Updates From The "Saga" GroupDay 1 Friday 17th October In the early hours of Friday morning, group gathered at Heathrow Airports' Terminal 4 for the start of their African adventure. The Testbourne members were both excited and apprehensive, and with just one or two tears, they said goodbye to their parents in the departure lounge. Later on that evening we were able to make call with the welcome news that the whole team had arrived safely in Uganda, with no one missing, and nothing lost. Days 2&3 Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th October We are currently all well and enjoying our time at the school. Today the team have gone to school and have met up with the buddies. They spent nearly two hours finding out information about each other and the lives that they live and their daily routines. It has been extremely interesting. The weather is very hot and humid so no need for the hoodies! The buddies took the team for a tour of the school including the dormitories and the farm. They seem to have found this interesting and are very excited about showing all of their photos. The team then had to speak in the headmaster's assembly and introduce themselves. During this assembly we gave the school the gifts of the sports kit, carpentry tools and Ug$300,000 for the maths department. They looked very happy with the gifts that we have given them. The team were then taken to lunch of poshu and beans by their buddies in the school canteen. This afternoon the team are going into lessons with their buddies, then having a Ugandan lesson to learn twinkle twinkle little star! After that they will be going to collect water from the river, something they now have to do less often thanks to the water tanks that we gave the school! Day 4 Monday 20th October The Testbourne crowd disappeared off to school and the ‘saga’ group headed off into town to look at the market and shops. They also visited a school run by our driver Juma – whose wife is the head teacher. The school campus is on a site the size of the recreation ground car park and there are about 350 kids there! It is startling what they cramp in. Just brick walls, some kids on benches others on the floor. There are seven year groups in Primary school and they do not go up a year until they pass so some children leave primary at 16. It was then onto the secondary school where we had our lesson in the Lugandan language! There were a number of tongue twisters and a certain amount of class disruption as we struggled through greetings, singular and plural and and pronunciations. Our patient teacher Noelene was very good. The kids joined the end of our lesson before the beginning of theirs and we all learnt Twinkle twinkle little star in Lugandan and then sang it a couple of times – all good fun…the rains fell and we returned to the Enro Hotel! Day 5 Tuesday 21st October The kids returned to school and the saga team went to Afinnet – the women’s project ‘school’ where they are taught sewing. Here we were all under the instruction of Maddy Winter who taught the 40 + students how to make a simple bag. Pam, taught 9 girls how to knit and Ann taught twelve girls how to plait lengths of material and then sew them together into a mat. Nigel had 8 boys in the carpentry room and they honed their skills in making a simple toy – enjoying the many tools we had brought from the UK. The girls usually practice sewing on their treadle machines with brown paper but we went straight to the materials we brought. Our aim was for them to make a bag for themselves in one day! The delight was worth all the effort, broken needles, lack of bobbins and patient waiting as the sewing machines have to be shared between two or three. After lunch a few of our party left Afinnet to go to Mityana Junior school to begin painting Primary 1 & 2 classrooms. Day 6 Wednesday 22nd October This turned out to be a tough day. It poured with rain and that meant that the day was ‘disorganised’! Some adults returned to Afinnet and some went to the junior school. Here we waited for the staff to begin lessons – 1 ˝ hours late – disorganised by the weather….(they didn’t want to get wet!) We had half the Testbourne team so we waited and waited – a lesson in African patience. Then the kids went into observe lessons or talk to the pupils and later they had a big assembly for us with singing and dancing! After that we had a short time to make bracelets and then they returned to Mityana secondary and those down there came up. We found that some of them had been ridiculed, we found out that their buddies also take a huge amount of stick – some really nasty stuff from there peers for being chosen. It was a huge learning curve for our kids and in our evening discussion all sorts of feelings and thoughts were raised about bullying and unkindness. However the day was not all bad. The afternoon group painted and the morning group had a wonderful time blowing bottles of bubbles and shared the huge delight of the kids and the adults were able to finish off all 75 girls making bags, sewing or knitting and the sense of achievement was significant amongst us all. | 
