The Rural Uganda Education Initiative #TRUEINITIATIVE

TRUEINITIATIVE: ( #2) (Essay) 

I am the kind of person who has had to deal with people older, wiser, successful…and way more educated that myself…. my time is Uganda was the same way…. Dealing with mostly people that are way older than me…. Some that probably understood the system better than me ….the only way I could survive such an ordeal was the fact that on October 22 last year I turned 28 years old while I was in Uganda.

So what that means is that this year I will be 29 years old and I will begin to live my last year as a twenty something year old. Now that does not means that the child in me would go away or anything! No, it simply means that I am going to understand more of what I want and what I am capable of accomplishing.

Personally, I am an extrovert, a right brained kind of a fellow…my personality is just that, if I was a dog I would be a Shepard, a German Shepard that is…and being that my brain allows me to look at things more at whole; for example, if I sit at your desk at your job…I am learning so much more about you with what I am seeing than what you are telling me about you…I feel the say way about how people feel about me; I am an open book/person and it is easy for me to share my experiences and being with others.

That being said, I find myself constantly in front of people that do not know me; don’t care for me; or view me negatively sometimes; at times it was because of my long hair…other times it was my American Swagger;

I explained to so many people about my intentions of being founder and president of a TRUEINITIATIVE; I found myself drafting documentations, such as by-laws, work plans, I had to find board members and volunteers. Yes human beings that can work for free. I have had to find donors. Yes human beings that are willing to hand me one-hundred or one-thousand bucks..trusting me to put it to good use…

Being that I will be 30 soon and I have been a teacher most of my twenties, I have learnt how to put up with “the should-of” in my life, I have learnt to put off societal pressures; yes, people ask when I am getting married, I don’t have kids, most people in Uganda can’t understand how an almost thirty year old can be there unmarried and with no kids…nobody, I mean, nobody wants to trust a person like that down here…but two years before I turn thirty I know, I am not going to care too much about what others think about me; and honestly I cannot spend one second of my life on negativity.

I FACED A LOT OF NEGATIVITY while seeking the paperwork of TRUEINITIATIVE; I don’t even know why they call it an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization or a Non-Profit …because A.) you have to get approval from the government to run an NGO, which means the government is giving you authorization to run an organization B.) The fact that a successful NGO has to be ran like a business I have to argue that a non profit is a business that brings in profits for the economy in which it operates and its benefiting populations….

The fact is running a non-profit cost money; and that’s why I choose to call what I do (social entrepreneurship); non-profits have to hire contractors of all sorts, website designer, graphic designers, etcs…some places it is hard to find a legal consultant that would do work pro-bono. Let’s not mention the money spent on fieldwork, paperwork, travel, air and land, hotels, events and such things. I would call that a business, period!

There’s no business venture that has grantee success; and most business success is dependent on its owners and those that run it. Nothing can be firmer than that when it comes to running an NGO.

It is mid November 2013 here in Uganda and it is a rainy season; it rains everywhere; it is 10AM and it has rained on me most of the morning as I made my way to the internal affairs ministry office to register for NGO status, I couple of days ago I had come to the same office and picked a pamphlet that had all the recommendations; I have them all or I thought I did.

A bunch of us are waiting outside in a green tent; people are here for different reasons, from passports to work permits to what have you… 10AM became 11:30AM it became 12:30PM it became 1PM and now it was 2PM…the person I am waiting on is no where to be seen.

After all these hours, I have went from being wet, to feeling hungry to being pissed off, to having my phone calls not answered or being hung up on.. I am holding five folders full of wet paper, I am ready to go back to the village …at about 2:30 PM I got up and walked through the gates of internal affairs ministry.

I took a long walk from Jinja Road without looking back to the old taxi park where I would board a taxi heading back to the village…I could not get over the fact the my time was wasted and I was treated like a second grader in a bathroom line by someone in a position of power, someone way older than me.

That moment I realized that what I had got myself into wasn’t easy and that I wasn’t going to quit because I had invested so much time in this and I had flown about 9000 miles to be treated like crap a few weeks ago. And if it was not me; someone else would be doing this and there is a reason why it is me, because I can handle this … “I have got to keep on moving,” I said to myself! 

@the office

"Oh Uganda, may God uphold thee....we lay our future in thy hand"
National Anthem of Uganda 

The Rural Uganda Education Initiative #TRUEINITIATIVE

TRUEINITIATIVE: ( #1)

So after spending all that time in the field in Uganda. I had lots of time planning, thinking and understand more and more what (A) non-profit(s) in general are and what they are not…. why the failure rate is so high…why do some over promise and fail to deliver.

I was searching and checking myself and rethinking and thinking about the mission and vision of TRUEINTIATIVE

As our title states: we are an educational non-profit initiative operating in rural Uganda. Therefore I spent most of my time learning about education in rural Uganda.

I spent my time volunteering and researching the needs of education in rural Uganda. I was more interested in the community education and community education. .

I spent most of my time in (About three months) Ssinda, Kivuluba Village of Mukono District in Uganda. I basically spent most of my time in Mukono District than anywhere else…

Population on village level is less than five thousands but more than three thousand… this is where I am a local boy…this is where I lived before I took off to America in December of 1997…as for the case of education the village of Ssinda, Kivulba has about six different schools ranging from nursery schools to late high school…the majority of the schools are private and one primary community school.

I spent most of my time teaching and doing other things at Kabimbiri R/C (Roman Catholic) Primary school. It a community public school and it is also where I went to Primary five through seven. (1995 – 1997)  The headmistress of the school was very welcoming knowing that I was running an experiment she was able to offer me as much access as possible to what I was doing. She also offered great advice…

I took a lot of notes, draw up all sorts of project, and went back to my notes again… most rural schools in Uganda that I visited are like this one; the structures: are very old, the windows and doors are no more or not functional, the roofs, well let’s just say that when it rains it pours in some of the classes especially the class that holds grade four students in this school: in this particular class there is not even a cement floor, student spend their whole days walking through dust some are barefoot.

The classrooms have no technology of any sort; there are no computers, no smart boards and well no electricity; just a blackboard and chalk, most blackboards are faded…they are about nine rooms that function as such in this school including and office and a teacher’s workroom…. the school has latrines where the pupils go when nature calls…overall it is a gross places, no running water, most did not wash hands after using sometime I noticed. The headmistress is working on rebuilding the area…she has a project going! 

0ne evening after our reading break 

The school has no kitchen; lunch was usually in open spaces around campus anywhere. The headmistress begun a kitchen construction project to which TRUEINITIATIVE has pledged to donate ten bags of cement; we have so far donated five bags and in May/2014 we will fulfill our pledge.  

So this is the basic explanation of how a community school looks like in Rural Uganda…

Private school had better structures; better staffing, the student population was not local, they are in the education business to make a profit, they are day and boarding, and some receive help from the Ugandan government and other donors.

So in conclusion the need of our services and presence is clearly needed and therefore there is a need for functional Community Based NGO Organizations in Uganda and anywhere else in the world were a need to do good exists. 

So what's the probability of Uganda becoming a Middle-class economy?

About 15 hours ago a popular journalist or a public figure like his profile states asked the question above to his Facebook friends.

It wouldn’t have been blog worthy if the comments on the subject were more supportive of the question asked.

But it became interesting when about three in say five of the hundreds of the people commenting on the question disagreed in some way or another with the friend asking the question.

Or they couldn’t understand why he was asking the question in terms of probability.

Because the commenters had their way on how they understood probability…. the public figure used a story saying if your past lover broken your heart the probability is high they would do it again…

The way money is handled in UG today doesn't promise a
middle class tomorrow
Photo Credit: Google Search!

AND THIS IS WHERE I whole-heartedly disagreed with him…I BELIEVE that the probability also exists that a person who breaks another person’s heart could learn not to do it again…hence the question he asked his friends was incomplete; why…the probability of Uganda’s economy becoming middle class is always there…thus the question should then be when?

Because this public figure should know, that possibility and probability are more of the same thing, while YES it is possible for the economy in Uganda to become middle class; it will probably take a very long time, perhaps not even in his lifetime.