Hey there!

So, let me tell you whats new:

While I was in Germany I did some fund-raising for schoolbooks for my school.

Actually it's quite wrong to say “I” , because there were too many people who contributed and helped,  so that I should rather speak of “we”.

We organized a stall at a flee market, collected some money on birthdays and made a coffee and cake sale in our backyard.

Our overall goal was to collect 1000€ which would have enabled us to buy a schoolbook for every pupil in every subject.

And...

Surprisingly we ended up with 1107€ !!!!!!

Hell Yeah !!!!!

Really, none of us had expected anything like this.

 I was hoping for maybe 500 – 600 € and we would've ended up with that amount if not for the generous donation of 500€ by Mr. Behrens, Thank you so much!!!

My thanks also to everybody else who donated or helped me, most notably my girlfriend, my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, my friends Felix and Simon, the bakeries that donated the cakes and the  “Weltladen Rheine” for their splendid Ugandan coffee, plus so many more who would fill the whole  page to name them now: Thank You !!!

Now, collecting the money is the one thing, using it the right way is another:

Back in Uganda I first had to make sure that we have the right structures and a good organization for the books, so they won't get spoiled.

The organization has been quite easy: we just give every book a number and every pupil a fixed number, so they can be held responsible (and feel responsible) for any loss or damage.

Of course they can't take them home:

– It just isn't possible! After a week half of them would've gone missing...

As for the structure, the school has just build a new building, which will be used as the new office and the old office is our new library. I used around 30€ ( 90 000 Ugandan Shillings) to buy three bags of cement to speed up the construction and now we have a nice new office and a good library.

The only thing missing now was the books.

Easy, right? Just go to a publisher and buy them. That's what I thought too...

But, as too often in life the easy things are unnecessarily complicated:

Naturally, we wanted to buy the schoolbooks which follow the syllabus and went to the first publisher.

They had schoolbooks which follow it, but unfortunately just English and math for P4. So we bought them and kept on looking for the others. The next two publishers just had the ones following the old syllabus, so we didn't buy any. After some searching we finally found one (MK publishers) that had most of them and we bought them. At the moment we're only missing the Luganda and some R.E. (Religious Education) books, but to be honest, I don't know if there are any...

Well, we'll keep looking.

The good thing is that we're still having some money left  ( around 800 000 Ugandan Shillings) that we can use to buy some extra curricula materials, like toys for the baby classes, some games, music instruments or sport materials.

That's it for my work, so lets continue with the personal stuff:

There's a new volunteer in Kalungu (my village) also from Germany and the same sending organization!

And that's definitely making village life a little bit more exciting :)

In addition we now have some internet here at the project, its not the fastest or clearest connection, but it's internet and that means that I can now keep you all up to date at least every two weeks!!!

I know … most of you don't think I'll be really writing that often and I also have my doubts …

But I'll try !!! :D

So, see you in two weeks then ;)

Bye Bazungu.