The rainy season has well and truly set in here in Kyaka, with thunder storms and heavy rain now being an almost daily occurrence reducing the dirt roads to squelchy-mud which even the camp 4x4s struggle to negotiate. We spend our days either with the Windle Trust staff attending community meetings, conducting and transcribing interviews or at Bujubuli secondary school spending time with the students. We have settled in to the Ugandan way-of-life surprisingly easily... The once terrifying task of riding a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) is now simply a convenient way of getting from A to B. We have also adapted to 'African time', where on-time is considered as being within the hour of the time you initially arranged... Something which I don't think we will ever quite feel comfortable with, however, is the company of many a bug while washing... It is fair to say that we now feel very well-acquainted with an impressive variety of Ugandan insects...

Everywhere we go we are followed by excited squeals of "Mzungu! How are you!" by small children running to greet us. However, the smiling faces and unfalteringly welcome waves make it easy to forget just what kinds of hardship these people have been through. While chatting to a volunteer at a community meeting, the conversation will veer as they disclose to you about their murdered families, their scarred bodies, the rapings... It brings you down to earth with a sobering thump and makes you wonder how someone who has so little and has been through so much is able to maintain such a sense of hope. But they do; an HIV positive single mother volunteers in the community, counselling fellow HIV positive refugees and strives to give her remaining 3 children an education. This amazing sense of hope is most pertinently felt in the secondary school where the aspiring students dream of A Levels, University and becoming doctors, engineers and lawyers. The prospect of these young people achieving these goals, however is too often obstructed by the frustrating barrier that it is simply too expensive. For the lucky few that are awarded scholarships, they are given the wings to fly; for the rest, it is unlikely they will even make it to completing Senior 4, never mind making it to university, their feet thus remaining firmly within the settlement. For the girls in particular, being unable to afford education more often than not leads into marriage, a much more lucrative option for her family. There has been a big push for primary education within the settlement- the 6 primary schools generate hundreds of P7 graduates every year. However, the one secondary school only sees about 100 of these enrol in S1, a figure which will reduce throughout the year as students drop out. This sorely felt lack of resources in secondary education in Kyaka inflicts a viscous cycle in which the refugees are locked in to the agricultural self-reliance forced upon them by UNHCR.

Our choice to focus on secondary education has proven itself to be a noticeably neglected gap which we hope to help address through our research. I feel utterly ignorant admitting it, but my concept of a refugee certainly doesn't marry up to the Paris-educated Congolese magistrate whom I have come to know. This elderly man deplores the lack of secondary opportunities for the young refugees in his community. A particular issue that he brings up is the way in which 90% of the refugees are Congolese and therefore fracophone. In Uganda, all teaching occurs in English and they therefore lose any grounding in French, a loss from which they will hugely suffer if they are to ever return home.

Over the past month we have interviewed various base camp and school staff and on Friday we interviewed the camp Commandent. In a place filled with people who can so easily fall into a desperate sense of hopelessness, he shared his plans for Kyaka with a determined sense of hope and most importantly, sympathy. We were very happy to hear of the approved plans for the Reception Centre in Sweswe which Robyn described so vividly in the last blog post.

We can't quite believe that our month in Uganda is nearing it's end. For the last two weekends we have taken the opportunity to travel around and explore some more of Western Uganda, spending time bonding with monkeys in Kibale Forest, crawling through caves in Fort Portal, appreciating the beautifully hazy Rwenzori mountains and even an intimate encounter with a pride of lion at Queen Elizabeth National Park. This weekend, however, we stayed in camp, in an effort to make the most of our last few days in Kyaka. We will be spending our last days conducting our final interviews and on Tuesday, the school's weekly debate motion has been chosen by us.... 'This house believes that educating refugees is pointless'... The result of which we hope will leave those against victorious... JH-J