Uganda Twinning Project

We were given a talk on 10th February entitled Uganda Twinning Project.

Jan is a Voluntary Ranger for the Queen Elizabeth Country Park. She explained to us what life is like in Uganda. There are five schools out there which are twinned with ours.

The “Womens Group” make things like bowls which take two weeks to do, and there were things which Jan had brought along for us to buy like pens, keyrings, a bag, little pot, and bottle openers. These women hope in time to build a hut from bricks which can be donated by money sent out to them, this hut would be a shop for them to sell their bowls etc in, and which would attract tourism.

Steve Peach is a chief ranger from QE Country Park and he met Charles Etoru from Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. They got talking and decided to twin the parks.

The twinning project is run by the QECP Volunteer Ranger Service, which is a registered charity. The people in Uganda cannot understand why we don’t have any large animals. They ask what is our largest animal and we say deer.

Jan saw whilst she was over there elephants, Uganda cob deer, hippos which were out of water, this is unusual as they normally stay in the water, getting out means they could get sunburnt. Mongoose which look very cute but are very destructive. They are weighed by the rangers and only a few wear collars, the rest are marked with a colour.

On the slide, we were shown a school which is twinned with Clanfield Junior School. In Uganda their schools have no doors and sometimes no windows. The children stay all day, some live too far away to go home, so they stay in a hut.

The children were asked what would they like. They answered ‘a fence to keep the animals out.’

Jan and her husband flew by KLM from Skipol to Entebbe. They stayed in a small hut called a Banda. It did have electricity, and they could lock the door especially at night when they could hear animals moving around outside. They got around by truck and were amazed to see many bikes were being used not for riding but for carrying bags of cotton and bananas on. They saw worthogs which are not very nice looking animals, they have lots of bumps on their faces and the saying is that ‘they like honey and one day they put their nose in a bees nest and got stung.’ We don’t know if this has any truth in it or not.

Jan stayed in ‘Hippo House’ which is owned by QE Country Park and she said they had fun, six people in a 12 ft boat going from Lake Edward to Lake Albert trying to spot the hippos and counting them. They kept popping up and down, they sometimes counted one twice. This would be a good tourist game!

The elephants were just across the water from the Hippo House, the baby elephants were about eight months old. They stayed underneath their mothers and when walking off, the babies were kept in the middle of the adults for safety.

There were slides of butterflies, lizard, a chimp and leopards. They went past some fishing villages which still had no doors to their huts. They catch fish called tapeacer, and there are over 600 different birds.

In the UK all those involved in the twinning project and its work volunteer their time. In Uganda, Community Rangers support our work with local schools and communities. They also give up much of their free time in support of the project.

In my own Write

On 24th February we had a very funny evening with Ollie Butler. The title of her talk was In my own write.

Ollie has written many poems on various different subjects, one of them being about public toilets. She says in her poem why do the drying heaters never work, we bang them on the top and on the bottom, the liquid soap most of the time will shoot out, miss your hands and land on the floor. Why is it the one toilet you go into has no lock on the door. You then have to do a balancing act in which you try and wriggle your clothes down whilst pressing your head on the door. Then while your head is pressed firmly on the door, you then try and sit down hoping you are far enough back to aim right, and then you notice no toilet paper!

Another poem was on tights. Us ladies seem to manage to get one leg on, then we have to sit down to get the other leg on, otherwise we would fall over trying to balance on one leg. We gather all our clothes up out of the way to get the second leg of tights on, pull them up oh so carefully, pull our clothes back down adjusting them as we go, and then get up from the chair, only to notice we have a ladder in our tights caught whilst moving off the chair.

This one was about wedding clothes. It seems that men are lucky in not having to buy new clothes for weddings like us ladies. Ollie said her husband only has three suits. He can still fit into them after having had them for many years. When they are invited to a wedding, he can just go into the wardrobe and pull out one of the three suits and he will know that it will still fit him. We ladies will start looking for something to wear a long time before the event. We will go from shop to shop, try on a dress that looks really nice on the dummy in the window but alas not on us. Then we see something but it’s not our size or doesn’t look a very nice green, if only it was blue! Then finally we do see just the dress, it’s the right size, nice colour and there is even a hat to match and where is it, only in Oxfam!

Ollie heard this said on a library bus: “Did your daughter have her eye operation?” “Oh yes, she can now see out of her rectum.”

A lady said to Ollie, “I need my hair doing badly.” Ollie said, “I can do that for you.” Lady said, “I didn’t know you could do hair.” Ollie said, “I can’t, but I can do it badly for you if you want.”

Ollie was wondering why, if cows eat grass, and they produce full fat milk just by eating only grass, then she must be doing something wrong by just eating lettuce.

It was a very good evening, we all enjoyed having a cheerful talk and look forward to Ollie coming back next year.

Priscilla Barlow

 

Easter Edition 2011

St George’s Ladies Group