Life in Uganda is a struggle especially for children. Imagine growing up without enough food, clean water, medicine, somewhere safe to live, without a bed of your own. There are no toys, no dolls, no footballs, no sweets, no treats. School would be wonderful to go to, your way to escape from poverty, but there is no money for school fees, so you stay at home struggling to simply stay alive.
You could sponsor an orphaned child in Uganda for as little as £12.00 per month.
Put your self into the shoes of a Ugandan child, I should say feet as many children do not wear shoes they might wear flip flops if they are lucky.
You are fortunate to still be alive at the age of 6 one out of every five of your friends will have died. You are lucky if you have a Mum and Dad, woman live on average to 42 and men to 40 so you are not going to see many grey haired people in Uganda.
So here you are living in a small shack made of sun baked mud bricks covered by a corrugated tin roof that leaks whenever it rains. The house is small one room, two if you are lucky. No kitchen a charcoal stove outside if you don't have money for charcoal you will have to find some wood and make a fire to cook over. There is no bathroom you wash using a plastic bowl or in the river. If you are a girl you probably won't be going to school you will stay at home. If you are the oldest boy in the family you might go to school if the money can be found.
Your oldest brother left at 7 this morning to walk to school. He had to take a roll of toilet paper to school since yesterday he was told off for not having any. He also had to take a broom to sweep the classroom and the school grounds after school.
School is expensive in 1997 a law was passed in Uganda making primary school free, but there are other fees to pay such as uniform, money for books, taking a bag of cement for the school building project. There are other costs that nobody talks about. Classes in Uganda often have over 100 children in them. So if you want to sit at the front so that you can actually hear and see what is being taught you have to pay extra money to the teacher if you want your homework marked you have to pay extra. To get into secondary school you have to pass an exam if you want help to pass that exam you have to pay some more money. So that is why only your oldest brother goes to school you have to hope that one day your aunts and uncles may be able to help you go to school.
Daily it is your job to look after the little ones, do laundry in two plastic bowls with water you have had to carry in a five gallon can up a hill from the river to the house. You also have to cook, you don't have to worry about preparing meat there is none. Your main food is matoke green bananas, mashed, and steamed under banana leaves and Posho which is made from corn flour. you help grow food in the fields.
You would love to learn to read and write but you may never have the chance.
“It doesn’t matter how many photographs you see or how many people talk to you about the poverty, it still doesn’t prepare you for what you see and feel once you are there”.
Visiting the orphaned children of Uganda is a truly life changing experience.
The vision and the need to assist the suffering children in Lango came to the attention of Rev. Johnson Ebong Oming in 1993 after their return from Nairobi Kenya. Johnson and his family had been to Nairobi International School of Theology for three years, on their return they could not believe the plight of huge numbers of vulnerable and innocent orphaned children. Some of these children had dropped out of schools because either their relatives or friends took advantage of them being young by grabbing whatever was left for them by their deceased parents.
Our fist child on the programme was Martin Aliga, whose parents died and left him at Lango College in Senior three with a huge bill not paid. As a family, we decided to share our little income with him in order to off set this bill. Because of this, we came up with a project named Lira Orphans Scholarship Fund, as an attempt to raise funds locally in order to educate some of these orphans, based on James l:27 " .. . to look after orphans...in their distress". We give thanks to the SOMA Wales team who came to Uganda in 1994, most of whom bought this vision. It was Ben Pitcher who renamed this "LOSF" to read "LOST", a new name with a better meaning fitting the situation of these children.
Background
The conflict in northem Uganda between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda has led to massive displacement of nearly 47%o of the population of Northern Uganda. These people are herded together in dehumanized camps without any social amenities. Moral conduct has immensely dropped, poverty level greatly increased and a new culture of begging and dependency has evolved. Children have been victims of the insurgency where they have been exposed to numerous problems related to psycho-social stress and trauma, poor feeding, inadequate health care, limited opportunities for personal development through parental guidance and education, increased child-labour and lost of property (as most of these camps are constantly razed down by fire). It has since caused major obstacles to child survival in Northern Uganda among others infections, parasitic diseases, malnutrition and risks associated with HIV/AIDS that have affected the children physically, psychologically, and mentally. The terror of war has been their daily reality, underlining every aspect of their lives and preventing them from gaining access to the most fundamental services - health care and immunization, a sufficient diet and education. Hence the place devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped, and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality.
