What's in Your Backpack?

Every August, Seattle families head out to fill backpacks with fresh notebooks, boxes of crayons, and new pencils. It's a familiar ritual, and if you’re school is participating in Sister Schools this year, we're asking our community to grab one or two extra items while they're at it. Those small additions to your cart can open a classroom door for a student in Uganda who would otherwise be turned away.

Here's the item that matters most, and it might surprise you: the plain, ordinary notebook. Most schools in Uganda don't have textbooks for students to bring home. What a student writes down in class is often the only record they'll ever have of that lesson, and it's the only thing they can study from at night. Without a notebook, there's nothing to copy from the board and nothing to review before an exam. We've seen teachers send children home for the day simply because they arrived without one. If a student can't take notes, the teacher reasons, there's little point in them being there at all. A single notebook can be the difference between a child staying in school and a child being sent away from it.

English language books are another quiet game-changer. Uganda's national standardized exams, the tests that decide which secondary school a student can attend and what doors open for their future, are given entirely in English, not in the student's home language. For a child who speaks Luganda or another mother tongue at home, every English storybook we ship is a chance to build the fluency those exams demand. It's one of the more overlooked ways a donated book can shape a young person's entire trajectory.

Crayons and markers do something different, and just as valuable. They turn a blank notebook page into something a kid is excited to open. Color brings energy into a classroom, and that spark of enthusiasm keeps students coming back day after day.

Then there are the balls and sports equipment, which might be the most beloved items we send. Many students have never held an actual soccer ball. They play with ones stitched together from banana leaves and plastic bags, and when those fall apart, there's often nothing to replace them with. A real ball or a jump rope becomes the highlight of the whole term.

Getting any of this to Uganda is its own adventure, and the rules seem to shift every year. Customs regulations we could count on a few years ago no longer apply, and we've had to adjust our packing lists accordingly. Toothpaste and clothing, for example, now fall under import categories that make them impractical for us to ship, so we've had to drop both from our list even though they were staples early on.

What we can always use are notebooks, pens and pencils, crayons and colored pencils, English-language storybooks, rulers, erasers, sharpeners, and any ball or piece of sports gear you can spare, new or gently used. If it's clean and still has some life left in it, we'll find a student who needs it.

We especially love seeing Seattle kids go through their own school supplies and choose something to give, a barely-used notebook, a favorite storybook they've outgrown, a soccer ball they don't play with anymore. Those choices, made by a child instead of a parent, carry a kind of generosity that's hard to put into words. As you're working through your own back-to-school list this year, consider tossing one more notebook or one more box of crayons into the cart. It won't cost much, and for a student in Uganda, it could be the reason they get to stay in school this year. Every gift makes a difference, no matter how small.