Stuff you might like to know

So you might be wondering what it is I’m actually doing for Jenga in Uganda? Or maybe you’re not. I’m going to tell you anyway. Well I’m still in the early stages of working out the finer details, but at this point, I am keen to get involved in a couple of different areas. One is a new project for Jenga to do with legal rights, and in particular, land rights. I am in the process of following up some contacts we have with some legal organisations working in Uganda which deal with legal education and advocacy in poor communities. Poor people are often uneducated and have no concept of their national constitution and legal rights as a Ugandan citizen. Unfortunately, some people take advantage of this and often when a women’s husband passes away, other relatives will come and seize the widow’s property and everything on it, and basically kick her out. Educating people on their rights will help them to recognise when there has been a violation of the law, and putting them in contact with organisations that can provide practical legal assistance gives people a way forward towards justice.

A very exciting project I have become involved with is the food storage program. People in the communities here are by and large subsistence farmers, meaning that everyone grows food on their own property to meet their own needs. If there is any left over, it is sold at the market. The trouble is, everyone is growing similar crops and following the same cycles of both the weather and planting/harvesting. So if everyone has excess maize, the price of maize drops because there is highly supply than demand, so people get less for their crops. When drought hits or it’s the end of the season and no one has extra maize, they then have to buy it from the market at peak prices (usually from richer farmers) because now there is high demand but low supply. Part of the problem is there is not generally a culture of saving or setting aside here in Uganda, but a bigger chunk of the issue is that people just don’t have an appropriate place to store food securely. Houses are small to begin with, so there’s not a great deal of room, and furthermore, food stored in houses are subject to things like rodents and moisture where they can spoil easily. This is where the food storage project comes in. Two community storehouses have already been built and another is to begin construction next week in Mooni. Basically, these are a large room with sufficient ventilation and protection from weather and animals, with wooden pallets on the ground to lift the bags of grain off the cement floor to ensure proper air circulation. There is a small office attached to it, where records will be kept of what goes in and what goes out. Storing food not only means that communities have greater food security, but it protects them from fluctuating market prices. It is also an opportunity for income generation which goes back into the community.

In both the land rights and food storage projects, I will helping with some administrative tasks such as writing up reports and doing proposals for funding and so forth. I will also be involved at a grass roots level as well – I have already visited one storehouse that will begin operation in the coming week, and attended a meeting with representatives from Mooni about how the proposed storehouse will operate in their community. These storehouses are run and owned by the local communities and once built and filled with a base level of grains, will (hopefully!) be self-sufficient.  

Another project I’m quite excited about is the hospital ministry at Mbale hospital. This is the hospital I visited last week and is not a small local hospital, it is the major public hospital for not only Mbale but many surrounding districts. I was talking to an English guy yesterday who had an allergic reaction to a banana a little while ago and had to go to Mbale hospital for treatment. The hospital did not have the medication for allergic reactions (or the needles with which to administer it!), so he had to give them the money to go to the pharmacy, return with the necessary items and inject him. It may not seem a big deal for those of us that have the few dollars to pay for whatever medication we may need, but for many people who arrive at Mbale hospital, they simply don’t have the money for the medical attention they require, and unfortunately many people arrive with more serious complaints than food allergies. 

I visited the surgical ward again this week. I did drop in quickly last Sunday after my initial visit and gave some exercise books and crayons to the kids and some food to Stella and the lady next to her. You should have seen Ivan’s smile, it was the biggest, brightest thing I have ever seen. Some of the same patients were still there today but there were quite a few new people in the beds. One nasty injury had happened to a little boy , Mark, who was maybe two years old. He had fallen off a bike (I’m presuming motorbike given the wound) and a large chunk of one side of his head was missing, exposing pink skin, tissue and skull. Despite the visually disturbing wound, Mark seemed to be doing well and although I think he was scared of the strange muzungu in front of him, he didn’t seem too fussed about his injury and just carried on with it as children have the amazing capacity to do. We also went and prayed for another little boy, David, who had horrific burns on the front of his body from the chest down. Apparently a neighbour had chased him out of their house and knocked him into a fire bin. He is only three years old. I was with Jacinta, one of the Jenga staff, and she actually knew David’s mother because she is her hairdresser. David’s mum had to be in the hospital to look after not only poor little David but also her two and a half month old daughter. She is a single mum and her only source of income is hairdressing. She cannot work while David is in hospital. I looked at David and the sight was heart-breaking. His stomach looked like a Caucasian childs, but with a thin layer of light brown skin slowly forming a crust over the centre portion of his belly. His legs were pinkish white from the knee down, where there was a lot of swelling and shreds of dark skin hung loosely from around his knee caps where he regularly scratched with his fingernails. His legs and stomach were showing signs of healing but his groin area was a terrible weeping mess from where he had been lying with his legs crossed one over the other and the air hadn’t been able to dry out the burns. He would cry when we moved his hands away from his wounds to try and stop him scratching them. Jacinta spoke to the mother for some time about how best to look after David’s wounds (doctors don’t tend to give instructions to carers about how to actually care for patients) and we asked if he was on any medication to prevent infection. He was on antibiotic injections but had just used the last vial and she didn’t have any money to buy more. She was also supposed to clean his wounds with antibiotic soap, but she couldn’t afford that either. The hospital does not have the funding to provide these things. As we prayed for her and David, I knew that I was the answer to my own prayer. God didn’t need to send antibiotics from the sky, because he had already provided all the resources needed – they were just in the hands of someone else. I knew I had the means to help this lady and there was no way I could have just prayed that God would provide for her, then walked away. I told Jacinta that I wanted to buy the antibiotics that David so badly needed, so we met up with the rest of the Jenga team  - who had also encountered equally as desperate circumstances in other wards - and organised to go to the pharmacy and local market. For around AUS$16, we were able to buy 20 vials of antibiotics – enough for 10 days – 2 kilos of rice, 1 kilo of sugar, a bar of Detol soap and some sachets of oral rehydration salts. It’s disturbing how the few dollars we throw around without a second thought back home can literally be the dividing line between health and sickness, life and death here. 

Jacinta returned to the hospital after our shopping spree to give the medication and food to David’s mother. She had already taken Jacinta’s advice to tie David’s hands to stop him from scratching, and to also tie his legs apart to allow the air to begin healing his groin area (sounds horrible, I know but it really will be better in the long run!). His mother was understandably overjoyed to receive our gifts. I will revisit next Thursday and give you an update on how David is going.

There are a couple of other organisations working with Mbale hospital and Jenga has a vision to become much more involved here, so stay tuned for good news. Apparently Melissa Gates (as in Bill Gates’ wife) is visiting the hospital in the next week or so, so that could potentially be a huge source of much-needed funding. Comic Relief UK also recently did a short segment on Mbale hospital which has helped to put the public spotlight on the very great needs here. It seems like things are happening and even though the hospital is horribly under-resourced in terms of both staff and facilities, there have been recent renovations to wards that were formerly unfit to house sick people. I am hoping to be part of the team that expands the work that’s currently being done in the hospital, in whatever shape or form that may end up being. Jenga is not the only organisation currently working in Mbale hospital, and the wheels are currently in motion to unite and coordinate all the various groups so that we can pool resources and work together more effectively to meet the physical and spiritual needs of all the patients. It’s really all quite exciting!

So that’s basically what I’m doing at the moment, I will keep you updated with how things are progressing both with the projects I am personally involved with and the wider workings of Jenga. Thanks so much for reading, I know this has been a long entry but I wanted you all to get a clearer picture of what work I am involved with here and what’s going on. I hope this has helped! Please don’t hesitate to ask questions if you’re curious about anything or would like more information. Myself and the other volunteers are all going to Jinja next week for a conference titled ‘Transformation of the heart’, which from all accounts is going to be quite an impacting and full on week! We’re really looking forward to it, but I’m not sure that I’ll have internet over there so if you don’t hear from me for a few days, that’s why. Looking forward to updating you again upon my return! Until then,

Louise xox