The 41-pupil class in the meeting room behind the sub-county office was lively, even if it was a handful of students asking all the questions. When he was not replying to questions himself, the teacher turned to his pupils for answers.
"How often do you de-worm these children?" the teacher asked. "What do you do if you find body lice on the children?"
This is no ordinary class. Here, the 41 teachers from four schools, in Olwelai parish in Katine sub-county, are attending a teacher-training course. The trainer is Edward Egau, the health inspector for Soroti district, in which Katine falls. The subject is hygiene and sanitation.
Under its initiative to strengthen the link between schools and communities, Amref is training teachers so that they in turn train their pupils in hygiene and sanitation issues. The children should religiously learn to wash their hands at critical times, to bathe regularly, and to cut their nails and hair short.
The children also learn practical activities such as constructing the "tippy tap", which allows a latrine user to wash their hands without touching the water can. The hope is that these pupils will be Katine's "change agents", by transferring best practices from school to home. That way, diseases like diarrhoea and dysentery will be reduced in the community.
It is an ambitious mission, and the training of teachers appears timely. The trainer asks his class how they would handle a pupil who has lice in his/her hair, one teacher suggests the children should be advised to use deodorants. The class does not seem to agree on how often their pupils should de-worm.
"What if some pupils refuse to use the latrine?" one teacher asks.
"Behaviour change is gradual; you cannot achieve it overnight," the trainer answers. "You have to continue talking about the benefits of personal hygiene. And you are lucky you are going to be dealing with children who can easily change their behaviour."
However, even if younger children can be more receptive to new ideas, there are some limitations that may make progress difficult. Samuel Omoding, 36, teacher at Ochuloi primary school, is ready to pass on knowledge from the training to his pupils, but does not expect it to be easy.
"It may be hard, because some of the children don't have pit latrines at home," Omoding says. "So it will take time for such pupils to get used to the idea of pit latrines and hand-washing facilities."
Omoding has a point. Initial assessments by Amref suggest that less than half of the households in Katine have access to a latrine, the only imaginable form of toilet in rural areas. In fact, in Olwelai parish where Omoding's school is located, latrine coverage is only 24 per cent. The danger in these statistics is that people without access to a latrine are most likely to use the bushes, raising the risk of water contamination and disease.
Charles Oyuu, 25, from Kadinya-Katine primary school, says his school does not have facilities for pupils to wash their hands after visiting the latrine. Water itself is a problem, since the school does not have a borehole. It relies on a well, one and a half kilometres away, which gets contaminated with faeces in the rainy season.
Last year, Amref gave the school a water harvester but villagers desperate for water broke the tank during holidays. In such cases, expecting teachers to encourage and enforce a strict hygiene code may be asking too much. Yet Oyuu remains positive.
"The washing facilities are not there, but now we have attended this workshop, we have been given that provision to improvise washing facilities. I think it will help us a lot," he says.
Such an attitude is what both the Katine project and district health educator Egau hope for from teachers working amid constraints. "We want to encourage these appropriate technologies and we want Katine to be the model for the entire district," Egau says.