She encouraged her students to support their needy friends

Some of the pupils that benefit from the charity initiative at Dangala Primary School, Mabira. The top two pupils from each class are supported by students from St Mary’s College Lugazi, an initiative Tushabe leads. Photo by Kelvin Atuhaire

What you need to know:

  • With a leap of faith, St Mary’s College Lugazi teacher Justine Tushabe mobilised students to pay fees for needy pupils off their pocket money. Three years later, 40 pupils are benefitting from the cause.

Justine Tushabe, 36, lives by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, and to make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
And happiness is all she looks for in everything she does. She is not just a classroom teacher, but one who ensures she brings happiness to others.

This does not come as a surprise as compassion runs in her genes. For instance, she studied A-Level on a school dependent scheme at St Stephen’s SS Bweyogerere (now Luyanzi College).
“I am a product of charity,” Tushabe, a teacher of Entrepreneurship and Commerce at St Mary’s College, Lugazi, says.

Charitable
Since 2015, she has been running the school’s Charity Initiative where caters for disadvantaged school-going children in Lugazi.
She was responding to a message delivered by the school director and founder Moses Ssenyonjo, who had visited St Bruno Dangala Primary School, a school in Mabira Forest.
“When our director told us there were children dropping out of school for just Shs20,000, I was so touched and soon I asked my class if they could help contribute to this,” Tushabe said.

The first students who agreed to contribute to the cause were 17. “The fact that these students came up to help excited so much. It is the positive energy I still ride on,” Tushabe said.
Sure enough, this has helped them reach 32 pupils at St Bruno and Sagazi Church of Uganda (each with 16 beneficiaries) and eight that have progressed to secondary school are supported at St Mary’s Lugazi bringing the total to 40.

At the school, there are donation boxes which are sometimes used to meet other community challenges. Recently, the students fundraised for the construction of a two-roomed house for an elderly woman as well as cancer treatment for a Primary Six pupil.
And all this is done by students she mobilised as a class teacher of Senior One.

Grateful
Betty Wudha, the head teacher of Sagazi CoU, holds Tushabe in high regard.
Visiting her school immediately after lunch, some of the beneficiaries, (two were absent because of sickness), Tushabe was welcomed with excitement and loud laughter.
It was a perfect day for the children some of whom would have been school dropouts yet the school fees is just over Shs50,000 per term, including lunch.

Wudha said of Tushabe as a beloved teacher. “Some parents could bring Shs1,000 and demand receipts something that was costly for us. Yet in some instances they could not be able to complete the required amount,” Wudha said.
“I really like seeing how Tushabe is reaching out and doing acts of kindness and compassion. And that is not easily taught, but the students seem to have embraced it which has really been great.”

Living example
Juma Saleh Chemutai, a Senior Five student, who has sponsored Teopista Nanteza, a Primary Six pupil at St Bruno, since Primary Three has a keen understanding of why they took on the project with his best friend John Mutsoshi.

“I am a beneficiary of the MasterCard Foundation scholarship scheme and they normally give us Shs60,000 pocket money monthly. I do not use all that money so I decided to take up a girl child because from where I grew up in Kotido, girls are seen as marriage material. Since I want to be a lawyer, I have to start with such initiatives,” Chemutai, the project mobiliser, said.
Two of the students he contributes to their fees, Vincent Ogen and Chrispus Bwayo, are in Senior Five now. Both are dreaming of becoming medical doctors.

Simple profile
Tushabe, a proud mother of one son, dreamt of being a journalist but a chance meeting with Chrysostom Muyingo, the minister of State for Higher Education, changed her perception.
Muyingo encouraged her to pursue a career in education and when she completed A-Level at St Stephen’s SS Bweyogerere, she enrolled for a Diploma in education at Kyambogo University before she graduated with a Bachelor’s in Education from Makerere University in 2016.

She runs the school canteen to supplement her income in addition to being an executive member of the school’s Sacco. But all over Lugazi, her name is nearly synonymous with pupils and parents due to her more than 12 years of teaching.