Two big pieces of news this week. The first is that we have two new additions to the S.A.L.V.E home. Asuman has been known to the S.A.L.V.E. staff for some time and was taken into the project this week. He's 11 years old and has been on the street for about a year. He's a very smiley, confident boy and drew us a great picture of an elephant this morning. Its great to see him settling into the home environment after having met him so many times on the street and Isma really appreciates the company. Waswa was also brough in this week and aboev you can see the three new recruits (from left to right Asuman, Waswa and Isma) along with our rather sad old football. Time to invest in a new one I feel! Assy and Stephen will be spending alot of time with them in the coming weeks to teach them some basic life skills- keeping themselves and their things clean, how to resolve arguments, how to help around the house. They may sound basic but its these sorts of small issues which can end up causing large problems. Imogen and I will also be spending time with the boys but on a less formal level as their command of English is pretty limited. We'll probably do lots of painting and football... theres lessons to be learned from these things I'm sure!
The second bit of news is that Imogen and I went off to Kampala this week to visit the Kireka women's group's bead project. We hoped we could learn some useful lessons from a project run along the same lines as our own bead project but established for a little longer. The group has been together for about a year and consists entirely of women from the north of Uganda displaced by the war and living as refugees on the outskirts of Kampala. Before coming togehter as a group the women were break rocks in a quarry on the edge of the city which we also visted. Not a nice place to be on a hot day. Through their own initiative in forming the group and the capital of the Diaspora project (who oversee the group and sell the products online and abroad) they have made a huge improvement to their lives. We were so impressed with the quality of the jewelry and came away with some good ideas for new designs. We were also able to have a good chat with the project manager who gave us some useful (if not the most exciting!) advice about how to manage the accounts and market the products. It really is wonderful to see how womens groups can turn things around for themselves and work so effectively together. They seem to be springing up all over Uganda and starting all sorts of projects from beads to gardening collectives to chicken farming groups. In a country where women have been so disempowered in the past its great to see them taking back control of their lives. From little acorns great oaks do grow...
Anyway enough philosophising for now!
Emma and Imogen
No comments:
Post a Comment