The girls after hiking Mabira Forest
The entire HELP group minus the country directors!
Two of our cute little neighbors
Hey, it’s Natalie!! It’s my turn to update the blog, so here I go! This week we had great progress with our projects! With primary schools we met every morning at 10 am with the teachers at St. Edwards Primary school to make posters. These classes’ room walls are completely empty and the teachers don’t have any aid to help them teach and the students don’t have anything to help them visually learn. We helped the teachers make over 30 posters and they turned out awesome and the teachers are so excited!
On Wednesday everyone went to St. Edwards Primary school for our weekly Wednesday night play date. We split the kids up into groups and had different stations for them to go to, like jump roping, doge ball, parachute, and more. There were a lot of kids but it worked out well and the kids had a blast.
On Thursday the group over women’s groups met with one women’s group in Namango and finalized that they were interested in adobe stove making. This next Thursday we will be teaching how to make and adobe stove!
Also on Thursday the choir group met with the aids choir and finalized that we will start working with them. We will meet again this coming week and get every thing going; we are excited because the kids are so talented and committed.
On Friday the Orphanage group went to Iganga to meet with Richard and Ruth (they run the orphanage). The group with HELP International last year worked with them and they were very happy to see us. It is about two hours away and we will be going their every Friday morning until the evening. We will do crafts, and teach those who do not go to school. We have found that this orphanage is in need the most out of all the ones we have visited.
Saturday we went hiking in Mabira Forest. It was very beautiful and green and we saw monkeys! At one point we got split apart into 3 groups and all went separate directions. The entire time everyone is wondering where everyone is at, but miraculously we ended up meeting together at the end at the same time. After the hike we went into the city of Jinja and got the closest thing to American food we could find. Then we shopped around a little and went home. While walking down the dirt road the kids swarmed us like normal but we saw that they were blowing on something in their mouths. We thought they had whistles but we got closer and saw that they were the girl’s tampons from our garbage. This could be one of the sickest things that have happened so far in Africa. The kids were having a great time making whistles noises and we couldn’t stop them so we kept walking home in shock , with some laughs, of course. When we got home the electricity was out and stayed out for the rest of the night. We were so bored that we played a mystery game where you try to find who the murderer is. It’s scary with no light and we had a few accidents. Tori peed her pants, Leslie got punched in the mouth by accident and another person got their eye poked out.
Today is Sunday and we all went to church, some in Mukono and some in Jinja. Now we have the beginning of a whole other week.
