It’s Monday again! Time for another round of “why I love to go to work” with the Invisible Children Uganda staff.

Lorna Peace

Lorna Peace has been working at IC Uganda since 2009. She said that her favorite day(s) are the ones when she gets to conduct career guidance at one of the Schools for Schools partner schools.

“You see these kids who are anxious to learn, and the questions they ask make you see that these students are really thinking about their future. The career guidance opens up a [place] for the students to express themselves. You get to know the child more, you get to know their ambitions and aspirations and guide them in their path.”

She also likes getting out of the office and interacting with the students. She sees the career guidance as a chance to open up their minds to all the opportunities that are out there for them.

“You get to spend the whole day at the school. You get to see the change in them there and then. At the end of the day they have opened up and they say ‘I used to think this, and now I think this.’”

Lorna said that she has met some of those same students after they graduated.

“They say, ‘hey, remember when you came and did career guidance at my school? That really helped me,’” Lorna said. Sounds like a good day, indeed.

Juliet

Juliet’s favorite day came in the form of affirmation for a job well done.

When Aber Juliet was put in charge of the team responsible for evaluating and recommending applicants for the Legacy Scholarship Program, they worked long and hard to develop a tool that would give equal weight to academic promise in a student as well as to the vulnerabilities (like being a child mother or HIV positive) that might make completing education difficult. It worked so well that the team has continued to use the same method of scoring that Juliet helped to develop.

“As proof that this was a good tool, an article was published about a student from Pabbo who had a really good exam score but was too poor to move on to secondary level. That same boy was on our list with the highest vulnerability score, even before the article came out. So that was confirmation that we were really picking the vulnerable and academically promising,” Juliet states proudly. “All along I’ve believed in the integrity of the organization, so that was really affirming to me.”

Later, Juliet was finishing a book by Pandju Merali, and she started laughing when she came to this passage:

Discerning who receives scholarships and making sure the funding is going to the correct hands is not an easy business. In some countries, universities are not equipped to receive and distribute scholarship money directly to their students.  As a result, I’ve begun partnering with trustworthy organizations that are committed to recognizing similar goals. To date, I’m working with four of these organizations – Global Giving, Invisible Children, UNDP, and the Masomo Foundation – and I hope to find others in the future.

“Just seeing Invisible Children being recognized by someone who really has an interest in educating vulnerable children as a trustworthy organization was fulfilling,” Juliet recalls.

More favorite days on the job are yet to come from IC Uganda!