Dr. Bill Cook of Geneseo, New York, visited Uganda and appreciated the work we were doing. I collected food and did a distribution twice a week and Bill accompanied me on this mission. As we fed the hungry, Bill’s coworker interviewed the children, and came up with a list of 14 children who could be enrolled in school. Bill immediately decided that his foundation would help to fund the education of these children, a huge turning point for Hope for the Voiceless. This foundation continues to provide tremendous support for the street children we serve.
Bill Cook Foundation
Books for Development
We developed another collaboration with an organization called Books for Development based in Houston, Texas. Books for Development helps communities establish local libraries and provides free books for many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda, as well as other countries around the world. With this collaboration with Mark Cotham, Hope for the Voiceless continues to receive hundreds of books for our street children. Like us, Mark understands that education is the key to helping our children find their way.
Koi Sports Business Network
Through our engagement programs, I noticed that involving our children in sports could keep them moving steadily forward and help them to avoid many troubles on the streets. This led to investing in them further by starting football programmes. I contacted an organization called Koi Sports Business Network based in England in order to convince them to come on board and work hand in hand. We have formed a football team called Kampala Giants. It includes different age brackets and we believe we can use this teamwork to fight many of the mental health issues which plague young adults.
In my childhood, when I used to sleep on cold streets, the only comfort I had was football. I used balls that were made of banana fibers because it was too expensive for us to buy a ball from shops. We used to make ours. It was a horrible experience but still it made me the man I am today.
Additional Programs
Clothing
These children absolutely depend on us when it comes to both clothing and feeding. Since we do not have a steady flow of income or funding, we do a breakdown with this project- giving out clothes to our children three times a year. We use that period to try to gather some clothes and funding so that we buy and give them not only clothes, but shoes and sandals and we believe they should last them for three months. The only belongings they have are those clothes we give them, and toothpaste and toothbrush and these all stay with them all the time on the streets.
Hygiene
When it comes to bathing, we gather our boys to have a proper shower which is usually a small tub of water and soap. When the holidays come, we make sure we teach these children the core values of helping out with domestic work. With that they can learn to keep both personal and collective hygiene. And they also learn to identify places where they can stay with primitive but proper sanitation.
Since these children do not have a proper place to stay, getting a big proper shelter for us is really on our minds. We find children sleeping under pieces of cardboard or tarps, and try to provide safety. We believe if most of those children get off the street, it will not only benefit those children but the country at large. Sometimes we will find a small group of children and then look for a safe area to gather them together so we can watch over them as they rest.
Shelter
Drug Abuse Prevention Efforts
The reality of life on the streets of Kampala is troubling. You will find boys dependent on sniffing glue from aerosol cans in order to find a way to sleep. A young boy can survive for days without eating because of that glue. Our dream is for these children to have a secure place to go to school, a place to call home, a nice meal to eat each day. It is a challenge for us to take a boy off the streets and off drugs because it seems he is simply trying to survive. We do our best to challenge this mindset through different programmes and engagement. I know someone, somewhere can changes these lives by supporting Hope for the Voiceless.
Public education in Uganda is very different as the children may sit on dirt floors in classrooms filled to the brim with boys and girls of all ages and abilities. A huge mission for us is getting our children enrolled in schools where they receive a quality education. The Bill Cook Foundation has been instrumental in helping us. Every day I find boys waiting for the chance to go to school. The cost is high and we may lose them before they get enrolled. I have a little boy who puts on his hand-me-down uniform every day, waiting for the day when he can attend school.
Schooling
Feeding
During weekly outreaches, we give out 25kgs of cooked food. We also have programmes which run during school holidays and that means those children need to be fed every day. In a year, we have several long school holidays that require some of our largest expenses in feeding programmes. We spend nearly $2500 dollars each term, depending upon the economy of our country and the commodities available.
We also have local organizations we work with like SESOLYA. Our collaboration with this organization is primarily to engage our children in the protection of our environment. Uganda is a beautiful country, but like our children, our environment needs protection. With that, we have come up with different programs which include planting of trees and protection of aquariums. We know very well that climate change has become a major problem globally that is why we make it a habit to teach our children to protect our environment at a very tender age.
Environmental
