Katine children eat mangoes from the trees. Photograph: Richard M Kavuma
If there is one thing Katine has in abundance, it is mangoes. Everywhere you turn, there is a forest of mango trees. But when, last month, I met Simon Peter, deputy headmaster at Katine-Tiriri primary school, he spoke of the mango season as if it worried him.
The reason? Some of his hungry pupils will constantly miss afternoon classes in order to climb up trees, tempted by the yellow-ripe mangoes that are begging to be eaten.
I love mangoes and when I was a child, spending school holidays with my grandmother, the mango season was always a delight. So while I sympathised with Simon Peter, I also empathized with Katine's children, who leave home without breakfast and are expected to study without lunch. Why shouldn't they enjoy the fruits of nature?
Returning to Katine this month, I saw that the mangoes were starting to look irresistible. While I was riding past Simon Peter's school one afternoon, I found the nearby mango trees full of boys, many of them carrying three or four mangoes in one hand while eating with the other. I asked Emmanuel, a 12-year-old in Primary five, why he was not in class?
"We have finished exams," he said, although he knew that was not reason enough. "Do you take lunch at school?" "No." "So what do you eat for lunch?" I pressed on. "Nothing," he said, as he took another voracious bite of his fruit.
I was happy for Emmanuel and his friends. As for the deputy headmaster, I thought he must be too busy marking exams and preparing report cards to be angry with Emmanuel. But when the new term resumes next month, he will certainly spend most afternoons hating the mangoes again.
One person who will not be going to school next term is Stephen Elapu from Samuk village.
I met Elapu the day before his 26th birthday. With his older brother Paul and a friend, he had come to hoe away weeds that had invaded the Amref office compound in Katine. For that they would be paid about $12. After we talked about Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army rebels and how his father was captured (but manage to escape) in 2003, Elapu had something to tell me.
"I would really like to go back to school but I don't know if Amref can help me," he said humbly. "School?" I replied, studying him. "In this area, if you don't go to school you can only do this kind of work and you do not get enough money," he said. He was deadly serious.
Elapu had had to drop out of secondary school because of a lack of funds to pay for school fees. His father, Faustino Ameca, was working as a herdsman for a local businessman, who paid the lad's school fees. But when the LRA struck, the businessman sold off all the cattle (before they could be eaten by the rebels) and Elapu's family members fled the village to Soroti town, where he was already going to school.
That meant the old man had no more business with the businessman and there was no more tuition for Elapu. That was when he was reaching the end of Senior III in 2003. Today, the old man has no hope of being able to raise about £100 for his son to complete his O-levels.
"My father says we should remain united and work together to ensure that at least the family has enough food to eat," Elapu told me. "In the future, if we earn more money, my father says I can do a vocational course."
Last year, the Ugandan government introduced tuition-free secondary education but it only began with Senior I and Elapu would not qualify. So he has stayed at home growing cassava, maize and ground nuts with his father. He must be one of the few unmarried 26-year-olds in his village - he still hopes to return school.
I told him that the Amref project has no school fees component, but he hopes that someone, somewhere, somehow, will help.
The Katine project seems to have brought so much hope to this area that people want help that is outside the project's defined goals. As a journalist, I am seen as a messenger and people will tell me to take their voice to Amref and to the Guardian.
For example, I visited a church in Katine at Easter and the priest, Father Fabian, had a message for me: "Since you are a journalist who amplifies people's voices, take our request for a public address system to Amref. As you can see, I am struggling to be heard by people at the back," he said, drawing applause from the congregation.
Knowing that Amref cannot cater for individual's requests, I wonder if all that clapping was in vain. It is one of many things I wonder: Will Elapu return to school? Will Katine school pupils find the right balance between eating mangoes and studying? Do children in the West miss school to look for mangoes or to catch grasshoppers? What do you think about these experiences?
