Location
Kitengesa's trading center
Kitengesa is a small trading center in Buwuunga sub-county of Masaka District in the western part of the central region of Uganda. The trading center is only about five miles from the district headquarters, but it is in a typical rural area, with no electricity and only recently acquired running water. Most of the people who live there are peasant farmers, growing their own food and depending for their income on coffee and other cash crops.
These people are not rich, but they have had access to education for several generations now. They value it highly, and such money as they have goes first and foremost to sending their children to school. And since the Ugandan government introduced Universal Primary Education in 1997, the numbers of children in school are increasing rapidly. Thus Kitengesa and its neighboring parishes have a large and growing literate population— a survey conducted in 2002 identified well over 2000 people in the immediate neighbourhood who said they could read.
In 1996, Emmanuel Mawanda founded the first secondary school in the neighborhood of the trading center. It is a private school and depends entirely on school fees except that the government, under the new Universal Secondary Education scheme, has been paying it a capitation grant for students recruited in 2007 and later. Fees are necessarily low, at 75,000 Uganda shillings (about $40) per term in 2010, and the capitation grants are even lower. The school consists at present of a couple of classroom blocks and dormitories for boys and girls, though most of the students are not boarders. In 2009 it had about 450 students altogether.
The original library building is on the school’s land. It is a simple mud brick structure with a corrugated iron roof; but it looks impressive when seen from the road that leads out of the trading center—especially at night, when it is the only building to be seen with electric light. It soon became a local landmark and added greatly to the school’s prestige. At the end of 2009 it entered a new lease of life as a workshop for Afri-Pads a tailoring project that is employing twenty local girls.
The new building, into which the library moved in July 2009, is less than quarter of a mile away from the school and just a short walk away from Dan’s and the volunteers’ houses. It is still more impressive than the old building and will be yet more so when it is finished. The plot is large, so the library is able to host several nursery beds for FADA, and we have planted several trees of our own to try and make the place as beautiful as possible.