Students at the school. Photo: Louise McCann.
A journey into Uganda
Louise McCann describes an inspirational project
In 2016 Northampton Meeting adopted as its charity the community of Butta, in the district of Manafwa, Uganda. An attender at our Meeting, Alex Gyabi, is a long-term resident of the UK who comes from that area and was concerned about the situation there: subsistence farming made precarious by soil erosion and flooding, with not much by way of opportunity for the young people of the area. He wanted to help.
An idea emerged to help the young people to gain skills which would enable them to earn a living: to begin a furniture makers’ association. Tools were obtained from a local charity, Tools for Self Reliance (Northampton), including woodworking tools and manual sewing machines for people to make clothing.
We also began to raise funds for a workshop and classroom. As a member of our Meeting’s peace and service committee, I worked with Alex to apply to Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) for a grant to help complete the building,
In 2015, Alex reported back on the completion of the project, and how needs remained for water provision and sanitation. My husband and I were struck by how much could be achieved for the community with relatively little funding in UK terms. We felt moved to do more.
We talked at length with Alex about the needs of the community, about the lack of opportunity for education and training and eventually, in 2016 with two other trustees from Northampton Meeting, established a new charity to allow us to raise funds to do more for this community – Friends Community Development Trust (Uganda), which became a Quaker Recognised Body at the end of 2017.
In order to get started we went back to Northampton Meeting and asked for funds to begin building a community secondary school – a school which would be owned and controlled by the local community, and which would be affordable to them. The Meeting generously donated £20,000, sufficient to build a three classroom block.
The community had a primary school, which was free to all, but no secondary education. Children could find secondary education only by making a hazardous cross-country trek, which included a river in which people occasionally drowned. Parents of girls, in particular, were not willing to allow this. The other alternative was to attend a private boarding school, but that is too expensive for most.
We visited the community in 2017 and were touched by their friendliness, but also by the stark realities of their poverty. We were shown, with pride, the workshop and classroom which they had built with the QPSW funding, and the land on which the new school would be built: land donated by the Church of Uganda.
In February 2017 the new school opened its doors and has a roll call of fifty-eight pupils – thirty boys and twenty-eight girls – spread across three year groups. We have just recently sent funds to build a fourth classroom, allowing space for the school to recruit another year group at the start of the new school year (February in Uganda).
All buildings have been built by local labour, meaning that, even at that stage, people gained new skills and a source of income to the community.
It has been a very interesting, humbling and moving journey, being able to help so many people. As for the future, we look forward to bringing the school to completion, and then to help develop other training opportunities for the community.
Louise is a trustee of the Friends Community Development Trust (Uganda).
