A Happy New Year and fantastic opportunity …!

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.

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!

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!