My day with Dutch entrepreneurs inevitably took me down memory lane…
To the beginning of 2007.
I had just spent all my money and sold all my stocks to make The Home of Edirisa in Kabale Town as impressive as possible. Our volunteer Samo Ačko had been doing crazy things, including calling his father to join him in Uganda because he needed an electrician and a handy man to help him with the remake. A drab building was becoming really special, both on the inside and the outside.
My favourite moment was taking a projector, powered by a generator, to the dirt road outside and drawing pencil circles around dots that Samo’s laptop was projecting on the wall. It worked. From a distance, from an angle, those dots became the face of Festo Karwemera, the founder of the Bakiga Museum. It was a magical visual effect.
We ended up with a spectacular place, a cosy haven for travellers that we would happily utilise for 8 years—a beacon of hope in the dusty dirty town somewhere in the middle of Africa … at least that was what Seb Bishop called it.
Seb was from a group of businesswomen and men that Channel 4, a British TV station, brought to Uganda to record a reality show. Its title, “Millionaires Mission”, will give you a decent idea of the calibre of these guys. They were super smart people with great ideas and best intentions but only some weeks to implement them; that their development efforts would not bear much fruit was obvious in advance. It was done for TV. Was it at least good television? Unfortunately not as good as it could have been.
Among the variety of projects they started for the cameras, there was an Irish potato storage facility in the village of Nyakasiru.
Noah Liberi, a 20-year-old secondary school leaver, was one the many guys hired to build it. The first kid in a family of 10 to reach advanced levels of education, he had a shrewd mind and a philosopher’s tongue. He was all ears when he heard the millionaires were hiring a project coordinator for another project, Teach Inn Uganda.
Influenced by the presence of Deirdre Bounds, the founder of a commercial volunteering provider named i-to-i, they were to invite youngsters from around the world to come to Nyakasiru to teach English. They renovated a structure next to a primary school to serve as a comfy village residence. There was a spacious living room with a gas cooking corner, a veranda to chill out on in foldable chairs and simple but colourful rooms at the back. It took a little walk to reach the bathroom facilities, but all in all, lovely. Solar panels to charge phones provided the final reason for everyone in Nyakasiru to want to be employed there.
Noah went for the job interview and failed.
However, he left enough of an impression to be called back and was offered the position of caretaker. He was to clean the facilities and try to meet our volunteer teachers’ every need. Yet, more than anything, he became the source of a unique brand of humour and the writer of an engaging chronicle.
Generations and generations of volunteers, mostly British, would come to Teach Inn and enter the Book of Noah. Before reaching Nyakasiru they would go through an orientation process managed by me, and I would remain their point of contact throughout their stay, as an i-to-i mercenary.
Thus my financial worries would evaporate and I would be able to comfortably appreciate the amusing literature Noah was producing. He found my interest special and eventually entrusted me with his manuscript…
Over the weekend I pulled out an old stack of colourful papers, and it dawned on me: the tenth anniversary of Teach Inn was approaching and I was the keeper of its archives!
I shot a Facebook message towards Noah and hoped for the best. And, lo and behold, some days later the man replied and graciously gave me the licence to do with his writings whatever I wanted. Now equipped with his phone number I could call him and get an update.
He worked at Teach Inn till September 2009, then obtained a diploma in Mass Communication in Kabale and a certificate in International Relations in Kampala. After a volunteering stint with the Commonwealth and a job for the European Union he became a wanderer, a seeker of experiences around the country. These days he is helping a run a bar in Wakiso, central Uganda. Volunteering at Teach Inn ended in 2013 and Noah believes it is now a hotel for random guests and an accommodation solution for trainee teachers.
But our real interest is the glory days! Starting tomorrow, every Friday, I will be publishing Noah’s stuff from 2007. It is one of the most fascinating creative endeavours I have encountered in the Gorilla Highlands.
… And so it begins: Irremediable Compulsive Exasperate Inveterate Invincible Beliefs
text: Miha Logar