Educating Ronnie

Over the last decade, Joe Douglas has given thousands of pounds to his friend Ronnie, a boy he met in Uganda during his gap year in 2002. But he won’t say exactly how much – yet. The figure will be revealed in Educating Ronnie, a new play that charts the highs and lows of Douglas’s 10 years funding his friend’s studies and the impact it has had on their relationship.

“I was in Uganda for six weeks,” he says. “My aunty works for a charity out there, so I stayed with her, met lots of people and one of them was Ronnie. There weren’t that many people around who were my age and he was one that I really clicked with. He took me to parts of Uganda that I never would have seen. I got a rounded picture of the country and what it was like to live there, to live the life that he was living.”

At the time, Douglas was 18 and Ronnie was 16. When he returned to the UK, they stayed in touch by text: “About six months after I came back, he sent me a message saying that his sponsor had pulled out on him—a family friend had been paying for his school fees—and asked if I could help. So I said yes. It started off as £20 a month. I was paying for his O Levels, that’s how it began. Then that became his A Levels, then he was off to uni. And I was at uni too and the figures all started mounting up.”

Today, Douglas is an acclaimed theatre director. Earlier this year, he directed The Last Polar Bears for the National Theatre of Scotland, which travelled to 17 primary schools by bicycle–a 300 mile round trip–to highlight issues of climate change. But he’s still sending money to Ronnie.

Educating Ronnie is the first play that he’s written and performed in, but Douglas is adamant that it’s not an exercise in self-congratulation. “Hopefully it doesn’t feel too sentimental,” he says. “I’m very aware that it’s a kind of ‘nice’, lovely thing to do. I don’t want it to be seen as me harping on about how nice I am.”

“When I was out in Uganda,” he explains, “I felt a sense of futility because I wanted to help. I was raised as a Catholic and that sort of religiosity was so strong in me when I was there. So that’s why I started giving to Ronnie – because I wanted to help but also because I had a personal connection. I thought, I can’t help everyone but maybe I could help this one person. Since then, the nature of the show has given me a slightly more objective view of this decade of my life, and of this story and of Ronnie and of what our relationship is.”

Thanks to American charity Invisible Children Inc—whose notorious short film Kony 2012 received over 80 million hits within a month of its YouTube release in March—there’s now more knowledge about the problems faced by children in Uganda. “It’s a very different story [to mine],” says Douglas. “Their motives are much more grandiose and overtly political but it’s been brilliant in raising awareness. I remember being in Uganda and feeling similarly outraged by that. The front page of the Uganda Monitor, which is a paper out there, said ‘Kony kills 200’ and I was reading it and thinking, how isn’t this on all the front pages in London or America? Hopefully it’ll make people think a bit more about our relationship with the developing world.”

Douglas is tight-lipped about the current state of his relationship with Ronnie, except to say, “It’s really difficult. We live 4,000 miles apart but we’ve kind of grown up together, and I’ve not seen him since I was 18, not in the flesh.” But the play has Ronnie’s blessing, and while it’s clear that it’s been a stressful part of his life for 10 years, Douglas is sure he’d do it all again.

“I don’t regret it. It gave me a really huge sense of the injustice between where we live and where he lives. I guess at the end of the day, it still feels like the right thing to do. What happened to me was that I got drawn deeper and deeper into it and it affected my life. But if someone asks you to help, well, what do you do? I’d try and help them.”