Hello Everyone!

Greetings from Miryante! Happy New Year! We would like to start off 2012 with a letter of thanks to all of you for your incredible support throughout this past year. Miryante has been growing thanks to you and we want to share our news with all of you.

To date we have 91 children residing at the project. The number of children has continued to increase as the capacity of the project grows. Due to the expansion we are currently looking for a new caretaker.

Miryante succeeded in expanding our crops this season, and the children helped harvest maize during their holiday break. A million thanks to our donors who sent vegetable seeds last season through Laura!

We are currently brainstorming ideas for generating income to improve our rabbit house and expanding our other animal husbandry projects.

As usual the vocational school is still trucking along. We have started painting the buildings, so far two blocks are finished and our engineer Master Jon will be starting on the third. We will keep everyone updated as we progress with that project. Many thanks for the tremendous support we have received!

Our animal husbandry projects have been moving along nicely! We have had two other offspring this week and it is a very exciting time, that being we are able to milk four cows. Another set of baby rabbits has grown tremendously! Our children are learning how to take care of animals and it is fun to see the animals grow thanks to their TLC! Our goat project is also very promising. This week one gave birth and currently one is pregnant.

Hello Everyone!

Miryante Orphans Home hopes that you and your families all had a wonderful Christmas and New Years! We begin the New Year by welcoming our new Director Fr. Aloysius Manilagaba who was appointed by the Bishop this past December. Miryante staff receives him with open arms and we are so excited to see what this 2012 year brings!

We had a wonderful Christmas here at MOH! Many thanks to our generous donors who were able to help make this holiday special. Each child received a new set of clothes and the orphanage received many balls, brushes and radios! The children had a fun game of football with their new balls! A MOH Christmas tradition. We also had a wonderful holiday meal with all the fixings!

Since establishing our constitution, MOH has formed three Sub-committees to help guide our project. They are as follows:

1. Physical committee. This includes responsibilities of Construction and Agriculture. This is headed by Mr. Lucas Kamara Vice chairperson Board, Mr. Kabwizi Cris Chair person LC3 Board member, Mr. Kadoma Joseph Staff member and Rev. Fr. Aloysius Monilagaba who is our new director

2. Local Economic Development Committee. This includes responsibilities of Finance, Hiring, procurement, Construction, Agriculture, Catering, Fundraising and Transport. This is headed by Ms Kalisa Leontina Secretary board, Rev. Sr. Theresa Abigaba board member, Ms. Doreen Tigah staff member, Rev. Fr.Aloysius Monilagaba.

AUGUST MONTHLY REPORT 2011.

August has been a very busy month with a lot of rain, harvesting, planting, children breaking off from school, and construction going on. We harvested our beans and maize. This time our yields were much better than before. We expect ten to fifteen sacks of maize. We have so far planted four acres of beans which were done by children, three acres of maize which we just hired people to plant. Our target is covering at least fourteen acres of both maize and beans. We are planning to plant variety of foods such as maize, beans, Irish potatoes, sweat potatoes, yams, and bananas and expanding our vegetable garden at the same time. This holiday the children have really participated in garden work than before.

We stocked beans and maize that will take us for four months that will be until November when the new season begins.

1/8/2011

We are very happy for Laura Corcoran’s family visit and other friends who helped with volunteering. A special thanks to Mr. Corcoran’s and the Wife, Hannah Corcoran, Fallon Ruff and Amanda Zurface from the US who donated their time and energy to come spend time with the kids. Teaching them how to write, read, constructing a goat’s house fencing it and decorating our Library.

ON 17/8/2011

Our goat project is finally up and running. A special thank you to St. Peter’s Church in Chillicothe, Ohio that funded the project almost a year ago. The project took an unexpected amount of time to construct and start, but thanks to work from American volunteers, we now have five goats, a house, and completed fence.

TRACTOR UPDATES

Our tractor was hired in Kasese. In January there is a gentle man who hired it for eighty acres in Mubuku Irrigation scheme. Later another gentle man called Mr. mwabale William hired it for twenty six days and he paid us three million one hundred twenty thousand Ugandan shillings. Therefore in total since January our tractor has been able to get us around Ten million Four hundred Ninety thousand Ugandan shillings in the eight months it has been there. The contractor also promised to pay the driver and the tractor manager’s rent. This is the only source of income we are now looking up to. Kasese being flat we are looking at so many opportunities than in Kyegegwa which is hilly and not open.

Hello Everyone!

Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to go to our website and support our work here. So far 11 of our children have been sponsored and we have received numerous donations to support our livestock projects and general operational expenses. We appreciate your support so much!

It’s now the beginning of June, so our children have started back into their second term of school. We noticed a marked improvement of the scores of many of the children. We were very fortunate this month to have a number of volunteers from abroad come visit us here and spend time with the children. A special thank you to Sayako Kato from Japan, Lisa Hitch and Erin Garrison from the USA, and Maurice Lamot from the UK for all the time and effort they put into making the school holidays special for the kids. We welcome all volunteers to the project!

Children welcome visitors Lisa Hitch and Erin Garrison from the USA

We are still moving forward with our registration at the national level as an NGO. The whole bureaucratic process has proved to be much more complicated than anticipated. We are pleased to share that we have met all the requirements to become registered including the employment of a security guard, clinical officer, and warden. We welcomed Julius Kubiragume and Mattias Weka onto our staff this past month. Julius is serving as our security guard at night and keeps the place safe with his bow and arrows. Mattias is doing supervision of our more complicated cases with our nursing assistant, Kellen. Unfortunately we had an outbreak of the chicken pox in May. Fortunately we were able to quarantine the affected children and now everyone is back in school.

We had our first board meeting with the approved board members from the Ft. Portal Diocese in May. We were able to generate a lot of new ideas for the project and hope to meet again soon to finalize our constitution as well as create a local fundraising plan for this year. Currently the management staff is working on a 3 year and 5 year strategic plan for the project.

Currently we are housing 78 children and employing 8 caretakers. We managed to get 10 acres of maize and beans planted and some of the early beans planted are already ready for harvesting. We also have a vegetable garden up and running and will be planting another garden in the next week. Prices of food remain high, but we hope that we will be able to reduce the cost of feeding as we start to harvest some of our own food.

Construction on the vocational school is continuing. We have reached the roofing level on two workshop buildings and have started to clear land to start the substructure of a classroom block. We are very excited to announce that thanks to donor support we were able to purchase an interlocking brick machine. This is a new technology that has been introduced to Uganda. It allows organizations to manufacture their own bricks using subsoil that is in abundance all over the country combined with a small amount of cement which serves as a binding agent. Our construction workers were trained on the operation of the machine and now we have the capacity to produce as many as 350 bricks a day. This number will increase as we improve on our technique. This machine is expected to reduce the price of building the vocational school as well as serve as a potential source of income for the project once we have marketed its use within the community.

In April we celebrated International Youth Day with a game day at school for our kids and Easter with a big meal and football match. In May, our international volunteers were able to do several activities with the kids including a field day competition. The kids loved all the activities!

Pius and Kamuli run neck-in-neck in a relay competition.

Volunteer Lauren Myers gives a lift to one of the junior sack race competitors, Joseph.

Sam practices balancing for the bean bag race

The cows and chickens at the project are doing well. One of our cows gave birth in April, so now the kids are getting milk in their porridge again. We are pleased to announce that construction on the goat project has finished up to the fencing level. Posts have been cut from trees and dug for an area of five acres and the construction workers are finishing up fencing in the swamp area so the goats have a permanent water source before putting up the final touches of barbed wire. We’re almost there!

Once again, thank you to everyone who took the time to visit our website. We hope to have more of the children sponsored as we move forward, so please share our website (www.miryanteorphanage.org) with your family and friends.

Together in Christ,
Doreen Tigah
Communications Officer

Hello Everyone!
We are happy to announce that we have officially launched our website! www.miryanteorphanage.org. Please take some time to view the website and feel free to share it with your family and friends. A big Thank You to Super Cool Sites for all their hard work in putting together the website. We are hoping that by having sponsors for the children, we can make the project sustainable and increase the number of children. So far we have three children who are sponsored!

We are also proud to announce that we are officially registered as an Non-Government Organization through the Kyegegwa District. This was a long and arduous process, but we succeeded and are now applying for registration on the national level. Since we are registered, this allows us to work hand-in-hand with the probation officer in the district to make sure we are providing services to the children in the most need. Also, we had 9 members of our board approved by Bishop Robert, and we hope to start additional meetings with the board as soon as our constitution is approved as well.

Currently we are housing 70 children and employ 7 caretakers. We harvested our maize at the end of the dry season in February and are now busy clearing land and planting as the rains have started. We have been working on vegetable gardens for the kids and hope to try a monthly planting scheme with irrigation to insure a more steady supply of vegetables. We have welcomed two new caretakers to the project: Madam Grace and Mr. Didas.

We have 11 houses completed at the project and an additional 4 under construction. This construction is paused until additional funding is received. We also finished construction on our kitchen unit. Caretakers are now cooking using energy efficient stoves with proper ventilation and we have access to a storage place for food.

We began construction on our technical school in January. So far we have raised the walls on two workshops that will be used for carpentry and masonry. We have formed a committee for the technical school and will be working with the district to try to secure any kind of funding assistance possible. The committee has decided to name the vocational school St. Mary’s Vocational and Technical Institute Miryante because the orphanage was founded on August 15th, the day of the Assumption of Mary.

We have been doing several activities with the kids. In March we celebrated International Women’s Day we some activities discussing gender roles and games encouraging the girls to plan for their future. Also we hosted the NGO PROMETRA which came and taught the children and staff how to use local herbs for medicinal purposes and taught the kids how to do yoga. Everyone had a great time!

We also had a field day with the kids before they returned to school at the beginning of February. The kids turned out to be pretty incredible athletes and we learned some unique and fantastic Ugandan sporting games.

Sack Racing

Bottle Filling Contest

In January we took all of the kids for HIV testing. We were very fortunate to find out that only one of our children is positive. Please keep this child in your prayers as this is a very difficult disease, especially for a child so young. At the same time we are very thankful for the health of the other children.

As many of you may have heard, between the political unrest in Libya and the food crisis around the world, the price of food has increased and we have been forced to cut back in our feeding program. We are no longer able to supplement the children’s diets with eggs, as the chickens do not produce enough eggs to feed everyone. This is our main concern as we start this quarter, and we are hoping that support from our website will allow us to restart our supplemental feeding program.

We are incredibly thankful for everyone’s support. We hope that together we can continue to grow and expand throughout this next quarter. We hope to be welcoming some volunteers from abroad in the future as there is such a need for the children to spend time with positive mentors. Please take some time to visit and share our website.

Together in Christ,
Doreen Tigah
Communications Officer

Hello Everyone!

We are proud to welcome a new member to our staff. Doreen Tigah has been hired on as our Communications Officer and Caretaker, and she is now co-writing this newsletter! Doreen graduated from Makarere Univeristy in Education with a background in counseling and working with orphans and vulnerable children. She is very happy to be at Miryante working with the children and staff.

Our housing project is rapidly progressing. One of the houses is already occupied by a caretaker and children; another house will be occupied by children by the end of this week. The builders have been doing great work, and the houses are very impressive when finished.

We now have 35 kids at the project and are in the process of registering more in conjunction with UNHCR. We have been monitoring the growth of several children who were struggling as a result of malnutrition. Thanks to improvement in diet, all the kids who were at risk have mightly improved. We celebrated our one year anniversary on August 15th. We marked the occasion by holding a prayer service, singing and dance performances by the kids, and a special meal with staff, children, and a few community members.

We are also in the process of registering Miryante as an NGO so that it can be run independent of the district and will be able to apply for funding. So far, we are in the process of collecting signatures and stamps from Local Councils.

We are currently in the planting season. Crops we have planted include beans (around an acre), ground nuts, and maize. Since we are trying to improve the variety in the kids’ diets, we have been concentrating on our vegetable gardens. A special thanks to Margaret from St. Francis De Sales for her donation of vegetable seeds.

Furthermore, we are preparing to welcome 20 kids this upcoming month. We have been working hard to purchase essentials such as mattresses, basins, books, blankets, cups, and plates for when they arrive. The new group of kids will be staying in our newly finished houses.

Our chicken project is in the process of expansion because the chickens (30) have been laying eggs around the children’s dormitory, compound, and in the bush. We deemed it necessary to expand their house so that they all stay in a fenced location and hatch eggs in the same house to increase in their number. We would like to thank St. Peter’s Parish for fundraising our goat project to help the kids save money. The goat project has yet to commence, but it will start as soon as we finish the chicken project. In regards to the goat project, we have moved around and secured 5 acres of land that has a constant water source and will be used to pasture goats and cows.

We would like to thank everyone for their continuous support and involvement in this project. May God bless all of you for your work well done, and we look forward to continual progressing with this project.

Together in Christ,
Doreen Tigah
Communications Officer

Hello Everyone!
Greetings from Miryante! Happy New Year! We would like to start off 2011 with a letter of thanks to all of you for your incredible support throughout this past year. Miryante has been growing thanks to your support and we want to share our news with all of you.

To date we have 15 houses that are under construction at the project. Seven of the houses are completely finished and occupied. The other eight houses are under construction and five are expected to be completed by February. In addition, we are in the middle of constructing a kitchen complete with wood burning stoves for preparing meals for the children.
In November, Miryante established a Board of Governors. It consists of 17 members from the community, Wekomiire Parish, and the Ft. Portal Diocese. It has already had three board meetings and hosted a community awareness function on January 9th, 2011 in an attempt to raise funds for the project within the community and generate other means of support. The turnout was tremendous with over 400 community members in attendance and representatives from both the district and sub-county level. Fr. Bernard and visiting priest Fr. Mike from Nairobi celebrated mass at the event.

Miryante Children sing for community member who came to celebrate mass at the awareness function.
The number of children has continued to increase as the capacity of the project has increased. Miryante currently houses 68 children and is employing 7 caretakers. In December, Miryante welcomed Mugambo Asman to the project as a general laborer and caretaker. In December, Miryante also welcomed Samuel Kule as a full time driver for the tractor. In January, Kellen Kaneema joined the project and is jointly serving as a caretaker and on-site nurse.

Miryante has been using the donations from Bishop Flaget and St. Mary’s School to build bookshelves for over 40 boxes of books that were received from ‘Books for Africa’. We are working on establishing quite a library.

We have made some improvements to our chicken coup and have started construction on a goat house and fencing for the goat project, sponsored by St. Peter’s Parish in Chillicothe, Ohio. The construction is coming along slowly but surely.
Miryante succeeded in diversifying its crops this season, and the children are helping to harvest sorghum during their holiday break. Many thanks to donors who sent vegetable seeds! The kids have been trying a variety of new foods from America. Thanks to support from a parish in Poland, this year we are starting to purchase a variety of foods to diversify the children’s diet.

We celebrated Christmas and New Years with special meals where the children were able to enjoy meat, rice, eggs, Irish potatoes and their favorite food- plantains. A special thank you to Jon Sill and family who donated money to purchase a soccer ball, net ball, and radios for the houses.

The children finished their school year in December, and we reviewed their report cards. Because many of the children had scores that were so low they will need to repeat a level, we hired a tutor with funds donated from the Teresa Ross Family to work with each class during their holiday break.

We are currently looking for funds to buy beds, mattresses, blankets, clothes, and mosquito nets for new children who are coming to the home. We are starting construction on a vocational school this year and will keep everyone updated as we progress with that project. Many thanks for the tremendous support we have received this year. Please keep us in your prayers as we work to expand the project in 2011.

Together in Christ,
Doreen Tigah
Communications Officer