A surprising meeting

We all know that meetings can be annoying. However much the instigators try to give them an exciting flavour, they are often tedious and fail to achieve very much. So it was partly with a sense of duty to be done that we approached the Lweza centre near Entebbe on Tuesday afternoon, to join the Global Care Uganda team conference.

We were looking forward to seeing friends again, to be sure, and to be honest, starting to look forward to getting home. We checked in, received the usual friendly Ugandan welcome, and were taken to our pleasant room. We found some of the team concluding a meeting in the lounge. We were surprised to find the conference centre has a spacious peaceful park-like setting. It is a haven of calm away from the madness of Entebbe Road. And there are birds singing and little monkeys playing.

On Wednesday afternoon, after team reports in the morning, it was my job to conduct training. Global Care wants to ensure that it gets the results it aims for. So do its supporters. Hence we are working to find better ways of testing and demonstrating our impact. I was gaining a little more confidence in what I was doing, having attended a day’s training at Charities Evaluation Service, and delivered sessions at Global Care HQ, Rukungiri and Soroti. Still it felt rather daunting. There were some blank looks as I started to set the scene. They got even blanker as I introduced the logical framework tool that is generally used for planning and evaluating development programmes. We struggled through the first session, the language gap adding to the difficulty of the unfamiliar concepts and ways of thinking.

For the second session, after tea and snacks, I gave each locality group the task of starting to complete a ‘logframe’ for an aspect of their work. They began with a good will, and soon the shape of the projects was emerging. It was striking to see the energy levels rise as the purpose of the exercise became clearer. It was a big effort for us all to see how the work we do could fit the framework. By the end of the afternoon, most people had a headache, I certainly did. But that was more than compensated for by the sense of achievement. Looking at the forms completed, I repeatedly had to congratulate the teams. Not only had they grasped how to use the structure to describe the impact, aims, results and activities of a project, but the content was impressive. Here were realistic accounts of how they could deliver radical change for vulnerable children in their communities. Their vision and experience were evident in the ambition and design. The added rigour of the logframe process only enhanced the power of their plans. A good result to build on!

The next morning saw the teams wrestling with the challenges of selecting children for sponsorship. They receive so many needy applicants. In their communities, perhaps the majority of families are below the poverty line. Their task is to identify the most vulnerable, the desperately poor. These are folk who have absolutely no resources to meet their basic needs. Mere poverty does not impress them. Children struck by sickness and malnutrition, who are orphans, live in tumbledown hovels AND have guardians who are in some way unable to make a living, these are the ones they look for. They are eager to improve, so they did not flinch from revealing past errors and differences in practice in order to challenge themselves with the hard questions.

Perhaps the essential challenge is to have clear criteria that are followed strictly, except when they are not! Because every child is treated as an individual, and sometimes you have to change things. Sometimes you have to find ways to meet additional needs. This happens especially for children with disabilities, whose care and education can be way more costly than others. We debated about the few whose families prosper after being taken on to the scheme. They can afford to add a little money to the sponsorship to gain access to better schools. Should we continue to support them? And how can we work with guardians who are uneducated and don’t understand the value of schooling, or know how to encourage their child to learn?

I left the conference feeling humbled and seriously impressed with the Global Care Uganda staff. Between them they have many years of experience and many professional qualifications. But beyond this they have a love for needy children, compassion for their families, and a drive for excellence. They show a strong desire to ensure that they direct all their resources to the most desperate cases to bring hope and life. They respect the donors and the organisation that enable them to do this, but for them it is personal and a divine commission. I honour them for it and am proud to call them friends.

To learn more about Global Care and how you can help, click here

Despair and Hope. And a Thing.

In Soroti District Referral Hospital it wasn’t my white skin or my inability to communicate in Ateso that made me feel like an alien accidentally beamed onto a hellish distant planet. I was experiencing a major conflict between being a voyeuristic misery tourist and the urge to flee somewhere safe. Why were we intruding in a place where people were so desperate with sickness and fear and the knowledge that every day, every treatment or procedure was depleting their meagre resources or putting them deeper in debt? Never mind the fact that several people with the most serious, and

malodorous, conditions were not getting any treatment at all or even food, as they were destitute. While I had been wrestling with the challenge of how to eat all the food that people here are giving me, and knew that if I were ill, my travel insurance would whisk me away to a proper hospital. One where people had time for me, all the needed drugs and equipment, and did not need me to pay them extra to do their job.

Nevertheless, under the skin these are people just like you and me, with the same needs and desires, aspirations and fears, loves and loathings. We inhabit the same planet in fact. The glaring and painful differences between us are not accidental, rather they are mainly man made and the result of human decisions and actions, both historical and present-day. Their causes and solutions are in other words political.

Speaking in Nairobi this August, Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation quoted Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in describing Universal Health Coverage as “an affordable dream”. 100 million families a year are said to be pushed into extreme poverty as a result of unaffordable health expenditure. In 1948, stirred by the impact of war, Britain took the courageous and visionary step of introducing a National Health Service. Its success demonstrates to the world that a reasonable investment of national resources leads to a pooling of risk that is in everyone’s interest. Let us stand together to ensure that it is preserved and that similar systems prevail across the world. Or are we content that the rich get the best treatment, while their neighbours suffer under this intolerable burden?

And then we had the honour to visit the Atiira Disability Support Group, a fine example of people working together to bear burdens in a spirit of brotherhood, transparency, optimism, loyalty and so many other virtues. A completely different set of conflicting emotions for me. This group started in response to my Masters research project on childhood disability in June/July 2012. Back then, when I returned to the shade of the mango tree in Atiira Primary School to feed back my research findings to the people I had been meeting and interviewing, they responded by insisting that I help them to set up a support group on the spot. And they have gone from strength to strength. So now they treat me with great respect and gratitude, though I think they are the heroes of this story and I just had the good fortune to be there at the time they were ready to do this. It is nice to be feted as a celebrity but also uncomfortable, and they always say they will have a drink with us and then prepare a feast with the little resource that they have.

This group has over a hundred members and a committee elected from all the parishes, representing mainly parents of children with disabilities but also disabled adults. They pay a monthly subscription and can then apply for benefits. These can be micro loans, usually for an income generating venture like buying ingredients for foods to sell. Also most families have received a goat. They explained to me that the first kid is repaid to the scheme to give to another family, subsequent ones are kept. They can then be sold to provide for the family’s needs. And the grass and browsing are free, as they live in the country. The group is well led and organised and has recently been registered with the government as a NGO. This enabled them to receive a grant (used for more goats) to add to the regular support they get from Global Care. They seem to give each other a lot of support and encouragement as well, which helps to overcome the stigma and isolation that attaches to disability (and please don’t think that stigma and isolation are only problems in other countries than your own).

So three cheers for Atiira Disability Support Group and Global Care, and none for underfunded or privatised health care disasters. And here's a thing.

A Rock in a Soft Place

Whizzing along the road from Masaka, chatting to our self-invited passenger Jerome, we suddenly heard and felt a bang under the vehicle. Driver Charles immediately pulled on to the verge and quickly confirmed what we knew: a tyre had blown.

Out came the jack and tools, the spare wheel released from under the rear of the vehicle. It looked OK. Jerome helped Charles set up the jack and loosen the wheel nuts and up went the van.  Anxious about the traffic racing past, I stood a little behind the vehicle to post a warning.

However, a problem was encountered. The jack would not go high enough to release the wheel. So Jerome and I went off to look for a rock. The problem with that was we had stopped by a swamp. No rocks. After some searching and poking around, we found some a hundred metres away and triumphantly carried them back. They were used to support the vehicle, and to raise the jack, so the wheel change was successfully concluded.

Sometimes a little rock is what you need in a swamp.

Psalm 40:1-3 is one of my favourite Bible passages: I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.

I have always thought of this metaphor as applied to my own life and thinking. For me, the slimy pit and mire was the confusion of my own thoughts and the trouble I got into by living life on my own terms. God has placed my feet on a rock. Now I am thinking of the people we have been with, for whom much of their day to day life must seem like struggling in the mud. So the actions taken by our local partners to place some rocks under their feet, giving them shelter, food, and well targeted help are a life saver from the Lord. Certainly we know that they are thankful and that those in their communities who see it are impressed.