Ik Mobilization Day
Our second blog from Uganda (March 2011) briefly described our visit to Ik land for their Mobilization Day. It is so-called because it endeavors to “mobilize” the parents, government officials, community, and children to encourage education. We again attended this celebration in Kamion at the end of January. We also spent a short time in Kaabong where our partner gave us a history lesson of the Catholic missionaries in the area (through paintings on the wall of a community centre.)
Kamion sits on the escarpment looking to Kenya. It is an awesome site to see the vastness. Ik people are not cattle herders like their neighbors, the Karamajong of Uganda and Turkana of Kenya. Instead they are mainly “hunters and gatherers” with honey as a key crop.
Through the Global Families Program, MCC helps to pay for school fees and other necessities for over 40 Ik children who attend secondary school in Kaabong. We also provide some basic necessities (soap, paper, pencils) to two village schools of over 1000 students of which Kamion is one. Presently, we also have a special project of building a fence around the Kamion school to provide more security and privacy for the students and teachers. Some of the secondary school boys cut poles for the fence to earn money for incidentals.
The day included many speeches and some dancing. The flight there in the small MAF plane was awesome! It is fascinating to see the very different landscape in northeast Uganda and the Karamoja manyattas, where people live and keep their cattle, form interesting patterns from the air. It is also encouraging to realize how much more of Kampala we can now recognize from the air—as compared to 10 months ago.
