Update (06-12th February 2010)

On 6th February, a big group of us awoke at Backpackers in Kampala to travel to Jinja. Jinja, for those that don't know, is the source of the River Nile. For Sophie's birthday we were all going white water rafting and bungee jumping! The group was Molkie, Boz, Sophie, Emma, Vic, Heather, Emily, Oscar, Shaun and myself. All of us except Heather and Emily went rafting. It was amazing! We travelled 31km down the Nile towards Egypt, which we were told would take at least 3 months to get to by boat. Overall, we went down 11 rapids, 3 of which were grade 5's, but only capsised twice! We even went down a 14 ft waterfall and stayed inside the boat!

It was interesting passing African women and children doing laundry on the river banks. We even saw some children swimming in the river, even though the current was quite strong. The whole rafting experience lasted about 6 hours, with a break in the middle for lunch. In the evening we just chilled in the bar area, playing guitar and chatting. We stayed in a dorm in the Adrift compound, Adrift being the company we were rafting and bungee jumping with.

The next day was our bungee jumping day! At about 9 all of us bar Vic went up to the bungee platform. We took it in turns, with Sophie wanting to go first but backing out and going after Oscar and Heather. Emily fainted into Jack the instructors arms when she got to the edge and wasn't allowed to go after that for safety reasons. Shaun got pushed during his second countdown because he didn't jump after the first countdown. We all went waste deep into the water below, plunging 43 metres (145ft), which while it isn't a huge height for bungee jumping, was enough to make me want to go again. At about 1, Sophie and I went up for our second jump and Vic, who'd watched us all go, came up as well. Vic, who was initially too scared to do it, did one of the most confident looking jumps of the lot of us and loved it, while I went backwards on my 3rd jump (3rd jump was free so Sophie and I did it).

It was a fantastic weekend spent with fantastic people. I really love all the Uganda volunteers and I loved spending such a great weekend with them!

Anyway, the following week a few things happened. On Monday, the school building moved! Apparently the landlord of the old building decided he didn't want a school anymore so we moved to a new place with 6 classrooms and 2 dorm rooms, which double up as offices... I quite like the new place, its much better equipped than the old building, with blackboards in all the rooms and roughly flat ground for all the classrooms, which are also bigger than the old buildings classrooms (see picture).

So on tuesday we began teaching proper lessons, with separated classes and everything! We even had textbooks! Well...some textbooks. I'm teaching P4 SST (again, see picture), P5 Science and...well I'm meant to be teaching P6 English but still don't have a textbook, so haven't had any proper lessons. Oh, Molkie and I have also taught a couple music lessons. I've been teaching UHS musical warm up hits such as 'Huh Kilele' and 'Singing in the rain (ree-sha-sha)', and Molkie and I have set ourselves the task of teaching the kids the Mighty Boosh 'Soup Crimp', which is quite challenging when they don't have the best pronunciation ('Sweep, sweep, a tasty').

Probably the most exciting thing that happened last week was on the friday. Paul came to the school at lunch to help us search for a house. We'd been looking for a few weeks and were starting to lose hope. We looked at one place right next to the school, and finally decided that this would be our new home! It's two rooms out the back of a bigger house, with an area for cooking just outside. It's got reasonable longdrops and a great view, and best of all, we finally have our own space and independence.

We're in the slow process of kitting out the house. We have mattresses, but will hopefully get a triple bunk bed in the next few days to give us some extra space. After I write this I'm going to buy a small storage unit for food and cooking utensils, and we'll hopefully soon have storage for the rest of our stuff.

Teaching is sometimes annoying and sometimes awesome. It's true what teachers say about monday mornings, yesterday's SST class was a nightmare.

But with the new house, we're feeling pretty good!

Until next time,

Weraba xx