Meeting my partner teacher

Since the war, the Acholi people of Gulu, Uganda have been rebuilding their city and taking back the lives that were stolen from them so maliciously. If you ask the Acholi people what they want most, they say that they want to rebuild their education system. Before the war, the schools in Gulu were doing very well, but when the rebels came through, schools were destroyed, children were abducted, and the education system shut down. During the rebuilding process, students who have returned to school came back to temporary schools (called displaced school) while their previous schools are being rebuilt in the original site which can be, in the case the original site of my school, ~2 hours away. The past few days, I have had the opportunity to come acquainted with Awere SS, the school I will be teaching at, which is just about a 10 minute walk from my house. I was told previously that my school is probably the poorest in the area, but I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw, and I was a bit overwhelmed. When I go to Awere, I see these students, ranging in age from 13 to about 20 or so, going to a school that is 2 hours away from home, and literally put together with tree trunks cut in half (walls) and chicken wire (windows). There are 3-inch gaps in the walls…I have no idea what will happen when it’s raining outside. Inside there are benches where students in a class of 70-120 sit two to a bench facing a blackboard. This sounds so stupid, but for some reason, before I came here I was expecting the quality of education to be very low and outdated. However, today when I looked in on one classroom, I looked at the blackboard to see what the students were learning. On the blackboard, there was this extremely complex math/physics equation that is on par with first year college classes in America. For some reason that moved me so much…the fact that these students could be living through one of the most gruesome wars ever, going to a school that could blow over in the wind and still somehow have the motivation and foresight to desire and apply themselves to learn such complicated material under the toughest possible conditions….all with an attitude of feeling blessed. Incredible.
The camaraderie spurred between Ugandan and American teachers through the Teachers Exchange Program has been very well accepted here…learning from each other so as to initiate cross-cultural dialogue and continue to improve student learning. For me, I have been paired up with Mr. Okello James David Marian, a biology teacher for S2 students, the equivalent of about 8th grade. I am very excited about this partnership…when we met for the first time the other night at a “welcome banquet,” we were like two peas in a pod. After getting past the hi-how-are-yous, discussion of family status, and introducing him to my “son” named Ralph (the Ugandans think this is hilarious), we instantly started talking Immunology and Virology…we were definitely the science nerds in the group! Today, I had the fortunate opportunity to visit James David’s home and meet is wife and 2 sons (one 4yrs and one 4 months). They were so hospitable, and instantly took me into their home, offering coke and biscuits (cookies)….whether they could afford it or not, just to let me know that I was welcome in their home! I know that I keep saying this, but it is just so amazing to me just how welcoming the Acholi people are. Anytime you meet someone, they shake your hand with a very specific hand shake, they look you in the eye with a sense of reverence and tell you over and over that you are “most welcome” to Uganda…or to their shop…or to their home. These people have everything in the world to be bitter and down-trodden about, but you would never know that if you came to this city without being familiar with their recent history.