After a whirlwind few days in Rwanda we all made it over the Rwanda-Uganda border and added another stamp to our passports. We spent a night in Kabale, Uganda at a wonderful guest house run by the NGO Edirisa. Edirisa strives to promote Africa through creativity, culture and practical skills. They have started amazing projects in cultural tourism, education, fair trade crafts and multimedia. After spending a night in Kabale we drove one house outside town to SNEC (Special Needs Education Center) in the village of Katanga. SNEC is a school opened only a few years ago for special needs children and provides them with education, housing, food, and support. Students have a wide range of disabilities which include physical disabilities, mental disabilities, and students who are deaf. During our time at SNEC we went to each classroom of students and made bracelets and necklaces with them out of paper beads. Each kid got to roll their own beads, glue them, string them on colored yarn, and give them a shiny coating with varnish. It was so rewarding to see students catch onto the process and take charge of making the beads all by them self with little or no help. The day after they were dry and all around school the kids were sporting the yellow, green, blue, pink and red beads. They wore them with pride and never let them out of sight. For them everything is normally communal so for each and every one of them to have something uniquely their own is special. Their faces would light up when they finished and the biggest smiles would appear. Our other big project was painting murals. Because the school has so many deaf classes and not enough classrooms they take a normal sized classroom, divide it in two, and just have the students face opposite directions while two separate teachers teach. As you can assume this gets distracting so the school came up with the idea for us to get dividers made and paint educational murals on them. We consulted the teachers on appropriate mural material, put our paint clothes on and unleashed our inner artists. In total 18 dividers were painted, totaling 36 sides each with an individual theme or scene. Mad are skills were unveiled when we painted everything from elephants to banana trees to a 9 divider long continuous morning to evening scene. Unfortunately we wont get to see them hung up but we know the kids will appreciate them. When we weren’t working we passed the time by playing with the kids and discovering each of their special and remarkable personalities. They all are so spunky and full of life that we all wanted to spend many more months with them. One of our favorite quotes of the week was “Screw Disneyland, this is the most magical place on earth. ”
–Rebecca Kuntz