More Hands for Hope things and a trip to Jinja.

I thought I would write a bit about my time at work since my earlier update a week or so ago. I’ve done two full weeks at Hands for Hope (HfH) now. The first week was the final week of our holiday programme for the children before the school term starts next week.

The nursery children playing during the holiday programme.

On the final Friday, the children took part in a talent competition “Namuwongo’s got talent”. The contest latest about five hours and I was one of the judges. Here are a few pics:

 

 

 

After the competition, a number of children were given prizes in recognition of the performance across the whole 6 weeks of the holiday programme. They were given pens, maths sets and exercise books, which they were really pleased to receive.

As well as running the nursery and supporting children through primary school, HfH supports vulnerable families in a range of ways, particularly in the area of health. I have visited, Little Light, a health clinic that HfH partners with – providing accessible health care to those living in the Namuwongo slum. HfH also works with partner organisations to train members of the community to be peer educators. Last Saturday morning I attended a session the peer educators were delivering to young people from the slum on sexual health.

I’ve also spent more time with the social work team in the Namuwongo slum (and have also been to the Nsambya slum, whose families HfH also supports) and visited a number of families. I’ve been learning about some very complex and challenging cases and the team do a really fantastic job at supporting the families who are in incredibly difficult circumstances.

HfH currently runs its nursery and offices across two building, based a 15min walk apart. We are currently trying to raise enough money to buy a new building, which will not only save money, but will also be more fit for purpose and enable us have more space to increase our community work. We have £25,000 left to raise (that’s 100,000,000 Ugandan shillings…. – trying to work with budgets in such high numbers is quite interesting….). I’ve been to visit a couple of potential sites and am quite excited that I will be involved in the (fingers crossed!) completion of this project over the next year.

Finally, I briefly visited the Ugandan national library as they donated some books to us. At HfH, we run a community library, containing about 3000 books and used by the families we work with as well as local schools:

 

On the non-work front, I’ve just spent a lovely weekend camping in Jinja. Jinja lies about 80km from Kampala and is famous for being the source of the Nile. Here are some pics:

 

 

 

Today at work - at HfH we work with three children with disabilities. I'm going with them today back to their school in Entebbe. In the evening I'm off to a yoga class nearby - my first attempt at any exercise since I got here...