20th May 2022

The past few days I have been going to school, preparing materials for the children for a restart of school.  I have been joined by four to five teachers each day, which is encouraging.  We have sorted out coloured pencils and crayons, jigsaws, dominos, recorders and various literacy and numeracy games. 

I have brought powdered paints from home.  Unfortunately the only paint brushes available are much too big for any delicate work.  I envisage that we will be doing finger or hand painting and maybe making stencils.  We have a ridiculously large number of sports team tabards given to us by Plan International and UNICEF over the years (we are never consulted about what is actually needed by these big NGOs).  Some of the tabards will be used as aprons while painting.  Painting is a real innovation here, so we will see how it goes.

My major concern is the pupils in the highest classes, because they are getting closer to the end of primary school and they cannot afford to miss lessons.  As far as is possible, we will give those who attend formal lessons in examination subjects.

Up until now, not one child has appeared.  Even our neighbouring school is now empty – it turned out that those who were attending were doing exams, but in very reduced numbers; their exams are now finished.  I and some other teachers are going to make an announcement at Sunday services at our respective churches that our school is reopening on Monday.

However, things in Nimule remain very unstable.  There have been several murders each day, usually in the evenings.  Yesterday night an elderly doctor was beheaded on his way across a less frequented area on the town outskirts.  He was carrying a radio, which was left beside his body, so it seems that the motive was not robbery.  We are caught between the importance of getting things back to normal for our children and keeping them safe.  We have therefore decided to have only morning school for the time being.  Under normal circumstances that would not be possible because of the numbers of children, but it is unlikely that many children will come back as so many have been taken to Uganda.

The general rule is to be at home before dusk and remain inside until morning, padlocked inside and outside the door.  As toilets are always outside here, this means using a chamber pot of some sort during the night hours.  This is nothing new.  We are all well used to this way of living, uncomfortable as it is.

HUMAES has taken the initiative to call a meeting of all local NGOs (that is, locally established ones) to form a new civil society organization in order to work together to bring peace back to the community.  Each NGO has its own specialism, e.g. livelihood, gender based violence, health, education etc.  They held their first meeting today in the HUMAES office and then went to visit the local radio station to see if they would be interested to join.  They are all going to visit the local government offices to register and get their agreement to work together.