Hello Everyone!

Greetings from Miryante Community and Home. We are here to thank you for your generosity. Despite the lockdown, we are able to study and have three meals a day. It is because of your support that we are able to have all this. We are not happy with the situation everywhere from what we have read in the news, but we are in this together and we do pray for the whole world everyday to stabilize so that we can go back to school, go to church, and get to see our friends back in school.

All the children are safe, healthy, and they are praying for everyone.  Due to the long holiday, our children are following a holiday program to keep them busy around the home. These programs run from Monday up to Sunday and these activities include prayers in isolation, exams & revisions from lessons, cow grazing, rabbit and goat rearing, planting crops, slashing the compound, digging, Bible study every Thursday and football every evening. This has helped our children learn more skills and has helped us as management and caregivers to handle them since the holiday is still going on.

Below are photos of the children practicing exams with social distancing.

Donations!

 We are very happy to update you on a number of donations that we received this month from two companies. We received over 30 boxes of sanitary pads for the girls and 8 boxes of toothpaste for all the children to use. We are sure this will take us through the year. We received this donation from Vision Impex.

We also received over 72 dozen books of 96pages, 44 dozen books of 48 pages, 5 boxes of beans and 11 reams of paper for the office use, all this was from Prime Impex Limited in Kampala, Uganda. We surely feel blessed as management and the children feel loved.

Another donation of $650 to cater for food came in from David Talbot the president of Crutches for Africa who donated over 780 kgs of posho and 200 kgs of beans. We really feel so blessed to have people think about us especially in a season where people are meant to think about themselves.

Another big surprise came from Stanbic Bank that donated a number of items to us and thanked us for banking with them. The items included sugar, rice, and cooking oil, pads, soap, beans, posho and toothpaste. The Stanbic Team spared time to visit our project and played with the children and shared smiles. We really thank you our sponsors for allowing us bank with Stanbic Bank group.

During this lockdown, we have also received a lot of new cases from the community and all these cases were a result of poverty and family breakdown due to this pandemic. These children were found living without parents or guardians in child-headed house-holds and they have been moved to Miryante to receive services. The children include Sirivano aged 14 who has been grazing people’s cattle to get food for the siblings, Lillian aged 13 who was working as a maid in the neighborhood,  Aloyozous aged 9, and Gerald aged 6.

The four children lived in an old muddy structured house and shared beddings. These children were also malnourished and infected with jiggers because of being neglected.  We managed to rescue them; they are very happy here and their health has improved in one month.  The first pictures below show their condition when found by children services, and the last photos below were taken a week later at Miryante when police visited to check on their condition.  

Our latest arrival is a seven-year old boy called Sirivano, who was found living without a responsible parent or guardian. The Community members became concerned and reported the case to Miryante. We are trying to locate the parents and reunite these children with their family. We are working with a government team from the office of child welfare services. Sirivano is now with us till the situation normalizes.  Below are pictures of Sirivano with a big smile on his face after joining us at Miryante.

Under agriculture department!

We are grateful for the wonderful works done by the children during this break. The drought has been very long here and the children have helped a lot with watering the vegetable gardens and weeding the bananas and sweet potatoes. This hasn’t stopped at that, they are also mulching in the vegetable gardens where we are growing green peppers, egg plants, kale and the banana plantation as shown below: 

Below is a photo of the land we cultivated to plant more vegetables and greens. It’s about 1 acre of land.

Under the farm project, 3 of our sows gave birth to 8 healthy piglets and our two female rabbits gave birth to 14 young ones. The little children have shown much love to for rabbits and they find it very interesting. We have also given them a chance to manage the rabbit project but under serious supervision by the agriculture officer.

Thanks very much to everyone that is contributing to support this project and also thanks for loving us.