Monday 24 October 2011

HUGS 10th Anniversary Dinner

October 23rd was a bit special. Fr John had come all the way from Nairobi to join 145 HUGS supporters to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the opening of St Zoes Primary School.

Gorton Monastery, a World Heritage Site in Manchester was the venue. And what a venue. If you haven't seen it then do take time out to visit.

We had a wonderful evening and the speeches were quite short!


Sorry the picture had to be me. All the others were rather dark and would not look good.

Monday 17 October 2011

Tragedy in the Congo

Some of you may have heard about the recent tragedy in the Congo and one of great supporters has told me a little about it;



Dear all,
my friend James is a Drama professor and specialises in using Drama to help people in war and conflict. he has recently been working in the DR Congo and the recent massacre killed the people he has been working closely with - see message below. They are raising money to support the bereaved families who have lost their only wage earner. please support this and pass it on to anyone who might be interested
bw
Louise

Your can read more about it at the web site


www.childrenincrisis.org/DRCAPPEAL



Those who lost their lives were doing what we are doing. Bringing education to the people in a country which is notorious for the killings over so many years.


It would be wonderful if we could help and HUGS Trustees will be thinking what we might be able to do to help.


Sunday 9 October 2011

Sorry for the Silence

Isn't it odd. Knowing that I would not be able to work for a while as I recuperated from my knee operation I had visions of all the thousands of things I would have time to do from home. Just shows how little I knew about the "getting better" process. Very little energy and no real ability to sit and concentrate on anything for long. And this blog got a bit neglected!

I will be much more understanding if the future!

Our volunteer Rebecca has posted loads of pictures of her12 months in Uganda on her picture site and it you want to take a look it is at http://rebeccanixon.traveljournal.net/gallery/


The serious drought and massive inflation in Uganda has been a major challenge to all our schools and we have delayed some building work in order to make sure that the children and staff have food and water. We have already had two substantial water catchment projects at St Zoes but now we have pretty certain knowledge of underground water on land we now own we may have reason the start a new project to drill down and find ways of pumping it to the school.

The Lira Babies home has been visited by some wealthy and generous Americans who are keen to fund an extension of this wonderful orphanage. Sarah Woodward, niece of Trustee Chris Bishop has also raised a lot of money in New Zealand for the same cause and HUGS is helping with the money transfers.

The builder of our secondary and vocational blocks at St Zoes has proved to be really dreadful and although he has been paid a lot of money he disappeared from the site in April and has not been seen since. This is quite a setback but over time I believe we can recover and refinance the completion of the work by other means.

Things like this remind me how lucky we are!