Namirama Construction Project

The New Building Project

Namirama Community School is in eastern Uganda, about 2 hours drive from Mbale in Bubulo County.

The nearly $40,000 building project has created a larger, safer, more equipped structure to support the secondary school and its 15 employed teachers and (approx.) 200 students. The building, complete with new school materials and furnishings, includes four classrooms (one for each grade: Senior 1-Senior 4) and a small office. Its walls are composed of a strong, weatherproof combination of mud-brick, sand and cement with built-in chalkboards (as is customary in Uganda); the floors are also cemented to make the building usable year-round and keep out the snakes! The building secure windows and doors are being installed soon to protect school supplies from being stolen or damaged by the rain.

School materials just arrived thanks to the $10,000 in supplies donated through the partnership of City High of Iowa City, Interact Club (a division of Rotary), Iowa City Rotary and Rotary International.

Engineer Anna Levitt traveled to Uganda in mid-July of 2005 to oversee the building project and support in the construction of the Namirama school building. To read her reports from Uganda, visit her blog here. Or, to see photos of the construction, visit our photo gallery here.

The History of Namirama Village's Secondary School

Namirama Village and its mud-brick secondary school lie very close to the Kenyan border in an area with virtually no roads and very few automobiles. The community organized to create the school in February, 2003 as a response to the prohibitive distance of the nearest school, over six miles away. Before Namirama Community School was built, the distance of this secondary school forced students to embark on what became a very dangerous journey for many young female students; furthermore, the dirt road in made the trek nearly unmanageable in the rainy season, thereby preventing students from going to school for many months out of the year.