Year 3 and Year 2 had a proper Ugandan experience yesterday when they were visited by Ronnie Musabe, the Twinning Project’s ‘man on the ground’ in Uganda.
Ronnie spent the morning with Year 3 reviewing their topic on changing Communities. He was able to answer the children’s questions on the relationship between the villages surrounding Queen Elizabeth National Park and the park rangers, particularly with regards to villagers encroaching on park land to plant crops.
In the afternoon, Ronnie visited Year 2 who have just begun their topic on Uganda. Again, he had many questions to answer and said afterwards that he could’ve been at the school for a week and not managed to answer them all. One of the activities Ronnie carried out with both year groups was to go through the Uganda Boxes that the Twinning Project have collated over the years. The children were able to see some traditional Ugandan toys, instruments and clothing as well as well as more modern materials.
This was a highly successful day from which the children obviously benefitted enormously. Ronnie was incredibly impressed, not only with the children’s maturity, but also with the quality of initial and follow – up questions that the children came up with. He told Mr Stanley that many of the tourists who come to Uganda come nowhere near to matching the children in terms of curiosity.
Everyoneat the Liss Federation would like to thank Ronnie for spending the day with us. When Ronnie returns to Uganda during half term, he will be taking some money with him in order to enable Kafuro to reopen lines of communication with Liss and also some special varieties of tomato seeds for the children to grow at Kafuro Primary School. For those readers of the blog who don’t know, Kafuro is famous throughout Uganda for the quality of its tomatoes, so we think the new varieties will grow really well. We hope to show you photos of the tomatoes later this year.
Readers of the blog will have noticed that it’s been a long time since there was any sort of update from our twinned school, Kafuro Primary School. To recap, the Covid pandemic meant that the last reciprocal visit had to be cancelled although some work was carried out at both schools.
Since then, the prospects for another reciprocal visit has become minimal. The British Council (which has had its funding slashed) is no longer offering funding through Connecting Classrooms for reciprocal visits, and the replacement Turing Scheme doesn’t work in the same way. Therefore, any chance of face to face contact is remote at the moment .
However, we now have some up to date news on what is happening at Kafuro Primary School. Ronnie Musabe (who is the twinning project’s man on the ground in Uganda) visited Kafuro last month and was able to spend some time at the school.
Firstly, the school has a new headteacher. Mr. Stephen Thembo (the last Ugandan headteacher to visit Liss) has been transferred to a school in Katerera. This is pretty common in Uganda – most headteachers spend 3 – 4 years at a school before they are moved onto a new school. The new Headteacher is Mr. Jackson Twinamatsiko.
From the photos received from Kafuro (below) and the information Ronnie has already passed on, Kafuro is facing a number of challenges. Firstly, although the school population has remained the same since the pandemic, there has been quite a shift in numbers in each year group. P1 (which is roughly equivalent to Yr R/1) has 145 pupils. They are likely to be in two classrooms with totally inadequate seating! P7 (which is equivalent to Yr 6) has only 16 pupils.
There are now big issues with water coming into the school. Readers of the blog will remember that during Mr Stanley’s last visit to Uganda, he was at Kafuro Primary School when running water was turned on at the school – Liss pupils had funded the cost of the pipeline to the nearest lake and Kafuro pupils and parents had dug the pipeline to the water source. Apparently, although the pipeline is still secure, the source of water appears to have dried up or receded. To make matters worse, the massive (2000 litre) water tank at the school has perished so there is now no water source at the school. This means that children will have to fill jerry cans of water at the nearest crater lake.
Other issues that are facing the school is that although the solar panels (which Liss pupils raised the funds for installing) still work, the batteries to store the energy created are no longer working. These will need replacing. There are also issues with some of the windows no longer keeping rain out of the classrooms.
For all the negative news that has come before, there are also some positives. The last major fundraising that Liss pupils provided for Kafuro was in getting windows and shutters for the staff blocks which was under construction at the time. The staff block is now complete and several of the teachers (including Mr Twinamatsiko) live there during the week. Another area where Liss pupils had helped in the past had been to pay for the draining and upgrade of some of the school latrines. The Ugandan government has now built a brand new latrine block which will help to improve sanitation further at the school. Kafuro also continues to innovate with the construction of a bin for collecting rubbish made entirely out of recyclable materials.
Our immediate priority is to re-establish communication with Kafuro on a consistent basis. For many years the film club at Liss has raised money from selling crisps at screenings and Mr Stanley will be sending out some funds to allow Mr Twinamatsiko to communicate regularly with him. The plan is to identify some projects that both schools can work towards, and see if there are things we can do to help.
One final piece of really good news is that Ronnie Musabe is in the UK for the next three weeks and will be visiting the Liss Federation next Thursday. He will be working with Yr 2 and Yr 3 who have learning about Uganda in their geography curriculum.
After many delays, we finally began construction of our African Keyhole garden today. The Liss design is not quite the same as the circular gardens that you see on the internet, but has been configured to match the available space in our school grounds.
Year 3 children from Ash and Oak classes came and worked with Mr Stanley and Mr Haycock to dig out a trench to lay our bricks. This involved moving lots of earth around with trowels and spades. When this was done, The children worked with Mr Stanley to fetch bricks and bring them to the site of the garden where Mr Haycock arranged them into courses at a 45o angle.
By the end of the morning, 60% of the work had been completed. Next week we hope to lay the remaining courses, fit a willow cylinder to house compost which will spread nutrients in the soil and add more earth to the garden so it is ready to be planted in the spring months.
On Friday, the Liss Federation was represented at the East Hants COP 26 conference in Alton by Mr Stanley, Sophie and Lola. Liss were among many exhibitors at the conference which was open to the general public.
Sophie and Lola talked about all the positive changes that have happened at the school over the last ten years in the fight against climate change as well as the work the school has done overseas with Kafuro Primary School due to our association with the Queen Elizabeth Parks Project and the British Council
The pupils were visited by many different people including Damian Hinds MP. They soon had all sorts of people signing climate change pledges which we will be displaying in school. They were also interviewed for BBC Radio Solent.
There was also an opportunity to visit the main conference room and see some of the speeches as well as some of the other exhibitors. The girls were fascinated by a company called iRED who had a thermal gun. The exhibitors showed them some neat tricks with it.
Everyone had a fantastic afternoon and the girls were an absolute credit to the school.
The Liss Federation display
Trying out some amazing software from the River Wey society
By the end of the afternoon the display board was covered in pledges
Here’s the latest photos of the building work in Liss. As you can see there is a lot of work happening and the first show home is being built. For our friends in Uganda, a show home is a home that people can visit to get an idea of what all the other homes will look like. It is used to attract new buyers.
The Covid – 19 outbreak has delayed building on the Andlers Wood project in Liss. Show homes, which were due to be available to view in July, have now been delayed until December. However, work has restarted and there will be road closures for six weeks while essential work is carried out.
On Thursday, Ash class got into role as Farmers or Rangers of QENP to try to explain why farmers encroaching on National Park land was a positive or negative. They gave great ideas and were very articulate about their reasons, using what they have learnt from looking at maps to support their arguments.
Queen Elizabeth Parks Project Schools' Blog 