Nothing prepares you for your first visit to a Third World School. Lweza Primary School is in the Mukono District about 40 km east of Kampala. It’s a short walk up the primitive road from our house in the hills above the town of Mukono. It would be impossible for five white people to walk anywhere in the district unnoticed. We must be a bit of a curiosity.

The path into the schoolyard is nothing but a culvert dug out by the rain of a thousand storms. The school consists of two long parallel simple structures with classrooms that hold desks you might see on old re-runs of Little House on the Prairie. 700 children are educated here in grades K-7; one classroom per grade level, one hundred students per classroom. The students arrive at 8, and leave at 4:30 with an hour lunch break between 1:00 and 2:00. A porridge is served for lunch but there is never enough to feed anywhere near all the children. Many go without eating for the whole day. Others escape the campus, go home for lunch and do not return.

When we arrived, most of the children were at some kind of recess. We were mobbed instantly. Kids of all ages waved, laughed, and tried their best to greet us in English. Everyone wanted to touch us.

We first met with the head mistress and a few of the teachers. Maggie, the lead professor of our little entourage is wonderful about laying down the law as to what we should have access to and what we are expected to do this week. Loy, the head mistress, has been here for two years and quickly built up a bit of a reputation as an obstacle to progress. Maggie has been stern in her conviction that the school has to honor a commitment made four years ago between a team from the University of Wisconsin and Lweza’s board of directors to help the school be more effective. We are careful to allow teachers to take the lead in telling us what they would like to be able to do. It’s our task to make their wishes possible whenever possible.

Most teachers in Uganda have two years of teacher training before they’re assigned to schools. To watch them is like going through a time warp back to the early 1900’s. Two years ago, Maggie bought them six new Macintosh computers as well as Internet access. Sarah, the English teacher at the school, has learned how to use the computers for research and communication; however, most of the teachers cannot use a browser. Some lack even basic keyboarding skills.

After our meeting, we wandered off to visit classes. I teamed up with Sarah and we went to visit her 7^th grade class. The students had been completely unattended for at least a half hour before we entered the room, but no one was out of his/her seat. They all stood up as we walked in and apparently had been previously coached in how to greet me. “Good morning visitor. Welcome to Lwecy Primary School”. I was told they would not sit until I said “Thank you” which I promptly did.

That the room was filthy was the least of the problems. Christianity is openly observed here in Mukono and most of southern Uganda. There were tattered posters on the wall of Bible verses including the Ten Commandments. Many of the families have been destroyed by the HIV virus, so there were many posters about not allowing oneself to be touched inappropriately. Every piece of writing is in English. There were several misspelled words.

Of the 700 students, approximately 180 acknowledge to be homeless, but the actual number is much higher. An equal number, certainly correspondingly, are orphaned. It is very common for both parents of a child to die of AIDs leaving their infected children in the care of the next of kin. Families each rent rooms in small primitive houses that sometimes house more than 20 people. Health issues dominate the literature that Ugandan children read in school beginning with the youngest.

At first sight I perceived all of the students to be boys. The heads of all children are shaved and, except for the most destitute, they all wear mustard yellow school uniforms. The boys wear pea green shorts; the girls wear pea green skirts. When the children are sitting, it’s hard to tell the difference between shorts and skirts. Skirts must be long enough to cover the girls’ knees. Before we left home, Cathy and Carly bought long skirts to wear. They blended right in with the female teachers.

Sarah immediately began to teach. She stood at the blackboard, a piece of particleboard with a laminated black veneer that is rough and cracked. Today’s lesson was how to write an informal letter. Sarah modeled a letter on the board. Everyone’s native language (including all the teachers) is Luganda, a derivative of Bantu. Sarah’s English is very good, but not good enough to escape an occasional spelling or syntax error. She taught valiantly for at least 20 minutes while the students up front paid rapt attention and the students in the back of the room fidgeted and talked to each other in whispers.

When Sarah finished writing and explaining her model (an invitation to a birthday party) she directed the students to write a similar letter in their composition booklets: “Your sister is getting married and you want to invite a friend to the wedding.” The students then got to work while Sarah graded papers at the back of the room.

I asked Sarah if I could wander around the room to see the students’ progress. I sensed a moment of hesitation, but she agreed. As I expected, the students at the front of the room near the blackboard had no difficulty with the task, but those in back struggled and seemed to need a bit of direction. I later found out that seating charts are constructed so that the brighter students are seated closer to the front of the room. It was when I started reading their work and saw their names signed at the bottom of their letters that I realized for the first time that most of the students sitting up front were in fact girls. After a while, Sarah got up and collected a few specimens that she proudly showed me. They all came from female students seated in the front of the room. Interestingly, there was only one left-handed student in room; he had no idea of what to do, and no one came by to help him.

In the afternoon, I visited a level three classroom. Whereas the seventh form had only 23 students (9 were absent) the third grade had almost a hundred. Apparently, two-thirds of the students drop out of school after the 5^th form. Daisy, the teacher, apologized that several student went home for lunch because they were hungry, but failed to return for the afternoon session. When I walked into the class the moveable partitions had been removed between the second and third level classes. There didn’t seem to be any lesson going on in this combined room of about 200 students;  all were sitting on their bench, four to a desk. There was a brief huddle at the blackboard between Daisy and another teacher as they seemed to be coming up with a lesson plan at that very moment. It was decided that the lesson would be about dangers found around the house.

The partitions were hauled back into place and Daisy went into action. She taught mostly in Luganda but it soon became clear this was an English lesson. Unlike Sarah, Daisy does not stay at the blackboard. She moved freely and quickly up and down the two aisles soliciting responses. When she called upon a child, the child would offer a danger in English. Dog bites, snake bites, accidental poisoning, falling out of a tree, falling off a roof, and so on. For each response, Daisy would go into an animated story, thought up on the spot, of how such a danger could occur. Then she would write the child’s response on the board as students copied each response into their composition books.

The lack of school supplies is heartbreaking. Teachers have chalk, but no erasers. They improvise with pieces of foam ripped out of an old furniture cushion. Teachers keep records in decrepit 3-ring notebooks that should have been thrown away ten years ago. Students make their own composition booklets by stapling a few sheets of lined paper together and constructing a cover out of old newsprint. A few students shared their booklet with another student. A couple students in the back of the room had no booklet and no one to share. One girl in particular was exceptionally dirty, had no uniform, and could not keep up with the class. She sat alone and never talked to anyone. Cathy wondered if some of these children might need glasses and may have been having trouble seeing the board.

One of the boys in the class seemed much older than the others, He wore a string of beads around his neck, probably a rosary. He didn’t sit in the back, but he seemed to struggle a bit. When independent work time came, he took an extra long time to get started.

How do you keep a hundred third graders focused on the teacher? When Daisy told a story, she put her whole body into it. This was theater. The other technique employed is one I noticed with Sarah in the morning. Daisy would say something important then she would repeat the sentence leaving out a word, which the students would shout out in unison. Choral responses seemed to be in all the teachers’ repertoires. This is definitely a cultural practice that long predates African schools.

After a long list of dangers had been pulled from the class and written neatly on the board, Daisy told the students to draw a picture of a boy falling out of a tree and then write down two dangers they might face around their house. She then asked if I would get up and help check the students’ work. What I quickly deduced is that anytime a student is given an assignment for his composition booklet, the teacher must grade it. With a hundred students in the room, that could be quite a task. So I helped. A correct answer is noted with a check mark, a wrong answer is indicated with sort of a squiggle. At first, the students sat without working. The instructions had been given in English (a school wide initiative) and I didn’t thing the students understood. I took our a notecard and drew a crude picture of a boy falling out of a tree. The students thought that was a riot. When I then pointed to their paper, they understood. Cathy and Carly had come into the room earlier and they moved around the class as well. Lweza kids love to smile, giggle, and touch. We were clearly a welcome novelty as they each raised their hands to show us their pictures. Even after we checked both picture and written response, they would raise their hands, just to get out attention. High-fives, knuckle bumps, and three-part handshakes were essential parts of the experience. On several occasions, students wanted to hold our hands.

At 4:30, an older student banged a stick on an old tire rim out in the schoolyard, the signal that classes were dismissed. Students and teachers poured out of the buildings into the school yard which was red dirt, stony and had never seen a york rake. We were again mobbed as we tried to move across the yard to the computer lab. It was then I noticed that at least a quarter of the students were barefoot. They waved and shook hands. Many times I felt a child come up behind me just to touch my shirt. Across the yard I noticed the boy I thought too old for third grade. He had the limp and unmistakable limp of palsy.

The sky quickly turned ominous with dark clouds and distant lightening. We had scheduled a professional development session to teach teachers some basic computer skills but realized we had to cancel. No one would have been able to hear as the rain beat down on the corrugated metal roof and no one expected the electricity to hold up through the storm. Besides, if we didn’t make for home before the rain began, we would have to slog through the road-turned-to-mud and be soaked to the skin.

This trip has definitely made our daughter, Carly, grow up notch or two. She’s 18 now and heading to university in a month. She spent the day observing classrooms and pitching in to do whatever the teachers needed done. Just before the storm hit, we hurried back the rugged path used as a road to our house. Again, we were surrounded by children. Some were holding Carly’s hands; others were jealously waiting their turn. There was one large blue van that had “school van” painted on the front. Brothers, parents, uncles and grandfathers drove up on small motorcycle to gather up as many as three kids. Children lined up along the road to yell out “Hello”. One small fry let go of Carly’s hand and ran into her yard. She stopped amongst the chickens, turned around and yelled out to Carly, “Good-bye! I love you!”

Now I’m sitting here with the rain and lightning, writing this before I forget. Mukassa has yet to begin making dinner and will probably get yelled at by Maggie when she returns from finding an electrician. Maggie’s nagging seems to have little effect on Mukassa whose English is limited but not his smile. Ron, our sometimes driver, is trying to get through the gate into the yard, his car buried to its axels in mud. Cathy is working in the darkness on the other side of the room. Carly is fast asleep. And there was morning, and there was evening another day.