Bev Murrill comments on progress being made in Uganda

Bev Murrill

Uganda has been prominent in the news recently, not least for the furore that has risen over the infamous death penalty for homosexuality. While the government and religious leaders wrestle to find solutions to the nation's issues, in totally different stratas of Ugandan society there are many signs of hope.

In fact, despite the problems, miracles abound in Uganda. This nation has been raped by many of its own leaders throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Names like Idi Amin and Milton Obote strike loathing in the hearts of those who were subjected to their reign of terror; the destruction wreaked on the land has been cataclysmic. The AIDs virus has contributed severely to national brokenness yet this resilient people have continued on, bloodied but unbowed.

The rubble of a society has given way to the rebuilding of new walls with the broken stones of the previous regimes. Undiminished by violence and sickness, the exuberance of life refuses to submit to death. Everywhere you see the encouraging signs of a blooming economy. The road from the national airport in Entebbe to the capital city of Kampala energetically displays the burgeoning prosperity of a people who, despite having lost everything, are rising again. This is illustrated in myriad ways, including new building projects and, predictably, the rise of western coffee shops for the incoming expats and increasingly prosperous locals. The nation is being restored.

A microcosm of this national wellbeing can be seen in the tiny fishing village of Bulega, on the shores of the vast Lake Victoria. Within this community is another village whose rapid development signals change for the entire peninsula. Akaloosa - meaning fragrance - is a community of children and those who love and care for them. The name of the project, the work of which has already spread far beyond the fence around the site, is CHERISH UGANDA.

Envisioned for abandoned children suffering with HIV/AIDs, the project provides positive living for those little ones who otherwise would have no hope. Hope is the context for life at Akaloosa as 41 children who would otherwise have lost their lives are being educated and encouraged, nurtured and nourished, and most of all, loved. Five homes, each with a 'mother' who has been carefully chosen and trained for such a role as this, house eight children in the process of learning to become brothers and sisters with the other members of their household. New aunties and uncles inhabit the children's world as members of team and staff give the children all the support that would naturally be due them. Children are being received as fast as infrastructure can be developed to support them.

Over the summer, a team from Hong Kong and another from Rising Brook UK built three schoolhouses, providing all finances and labour. It's fantastic to see people of different nationalities working together to establish a vehicle from which CHERISH UGANDA will reach not only the children on site, but also the children of the surrounding Bulega village who otherwise have little hope of ever getting the education vital for not only their own future, but also that of the nation. Learning is highly prized in Africa, rightly viewed as the way forward for societies determined to transport themselves out of systemic poverty and into living conditions that will provide clean water, good sanitation, sufficient food and other benefits that the West takes for granted.

As with so many other projects across sub-Saharan Africa, Cherish Uganda is miraculous. A thousand small actions that take place across projects like this in any given week, and in any given life, all combine to make the miracles that occur when people care enough to use their own lives and money and time to make a difference.

And a difference is certainly made! It's made to the Cherish kids of Akaloosa, who would otherwise have already been deprived of life, but more than that, it makes a difference to the lives of those in the West who make the decision to give away their own comfort and ease in order to increase the same for others.

There's a great quote by Thomas Fuller -

'Let him who expects one class of society to prosper in the highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side of the face can smile while the other is pinched.'

The truth is that our world can't survive with the huge inequities between the western and developing worlds. The obscenity of incredible wealth in one hemisphere is rivalled only by the obscenities of children dying of starvation and treatable illnesses in the other. Let's be part of the miracle and not of the madness of consumerism.

In the life changing words of Ghandi, let each of us 'be the difference you want to see in the world'.