Greetings from Uganda

Greetings from Uganda. Its been a busy couple of days. My niece and I started our adventure by going on safari. We made friends with baboons, elephants, giraffes, hippo's and a wart hog. We even saw some newly hatched crocodiles and a leopard (which apparently is quite rare). The animals were very obliging about posing for photos for us and my niece Bekka took some amazing pictures (I can’t be trusted with a camera because I cut out heads, arms and feet). It was a great experience and such a nice introduction to our first trip to Africa. We also found that we quite like the local beer.

After a fun couple of days checking out the African wildlife we finally made it back to Kampala to meet up with the rest of the Kids Club Kampala volunteers. Yesterday was our first day volunteering and we visited the Ewafe Project. Ewafe means ‘where we belong’ in Luganda and is a transitional home for abandoned children. The project offers a safe place to live for children who have been abandoned in the slums. Its unique in that it also works towards reuniting children with their relatives or finding permanent foster families. The project also employs social workers to rehabilitate any traumatised children.

Kids Club Kampala have built a fantastic facility with bedrooms, bathrooms, a playground, a kitchen, hen house and vegetable gardens. They even have a cow and are expecting a baby calf later in the year. We had the pleasure of spending the whole day with the children and some really dedicated and fun staff. We chased bubbles, jumped a rope and played ‘piggy in the middle.’ Strangely given my natural athletic ability I seemed to be the ‘piggy' a lot of the time and suffered a number of ball related injuries. Everyone also enjoyed my attempts to count to 5 in Luganda.

A rainstorm meant that we had to curtail the outdoor activities and head indoors to play with lego. The wonderful thing about the Ugandan culture is that children are taught to share so there were no arguments about getting the best bits of the lego it was all shared around. I helped to build a house with many rooms, a flying car and something that resembled a lorry.

A single blog post doesn't provide enough time to detail all the great things this project is doing, but if you want to find out more then please check out the link below:

http://www.kidsclubkampala.org/ewafe-project

Education is key to breaking the cycle of poverty for many of these kids. The children here are so keen to learn but are hindered by the lack of access to free education. If you have spare cash every month I cant think of anything better than using it to sponsor a child through school. I’ve attached a link if you want further information:

http://www.kidsclubkampala.org/sponsor-a-child