Amy McGee, Senior Analyst, started an 8 month sabbatical in August. She worked with schools and community projects in Uganda and Kenya before heading on a 5 week overland tour through Southern Africa.

Amy’s second update

To begin my sabbatical I spent a few weeks in Uganda working for a charity called Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS). I was based at St Jana Luwum school, in the Kabalaga district where I:

• Initiated a partnership between PEAS and a large Africa based computing company who are now undertaking fundraising for the charity as well as initiating contact with over 20 potential UK partners
• Ran several basic and advanced Excel and Word training courses with the teachers. Although it was quite difficult as there were only two extremely slow computers and about 20 staff, the staff were the most attentive I’ve ever seen and they seemed to pick things up very quickly and hopefully will go on to use their new skills in their teaching
• Formalised the recruitment procedure for all new teaching and management staff which the charity are planning to use for all future recruitment needs
• Helped organise a charity event at the school to raise money for a new science lab attended by 7000 people from the local area.

I then moved to Kenya where I was working at a school and community project called Lavenda Springs helping out with hands-on tasks such as:

• Looking after the 2 and 3 year old reception class for a few days whilst the teacher was off - not easy when they don’t speak English and as many of them are AIDS orphans they just want to be hugged and given some attention
• Helping the older children with revision for upcoming exams
• Working in the kitchens and cooking for the 500 children on open fires!
• Liaising with local farmers and encouraging them to have their cows de-ticked so that they don't spread disease - not easy when it is quite expensive and it is a choice between doing that and eating that day

That was the end of my volunteer work but not the end of my African experience as I've been touring around for the last 5 weeks, the highlights including:

• Visiting a Masai village in the Serengeti National Park and being shown around their huts and told about their way of life - all they eat every day is milk and blood!
• Swimming on the back of elephants and walking with lions in a game reserve called Antelope Park in Zimbabwe - the only place in the world where you can walk with lions
• Doing a gorge swing in Zambia where we dropped 53m in 2 seconds!
• Taking a Microlite flight over Victoria Falls
• Trekking rhinos in Botswana and coming within 5m of them
• Staying in a small town on Lake Malawi and visiting the local school, hospital and prison - we think our prisons are over-crowded, here they had 150 prisoners in one room that had no beds and only 10 blankets between them.
• Relaxing on the undeveloped pure white sand beaches in Zanzibar

And I've learnt loads about the different cultures, economies and landscapes in Africa.

• The most problematic place at the moment has got to be Zimbabwe where we stayed for about 10 days. It was very difficult to get any food there and many people are starving - we saw queues 100 people long outside bakeries and supermarkets. The money there is worth absolutely nothing, the official exchange rate is 3,000 Zim dollars to the US$ but on the black market you could get 450,000 Zim dollars to the US$! Tourism has massively decreased, in Victoria Falls which used to be the place to go in Southern Africa, there was hardly anyone there and many hotels were shutting. Despite this the local people we met were hopeful that things were going to change.
• Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world but probably the friendliest place we went to - the people there were desperate for us to sit down and talk to us about life in London and learn about our experiences
• All of the countries are trying to go through massive development and economic changes and are embracing technology as a way to develop. In many of the rural villages that we visited children are being taught to use computers and mobile phones as they realise that this is the way that business will be conducted there in the future.

But, that’s it for Africa and now I’m off to New Zealand….