Hi -here’s a happy Esther sitting in her hotel room with a laptop right in front of her and all functioning properly albeit without internet. The Joy School director, Mary, has kindly lent it to Caitlin while she works on the school’s brochure and website and luckily for us it sounds like we’ll be having it for a while! We were very excited to watch a DVD the other night and found it such a novelty we were happy to sit through it again the following night...and since we forgot to return it on its due-back date today the temptation to watch it a third time seems to have passed us by.

The hotel has a few other luxuries such as plumbing and beautiful gardens where we relax and read after a day’s work and enjoy the rest of the sun. We do miss the bustling tracks of Bugembe and the children’s excited yells of “Oh-Mazungu-bye-bye”, their accompanying dances and the grins that could light up your mood in a smallest moment. However the lushness of this area alongside the Nile with its colourful gardens, restaurants and pools are something we are more than enjoying and feel very spoiled to have.
Last Sunday we unexpectedly found ourselves at the Source of the Nile, as on the way into town we bumped into a national marathon, which we discovered ended at the Nile’s source and that entry was free and all including street kids were making use of the opportunity!! Nothing amazing but a nice view down the river from a well-placed jetty and some very impressive runners. I don’t know much about running times but for those of you who do the winner took only 1 hour 3 mins or thereabouts to cover an amazing 21 k in the heat.
I feel that our biggest achievement this week has been to finally make contact with the manager of Jinja’s main street children’s service, Child Restoration Outreach. After various frustrating attempts to arrange meetings during earlier weeks to discuss how we hoped to partner with the organisation, we had finally been asked to write a letter of introduction and await the manager’s call to schedule a meeting. Needless to say this did not happen and finally Caitlin and I decided to go along and follow things up. The manager, Elizabeth, successfully managed to conceal her knowledge of this if she knew anything of it and sounded very interested, believing that our support would be of benefit to CRO.

Unfortunately the way forward seems only through another letter of introduction, this time explaining our intentions in full. However she did mention that this would be followed up with a meeting with her staff who would discuss how best we could make this work. We’re optimistic about this and already have hopes for the huge amount of help and support this would entitle us to as individuals and an organisation if this were to come about.

We are keen to discover more about how it works as an organisation and to learn from its involvement in the community (we heard that it partners with the police in some constructive-sounding way and are very eager to hear all about this!)

Also it would help us enormously in our community outreach. I have already begun conducting interviews amongst the general community about people’s experiences of street children and attitudes on how best to deal with the situation with the idea of using the evidence to suggest ways in which the police are falling short of the public’s expectations. So far the data looks good. Everyone I have spoken to – from business men and security to boda-boda men lounging idly alongside the streets who are more than happy to chat – have been pro street children and believe that getting them off the streets through long-term solutions such as training and education is the way forward. The next step will be to gather info from the children themselves to discover the real causes for their lives on the streets. CRO’s input will be invaluable here, as it houses so many children all in one place! It will also be great to speak with the staff and get their (hopefully) expert opinions.

With all this we hope to locate the varying reasons for children’s disappearance from their homes and relatives to the streets, according to specific communities. The idea is to then provide support and guidance within each community to those who are the root of each specific problem (such as parents with poor parenting skills), through professional councilors and respected people of the local area.

The other thing that we’ll be using the interview data for is to discover what the children would find useful during their lives on the streets in terms of education and training opportunities. Whilst we cannot begin to provide such widespread support as an organisation, we hope that in partnership with others – and CRO will be a great beginning – that we can provide direction to certain sources of help.

Speaking of which... our registration as a CBO is coming on slowly...we hope to have this complete by the end of the month (hopefully) – this will be amazing to have access to a whole range of like-minded social organisations.

We’ve also started recruiting a Ugandan volunteer to help us really get things going with the street clinic until we find a full time worker to translate for us. Hopefully this will allow us to get twice the amount done as we make finding new kids for the home one of our top priorities. Now that SALVE’s current children are all at boarding school and have managed to re-establish relationships with relatives with whom they spend much of the holidays there’s a lot of empty space in the home! We’re excited to see how the family well grow... Hopefully we’ll be able to tell you more about this next week!

Things are coming on nicely with Joy school and it’s always nice to have the excuse to see the SALVE children there. Caitlin is getting on well with her English teaching and spends a lot of time making amazing teaching aids which keep the kids entertained – I’m sure they love learning in such an interactive and fun way.
Caitlin has almost finished the school’s brochure already, and is almost ready to start thinking about its website (a seemingly daunting task in my mind but she aims to transfer the info to the web once back in the UK so this will combat all problems with slow computers, power cuts etc.)

I had a wonderful surprise with the beads project today, turning up to be presented with a whole string of brightly coloured and shiny beads, stretching the whole width of a room! All varnished and almost ready to be made into necklaces and ready to be sold! It’s incredible that the quality is at least as good as those sold in town even though many of the children have only just learned how to make them. I’m extremely impressed and proud of them and just hope that we will find the market that they deserve...speaking of which, if anyone knows of someone who could sell these in the UK please let me know! We’d get a much better price there. You can contact me on salveinternationalinterns@gmail.com. Thanks!

All the best for now and hope you enjoy Caitlin’s update next week!

Lots of love Esther xxx