Day 3: Gardening with The Great Generation in Jinja, Uganda

We have been given responsibility to lead the Shadow Idol Club, this takes places every Saturday at St. Francis health care centre. We came to the centre at 9am for a prompt start, but as we have been told many times, we really need to get used to ‘Ugandan time’ because 9am does not necessarily mean 9am, as today’s start was delayed to 10am. As we waited we practiced a range of different games, which we thought we may be able to do with the kids at the Saturday’s shadow idol club, ‘stuck in the mud’, ‘duck duck goose’ and ‘tag’. The students realised that the games we all seem to know are actually quite difficult to explain to anyone who does not understand our language and pass time activities.

This plan to play games took a severe blow when we sat in our session with John, as he explained that the youth club has a minimum attendance of 120 students and as much as 300. The students gasped in shock and realised that they need to be seriously creative and imaginative in dealing with the club.

We visited Omoana centre, which is a respite care provision for children with Aids and HIV. We met the most cute children in the world, the personalities, the vibrancy in the atmosphere was ecstatic. The children were excited in meeting us and playing with us. Ceaser, possesses as much confident as President Obama, difference being Caeser is 3 years old, trust me, he is something special. We all split into little teams with the children, Karen was with the youngest child at the centre aged 2; Mariam, she did not go near anyone else but could not seem to let go of Karen. We also met Sir Jim, we are all sure we have not really understood what his real name but it sounds so much like ‘Sir Jim’, so he has officially been knighted by us, he actually is quite a ‘sir’ type of kid, so serious, but really caring of all the other children.

Wow, roast potatoes for dinner, the most amazing roast potatoes, incredible, absolutely delicious, we spent over an hour just talking about how great they were. We had to add this onto our blog; as they have the world’s best roast potatoes.