I wake to the sound of squawking birds. I have a cold or tepid shower. Today we walked down to the centre after a breakfast of fruit, eggs and chapatti. We enjoy the sounds that accompany our walk. There are 2 schools on opposite sides of a road and they seem to have a morning assembly competition to see who can sing the loudest. We gave our morning greeting to the boda-boda boys on the corner waiting with for passengers for their motorbike taxis.
We arrived to find a queue of children with disabilities (CWD) – this was at 8.30am! The guardians had heard about the meeting yesterday and wanted to come and tell us their own stories. We met a sick grandmother with HIV who brought a 2 year old girl with cerebral palsy. When the grandmother goes to work digging neighbour’s fields, she makes a hole in the ground for the child to sit in. She is looking after 9 children altogether as she cares for her dead sister’s children too. One of the children is sponsored. We met a baby with a deformed foot, a deaf girl, a girl who suffers with fits, a 4 year old who is deaf and dumb and is HIV+, and a boy with spina bifida. Once again we listened to stories of poverty, inability to get work because of the CWD, little food, no money for medical care (many of these children don’t have an official diagnosis) and met grandparents who are single surviving adults in families with many children.
After this we collated the results from the HIV discussions yesterday and then set off for the prison. We stopped on the way to buy some bars of soap which Moses cut up to give to the women prisoners. The soap comes in long slabs at 45p each. We shop at our friend Rev Moses’ shop – The Come Again Shop. We took some baby clothes with us too which had been donated by friends in the UK.
We met the prison governor first. He was welcoming and pleased to see us and appeared to have compassion and concern for the welfare of the prisoners. The women were gathered together and they sang to us and Tom & Moses spoke to them and I was asked to pray for them. We also got a chance to talk to some of the prisoners so this is a mixture of comments from both the governor and the women!
There are 20 women and 2 children and 1 pregnant mother. They all share two metal huts, 10 adults in each, squashed together with a mattress each (no mosquito nets). The mothers have to share their mattress with the children as they cannot afford to buy the child one of their own (they cost about £4). They similarly have to share their food and soap. The huts are very cold at night and unbearably hot in the day. They all share a tiny compound with hardly room for them all to sit on the floor. Most of the women are in prison because of committing murder – their husband/boyfriend, relatives, and neighbours over land disputes. Medical help is poor and there is none for the children, only the women. The babies born in the prison are not vaccinated. They sang to us, we talked to them, we gave them soap and baby clothes and we left.
It was encouraging to meet the women – one of them told us she’d learnt a lot and would come out a better person. And as for the children… It was heart-breaking.
We went straight from the prison to TASO to discuss the results of yesterday’s survey and to see how GC can work with TASO. We met the manager and told him how many children needed testing for HIV. It was an excellent meeting, the outcome is that Moses must send a formal letter and then they will arrange a full programme of sensitisation, testing, counselling and referral as necessary. We all felt like we’d actually managed to achieve something significant so Tom took us into town for tea and snacks.
This is for my Mum… African tea comes in a flask. It has a few tea leaves, hot milk, cinnamon and a lot of sugar. You would hate it. I don’t mind drinking it as its so great to be sitting round a table chatting with local people and experiencing a bit of Rukungiri life. People come and go and sit wherever there’s a space and mugs appear in front of them followed by the flask of tea. I had a samosa – it was very good. Tom’s treat for 5 of us cost him the princely sum of £1.40. The Ugandans said it was cheaper than buying the ingredients and making it themselves – but they would never normally go out for a tea break.
When we got back to the office I wrote up the HIV report for the UK managers. I’ve just realised I probably emailed it in a format that means no-one can open it. Hey ho.
While the others went out for lunch, Tom and I stayed at the office while a queue of people gradually arrived outside. There was a boy who needs to go to hospital (we’re planning to take him on Thursday) and three women who had heard that the Europeans were here to give out help and came to ask us to sponsor their children. Moses went into action explaining that there is a waiting list and the children will be assessed for sponsorship on the basis of vulnerability and specific criteria. There are 200 children on the waiting list so at the minute they can’t take on any more names until they get more sponsors.
Having discussed the enormity of the problem with lack of sponsors and hundreds of orphaned children in vulnerable situations, we went on to discuss what we had learnt from the people who had brought CWD. We started summarising the problems: bad attitudes of others, exacerbated poverty, lack of medical treatment, lack of medical diagnosis and consequently no treatment and inappropriate prognosis or expectations, rejection of mothers and children, lack of support agencies, problems with communication with children who are deaf, dumb and/or blind, lack of equipment including walking aids. We kept going back to individual situations and the enormity of what the guardians and children face. There are only 2 GC workers in Rukungiri, and 192 sponsored children – so they are faced by a huge challenge to come up with proposals to support CWD or the children in the prison. However, we felt we came up with some practical proposals for them to present to ‘Head Office’.
The rest of the day was spent sorting out things to take on school visits tomorrow, making the inevitable trip to the ATM and then coming back to the hotel. We’re the only people staying here and we know the names of most of the staff. They greet us with ‘Welcome back Tom and Barbara’. We ordered our supper for later and collected the room key.
Now we’re back in our room dressed in warm clothes (i.e. long sleeved T-shirt and fleece!) because it has rained a lot today and we’re cold. We’ll go up to the bar for supper – the staff watch endless English football so Tom might stay up with them for a bit. I’ve ordered chicken stew, rice & chapatti. I’ll write my blog and try to upload it if we get Internet; I’ll get the footballs ready to take to the schools tomorrow then we’ll put up the mosquito net and go to sleep.
I suspect when we reflect on today, our main thoughts will be around the guardians of the CWD who are depressed and broken, and feel powerless to do anything. They can’t even tell you what they need or what would help them as they cannot imagine any way out of their situation. We’ll think of the little girl we met in the prison, being brought up in total poverty in an institutional environment, and we’ll think of ways to try and recruit more sponsors and raise funds for the work here.
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