guardian

Alice Oriokot dreams of becoming a nurse. And the Guardian's Christmas 2009 appeal aims to offer her and others a chance to make their hopes a reality

During the two years Alice Oriokot was meant to be studying for her A-levels, she was banished from her boarding school on 10 separate occasions because her father could not pay the fees.

Naturally, the experience was humiliating. Every child is given a three-week grace period at the beginning of the term, when they can attend classes even when their fees have not been paid. After this, the school administrator will begin to chase them, demanding the money, and, if it is not forthcoming, he will send them home.

"It is terrible when you are sent home. You are traumatised," says Josephine Abalo, manager of the Ugandan charity the Mvule Trust, which the Guardian is supporting in its Christmas appeal. "The teacher's salary often depends on the fees that you pay. They say: 'Why are you here? Get out of class!'"

But far worse than the humiliation was the disastrous impact the exclusions had on Alice's academic chances. Every time she found herself on the bus, making the long journey home, she knew the prospect of passing her A-levels in physics, chemistry, biology and agriculture was getting slimmer and slimmer.

Each time she would have to wait two to three weeks at home, in the district of Kaberamaido in Teso, until her father – a low-paid primary school teacher, struggling to bring up 12 children – received his salary. She would copy her friends' notes and try to persuade the teachers to help but soon she began to find it hard to follow the lessons.

From early childhood, Alice has been hoping to train as a nurse and this should have been an eminently achievable ambition. Not only are there plenty of jobs available because hospitals are short-staffed, but she was academically gifted enough to make her way into college. She passed her O-levels with eight credits, a score that none of her seven older brothers and sisters had matched, and even now she laughs with delight at the memory of outranking the boys.

She gained the grades despite the fact that she was sheltering with her parents in a temporary camp for families displaced by the violent insurgency that swept through this part of Uganda six years ago, living in a hut where no one was permitted to light paraffin lamps at night, for fear of attracting the attention of enemy rebels.

Her teachers told her parents that she was talented, and her fellow pupils elected her head girl. For a while her prospects looked promising.

However, poverty intervened. Her final A-level grades were very poor – she failed biology and got only passes for the rest. Her father had hoped she would get a government scholarship to study further, but it was obvious that her results were not good enough. There was no chance to retake the exams, because by that point there were more, younger siblings to educate and her parents said her opportunity was gone.

"I was very disappointed when I saw the results. I knew my future was not going to be OK. I cried," she says, sitting the late afternoon by her mud-walled home, in a distant, rural region of Uganda. The family's hens are pecking at the purplish sorghum crop, laid out to dry on the swept mud yard. Alice's mother is listening, dressed in a washed-thin Unicef T-shirt (many people here wear T-shirts donated by aid agencies, a legacy of the fighting and natural disasters that have plagued the region). She remembers how she quarrelled with her daughter when the results came through, before reflecting that it would have been hard for her to excel, given how frequently she was made to leave class.

Alice, 20, is a good example of the kind of student the Mvule Trust hopes to help with its programme of scholarships: someone who is bright, motivated and ambitious, but who has been unable to fulfill their potential because they are too poor.

She searches in her house (three paces wide) to find her school books, stowed away since her plan to go to college was shelved, and unpacks them from a plastic first-aid bag donated by a UN relief organisation. "Reactions in which aldehydes and ketones differ," she has noted in diligent blue biro, above lines of chemical equations. "Structure and bonding of period (III) oxides". The A-level science curriculum has barely changed since the 1960s, when it was based on the UK model; standards are judged to be higher here than they would now be in the UK.

"I believe I would have succeeded if I had had the money," Alice says.

Alice had left home before dawn that morning to undertake the four-hour bicycle ride from their family home to Kaberamaido secondary school, where the scholarship interviews were held in the shade of tall neem trees. She made the journey without stopping. "You only feel the pain in your legs later, when you have rested," she says. "I felt happy. I knew I was going to get a chance."

Not many chances come along if you are a young woman in this impoverished stretch of north-east Uganda, which, over the past 20 years, has been beaten by rebel uprisings, banditry, flood and drought. When Alice heard at her church that scholarships were on offer, the Sunday previously, she clutched at what she saw as a way of fleeing the otherwise inescapable path towards marriage and a hand-to-mouth village existence, scratching at the fields for food.

A crowd of more than 100 people had gathered by the school playing fields, waiting for an interview. Some of the women were trembling when they sat down to explain their stories, some began to weep from the emotional exertion, aware that their future rested on their ability to show that they deserve support.

Alice was calmer than most, and impressed her interviewer with her determination to continue studying. "At school you can control your life. You are not wasting yourself," she said. She made it clear that she finds life back at home frustrating – she misses the chance to use her brain; she misses the friends she used to play netball and football with; she sees herself following in her mother's footsteps and is alarmed at the prospect. "My mother has a difficult life; she depends on only digging," she said.

Other girls in her village were pushed towards marriage, but her father believed in the importance of educating girls, and hoped she would go to college. However, on his salary of 200,000 Ugandan shillings (£65 a month) there was never "enough to feed us, to pay for all the things we need", she said.

Alice knows no one who owns a television, or a car, or even a motorbike, she said, and does not aspire to own anything like that herself. "As for now, there is nothing I need except for my studies. There would be no way I could become a nurse if I don't get a scholarship. The fee is too high."

"When I become a nurse, I will be helping the community. I want to help people with Aids," she said. Despite her poor A-level grades, there is a nursing college where Alice can be admitted on the basis of her good O-levels for a nursing certificate.

The interviewer smiled and made a positive note on her form. If money is raised by the Guardian appeal, Alice will be one of the first beneficiaries.