Alice and I have just returned from a day away exploring some of the beautiful scenery Uganda has to offer. On Friday it was Independence day here and was a national holiday. So we decided to make the most of it and visit Sipi Falls which is near Mount Elgon and is meant to be one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the country and it definitely didn't disappoint! It was very impressive and such a peaceful place to spend a night.
But on to what we've been up to this week. As Alice said last week sadly Musa decided to go back to the streets, his main reason appearing to be that he missed his friends. They are a very close group spending the whole day together, working together and sleeping in a group on Main street for safety, so we could understand that it must have been strange for him not being able to see them. We spent the early part of the week trying to investigate what had happened to MUsa, speaking to his friends, to shop owners we knew helped him and to senior members of CRO staff. As yet we have not been able to get hold of his parents but CRO staff think that it may be possible that he has journeyed to Kampala. But we are continuing to look into this and hope to have more information on his whereabouts soon.
This week also saw the start of SALVE's use of the local community centre at Source cafe for our street clinic. We're really pleased to now have a safe and regular place where we can conduct our clinics at least one day a week to begin with. We decided it would be really beneficial to have a team training so we held that on Tuesday at Source. It was great to all come together and discuss SALVE and our aims and objectives and we also spent time deciding what topics we think it will be useful for us to cover during our one day a week lessons with the children such as basic hygiene and life skills.
Our first workshop with the children on Wednesday was a great success and we're really looking forward to seeing it develop and grow in the weeks to come. Luca, Robert and Charles were the three boys that attended this week and we hope that they will come back regularly and our numbers will grow. We began with asking the children to draw round there hands, write their names in them and decorate them (which is something all the children at the SALVE house have done). It may not sound very exciting but they really enjoyed it and you could see it was nice for them just to do a fun activity for a change. We have now cut them out and mounted the hands and are planning to display them at each lesson and ask any new children to do them as well. This activity also highlighted that it might be beneficial to cover some basic reading and writing skills as all three boys had trouble writing their names. After this Mike spent some time explaining to them exactly who SALVE is and what we are trying to do and we then we had great fun playing a game to trying to learn each others names, for most of the day I was Elizabeth and Alice was Alex - close enough :) We took a break for chipatis and juice, not before trying to explain the importance of their hands before eating and then moved on to collecting some basic information about the boys such as where they're from, how long they've been on the street and how they get food and money. At the end of the lesson all the boys said they were looking forward to coming back next Wednesday and were even more excited about the game of football we're planning for Tuesday. Alice and I have also started using a log which we will use on each street clinic so we have a clear idea of who we are meeting each day which hope will help us monitor and evaluate their progress.
We ended the week by doing some essential admin and deciding on the criteria for the research we want to do for SALVE's planned community education project. We plan to visit villages in the Jinja district to establish exactly what each community sees as a priority for community education and what they would like to be covered. We also want to find out what community education already exists in the villages so we will be able to compliment them once SALVE's project is up and running. We have also been having a look into how charitable organisations in Uganda gain funding and hope to put together a list of possible sources for the future, although fundraising is not as established here as it is in the UK.
So there you have it another week in Uganda, as always we're looking forward to seeing what next week brings!
Lots of love,
Esther and Alice xxx
No comments:
Post a Comment