Music For Life, cont.

Music For Life

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit Music For Life, a boarding school that is home to the African Children's Choir. Music For Life has recently moved to a brand-new campus outside of Kampala. We were given a warm welcome that included a performance!

Classroom buildings

View of the lake from the main assembly hall

Next-- videos of the performance!

Backing up

It's so weird to be back... now that I don't have a job, an internship, or class! Clearly, I have plenty of time on my hands to go through pictures and process the pieces of this trip that we did have. I do want to document more of what we did while it's still fresh in my mind. It was definitely an amazing experience, and it gave us all a taste of what it would have been like to spend the full 4 weeks in Uganda. Also, a few people have let me know that they weren't able to comment without a Google ID-- I have changed the comment settings so anyone should be able to comment now.

One of the agencies we were able to visit was ANPPCAN (African Network for Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect). ANPPCAN works to prevent the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children throughout Uganda. In addition to the types of abuse we are familiar with here, the agency deals with practices such as child sacrifice and genital mutilation. The agency is able to collaborate with police, providing education and a greater capacity for child protection.

One of the things that really stood about about this agency and many of the others we visited was that they seem to get right to the root of the problem. In many ways, they seem to do a better job than we do here in the US of dealing with various social issues and providing services-- and with far more limited resources.

Many of the posters, brochures and other public service materials that we saw in agencies and in the city were much more direct and clear than similar materials in the US. A few posters in the ANPPCAN office:

Updates

What a sad turn this trip has taken. Making it especially frustrating is the discrepancy between how things seem here in the country, and how the situation is portrayed in US news outlets. Things are really fine here.

However, that's irrelevant at this point... we have new plane tickets and will be leaving Kampala on Tuesday. We'll arrive home on Wednesday after about 24 hours of traveling.

The good news is that Simmons has approved our scheduled safari for this weekend. We leave tomorrow morning. Lots of pics and more discussion of the end of our trip to come soon.

Cancelled

So, Simmons has cancelled the remainder of our trip. We have received the college's official decision that the course is no longer being conducted here, and we are all under instruction to return to Boston as soon as possible. In Boston, Hugo is supposed to figure out how to teach the rest of the course there.

I am so incredibly disappointed. I can't believe this is happening. We just got off of a conference call with someone from Simmons, relating our frustration and trying to figure out if there's any way to continue part of this.

This just absolutely sucks on so many levels.

Babies, continued

Babies!