Day Three: Friday 15.06.2012 – Part 2

Then we moved on to the Joshua Primary School, the school Bushikori runs. Most of the children in the school are sponsored. There are some students from the general community, as the school is very good, with dedicated teachers and ‘small’ class sizes of 30-50 children in each class. This is less than a quarter of the size of many government funded schools, which have over 200 children in each class.

We greeted each of the classes, and I got to meet my sponsor daughter Shamimu. She looked very surprised and shy. I hugged her, I was so excited. She is in P2. Esther has a sponsor son in the same class, Wycliffe (after the reformer) which was an added blessing.


Next we saw the new staff room and viewed the land where they are planning to build a dining hall for the children.

Our next stop was the recently built library, which is open to the entire community. I was able to talk a lot with Linus about a shared love for reading, about getting a catalogue system that works, and finding a way of supplying them with more books.

We had some morning tea at the library, then continued with the tour. Next stop was the medical clinic, where they provide a lot of care for the people of Mbale. Aside from general medical needs, they have a lab to test samples (especially for malaria), a pharmacy, three wards and a maternity wing. They do a lot of immunisations at the clinic. While there, we saw a family Esther has especially been praying for, who lost the father, one child, and their house in a fire. She has 3 children, 2 who escaped the fire and the other who was in utereo at the time. The oldest child was being treated at the hospital (not for burns, the fire was over 2 years ago). I’m not sure what for. Esther prayed with the child.

The next stop was to see the tree-project. Bushikori is working to provide stability for its people in terms of income, fire-wood, and off-setting global warming. They are growing seeds of fast-growing firewood trees and of fruit trees, which they then distribute as seedlings to people in the community. Last month they distributed over 20,000 seedlings!


The tour was over, so we headed back to the library for lunch and then to plan the rest of our stay. Aside from planning that we would be resting tomorrow and working out the time that I need to go back, we didn’t actually fill in much. Sunday is church, and next Saturday is the commissioning day.

We went home and rested, and then had dinner with Anne. We talked about some of the challenged that Bushikori faces, including students dropping out (sometimes having children) and living lives that and not materially much better off than their parents did. It is very challenging for everyone involved, especially the staff who have put so much effort into mentoring these children.

Aside from that, we had our first power outage this trip! It didn’t last long as there is the President staying in the area. We saw his entourage coming home, but we didn’t see him. There were armed police everywhere. There were a few political protests, but not much, and there didn’t appear to be any fear associated with them.