First Week

I left for Uganda last Wednesday, so today officially marks the first week of my HNGR internship. I was going to wait to post until I visited what will probably be my field site (which I will do tomorrow), but as the one week anniversary, I feel obligated to write something. This post will be brief though. I am interning with an organization called Cornerstone. Right now I am staying in their headquarters in Kampala (the capital of Uganda), where they have guest rooms. This organization, through a lot of different programs, is geared towards developing leadership among youth in East Africa. They started two leadership academies advanced secondary schools, one for boys and the other for girls. (Advanced secondary schools are schools only for the last two years. This is a simplified explanation. I will probably make a post in the next few weeks just explaining the differences in educational systems, but I will wait until I understand it better myself.) These leadership schools in Uganda, as well as similar branches in Tanzania, Rwanda, and South Sudan, are one of Cornerstone’s most important activities. As of now, I will probably spend my internship at the boys leadership academy in Nakasongola, a rural district north of Kampala and in the center of Uganda.

I have spent most of this first week just seeing what Cornerstone does. On Monday I attended a few meetings. On Tuesday, I looked at several homes for street kids or other “at risk” children in Kampala. The homes are run by university students who act as mentors and are geared towards removing children from the street and giving them an education. This amounted to driving quite a bit of Kampala. I saw eight (out of ten) of these homes, usually spending at least a half hour to an hour in each. It quite the day indeed! Today I went to a meeting in the morning and had the rest of the day off. Tomorrow I will see both leadership academies and spend the day at the boys, another seven hour day. On Saturday I have been invited to a wedding, meaning it will be a full day as well. Come next week, if everything happens according to plan, Cornerstone and I will discuss what I will do for my HNGR internship. I will probably be staying here in the offices in Kampala until next week and then head out to wherever my field site is. I figured I’d post today given that I will be too busy to post again at least through Saturday. I plan to make another post once we figured out what I will be doing and to discuss life in Kampala in more detail.