An Update on St. John's Primary School (Uganda) - Spring 2017
Lawrence Ssemakula reports on the new term at St. John’s Primary school in Uganda. St. John's is the neighboring school to our property in Uganda where we hold a formal partnership, investing in teacher development, water and sanitation issues, food production and facility improvements, to name a few.
Just three weeks into the term, the school has grown with over 50 new students. Our team of teachers is cooperating together to serve the students and parents as best we can, filling in the gaps ourselves and believing God gives us the strength.
Many students have uniforms though quite a number still lack shoes. Students lunch is still one of our challenges. About three quarters of students don’t eat lunch due to a lack of funds. Many of them are malnourished and often sickly. Though this lack of nourishment is not just solved at school, for many of them--having lunch at school would be one guaranteed meal per day. The students from this area are just very poor. Many of our students lack scholastic materials. So many live with old grandmothers or single mothers unable to provide.
We are thankful to God that the number of students with wounds and jiggers has greatly gone very low! We receive only 3-4 students a week, unlike in the past when we could get 10-20 students with these concerns each day.
In addition, this last year our facility was able to host students for their final exams. This is different from in the past when students would have to walk to other schools to take them. We now have a good facility to accommodate our students and even other schools now take their final exams in our main hall.
On the curriculum side, we have laid strategies to improve reading and writing and improve teacher classroom performance by ensuring that all teachers are planning in advance, and taking time to assess what students are learning. All in all, there is still so much need at St. Johns. But the Lord is helping us little by little, and these improvements are important to note as they happen so that we can give thanks and glory to God, who has inspired us to do this work.
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