One of the greatest things about being a KAASO volunteer is the incredible community of past volunteers you meet around the world. Volunteers returning from KAASO get in touch with each other to share stories, brainstorm ideas and to keep the spirit of KAASO alive. There’s a real sense of being part of something amazing.

This latest post was written by Lara Briz, a Spanish volunteer who recently went back to KAASO for the second time. It shares her emotions in going back as well as describing the great new initiative she set up as an alternative to traditional child sponsorship.

Read on and enjoy!

In the summer of 2014 I went back to Uganda. It was my second time there and it felt completely different to when I arrived the first time. I felt more confident and was looking forward to seeing how things had changed over the last two years. Arriving in Entebbe, the first thing I saw when walking out of the terminal was Dominic’s face, standing out from the other faces and signs waiting for people at the airport gate. The welcome and friendly look on his face made me realise I was truly back at KAASO.

Coming back to a place you already know is always a bit dangerous. You can find that things have changed a lot since the last time and be disappointed. You can also discover that people have changed and the place doesn’t make you feel at home anymore. My first days at the school proved to me that was not the case at all. I started to see lots of familiar faces, and some new ones. After two days, I was again part of the KAASO community and so happy to be back. Children are always curious when a new “muzungu” is around. This can sometimes be a bit intimidating, dozens of little faces looking at you every move you make, but to my surprise, I realised that I had missed it!

During those first days I talked to Dominic a lot about how the school was right now, what they had achieved since my last visit, and the problems they were dealing with these days. I was impressed by all the new things going on at the school. There were a couple of new water tanks donated by some amazing people from Canada, new pineapple crops were growing near the school, there was a new henhouse that incorporated eggs into the children’s diet, and many more inspiring new developments. I am always impressed when I read about what Dominic and Rose do, but seeing it with my own eyes made me feel really proud of them.

Unfortunately, not everything was going so well. They were having big problems trying to feed all the children. In the beginning when KAASO first started, there were only about 30 children. Nowadays, there are more than 600 and around one sixth of them are sponsored by the school, which means that with the fees of some, they have to maintain and feed all the children, pay the teachers, fund the materials, and keep the school running. Thanks to the crops they had planted, the situation was slightly improved, but still they had to find a way to get enough food for everybody and some months it was really difficult and incredibly stressful for them.

Because of the difficulty in funding the school from the contributions of a few, some of the volunteers and I had been trying to find sponsors for some of these children at KAASO who cannot pay. But again this has its challenges. Sponsorship is a long-term commitment and after some bad experiences with sponsors dropping out, we came to the conclusion that it is better to have no sponsorships than to have failed sponsorships. It is very damaging to the children to have a sponsor that starts and then stops, leaving them wondering what they did wrong.

Before this second trip to Uganda, I had collected some money from friends in Europe and wanted to use it to help mitigate this problem but I didn’t know how. After a couple of days at KAASO I decided the best thing I could do with the funds I had raised was to approach the problem but from a different perspective. Instead of finding somebody to pay a child’s fees, I could try to make the child’s family able to pay the fees themselves. I talked to Rose about it, and we sat and discussed it for a long time, brainstorming the best ways to help these families. As always, Rose never ceased to amaze me. Her intelligence and understanding of both Ugandan and “European” behaviors and feelings is just amazing.

We chose five families to help, most of them run by widows. Economic opportunities are extremely limited for rural women in Uganda and women generally have fewer assets than men and limited opportunities to make money. They have difficulty gaining access to the credit they need to set up small businesses that generate income, so they are constrained to remain at home and depend on their husbands. But when they lose their husbands, the situation becomes incredibly tough since they have no opportunities to make money, and no man to provide for them and their family.

From all the possible businesses, Rose advised that pigs were the most profitable. So we started to plan.

During the next few days, we visited many such families and discussed their issues. Rose helped translate to them what we wanted to do and while I didn’t understand their Luganda answers, words weren’t really necessary; their faces spoke for themselves. They were so happy to hear the good news! As Rose explained to me, in Uganda it is rude if you visit somebody and don’t receive a gift for your visit, and I certainly experienced this. After several days of visiting, we had been given so many fruit baskets!

Busy days followed as we bought all the required materials and hired workers, trying to ensure we stayed in budget. We designed what we considered the best sty, both economical and functional, using sand, rocks and cement for the floor, poles and wooden planks raised around the perimeter and covered by a zinc roof. We bought two pigs for each woman, one male and one female, as well as feed and vaccinations for at least the first year. After that time, all going well, the projects should become self-sustaining.

Let me introduce the wonderful women who participated in the project:

Madam Nasiwa Bena

She is 78-years old and lives in a mud-brick house next to KAASO. She was the only one to whom we decided not to give pigs as it wasn’t the best way for her to make money due to her age. She used to make mats when she could save enough money to buy the materials, so instead we bought enough dye and material so that she could make plenty of mats. Hopefully the sale of her mats will generate enough for her to buy new materials and the balance help support her family.

She has 10 sons and grandsons and one of her daughters who lives with her suffers mental illness and cannot do any work. After spending many days with her during my stay in Uganda, I was so impressed by her determination and strength. It’s hard to believe she is 78-years old.

Madam Nakalema Angelina

She is 60 years old and lives in a small mud-brick house in the forest. Most of her sons died from HIV, so now she has to take care of many grandsons, some of them also suffering from HIV. I can still hear her wonderful laugh and happiness. The first time I met her, after leaving the house, Rose and I were walking back through the forest when one of her sons came to ask us to stop and wait. Next thing, Angelina appeared with baskets of peanuts, delicious mangos and other fruits. I almost cried – there is so much we can learn from the Ugandan people….

Madam Nakitto Teopista

She is 34 years old. Three years ago, her husband died in a boda boda (motorbike) accident, leaving her alone with three children. After this, her husband’s family took everything from her, including the ownership of her pigs. She continued to take care of them and received a small amount of money from her husband’s family for doing so.

Now, with this project, she will have her own sty and won’t have to depend on anyone else. As well as her piggery project, she also works as a seamstress to help feed her children.

Mr and Mrs Kabuule

I had met Mr. Kabuule the first time I visited Uganda as he used to help organise meetings of the Empowerment Group. He was a small man but so kind and friendly, I couldn’t imagine that he was suffering from a terrible disease that prevents him from working or doing almost anything that requires any kind of strength. This congenital disease also affected his grandfather and his father. This time I met the rest of his family and he was very happy that his was one of the families chosen for the project. In this picture is Madam Kabuule having a meeting with Rose in our Ugandan ‘office’.

Nakuya Harriet

Harriet is the fifth woman we chose for our project. She is a widow who lives next to KAASO and who used to help clean houses around the village. We built her a sty and you can see here how proud and happy she is!

My time in Uganda was just incredible. It is crazy how much you can achieve with just a little bit of money. You can change a woman’s life, and therefore a family’s life. You can give them a future, making them feel proud of themselves, not dependent on anybody but themselves. I admire Ugandan women so much and I am sad that it is so difficult for them to gain access to the credit they need to set up a business.

None of this would have been possible without the donations of generous people and friends who trusted me with this new initiative. To all of them, thank you so much. And of course thank you to Rose, Dominic and their son Derrick, whose time, intelligence and efforts are what made all of this happen.