Work

Today we continued our work at Kamuzinda, making bricks to use for our construction projects; Reconditioning the floor of the girls Lionel dormitory; Painting classrooms and continuing the manufacturing process of the bookshelves.

Brick Making: Brick making consists of moulding wet termite mud into a brick shaped mould. Once in the mould we had to wet our hands with muddy water and scrape it along the mud brick, to ensure the brick had a perfect consistent shape. The termite mound consisted of dead termites, termite spit and a horribly textured mud. This all lead to the mud absolutely reeking. After a couple of mud fights, most had been covered from head to toe – some getting it worse than others.  All in all, the job was awfully smelly and gross however, to an extent it was quite fun, as we all had a laugh attempting to make bricks and having mud fights.

Jack & Ollie

Floor Reconditioning:

The floor in the girl’s dormitory in Lionel was looking pretty scruffy so we set about smashing it up with our limited array of tools (hammer), which took all day, and was harder than we expected.  We were then shown up by the Ugandan builders on rendering an external wall, which was good fun but more of a skilled based task. This involved us slapping a special plastering cement mix against the walls, and smoothing it out.

Tinkabelle Rice

Painting or not painting classrooms: After the teachers returning from their long lost adventure into to Masaka to collect our much needed interior paint, in their tired state they forgot to take it off the bus. Tom and Jon, left the next day, to upload the blog and left us again without paint lol!!! So we set about creating and improving the educational murals with in the Maths and Science rooms. We drew some maths painting to help the children whilst there in lesson, such as a times table grid and a fraction guide. We also made some science displays, such as a diagram of the digestive system and the anatomy of a tooth.

Daisy

Teaching

In the afternoon session we the students split into five groups to teach an hour long lesson to the secondary school students of Kamuzinda. We taught Science (Chromotology); PD (Cultural differences); Music (Singing and Dancing); Art (African Postcards), and Textiles (Windsocks).

The windsocks were a great success but teaching 56 students was an unexpected challenge but an absolute pleasure! The PD lesson was great opportunity to have deeper and more meaningful discussions with our Ugandan counterparts, a real bonding experience lead by our Head Teacher, Steve.

Following this we all came together at the Primary School to deliver a student lead music session. This was an amazing experience which ended with us all gathering on the fields, teaching and learning through laughter and nursery rhymes.