Senior 4 candidate students started their exams last Monday. Not just any exams, the national exams, which take multiple weeks to complete and years off of lives . . . . well, we hope not really . . . .

There is no re-take or make-up here, if you get sick you study for a whole ‘nother year before getting the chance to sit for exams again. And failing exams (as you do if you don’t complete them) greatly impacts your chance to go on to another school or university.

This is why I was up at 4 am on Wednesday morning helping a sick 17 year old vomit and praying with her while she writhed. Her stomach was in pain, she had a bad case of gastroenteritus, but mostly she was just stick scared that she would fail her exams because of the nausea diahrea and pain.

Now I might be crazy here, but I’d say there’s something wrong with the system.

Most mornings right now involve multiple trips to the local police station where David picks up the morning’s exams, sealed in special UNEB (Uganda National Examination Board) packaging. From there he hands them off to the special UNEB examiners who are teachers from another school and have been approved. They check pockets, make sure all desks are a minimum number of centimeters apart from each other and supervise the giving of the exam. Time is kept exactly and when the two hours end the students file out, the exams are repackaged in another sealed UNEB package and transported back to the police station by David where they are picked up by the UNEB coordinator for the area. This happens twice a day, every day, for three weeks.

And then our Senior 6 students begin THEIR national exams.