Global Youth Service Day -Uganda

Waiting

Friday evening

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While most people are only waking up to begin their day in my house, and by extension, in most of the city, I am usually only just completing my last email to send out for the morning. So it was, today as well, when I was sending out the final “preparations email” for the GYSD to my colleagues this morning. I only spent the night reading up on various malaria case studies from a recent UNICEF report.

I had little faith in plans to visit Muzinda again today, especially after looking at my day´s schedule. Much as we had shared out the work to be done, I found myself having to follow up on almost each and every item. The frequency of calls from the children and youth group to my phone has also increased drastically over the past 2 days especially. If I am not talking to Daphne, it`s Milly, Kenneth or William. And with every call comes a learning lesson. I think I am pleased with how this service project is going. There has certainly been a lot to learn -for both the group and I. A little towards 3.00pm, I found out from another phone call that the group were actually waiting for me so “we could plan together the new strategies for our first practical community service”. It came as such a surprise because I thought that this was something the group president and his council could ably do on their own. When I learnt that they had been waiting for me since they had finished doing the community awareness that morning, I shuddered to think of how they would feel, especially the younger ones, if I didn´t turn up at all. Immediately, I began to prepare myself for another gruelling journey. I got to the village a little after 6.00pm and found all members of the group seated outside on the pouch with their eyes fixated on the little cul-de-sac that feeds directly into the
compound from the feeder road just a few metres away. To say that they were pleased when they finally saw me come up that cul-de-sac would be an understatement. And on my part, it was such an honour and blessing to have them there with me. We had to make use of the little available daylight very soon because Muzinda village does not have power, and that juxtaposed with the high prices that people have to pay for fuel would not make it fair for us, in my opinion, to consume any available fuel at the home at all. My other concern was about the girls getting back to their respective homes safely. Luckily, we were able to finish everything we had to do and say as the last ray of daylight was being sucked back into the horizon.

Community involvement requires educating the public about a project/s and inviting the whole community to participate in the same at different points of the project implementation. When we discussed this with the children`s and youth`s group a few days ago, I had no idea that John was gonna be a little shrewd too about how he intended to garner community involvement in the service project. “I told them to come so they would watch a movie later at the end”, John told me he had informed various people as a strategy of acquiring a large turn-up on Sunday, when the malaria action club would be highlighting its community service to the general public in what would be the equivalent of the village square. Of course this new revelation by John presented a twist to our service project. What was John thinking? I decided to leave it out of my list of things to worry about for the time. More important was to ensure that we were actually committing ourselves, each to their responsibility, as we had agreed earlier. Strong follow-up is crucial to the success of any service project. It is not always the most glamorous work, but it is critical to ensuring a good experience for all involved, and for the organizers’ ability to conduct future service projects. Tomorrow we shall be meeting very early in the morning to start with the community well. Back in the

GYSD kitchen, my colleagues are chasing after service providers to ensure that they indeed deliver in time when they say that they will. As we wind up the day in this

small village, I can’t help but consider the many striking similarities that Muzinda has got to that Ethiopian village that I watched on the IRIN documentary just yesterday

morning. In the trading centre, old men wobble over board games played with cowrie shells as women roast meat, presumably for sale, just a few feet away. In another open hut, men with stained teeth sip on a thick liquid with locally-made straws out of a big brown pot. Everyone seems to be totally oblivious of the buzzing sound that emanates from the bushes just growing even into the little road that cuts through this petite town. The mosquitoes continue to make a vocal display of their territorial advertisement. It warms my heart to think that tomorrow, their populations size will have dwindled, hopefully greatly.