Arrived in Kampala yesterday. Tomorrow, we leave for the campus of the Uganda Rural Development Training programme (URDT) and the African Rural University about 5 hours southwest of Kampala. We have already had a pretty satisfying and educational experience.
Jacqueline Akello met us at the Entebbe airport when we arrived on Saturday morning with the amazingly talented URDT driver, Laurence. (It takes talent to negotiate the rutted dirt roads and mudholes in the rural areas as well as to dodge the motorbikes, pedestrians and other vehicles in the chaos that is downtown Kampala. Laurence does this all with great aplomb while listening avidly to the catch up conversations we are having about politics in Uganda and the US, the economic situations, and the latest news of people he knows on both sides of the Atlantic.).
Jacqueline Akello
We were dropped off at a brand new hotel--one we recommend wholeheartedly--the Protea on Acacia Avenue, near the golf course. While it is on the north-eastern side of the city, and far from the airport (about a 45 minute ride thru Kampala). it's a lovely hotel, perfect for westerners who want to break themselves in gently to 3rd world conditions. It was early, so the room wasn't quite ready, but we enjoyed complimentary coffee overlooking the gardens and Koi pond and watched the guinea hens strutting in the Japanese-style garden with until our room was ready. There we had about an hour to verify that the WIFI indeed worked, the bed was comfortable, the air conditioning worked and the flat panel TV was showing Al Jazeera in English -- all for $120/night for two people!
Courtyard of the Protea Hotel, Kampala
Around 11 am, Jacqui returned with Mwalimu Musheshe, to greet us.
We spent a pleasant hour catching up and gave him all the books we had brought for him--he's an avid reader--including several about Dennis Littky, the founder of the Big Picture Company and the Met School -- an amazingly successful inner city school program. We met Dennis two weeks ago, through the auspices of Stan Goldstein, the founder of CVS. Tom remarked about the similarities between the educational programs that Littky and Musheshe have pioneered -- one in the inner city in Providence, RI, the other in the rural community of Kagadi, in the Kibaale District of Uganda. The motto of the URDT is "Awakening the Sleeping Genius within Us." The motto of the Met School is something like "Bring out the Genius within You." Both educators focus on lighting a fire of passion and vision within each student and empowering them to achieve their own personal visions.
At the Met School, students spend 2 days a week apprenticing in their chosen fields of interest. They explore their own passions deeply studying and preparing an "exhibition" that they present as part of their studies.
Dennis Littky
At URDT, students compliment the traditional school curriculum with visionary leadership, create their own visions, learn how to achieve those visions and teach their families and communities how to envision the future they want to have and to create it themselves. Their projects are "back home" projects. They work with their families and communities on a project to improve the health and livelihood of their families and communities and present their results to a visiting group of teachers and staff each term.
We talked of getting the two educators together, perhaps bringing Musheshe to the States for the annual Big Picture/Met School workshop in which educators from the 50 networked schools in the US that are using the techniques and curriculum pioneered at the Met School to give a presentation. Both of these visionary educators are not content to transform secondary education in their respective countries, both have launched universities. Mwalimu Musheshe launched the African Rural University for Women two years ago (I am on the ARU Council).
Mwalimu Musheshe
Dennis Littky is planning to open the doors of his college in the Fall of 2009, in partnership with another, existing university degree program, but with an educational experience that differs profoundly from the traditional academic experience--one that offers students more applied learning, among other attributes. The African University for Women launched in the fall of 2007. It is also designed to offer a completely different educational experience--one that is tailored to educate young women to be powerful community leaders and social and business entrepreneurs, so they can change the face of Africa, starting in the rural villages.
After our visit with Musheshe and a discussion of the course I am planning to teach this week on campus--teaching our Customer Scenario Mapping methodology to the ARU students--we piled back into the van and dropped Musheshe off at a busy intersection, where he jumped on the back of a motorbike/taxi to take him to the public bus that would take him to Mubende and from there, on another bus back to Kagadi. He was planning to turn around a come back the next day for another important meeting in Kampala on Monday. (Imagine traveling 5 to 6 hours each way in a dusty bus, bouncing along dirt roads, to and from work and doing it twice in a single weekend!)
After dropping Musheshe off, we went shopping. The first stop was to exchange money. We ran into some difficulties because we had neglected to bring brand new $100 bills to use at the Forex foreign exchange in order to get the best rates and we both had bank ATM cards that were Mastercard, not Visa. Be forewarned if you travel here, you should bring VISA cards and crisp new $100 bills. After a bit of improvisation, we managed to get enough cash in local currency (a little goes a long way), and we decided that it was time to have lunch. Jaqui brought us to a lovely outdoor Italian restaurant, where Fred, Laurence, Jaqui, Tom and I had a lively conversation, lots of laughter, and a wonderful reunion/reconnection over a pleasant lunch under the shade of an umbrella with the Ugandan breezes wafting.
After lunch, we headed off to "electronics row" on Kampala Road in downtown Kampala.
There are probably 30 to 40 small stores next to each other--each one with the latest computer and electronics gear, most run by Indians and staffed by very knowledgeable black Ugandans. They are all very knowledgeable about electronics and great at bargaining. Luckily we were with Fred, the URDT's IT Director and lecturer in computer science. Fred had a shopping list we had asked him to compile, and in his soft-spoken but firm way, he managed to get "flexible" pricing even though he was encumbered with two white westerners. So we went from store to store, getting cable, connectors and other gear to extend the Internet network on campus.
We also stopped into an MTN phone store and got a SIM card for my Blackberry and some minutes so we could have a functioning local cell phone. Again, extremely knowledgeable staff who were able to debug the Blackberry mysteries and get us up and running after a couple of tries.
Finally, after 3 hours of shopping, we called it a day and went back to our hotel for a much-needed nap. We slept from 5 pm Saturday until about 10am the next day (with a few of hours of work in the middle of the night).
On Sunday morning, we rushed out without breakfast to try to connect with the Quaker Meeting which I thought was on the Makrere University campus, but hadn't been able to track down. We wandered around campus for a while, starting at the Peace and Justice Center at the Law School, then going to the Peace and Conflict Resolution Center at the Dept. of Religious Studies, and wound up at the University Guest House, where a helpful young woman called us a "metered cab" (one you don't have to bargain with) to take us back to our hotel. The cab driver was a delight. His name was Mike, he came from a village south of Kampala, and he was both skilled and resourceful. We were undecided about what to do --whether to go back to the hotel or back to the shopping center to do our grocery shopping. He recommended a coffee shop at the shopping center, took us there and picked us up after we had completed our errands. We bought a few necessities for rural life: bottled water, coke, snacks, yogurt, cheese, disinfectant hand cleanser (due to the Ebola threat) and a coffee pot to leave in the guest huts on the URDT campus so we could enjoy fresh brewed Ugandan coffee, rather than instant.
Dr. Sarah Ntiro speaking out again!!
Once we got back to the hotel, we were able to reach Sarah Ntiro, who serves with me on the ARU council and arranged to have Mike, our cab driver, pick her up at her home and bring her to our hotel for dinner. Dr. Ntiro is an amazing woman. She earned her PhD at Oxford University in the 1950s, and has been an uncompromising, guiding light. She is a renowned educator. She served in the Ugandan Government for a number of years in charge of the Non-Govt. Organizations in Uganda. Sarah is a staunch supporter of URDT and ARU. She believes in rural, applied education as opposed to citified, academic, and mostly useless education.
We discussed many of the challenges confronting the University--recruiting a new Vice Chancellor to replace Remi Munyonyo who died this Fall, getting more funding so we aren't living from hand to mouth and trying to share facilities and staff with the other institutions on campus, getting our first cadre of students ready to graduate (in 18 months), avoiding staff burnout, balancing the curriculum between the academic and the practical/applied. We also talked about economics, politics and world affairs. It was wonderful to reconnect. We agreed to meet again in March at our next ARU Council meeting and gave ourselves assignments between now and then.
Finally to bed, after an enjoyable and stimulating couple of days.. Tomorrow, we leave for Kagadi at 7 am!
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Marquette,
I will certainly give Sarah your regards when I see her, hopefully this Fall.. When I saw her in December, she said, "I'm so conflicted: I want a woman president in the U.S. and I want a Black president!" Then she laughed.. She was delighted that both Hillary and Barack were doing well.. I imagine that she's willing to settle for a Black President, but I bet she'd like a woman VP!!!
Posted by: pseybold | August 04, 2008 at 08:28 PM
Great reading your journal. Please tell Sarah Ntiro I said hello and that I long to see her again. I spent 8 days in Uganda with her in 2oo2, via the US State Dept and FAWEU. mjb
Posted by: Marquette Brown - [email protected] or | July 17, 2008 at 01:17 PM