Mikwano Children's Trust

A successful trip

2011-02-10T05:08:00.000-08:00

Overall it's been a successful visit and all the other projects are doing well. The little girl whose chemotherapy Mikwano sponsored has reached the end of her treatment and is doing well. The babies at the orphanage where we supply formula milk (the alternative being watered down cows’ milk) are thriving and we get a monthly report on their progress. All the new initiatives started by Becky have continued, the cow, pigs and chickens are healthy and productive and everyone is positive.

But most of all is the air of optimism from people living in conditions that most of us can only imagine, without running water or electricity and yet so appreciative even of our visit. And such small amounts of money mean so much.

If you would like to know more about Mikwano Children’s Trust please go to www.mikwano.org

Cultural differences

2011-02-08T05:07:00.000-08:00

One of the many cultural differences that we found variously interesting, amazing and appalling was the habit of ‘kneeling’. Children, women and anyone wanting to show gratitude often kneel to indicate respect. We find this difficult to deal with, thinking it indicates subservience, and I personally always told them not to do it. We got into a lively discussion one evening with a seminarian (trainee priest) – all men, and priests in particular, are accorded great reverence in Uganda, a strongly Christian country – about kneeling. We, not being constrained by a Ugandan upbringing, argued against it and a good hearted discussion went on for an hour or two – at the end he said ‘I wish every evening could be like this!’ I don’t think he was used to argumentative middle aged (I like to think) English women.

This led to several interesting discussions with the nuns, who we’ve become very close to, about differences between our country and theirs. One thing that they found amazing is our attitude to animals, pets in particular. They were astonished that we would keep cats and dogs in the house and FEED them. We (privately) wondered what they would think if they knew how much money we spent feeding wild birds!

Visiting Providence Home

2011-02-06T05:04:00.000-08:00

One amusing anecdote – we went to meet this lady who is a Civil Servant in Kampala at her office – just like any office building in the UK – but security was tight (because of the elections and after the rugby club bombings in July 2010 when 74 people died) and we had no photo ID with us. Phil carries cards to alerting people to his medical conditions, but these do not carry a photo. We thought we had reached a total impasse when he found his Alnwick District Council Senior bus pass! All was well and we were allowed in!

That was an unusual experience, however – almost unfailingly people are welcoming, helpful and friendly. Sometimes there are communication difficulties – although the official language is English, and all the signage and notices are in English, in practice most people’s mother tongue is Luganda and they only start speaking English at school. One strange anomaly is their swapping of ‘l’ and’r’ sounds. So we were told that ‘the storks are looking for lats on the load’, a boy introduced himself as ‘Lodger’ and the truck at Providence Home had a faulty ‘crutch’. But no plobrem once you got the hang of it.

We spent several days at Providence Home – a large home for 120 disabled and/or orphaned or abandoned children and a few destitute elderly. My friend Becky Rainbow spent over 3 months there last year as a volunteer and she and I returned this February to a wonderful welcome. It is run by 4 nuns of the Little Sisters of St Francis of Assisi, but not only do they have the children to look after, there is an on-site bakery that works 24 hours a day, a tailoring school and a shoe making school, all providing training and employment for local, especially disabled, people. Some of the children are extremely disabled, some have tragic histories like the little boy brought to Providence Home by his grandmother because his father was going to sell his head to the witch doctor. Or the boy whose mother died when he was very young, and then had cerebral malaria leaving him brain damaged and without speech, though physically normal. His father then abandoned him at Providence Home, leaving him in a locked shed until he was found 3 days later, covered in faeces, starving and dehydrated. Last year he broke his arm and Becky took care of him, staying with him when they tried to reduce the fracture without anaesthetic in hospital.

When we returned he immediately took Becky’s hand, sniffed her shoulder repeatedly and wouldn’t leave her side. We wondered what on earth was going on in his mind, but he obviously remembered her presence after a year. The most disabled of all is a boy with hydrocephalus – huge head and wasted, stick like limbs. One incident showed the difficulties medical and nursing staff experience with equipment and supplies. This boy has a catheter and is normally trundled up the ‘road’ on his wheeled stretcher to the local hospital for catheter changes (for which they charge). While we were there his catheter needed changing and all the equipment was there at the home except the anaesthetic gel usually used (in the UK). We decided to go to the hospital and buy some gel and that I would do the catheter change. But when we got there we found that they only use KY jelly – but worse still they only had one tube in the whole hospital. So they squeezed a bit into a plastic bag for me to use! (5)

Racheal’s story

2011-02-04T04:46:00.000-08:00

In 2007, when Mikwano was sponsoring a number of children at a primary school in Kampala, we had a letter from a nine year old, thanking us for supporting her. The letter (abbreviated) said ‘My father died in 1997, my mother died in 2006, the counsellor took me to hospital and they told me I was HIV negative. God loves me. Thank you for loving me too.’ Racheal is now 13 and has completed her primary education, but unfortunately Mikwano cannot fund children for secondary school. This bright, determined little girl again approached us and we decided to fund her privately. She wants to be an accountant and we want to give her that opportunity – otherwise her education would have finished now. We were very fortunate to meet a Ugandan woman who will organise it for us and scan and email her reports to us. It has been a huge learning curve in how the system works.

School visits

2011-02-03T04:38:00.000-08:00

One of our main tasks was to visit the schools to monitor the progress of the children being sponsored by Mikwano. Without exception the schools operate in conditions we couldn’t have imagined if we hadn’t been there. Time and time again parents were desperate for us to add their child to the programme. In Uganda the government has brought in UPE –Universal Primary Education – but in effect the cost is still prohibitive for many parents. Even in the UPE (State) schools there are still ‘requirements’ to be provided – uniform, books, pens, soap, toilet paper, food, building fund – and in the boarding schools, scrubbing brushes and cleaning rags.

As children do not necessarily progress each year according to their age, only if they have ‘passed’ the year, and as they frequently drop in and out of school due to an inability to pay, it is not unusual to have teenagers in primary school. The conditions in most of the schools we visited can only be described as Dickensian – faded, torn posters on the wall, 50, 60,80 children in a class – and in one rural school a single skin brick classroom with no windows or doors or plaster, where they were desperate for the floor to be concreted because of ‘jiggers’. Jiggers are sand fleas which feed by burrowing into the feet, causing huge suffering. Of course, few of the children, especially in country areas, have shoes. In Uganda, 57% of children finish primary school and 18% have the chance to attend secondary school. And over 1 million children are not enrolled in primary school and, of those, 70% are never expected to.

Election Year

2011-02-01T04:27:00.000-08:00

February is the time for our visit to Uganda. The school year there starts in February, so somebody from Mikwano needs to go then to pay the school fees for the children whom we sponsor. But this year (2011) is election year – President Museveni has been in power since 1986 – and we gave serious consideration to the advisability of choosing election time to go. In the end we decided to risk it – but more than that, for the first time my husband Phil accompanied Rachel and me! We tried to make it an ‘Africa-lite’ experience for him, but even so he said that nothing can prepare you for the reality of Uganda. The fact is that everything is so different from our own lives, some aspects appalling, some humbling, some encouraging - and many, many, uplifting and encouraging. In the event, there was no trouble from the elections (Museveni won again - see photo) while we were there, although we were strongly advised to register with the FCO, who then phoned to check on our whereabouts at all times ‘in case we have to come and rescue you’. So let’s hear it for the FCO and their care of British nationals abroad!

I think everything can be epitomised by the question asked by an interested Ugandan – for they are very keen to learn about our world – he said ‘Do many houses in England have electricity’. Another asked ‘Are most of the roads tarmacked in England? (This man was taking his 4 year old son to boarding school at Entebbe, a 4 hour journey away ‘because it is the best school’ - the hunger for education is apparent everywhere, but I’ll come to that later.) And availability of clean water is something most Ugandans can only dream about.

The state of the roads, even in central Kampala was something that shocked Phil – dusty, boulder-strewn rutted tracks that intrepid drivers bump and scrape their way over. There is no Highway Code here ... at roundabouts everyone, cars, lorries, motorbikes, cyclists (sometimes carrying huge loads or two or three other people) all push and shove and hoot and just go for it! Scary stuff! One evening it took one and a half hours to travel about 3 miles across Kampala. But I did think that there was evidence of more prosperity by the number of relatively smart cars on the road – 5 years ago, when I first came to Uganda, there seemed only to be beaten-up old Toyotas on the road. Old habits die hard though, the taxi and boda boda (Motorbike taxis) drivers still only buy enough petrol for the next journey – resulting in one boda driver running out of petrol with Rachel on board halfway up a hill (traditionally Kampala was said to have been built on seven hills, but over time it has come to have a lot more). Not unusual, but she was late anyway as everyone works on ‘Africa time’ - even muzungus! (white people) - and had to run the rest of the way.