January has been so busy for us here in Miryante. We have had several new children brought to Miryante by police and the probation office from street. We were able to find two homes where two of these kids originated from before joining the street and we are happy that they will have a home where we can resettle them after school.

We are also grateful to inform you that Miryante is growing and expanding in the number of services that we offer. Last year we started offering services such as food and scholastic materials to child-headed families in Kyaka II refugee camp under Angels Care School and the program is still running. We are able to provide these services on a monthly basis.

This year we have started a Guardianship or Foster Program for ten of our children that have lived with us in the orphanage for some time. It’s a pilot project that we are trying to run. One of Miryante’s social workers and a counsellor visit their homes and school on monthly basis to check on their progress at school and home. Miryante still provides food to support to them on monthly basis, bedding, and school fees which is paid direct to the school. We came up with this kind of arrangement so that in the future if the government decides to close orphans homes we have another option to continue the support for our orphaned children. We included Isaac, one of the children from Kyaka II Refugee Camp with severe medical complications on board for this program. Isaac is an orphaned boy who is aged 6 years now and we couldn’t keep him in the orphanage because he seriously needed special care. He weighs 89kgs and as Miryante has been providing support for him via a family he started walking at the beginning of this year.

Below are the 10 children we are sponsoring.    

Last year 9 of our pupils sat for PLE (Primary Leaving Examination) and 6 scored good grades and they were able to be promoted to high school. 3 joined Technical School at Miryante Vocational. It was such agreat joy. Therefore, currently we have 19 students that we are sponsoring in high school, another student is in St. Peter’s Technical School majoring in designing, one child is in a teaching collage, one is in the seminary and one is joining senior five for her high school. Therefore in total we have 23 of our children going to school at boarding schools.

Below is the new group pausing for a picture before setting off for school.

During January holiday when most of the kids were off for holidays, we renovated all the dormitories around the site and sprayed all the dormitories that are now looking much better as shown below in the pic.

We are also grateful to inform you how our Peace Corps Volunteer has been of help with training caregivers during this dry season of January with digging around perma-gardens. We saw that it is necessary to involve all caregivers in this training such that each of them trains her/ his house of children. Alex trained caregivers on how to manage these gardens despite of the drought with a number of green vegetables to help improve the diet of the children throughout the season and some of the gardens will be shown in our Feb letter and some of the vegetable that will be ready by that time despite the drought. Below is also one of our girls Marie who is interested in being a farmer involved in the caregivers’ training.

Thanks to our generous donors for helping to keep Miryante shining.

Thank You,

Management