The people of Uganda have been through so much I find it so unbelievable that they are as open and friendly as they are.  They have to be one of the warmest people I have met in my life.  They welcome strangers into their homes, feed them, and pray for them upon departure.  They were honest and open when talking to us.  The people we were meeting through the Legacy Scholarship Program offered by Invisible Children were the proud parents and it was clear that they just want the best for their children.

The folks of South Africa have been as warm.  The students or Learners as they are called here have sung and danced for us at each location.  The teachers and other students have given speeches to thank us for our work.  I must say I have met some very poised 7th graders that are able to speak to a crowd of people in a stirring way!  Most of the libraries have been set up and are in good shape but could always use more space and books.  They serve an incredible amount of food to share with us and it is an outright celebration that we have come to visit.  Next time I visit home the family is really going to have to do some things differently because a person could get use to this type of treatment!

South Africa is a beautiful country with rolling hills and deep valleys. We are in Zulu country where Homesteads are settled on the ridges of the mountains and are meticulously kept.  The sunsets have been amazing and today we even were able to witness a sugar cane burn. The children wave as you pass them in the car and they are lined up in the playground waiting for us when we arrive.

While there is a need for books in South Africa as there is in Uganda, South Africa is fortunate enough to have a fairly good infrastructure.  Roads are in fairly good shape and organizations like the Rotary are well established and working to improve education overall.  They have built over 3000 classrooms in the area we are in and continue to work to build more and supply books.  Books for Africa(BFA) and Room to Read have done amazing things here and the books lining the shelves in the classrooms and libraries prove that.

If for no other reason, this trip has been great for all of us because we are seeing the action “on the ground”.  We are meeting the headmasters that work long and hard to make sure they are providing a good educational experience while supplying nutrition and counseling, and in some cases parenting to the Learners in their schools.  We are meeting dedicated teachers that want to do whatever they can to help the student even if it means going for more education themselves.  It is extremely exciting to see the children so happy to be utilizing their libraries and reading the books we have sent.  It is also good to see how a community like the one we are staying here in South Africa and organizations like Room to Read, BFA and Invisible Children can change the direction for not one but many children.  Work they do should be commended and supported!

We leave here tomorrow and head to Capetown.  More to come.

July 6, 2010

We have just landed in Uganda!  It is quite a small airport, with quite a few Coca-Cola logos.  We were immediately greeted by Andrew from Invisible Children.  We traveled approximately five hours from the Entebbe airport to Gulu, where we were staying in a hotel in the middle of downtown.  The first culture shock of the trip occurred when we immediately were thrown into the craziest traffic I have ever seen.  Our van driver was constantly honking at cars, scooters, and bicycles riding the shoulder of the road.  Along with the people on the side of the road, we witnessed goats, cows, and monkeys.  Some of them were even riding in the back of the trucks!  The power seems to go out in Gulu on a semi-regular basis, also.  We have been adjusting pretty quickly though and our flash lights have come in handy on a few occasions.

July 7, 2010

Breakfast.  We have become quite accustomed to Spanish omelettes, toast, bananas, and fruit juice every morning at our hotel.  Apparently though, you become a target of mosquitoes when you eat a lot of bananas and then sweat.  Most of us have chosen to live dangerously and just eat lots of bananas.

After breakfast, Andrew picked us up from the hotel and took us to the Invisible Children office in Gulu.  There is a case on the wall in the lobby, displaying all of the products that IC has created since they started.  He gave us a short history of the organization, and then introduced us to James and Patrick.  Both super nice guys.  We then went to four schools that have benefitted from our donations, and Invisible Children.  Each school had a library in a different stage of progress.  It was amazing and very satisfying to finally see some physical evidence of the work that we have been doing since we have each started working at BWB.  A few of the people we met were very interested to talk to us, and we were able to interview them for our website.  Very exciting stuff.  The teachers and the students were great, and were very happy to see us.

July 8, 2010

Spanish omelette, bananas and toast.  We met up at the Invisible Children office, and visited three more schools with Andrew from IC.  We started by traveling a couple of hours to the first school and then worked our way back to downtown Gulu.

At the schools we visited,  we met even more excited and friendly teachers and students and saw more libraries.  We spotted several books with our BWB barcodes on them and saw boxes with Books For Africa logos on them. Very cool.  Andrew introduced us to a few of the classrooms full of students, and they applauded us!  Just then, I felt the proudest I have even been of my association with Better World Books.

Lunch was at a restaurant in Gulu with live music.  Our second meal of authentic Ugandan food went even better than the first.  Mattuck is quickly becoming my favorite dish here.  Very similar to mashed potatoes.

During our trip back to the hotel, a soldier asked if we could give him a ride down the road.  Andrew politely declined, as our driver was not licensed to carry any armed passengers.  I would have never thought I’d witness an armed soldier being told “No.”  Pretty amazing.

July 9, 2010

No school visits today.  Instead we went to the homes of some of the students! Most of us went on our own, to shadow IC mentors.  Mentors who mostly got where they needed to go on motor bikes!  Since Maura, Stephanie, and I are not as adventurous as the rest, we traveled together in a van with a mentor named Stella.  The first two guardians we met paid for their children’s school fees from planting crops.  Mostly maise, cabbage, onions and assorted greens.  We were offered freshly grown maise, which we excitedly accepted.  If you have never eaten maise, it is very similar to corn on the cob, but much lighter in color.  No butter and no salt.

The best lesson that I have learned on this trip so far, is to live within your means.  Don’t stress about what you cannot immediately acheive or afford.  You will alleviate a lot of stress.  If we were able to speak the native language, I’m sure we could have spent an entire afternoon talking to some of the parents.  Tomorrow we are sitting in on a meeting with IC, and then heading to a wildlife park!  More later.

– Jason Staples, Customer Care

Our last few days in Uganda were very memorable. We all had the opportunity to travel for one day with Invisible Children mentors as they made visits to families and students. Invisible Children sponsors a scholarship program for nearly 700 students in the Gulu, Uganda area. These students not only have their education paid for, but are partnered with a mentor who helps the student to focus on their studies. Many of the students attend boarding schools as well and the mentors communicate between the students and families so news from home makes it to school and back again.

The main mode of transportation for the mentors is cheap, fast and easy to maneuver in the busy Gulu streets:  motorbikes! A number of us even cruised a little way out of town and into the bush, where the countryside is green, lush and covered in a mixture of tall grass, tasseling maize, and palm trees. I stopped at five different homes over the course of the day (which included a break at lunch for the local high school volleyball tournament) with Jefferey, who mentors 32 students in all.  The conversations were in the local language, and usually centered around the health of the family members and other happenings at home. It was a fascinating and humbling experience to be invited into homes, offered maize (like sweet corn, without the sweet, butter or salt!) and soda and hear the conversations translated from my mentor. What an incredible look into the real day-to-day experiences of a wonderfully hospitable and open culture.

So much of our trip has been enlightening and terrific. However, I feel it is only right to share some of our more anecdotal experiences as well.  In preparation for a cruise on the Nile which was planned for our time at Murchison Falls National Park (see Jason’s upcoming post), one of our members visited the Pharmacy asking for a motion sickness remedy. Upon leaving, walking to our restaurant and opening the box and reading the details, we found it was actually a remedy for morning sickness. This person was able to return the purchase for a full refund.

Ugandan vehicles have to be built to survive hard and bumpy roads in the dry season and large mud puddles and slicks in the wet season. Our vehicle was from the Invisible Children office, and held up wonderfully for our long hours on the road. One afternoon, as we were about halfway through a five our trek, we stopped to stretch. As soon as everyone was out of the car, we heard a hissing and looked; our rear tire was losing air, and quickly went completely flat.  Luckily we had a spare with us, but the jack we had wasn’t tall enough to get the vehicle far enough off the ground! The next hour (maybe more) was spent trying to place the tire in the perfect pothole, while keeping the axel on high ground so  we would be able to get the tire off. The truly ironic part was that this was one of the smoothest gravel roads we had been on in days…

More stories to come!

–Audrey Mohr

P.S.   Wanna see how the whole thing started?  Check out the earlier Africa trip posts:

On the ground in Africa
Africa Trip: Day 1, Audrey
Africa Trip: Day 1, Maura

Invisible Children has linked up their amazing “Schools for Schools” program with Better World Books, and the results are sure to be spectacular.  Haven’t heard about IC?  Well, they’re an amazing group of folks in SoCal who have created a documentary and mobilized a nation’s worth of students to help partner schools in Uganda.  Why Uganda?

” The war in northern Uganda has been called the most neglected humanitarian emergency in the world today. For the past 23 years, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GoU) have been waging a war that has left nearly two million innocent civilians caught in the middle. The GoU’s attempt to protect its citizens from this rebel militia has largely failed, leaving an entire generation of youth that has never known peace.

Since Invisible Children: Rough Cut was filmed in 2003, night commuting has ended for the children of northern Uganda. For the past few years, the region has been closer to peace than ever before. From June 2006 to March 2008 in Juba, Sudan, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GoU) engaged in a series of peace talks in order to end the conflict. These peace talks, supported by special envoys from the United States and other nations, allowed for the longest period of peace in northern Uganda’s 23-year war. “

Unbelievable right? It gets better. Through the schools for schools program they managed to raise over $3 million last year (wow!). Now, not only can students in the program raise money for schools, they can run book drives as well. In addition to the millions of dollars raised, schools are going on a full assault getting stacks of books for those in need. One school in Vermont will have shipped 30,000 books by the end January. That’s just one school amongst the hundreds across the US that are involved in the project.

The international organization created the revolutionary fundraising program in 2006 in response to the need for quality schools in northern Uganda – schools that have been destroyed by displacement, rebel occupation and lack of funding due to the 22-year war. Schools for Schools uses an innovative online social community to help students see where their money is going and connect to different projects, fundraising ideas, and supporters. Within its first year, students rallied together and raised over $3 million.

The World’s Biggest Book Drive will build upon Schools for Schools’ innovative fundraising strategy and will help complete the ambitious projects at Invisible Children’s eleven partner schools in northern Uganda.  Through a Partnership with Better World Books, a global bookstore that harnesses the power of capitalism to bring literacy and opportunity to people around the world, over 1,000 student groups will be invited to join the movement by leading community-wide book drives.

A winner of the 2008 Fast Company Social Capitalist Award, Better World Books is a fast-growing social enterprise that collects donated books and sells them online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide.  Through partnerships with more than 1,600 college campuses and 900 libraries nationwide, Better World Books has generated over $4.7 million for its non-profit, library and college partners, donated 1 million books to literacy programs globally, and diverted nearly 13.5 million books from landfills.

The World’s Biggest Book Drive will utilize the passion, creativity and hard work of student groups inspired by the GO documentary, and the technical and logistical expertise of Better World Books, to collect, sell and donate used books in support of schools in northern Uganda.

“What’s incredible about this program is that it relies on the most unlikely donors – high school and college students – to raise the money, allowing them to believe that they have what it takes,” said Laren Poole, Invisible Children co-founder and GO Director. “At the end of the fundraising and book drive competition, the top students have the chance to visit their school in Uganda to meet students their own age. It’s a story come full circle.”

Xavier Helgesen, a co-founder of Better World Books, believes the partnership with Invisible Children is unique in that “it allows ordinary citizens across the U.S. and Canada to support lasting peace in Uganda by donating a national resource in vast supply in both countries – used books.  Books cluttering up their closets, stuffed under their beds, and collecting dust on their shelves will be transformed into dollars to support literacy and international development.”

22 all-expenses-paid trips to northern Uganda will be awarded to student groups that raise the most money, collect the most books, and offer the most creative ideas for propelling the Schools four Schools movement.

The World’s Biggest Book Drive starts on September 8, 2008, and will end on January 31st, 2009.

About Invisible Children, Inc. Established in 2005, Invisible Children is a social, political, and global movement using the transformative power of a story to change lives. By inspiring youth culture to value creativity, idealism, and sacrifice, the movement fuels the most effective, adaptable, and innovative programs in the world. Invisible Children, Inc. was formed after the release of the film “Invisible Children: Rough Cut”, which documents a war in northern Uganda in which children are abducted by a rebel army and forced to fight as child soldiers. Currently, Invisible Children is putting 740 kids through school and employs more than 250 men and women living in this war-torn region, with plans to see that number grow. These programs on the ground were developed by the people of northern Uganda and seek to improve the quality of life for individuals through quality education, enhanced learning environments and innovative economic opportunities. www.invisiblechildren.com.

For $13,000 assembly, packing and shipping costs, Books for Africa will be shipping 35,000 well selected school books (approximate retail value: $150,000) and ten computers to four secondary schools in Northern Uganda. We are leading the campaign to raise these funds which will bring needed books to classrooms and libraries at Sacred Heart Secondary School in Gulu District; Alliance College Secondary School in Kitgum District; Lira Palwo Secondary School in Pader District and a secondary school in Amuru District in Northern Uganda . For more information about Books for Africa. (original text at Pan-African Empowerment)

Now Friday has finally arrived, and we ended our week in the warehouse by sending our second shipment of approximately 18,000 college text books directly to the Kampala International University in Uganda .

We have more of these direct shipments scheduled and we will try to keep everyone updated as they go out. In the meantime, everyone have a fantastic weekend, and keep those books coming!