A few weeks ago I blogged about falling into an unexpected teaching position at a Ugandan primary school. I finished that email with a promise that my next blog would be about a project we undertook that the kids absolutely loved and would remember for the rest of their lives. I then proceeded to write my next blog about fixing up a rickety old board walk at the wetlands – well, believe it or not my amateur handyman skills were not what I was referring to in the earlier email, and if I’m not much mistaken our work there has probably been forgotten already.
Here’s the story of the project that made kids smile.
After teaching kids how to draw an equilateral triangle with nothing but a compass and a ruler I realised that me teaching the curriculum wasn’t helping anyone, I’m no teacher and the language barrier meant the kids really weren’t learning anything. I thought about where my strengths lay and what I could contribute that would be unique when an idea struck me like the sting of a jellyfish (I got stung by a jellyfish today FYI) – SCHOOL PHOTOS! I’d attended a local wedding a few days earlier and there were only 5 camera there out of 500+ guests so it was a safe bet that few (if any) of the kids had access to a camera at home. Further, it was highly likely that many of these kids would not have a single photograph of themselves. Coming from a culture where photos are seemingly endless and backed up and distributed freely online (I read recently Facebook has 150 million photos uploaded every day) it’s easy to forget that for some people a single photograph can be an extremely important possession.
To this end I decided to expand my job description to “school photographer”. I had a chat with the headmaster Sunday John (side note: they’ve got some awesome names in Uganda, we came across Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Brave, Innocent, Silver and God) and we got the show on the road. We took it one year level at a time, beginning with the entire class before taking individual shots of each child, once we’d been through all the year levels it was time to round the whole school up and get them all together.
That weekend we headed into Fort Portal to find somewhere to print the files. Under normal circumstances Fort Portal would be a largely forgettable small town with few redeeming features, but after a week of no electricity, running water or imported food it felt like we’d arrived at NEW YORK CITY!! Oh the fun we had, first stop was a packet of pringles, this was washed down by an ice cold beer and an Italian style pizza – yes sir, I was living large! We managed to find somewhere to develop the photos and returned home to Bigodi later that day with around 150 individual portraits, 150 class photos (spread over 6 classes) and 3 large whole school photos.
I don’t know who was more excited when Monday rolled around, me or the kids! I spend Sunday trying to arrange the photos into class groups which sounded like a good idea at the time but was actually borderline impossible when push came to shove. I got about as close as I was going to get and was stoked to find that all the kids got their photos and nothing was lost along the way.
Location:Bigodi progressive primary school
