After a really lovely two week Christmas break, it’s good to
be back and into the full swing of things. Thank you to everyone who made
Christmas and the New Year so special, it was so lovely to see and catch up
with so many of you.
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Neighbour Barbara under the Matoke tree in our garden |
I’m really happy to be back in sunshiny Uganda, it has been really
nice to come back to see friendly smiley faces and the feeling of being back
home. This last week I have enjoyed chatting to my neighbours; Winnie, Barbara
and Irene on the compound where we live. They have taught me much about even
more plants and crops that are growing in our back garden; sugar cane,
avacados, mangos, red hot chillis and off course the Ugandan staple of matoke.
Add this to the student’s crops, which are now beginning to grow; it is a whole
new world of learning how to maintain crops in the very hot sunshine!
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Students being silly at the swimming pool! |
Over Christmas we received some very exciting news that our application
to Books2Africa has been accepted. Books2Africa are an NGO who provide books to
local charities for the benefit of local communities in Africa. After our
application we just needed to find payments for the shipping of the books and
that was all. Thanks to all the Wolf runners who ran a 10km obstacle course,
all who sponsored them and also Neighbours and Nations for their generous
gifts. These gifts have been used to pay
for the shipment of 2414 books; extremely exciting! The books are sailing across
the sea as I write, they are mixture of both academic books and novels for all
ages; this will provide an excellent resource for the primary, secondary school
and the local community. With these books we will set up a community library. There
is nothing like this in the area at all and so this will really be a benefit to
the local area and a fantastic resource to help develop a greater reading
culture here; the students actually love to read but until now books are
scarce. As you can imagine this is fantastic and exciting news, thank you to
everyone for your support! Now we just need to get the room sorted and make the
bookcases ready for the books’ arrival in Feb!
