Connecting to Community

February 19-25, 2012

The last week has been about connecting to community.  Donna – through friends and friends of friends – has helped us to connect to the expat, rural, missionary, and conservation communities around southern Uganda.  We have had the incredible opportunity to meet many people as well as visit another school as we traveled from Kampala to Kaliro to Jinja and finally back to Entebbe (where we are preparing to fly out this evening). 

We began our final week connecting to a friend of a friend of Donna’s, Vicki. Vicki has lived in Uganda for over 20 years working in a variety of capacities.  Vicki took us to her church in Entebbe, where we were the only Muzungus in attendance.  We then spent a long, rainy (seems like the rainy season is beginning) lunch with Vicki at a delicious Indian restaurant in Kampala learning more about her experiences and life in Uganda over the years.  When she drove us back to our hostel, we spent almost 2 more hours continuing to visit in her car!  We rounded out day with the owner of our tour company attending a cultural show (with traditional music, dancing and food) for the evening.

Our travels next took us to the small village of Kaliro about 150 km from Kampala. Kaliro is the home of Donna’s friend Aggrey and his family.  Donna met Aggrey 10 years ago when he came to the US and Cuyahoga National Park on an exchange to be an instructor at Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education center with Donna.  Aggrey currently lives about 40 km away from Kaliro where he teaches at Iganga High School but his family – wife Juliet, sons Andrew and Stuart, and daughter Molly – still live at the family home about 5 km from the center of Kaliro.  We stayed with Aggrey and his family for 2 nights.  As guests, we were treated incredibly kindly – we toured the area, were given gifts of a chicken and fruits and vegetables from the neighbors, and were able to visit the Cleveland School. 

The Cleveland School was a dream of Aggrey’s after visiting the US 10 years ago.  He found a group of teachers who shared his vision for a more integrated, cross-curricular education, and 5 years ago they opened the Cleveland School (named after Aggrey’s experience near Cleveland, OH in the US), a private secondary school (serving the equivalent of about 6^th to 12^th grade in the us) with mostly day students and a few boarding students.  Aggrey is one of the founders of the school and on the board of directors, and rather than teach there, Aggrey prefers to serve the school in a volunteer capacity.  When the school first opened, Donna wrote a small grant to buy and send school supplies, and in her honor, a block of the school (one building with 2 classrooms) is named after her “Donna Daniella”.  At the Cleveland School, we presented the school supplies that we brought (thanks to many of you!!), taught the students how to throw the Frisbee (although given mine and Donna’s poor Frisbee abilities, most were more self-taught), and we had the equivalent of the 6^th grade class write letters back to my Girl Scout troop in Wyoming.  We closed out our visit to the Cleveland School with a ceremony in which Donna put her hand print on the sign honoring her and we both planted mango trees on campus.  Our entire time in Kaliro was hard to describe – humbling, inspiring, joyful…

We left Kaliro and headed next to Jinja, where another friend of Donna’s connected us to a US missionary family living and serving there.  Misti and Anthony have served as missionaries in Uganda on and off for the last 6 years with their two elementary-aged daughters.  They were kind enough to host us in their lovely home in Jinja, where we re-connected to the outside world with food, TV, internet, and did a lot of souvenir shopping.  I spent a lot of time playing games with the two girls, and thoroughly enjoyed long conversations with Anthony and Misti about missionary work and science & religion (Anthony’s area of study from graduate school).  Unfortunately, the end of our time in Jinja was tainted by a stomach bug that hit Donna pretty hard. 

From Jinja we returned to Entebbe on Friday by way of a long stop in Kampala (not to be confused with a “long call”, aka “chase the bear” or #2 J ).  In Kampala, we connected briefly with Aggrey’s oldest daughter Stella, at college there, and re-connected with Vicki for lunch.  When Vicki heard of Donna’s stomach-status, she suggested a visit to a local medical clinic to get a check-up before our flight on Saturday evening.  Donna and I visited the clinic and found that she was suffering from an infection that thankfully our travel meds were well suited to treat, and so we headed on to Entebbe.

For our final night in Entebbe, we are fortunate to be staying at a hostel at the Jane Gooddall Institute, near the zoo where we stayed before.  We had hoped to travel with them to Ngamba Island (a chimp rehabilitation facility on an island in Lake Victoria) this morning, but rain and thunderstorms that began early, early this AM have persisted through this morning.  So we will spend our final day in Uganda visiting with the staff and other guests here at the Jane Gooddall Institute, and if it stops raining… perhaps a final walk around the town.