Baking Bread with Gulu Public Primary

Siong teaches P7 students to bake/sell bread.

My good friend and Peace Corps volunteer Siong Ng of Leawood, Kansas has spent the last two months teaching teachers and over a 100 students of Gulu Primary School how to make, bake and sell bread to generate income and provide necessary business skills to students of Gulu Primary School.  He started this innovative business class on his own initiative.

Siong works side by side by his students.

You can see from the happy faces just how much they love this class!

His class is on Thursday, and I spent the afternoon with them.  It was a lot of fun!   On one of Siong's field trips to a bakery store, he saw an unused wood-fire oven and convinced the owner to donate it to the school. Rotarians from the United States and Canada donated $500 for Siong to buy the large bread pans, loaf pans and ingredients to get started.

Each loag sells for 1,500UGX (60 cents).  Big rolls are 3 for 2,000UGX (80 cents) and small rolls are 3 for 1,000UGX (40 cents).  After they sell some of the bread, they use the proceeds to buy more ingredients for next week; then they eat the rest.  Eating the bread is the most anticipated part!

Siong and his fellow bakers carry the rising bread across the school yard to the oven.  Just the heat of the day is enough to make the bread rise very quickly! 

After the basic loaves and rolls are made, the students get to be creative and make their own designs.

Country Bakery donated this wood burning oven to Gulu Public Primary for the baking class. 

Aww!  The finished product! Hot bread right from the oven!  It was delicious! I bought my share (I was the big customer of the day), took it home, put some butter and honey on it, and devoured it!. I relished in memories of my childhood where I grew up baking 7 loaves of bread every Saturday morning with my older sister....Good times!

Siong's baking class was so fun!  I am so proud of all he has accomplished in Gulu during his two years with the US Peace Corp.  His time is finished next week, and he will be leaving.  I will miss my dear friend. Gulu will miss him greatly as well.  Thank you Siong for all your time, energy, love, and dedication that you put into your work here.  Good luck in your travels and next possible assignment.  Wot ma ber!  Lubunga Ber!

IC Viral Video

If you are my friend of Facebook, there is nothing new on this blog that I haven't said on my FB wall.  I just want to put it in a blog because in a week, the wall posts of FB will be gone.  This will document my comments.  I don't claim to be an expert BY ANY MEANS on this subject.  As most of my friends know, I discuss what I hear and see and read in a very open and honest way.

I first came to Gulu in 2008 for a week and the experience changed my life. I returned again in 2009.  I lived in Gulu for 3 months in 2010 and then again for 5 months in 2011. I am here for all of 2012.  I am volunteering my accounting services for an NGO and raising donations to pay the school fees for  some children. Educating the youth of Uganda is the only way to overcome the corruption here and end this horrible poverty.  Now about the video.

Today is Friday, March 9th.  I saw the IC video "Kony 2012" yesterday.  Because the internet speed is so slow, it took 2 hours to watch the 30 minute video.  So you can imagine how frustrated I was to spend the first hour watching this little white boy running around, jumping, and blowing things up when I wanted to get to the actual story of Kony!  I found it irritating that at least 15 minutes of the video is the face of the video's producer, his life, and his little boy.  What is that about?  Think about how many more stories of other children and the atrocities they had seen could have been covered in that time....

The video will bring the spotlight to Gulu, Uganda, and if that brings even one more dollar to the area, than it is a good thing.  There is so much need here right now.  Before this 20+ year war, there was Idi Amin; so Gulu has been through hell for the last 50 years.  It is amazing that ANYBODY is still alive here.

Kony was only part of the problem and the video never mentions WHY he was building an army or WHO he was fighting!  There was another group of "bad guys" out there that were "supposed" to be stopping Kony, but they were doing just as much damage as the LRA!  They were raping, sodomizing, torturing, and killing.  THEY ARE NEVER MENTIONED IN THE VIDEO!  Why?

The current president of Uganda was the one in power during the entire LRA war.  Can you imagine this happening in the US? If our children were being kidnapped, and our women and men were being tortured and killed, can you imagine that we would still keep that president in power?

The video continues to repeat "Stop Kony".  They want him captured and brought to justice.  His army, the LRA, are now the grown up child soldiers that the very video is talking about.  If my son David had been kidnapped at 14 (ten years ago) and he was still out there, would I want the "big powers" to come after him to capture his boss after all of these years?  They will kill my son to get to Kony.  There are so many other complications to this issue.

This video is about money, military positioning (look at what countries Gulu is positioned near), politics, new found oil, and did I mention money, money, and more money? There is relative peace in Gulu now. Why didn't anybody care or stop Kony 20 years ago when all of these atrocities were happening? Think about it.  I do want to state that I am merely repeating stories I have been told by local people here. I am not an expert nor am implying to be one, OK?  These are just my experiences.

The Acholi people got it from both sides, but the video only mentions one group. I have heard HORRIBLE stories about atrocites committed by BOTH "bad guy groups".  I have heard stories that will forever be in my head all of my life and some are too horrible to even imagine or even to repeat.
Yes, Kony needs to be brought to justice, but what about the "other bad guy?"  The IC Children video is 1/2 of the story.  Who will tell the other 1/2?

I am not as good a writer as many out there, so I am going to post a couple of VERY good rebuttals to the Kony 2012 video.  I hope these people won't mind if I post their link.  They are all available to the general public on the internet.  Please read these links for more excellent and knowledgeable information.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/03/07/stop-kony-yes-but-dont-stop-asking-questions/

http://justiceinconflict.org/2012/03/07/taking-kony-2012-down-a-notch/