2012 Fundraising

This summer, another group of twelve students and three staff will travel to Uganda to build on the work previous groups have initiated with The Great Generation. We need to raise £22,500 for the project to continue.

On 11 May at 7:00pm there will be an Auction Night in the Ted Hughes Theatre. 

Tickets will cost £3 and will be on sale week commencing 30 April 2012.


2011 Uganda Experience

The Journey l St Francis Healthcare Centre l Bukaya Primary School l Community Work l Time Out l Harvesting crops and building a library l Visit to Kampala l Thank you!

A group of 11 students and three members of staff travelled to Uganda at the end of the summer term for two weeks to do work with local communities. They spent months preparing for it; including fundraising and planning the activities they were going to do.

The journey
We set off from Huddersfield train station at 7.45, all feeling anxious but excited. The two plane journeys were filled with excitement and anticipation and we arrived in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, feeling very tired after a full day of travelling (arriving at 1:00am local time). The next day we made our way to Jinga, a city on the outskirts of Kampala, where we would be working for the next two weeks. It was a massive culture shock for all the students!

St. Francis Healthcare Centre
St Francis is a community healthcare centre which specialises in working with HIV positive adults, children and families and plays a huge part in the community, with two days a week allocated as 'drop in days' when anyone can visit and get treatment. We got to meet staff members working at the centre and had a good look round at all the facilities, which were limited, and the rehabilitation house/orphanage for seriously ill children which is run by the centre, Omana house. We were also given a great explanation of the Ugandan culture and learnt lots more about the culture and community before starting to work with them.

Bukaya Primary School.

Bukaya is a large primary school in Jinga with 750 students and only seven classes with students ranging in age from four to17 which was once again a huge shock to us. We sat in on classes and observed before starting to teach our own classes over the next few days. We found this first day very overwhelming, as there were so many children eager to get to know us and it was amazing to see how enthusiastic they were about having a charity group come to work with them as we were the first group ever to visit Bukaya Primary School.

We split into six groups, each of us teaching lessons on different topics that we had chosen beforehand. We, as students, found it hard at first to overcome the language barrier between us and the younger students, but had a lot of fun playing with them and learning things about their culture whilst teaching them more about our own. Mrs.Clay also ran a workshop about the ways to use a library and how to enjoy reading in preparation to setting up our own library at the school in the second week. We got to know lots of the children throughout these lessons and it was amazing to find out about their lives and compare them to our own.

Community work

On the Saturday we returned to St Francis to help out at the youth clubs run by the centre every Saturday: the Shadow Idol Club and the Young Positive club, an organisation run especially for young members of the community dealing with being HIV positive. We firstly helped collect crops with all the members which the centre would either sell or use for food for its members. Then during the day we once again split into groups and played sports games, cards, board games and read with the children and ended the day with a game of rounders.

Time out
On our weekend off we had the chance to go and see more of Uganda and we visited Bujagli Falls, the source of the Nile River and even had a walk through the rainforest! It was nice to have a rest but all of us were raring to go at the start of the next week.

Harvesting crops and building a library

During the next week, we gardened in the morning doing such tasks as harvesting maize crops, making a compost area and several vegetable beds. It was really fun because we used tools like hoes and it was really rewarding because we knew it would have taken them much longer to do it without our help. In the afternoons, we went to Bukaya and built the library. This involved arranging the books, labelling them for ability ranges, cleaning the room, making posters and painting a mural on the back wall. We painted a book with a tree coming out of it, with fantasy creatures from books, sitting on it and a castle because they are book themed and are a good visual. To paint the leaves on the tree, we used our hand print which was really cool because a part of us will remain there now. Painting the whole mural was fun because we all worked as a team and got to get our hands in.

We had a library opening on the Thursday which was great. The children did performances for us - singing, dancing and drumming. We then let them all in the library and sat with them and chatted to them. It was great seeing how happy and thankful they were to receive the library. It was also really nice to have that extra time to have one-on-one conversations with the children to learn about them and their lives.

Visit to Kampala and Acholie Quarters
On Friday, we went to Kampala to see what it was like and the contrast between there and Jinja. It was very different as it was much busier and the buildings were taller. However, you could still see that people lived in extreme poverty even though they were living in the city. The next day, we visited the Acholie Quarters which is a large area of slums in Kampala populated by a tribe from the north which moved south to Kampala due to conflict and war. First, we got a welcome performance by the local elders and we danced with them which was really fun. We then walked through the slums and talked to some of the people. It was really overwhelming because there were very young children working at the quarry and children looking after their siblings even though they were only five or six themselves. But, we were all really glad we got to see the Acholi quarters because it puts our lives back home into context.

Thank you!
We would like to thank you all once again for your donations which made this trip possible and thank you for enabling us to have such an amazing time. We hope you think your money was well spent and wish all our luck to next year’s trip.

Report by Shari O’Regan and Josie Murphy

Fundraising for the 2011 trip

Helping hand from 'No Hands'
Eleven Calder VI students and three members of staff will be taking part in the fourth Uganda project, organised by the Great Generation Charity, in July. The group is indebted to the continuing support from the “No Hands Massage” Clinic in Hebden Bridge. Once again, the company has contributed over £1,500 to the fundraising project.

Director of Calder VI, Mike Howard, commented “the ongoing support from No Hands makes an enormous contribution to our fundraising efforts each year. It is so gratifying to receive the outstanding support from a local company, to help the development of our students, and to provide such a worthwhile experience for them and the community we work with in Uganda”.

Gerry Pyves, Founder and Managing Director of No Hands Massage, added: “We are delighted to continue to support this annual project with our local school. It is marvellous to think that receiving a massage can benefit not only our clients but also our local comprehensive and the community in Uganda.”  No Hands continue to offer a massage for a £10 donation to the Calder High Great Generation Project which is donated by the company. 

Please contact any of the No Hands staff on 01422 843777 for further details. This year’s Great Generation team leave for Uganda on 16 July and in the meantime, their fundraising efforts will continue.


Great Generation: Calder High's inspirational youth
The Sixth Form Centre at Calder High, ‘Calder VI’, is currently undertaking a array of fundraising activities that will finance an expedition to Uganda; possibly proving a life-changing experience for the students involved. The venture will stand students in exceptional stead as they tread their first footsteps into adulthood. Yet another remarkable example of the school’s attitude towards encouraging its students to achieve extraordinary goals that go beyond the standard curriculum.

Funds will come from student-run activities and events, such as an up-coming attempt on the World Record for ‘bunting’. Other events include a French Exchange Disco, Friday 8 April, which will not only raise money for the cause, but endorse the school’s capacity for Modern Languages; providing an opportunity for students in lower school to mix and converse with students from another country. An event is also set for inter-form trampolining, which will include prizes for ‘Best Bounce’, ‘Best Fancy-dress’ and ‘Most Bounces per Minute’. And for our beauty queens, a ‘Pamper and Purchase’ party will be held, where parents and staff will experiment with and buy cosmetics.

To date, Sixth Formers have sold homemade cakes, second-hand books, and raffle tickets at Year 7 parents evening, which took place on Thursday 10 March, and was held on their own turf in Calder VI. Local business, Harvey’s of Halifax, have donated a shop window in which students will create a display advertising the expedition, to raise awareness and further funds, for which the school is most grateful.

If you would like to make a donation to this worthy cause, please contact Mr M Howard on 01422 889918 or email mhoward@calderhigh.calderdale.sch.uk.

Report w ritten by Lyndsey Ashton

2010 Uganda experience
View Rowan Carter's video of the 2010 Great Generation trip made by Calder High staff and students to gain a flavour of this challenging and rewarding experience.