Students in Uganda and the UK were invited to write an essay entitled "A Day in My Life". Examples of these, one from Uganda and one from the UK, can be seen below.

"A Day in My Life"

by Anthony Bazira of Busoga College, Mwiri, Uganda

Of the seven days of the week, thirty or so of the month, my most vividly remembered day is Monday. Monday being the first of the academic days, is characterized by its length and worst of all, its hectic periods. So in return, it demands a lot of perseverance and commitment in which I have always tried my best to put up with.

As the first step is always the hardest, my firstly lively step into Monday is always in the cold weather. Very early in the morning when the cold lake breeze is roaming all over the top of the hill, I wake up to start preparing for the long day. With a vest, my school uniform shirt and a navy Blue Blazer, I soon make a favourable condition for myself out of the cold condition.

So by 5:30am, I go to the classroom for my morning preps. All of the Monday dawn just like on other days is spent on my morning preps which end at 7:00am, taking me directly to the breakfast period. For breakfast in the dining hall, tea and bread is served, which within 15 minutes leaves me strong enough to face the day before me. Here the busy weekend’s stress would have worn off from my body for a new one to build up;- The hectic Monday officially kicks off .

At the sound of the drum at 7:40am, twenty minutes school parade is held. This is where the whole school converges at the parade ground, the various anthems chorused and prefects and administration representatives each pass important information for the week. After twenty minutes of standing, our exhausted legs are soon relieved with a trek to our various classrooms for the first lesson of the week to start.

After the morning parade, the quadrangle (classroom section) is characterized by clamor of teachers’ voices imparting knowledge into their various students’ brains, explaining this, explaining that and so on. After four tiring periods of forty minutes each I’m relieved to half an hour’s break and teaching resumes. Then at least the number of periods is shortened to three so am kept patient enough to wait for lunch up to 1:10pm.

The lunch time is long enough for thirty minutes posh and beans’ lunch and a twenty minutes break afterwards, which refreshes me ready for my last streak of lessons. Although I freshen up, I fall into a period of drowsiness due to the now hot conditions and a digestion period. Anyway I strive to keep awake through the last periods of the day; - unlike a few incompetent classmates.

After 4:20pm, the feeling is like that of a big burden relieved off one’s chest for here the long hours of sitting in the class are done away with. So to also do away with the stress, I rush to the dormitory to take off my school uniform and change into my sportswear. Well dressed, I’m soon on the playing ground with my friends. After a period of playing, I and my friends end the game a few minutes to supper time(6:00pm) to go and clean up in our various dormitories and change into decent clothes ready for supper, and then after evening preps back in the classroom ;- but I prefer the library where I can carryout some research.

As soon as evening preps end (by 10:00pm), I go back to where I started the day from;-my bed remembering the events of the day one by one each critically until I say my prayers to conclude the plot of the day and dedicate the night in God’s hands.

"A Day in My Life"

by Anna Considine, Campion School, Northants, UK

I have five alarms to get me up in the morning. If one of them fails to go off properly, I am late for every single thing I have to do later in the day. One blares at half past six, and is completely ignored. The next trills its presence at twenty to seven, and is also ignored. Five minutes later, the next goes off, and this is the first to wake me up. My eyes reluctantly open, my pupils contracting painfully at the sunlight shining through my blind, and I stumble out of bed to slap water on my face in the hope this will do something to wake me. It rarely does. The last two alarms are to let me know what time it is: one at six minutes to seven exactly and the final one at seven o’clock. I don’t like mornings. Once I’m awake, I generally tend to like the quiet, but I can’t stand rolling over and realising that the frantic beeping near my head is not some bizarre dream, but an unwelcome fanfare for the start of the day.

I make my lunch, listening to my MP3 or the radio as I do so, which helps switch off the active, daydream part of my mind that is prone to making me late so I can switch onto automatic mode. It takes ten minutes normally, but if it’s a Monday morning it can take twice as long because my mind is still muzzy with sleep.

After making my lunch, I shovel cereal into my mouth and read. It doesn’t matter what I read: the newspaper, my new book, the cereal packet… I used to watch my pet goldfish when I ate, but they died two months ago. Britain is famously a nation of pet-lovers. Most people will have some kind of animal, be it cat, dog, snake, gerbil... Once I’ve eaten breakfast, I go upstairs and brush my teeth, making sure I don’t leave the tap running as I do so. I try to be very aware of my impact on the environment. Lots of people are quick to blame Britain for global warming, and while I agree we are partly responsible, I hasten to add we are not alone in abusing the planet. Countries in the EU and China are not blamed as openly, but are certainly as responsible for climate change as our country is.

I love recycling and walking to places to reduce my carbon footprint. Previous generations have not shown as much respect for this planet as they should have, but I would like to think my generation will be the one to do as much as possible to stop it. I think about this as I sit on the bus to school. (I like buses as well.) I don’t like the bus drivers though, as some can be very rude. The journey to school takes between five and ten minutes. I get off the bus and hurry to the warmth of my form room. In autumn, winter and spring school is quite chilly in the mornings. I normally sit and chat to my friends and then, after Registration, I hurry off to my lessons.

Today was a Monday, and my first lesson was BCS or Business Communication Systems. I still have no idea what that means, but we were, as always, on the computers. There are a lot of computers in our school. People in my class were surprised to hear that there were computers in Uganda, which I found quite funny. Most people think all of Africa is just huts and savannahs, and that everyone is desperately poor. On the television, the only side of Africa we see is the poverty-ridden side. We are nearly always shown pictures of starving children on the news. Because of this image presented to us by the media of the Western world, we don’t know what Africa is really like.

My teacher, Mr Watson, is very tall and very funny. He’s the best person for waking us out of our Monday morning stupors. Today we were designing an advert for a company looking for business clients. My next lesson is German. The English are notoriously terrible at languages. I feel lucky that I go to a language college, and that I am taking two language GCSEs. I love studying German: I get very excited when I’m speaking it, although I do find it much more difficult than my other language GCSE, French. My teacher’s name is Mrs Barlow and my class is very small – normally there are thirty people in a class, but in my German group there are just seven of us. This morning we were working from textbooks, which I have to say was not very exciting. .

At break I sat in the form “garden”. At the word garden I think of flowers and fruit trees, but our little garden is nothing like that. It’s a patch of grass with a pavement going round the edge. It gets the sun though, and is nice to sit and chat in.

Science is my next lesson; I rarely enjoy Science, but currently we’re studying an interesting topic. We’re looking at cloning and genetic modification. Everyone has strong views on this subject. I personally hate the idea of cloning. It’s wrong to let humans fiddle around with cells and think they’re gods. I said I was worried scientists would go mad and make Super Humans, who would never get ill and would live forever, and normal humans would die out. It was a scary idea, but good to talk about.

At lunch, I sat in the garden and ate the sandwiches I’d made at five past seven that morning. We often talk about school and boys. There is a lot of pressure on young people in Britain to go out with people their age. People always want to talk about this, but never the consequences. Apparently, AIDS is a big problem in Africa. I feel so sad when I think about AIDS, but I don’t know anyone who is HIV positive so I don’t know what it’s like to live with the condition.

My fourth lesson is Citizenship and Social Education. We talk about HIV and are told about contraception, but most of it is things we’ve heard before. I was surprised to hear that to get HIV through saliva you would have to drink 30 pints of it!

My last lesson before home is French. I love speaking French. The school have told me that I can take my GCSE a year early. In spite of this, I am very aware that children in other countries of the world are significantly better at French than I am. I think it’s a shame that some British people think that just because some places speak English as their first language, they don’t have to bother with learning any other languages.

The school bell rings out at half past three, and I hurry to my bus. When I get home, I watch TV for a bit then go upstairs for a shower. I use solid shampoo and conditioner now, because it’s much better for the environment than the liquid stuff. For dinner we have my favourite pasta dish, and afterwards I watch a bit more TV and then do my homework. We don’t get as much homework at my school as some of my friends do in other places, but we do seem to get significantly more homework now we’re studying for our exams. I love school, but I hate all the homework that comes with it. Most of the people in Britain forget that we’re lucky to be at school, and most teenagers have a very negative attitude towards it.

When my homework’s finished, I read in bed or sometimes go on the internet to talk to my friends. I get in bed at about twenty past ten and fall asleep at about ten forty-five. Then my day is done.

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