Helping one person might not…


Helping one person might not change the world, but it could change the whole world for one person. 

How true it is. In the past few months, we have seen how people through their kindness and generosity have changed the world for many of our patients.  I would personally like to thank everyone for the wonderful support KHC has received in the first quarter of the year. It is hard to believe how quickly the time is passing. I can only assume that it is either I am getting older or are very busy working!

The medical team have been particularly busy at the clinic with greater demand for home based medical visits, which is an important service that we provide to seriously ill patients who cannot come to the clinic.

There are also visits to palliative care patients which aims to improve their quality of life through relief and treatment of their pain and also assist with any psychosocial problems.

One of our experienced medical staff Aidah spoke about the home visits they make.

“In our team of 4, there is a clinician, community worker, counsellor and driver. Tuesday and Wednesday are the days we make home visits and currently we visit on these 2 days, 9 patients in their home and 2 needing palliative care support.

The community worker identifies people in the community who need home visits from our medical team. Most of our patients are extremely poor and when we arrive, often they have not eaten, and we use our allowance to buy food. Also, some patients don’t take their drugs as they have no food to take with the medication.

The challenges for our palliative care patients, who have cancer, are particularly concerned about having to pay for investigations and even though X-rays are subsidised the cost has gone up and the patient has to make up the difference, usually 20,000 UGX. Many do not have family support and the community worker tries and provides this support, but they are also limited by cost of transport. What we do is very important and worthwhile. “

Empowering Young Women to Challenge Gender Base Violence

Our communities like everywhere else in the world, have a major problem with gender-based violence, which is mainly against women and children.

KHC is very proud to have partnered with Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) to work with young women to empower them to help deal with this problem.

The workshops are run by IDI and are very informative with the women actively engaged in the activities. It is challenging for many women as most are from poor disadvantaged families and they may not have had the opportunity to go to school or learn a skill to generate an income.

The starting point is reminding women of what is unacceptable treatment and how to manage situations, where they are faced with violence by a male.

Orphans & Vulnerable Children (OVC)

This is an area of our services that is under-funded and we want to be able to do more to support these children. The children are mainly from very disadvantaged homes and many have lost one or both parents from an illness. Some of the children are HIV positive.

Those children orphaned may be taken in by the family but sometimes in the case of the father dying, the mother and children are more than often chased out of the home by the father’s family.

The OVC program is made up of several areas:

  1. Help children to access an education through our Home Education Schools program, which relies on sponsors to pay the school fees for the child. Currently we have 78 children being sponsored with many more on our waiting list. Find out more

The current school fees have not been adjusted for several years and now we have had to increase the school fees to keep up with the increase in the cost of school fees, scholastic materials, uniforms etc that are required before a child is allowed to go to school.

The new sponsorship fees: To educate a primary age child the fee per year is US$270 and for a secondary student it is US$390.

Pauline, like all school children, has to provide her own school materials and this year she needed; 8 hard covered exercise books; a ruler; 8 pens; 4 pencils with eraser; bottle of disinfectant, as the children have to clean the toilets; ream of paper; and a mathematical set. Her bag was kindly donated by Inger.

Nakalema Sherinah recently finished her secondary schooling and achieved very good results. Congratulations. She plans to apply to university and do a degree in education.

I was very pleased with my results.  My family were very poor and could not afford to continue to pay my school fees, but I was fortunate to be placed on the KHC Education program when I was 7 years old and in Primary 2. Margaret has sponsored me ever since.

I am so grateful to them as without their support I would not have been able to achieve my dream. Thank you.”

 I myself wasn’t a great fan of school but I know that the children I am sponsoring are very grateful for the opportunity and from the reports I receive on their progress, they do try hard. Congratulations Sherinah, it makes me feel very proud to have been able to help you.” Margaret from Australia sponsors 7 children.

The other two areas we plan to develop further and will be approaching groups to help fund these activities are: Psychosocial support and Child protection and legal services.

Supporters Continue to be our lifeline….

We have received in the past month, visits from local groups and donations of food for the New Hope Children’s hostel. Thank you very much for being there for us, as we are very dependant on the food donations.

  Left: Doreen and Joel Tsevume with their son Aron Mwesigwa 

These friends of Diana, a member of KHC staff, live in U.S and are part of a drive that has been supporting New Hope Children’s Hostel every Easter. This year they donated UGX 100,000. Thank You!

Great way to celebrate your Birthday – the children agree!

Muhuri, Namboira Esther, and Stacy Wanjiku are from Kenya but living in Uganda. They enjoy being with the children at the hostel and on 5 April it was there second visit. Monicah a fitness trainer, decided a great way to celebrate her birthday was with the children, which she says was one of her best birthdays.  She cut cake with the children, and they provided rice, sugar, toilet paper, cooking oil, milk, sanitary towels, liquid soap and washing soap.  

 “It was a very beautiful, fruitful and productive day. Sharing a meal with KHC children was all I wanted to do for my birthday this year. The smiles on their faces was heavenly. LORD, I am grateful” she said.

 

 

Youth Making a Difference – group led by Fahad

This young group in their sixth grade from different schools, came up with a club to support vulnerable and needy Ugandan children. Their parents assist them to organize the charity. During their visit, they cut cake with the children and donated items like maize floor, sugar, soap, clothes, sodas, salt, pads, washing powder, sweets, and more.

The future of our country will be in good hands with this generation of children, who unselfishly spent their vacation helping others.

Vet Centre Uganda Limited.

This company imports veterinary pharmaceuticals to Uganda. They have been supporting NHCH and at Easter, they wished the children to be happy and celebrate Easter like other children. They donated food such as sweet bananas, matooke, Irish potatoes, rice, meat, chicken, bread, sodas, pineapples and more. Indeed, it was a wonderful Easter celebration for the children.

Contributions from Australia.

Carol & Tom visited us again after a 4-year absence. They generously bought clothes for the children, with friends Brooke, Melissa, Trish and Ally also contributing.

 

 

 

 

 

Other items included some medical equipment, books and crayons, colouring pencils, and a football.

Two computers, a new one, donated by Jean Cope, and a second-hand laptop from Carol, for the KHC staff.  The recipient of the new HP computer was the medical department and Sarah, the Medical Manager, was very happy. ‘It will help us enormously with our reporting and general work. Thank you very much Jean for thinking of us.”

GlobalGiving LittlexLittle Campaign

This matching campaign ran from 3 -7 April. Thank you to our donors who raised US$2,171.  The donations came from 19 people, with most from Wales/ UK and Australia. 

The money will be used for food for the hostel. As you can imagine catering for 5,400 meals a month, creates a big grocery bill.  Thank you very much for your support.

International Visitors

It has been a wonderful start to the year with ‘old’ friends visiting us. Firstly, we had Inger and her friends from Norway. Anni Fjord was with us last month, and Carol & Tom from Australia, were with us for a month in April.

Not only do I personally enjoy seeing our friends again but the staff love engaging with them as it provides them with the opportunity to highlight the services we provide to our patients and in turn we get new ideas and skills to help us in our work.

The children at the New Hope Children’s hostel were introduced to a new concept by Tom, the Easter Bunny, which may have been confusing for the children and adults, but they fully appreciated the chocolate easter eggs.

Outing for the Children

The children could not contain their excitement when they found out that a trip to the Zoo was being organised.

It is quiet a logistics exercise in getting 30 children with varying degrees of disabilities, due to their illness, to the zoo. BUT it happened and as you can see from the photos it was a raging success amongst the children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you, Tom and Carol, it was a day the children will fondly remember, and no doubt will tell other children who come to the hostel. So, be warned next time you come the word would have gotten out about the zoo.

 

KHC Workshop: “How to be an Authentic Leader” by Carol Menzies

On Friday 14 April a workshop was held with 20 staff participating. The key focus was leadership.

In summary, to be an authentic leader:

  • Need to know yourself.
  • Courage to be imperfect, accountable and to set boundaries.
  • Be who you are and not try and imitate someone else.
  • Have integrity and core values.

The challenge is to understand ourselves well enough to discover where we can use our leadership gifts to help others. We are here for something, and life is about giving and living fully.    

To understand ourselves we need to revisit our past to understand what life experiences shaped us. The impact of parents, teachers who may have helped form your core values: leadership in team sports or early employment. Or difficult experiences, such as death of a parent or sibling, rejected by peers, or discrimination, how did you emerge from them?

 

In the afternoon the focus was on Team Building with a session on Hearing v Listening.  

There were lots of activities and the group were enthusiastic and involved in the workshop which makes the facilitator role that much easier.

 

 

 

They all passed!

I hope you enjoyed reading about what we have been up to.  Until next time.

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