with the students, learn one last dance and throw a celebratory school disco, before we climb into the now clanking bus for the last time, and then board the plane. I watch the largest lake in Africa recede. My time in Uganda has left me with many similarly vivid images – both of beauty and suffering – but my most enduring memory is of the exuberance, tenacity and welcome of its people. Back at home, the certain blast of the shower feels miraculous. Yet already I feel a twinge of longing as I watch the last of the red African dirt trickle into the plughole.

Hannah Roberts