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