Feed the Children

Update on the Farm – We Have Beans (and more!)

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Rainy season is over, for which everyone is (temporarily!) thankful. Of course, now it’s hot… TIA! (“This is Africa!” which explains pretty much everything!)

This fall has been exceptionally wet and cold, so Ronald and Fauza weren’t really sure what they’d find at the farm when they got out for a visit.

They were wowed!

Apparently, it wasn’t too cold, because the plants have done amazingly well. What all’s happening?

Beans are ready to harvest – look how beautiful they are!

The matoke (top photo) is coming along great.

The maize is starting to put on cobs.

The new banana saplings have all rooted firmly in the earth.

The cassava is lush and we can get a second harvest from them soon.

With the latrine done, the house finished, and the perimeter fence up, we’ve accomplished SO much in just 3 1/2 short months!

The project is 64% funded, so we’re at a pause except for planting some moringa, tomatoes, onions, eggplant, and other crops. But once we’re at 100% (well, really, as the funding comes in) we’ll be able to take the project to the next level.

What’s still to do?

  • Build the greenhouse
  • Dig the well
  • Buy the grain mill for the maize
  • Construct the coop for chickens and pen for goats
  • Hire a full-time farmer/caretaker

We are so thankful for our volunteer farmer, Pastor Moses, who has overseen everything so far, cleared the land, planted, and tended the crops. He’s also the one who told Ronald about the land, so we are very indebted to him!

With Giving Tuesday and year-end giving coming up, we’d be honored if you’d consider giving to the farm project as part of your end-of-year giving plan. 100% goes to the project, and you’ll have the benefit of seeing the whole thing unfold here and on social media.

We so appreciate your support!

Webele nyo,

Jennings

PS If you want to give now – $25 can help us buy seeds for the next crops! – just click the button!

FABULOUS FARM FUNDS!

PSS DON’T FORGET to get your free ticket to hear my talk on the 11th at the Expat Money Summit, which started on Monday. The Summit started yesterday and there are loads of other great speakers talking about really interesting topics like investing.

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Update on the Farm – Put a Roof On It!

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Ronald picked a great day to go out to the farm yesterday – look at the blue sky! It’s been SO wet this rainy season in the Kampala area, and even worse in the west.

This is Hopeland School on Sunday! Not good…

Anyway, back to the FARM.

As you can see, the roof work is underway and nearing completion. The doors and windows have been ordered and are being made. The cement was poured for the floors on a dry day – which was followed by NOT dry days, but it’s finally hardened. And look at the beans growing out front!

The rains will last a few more weeks. (Then we’ll be complaining about it being dry, I’m sure!) Meanwhile, they’re pressing on with the construction as the weather allows, and it’s looking so good!

The farm project is 63% funded, which is amazing. We do need the other 37% to come in in order to be able to get everything done that we have planned, like the greenhouse, the grain mill, and the bore hole. But we’ve made HUGE progress since July 11 when we launched (only 2 1/2 months!!), and we’re so grateful to you for your support.

If you know anyone who might be interested in donating to this sustainable farm project, please pass the email along. 100% goes to the project, so even a small donation really goes a long way. We’d love for you to also consider it for some of your year end giving budget (because holy cow it’s almost October!).

Thanks for believing in us and for helping us create lasting and sustainable lives for teen moms and teen girls in the slum. We never, ever take that for granted and are so amazed at your continuing support. Webele nyo!

Blessings,

Jennings

PS Here’s the link for the farm. When you go to DonorSee, make sure to Follow us, too, so you can keep up with all we’re doing there. We always have 12-15 projects up at a time — many more than I can update you on in a short newsletter!

TAKE ME TO THE FARM!

What’s Next for the Farm?

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When Ronald found this land, the most noticeable WOW was that it had a home already started. It’s a multi-room brick structure with a garage — the former owner had planned to move there before all the pandemic lockdowns and inflation. That’s a HUGE bonus, as we’d planned to have to build a house for our caretaker from scratch, and while it’s bigger than anything we would have built, we will be sure to maximize all the space.

With the cost of things right now, we won’t be able to finish out the whole building at one time, but our next project is finishing the garage area into a home, with a roof, windows, doors, and floor. We’ll also make another room into a store room for tools and supplies.

Moses, who has been helping us with everything out there, is getting the quote together, and hopefully we’ll be able to start this work next week! And that’s all thanks to YOU and your amazing generosity in funding this project. We’re at 63% now, and would love your help to get us over the finish line soon! There’s a button below.

Meanwhile, look at the cassava in the photo above! Once Moses cleared the weeds and invasive plants out (and sprayed for bugs!), we realized we had a LOT more stuff already growing than we thought. There is a lot of cassava (yuca in Central and South America), and Ronald and Fauza were able to bring some back to Touch the Slum for Mama Santa to cook up. Cassava is great, because you yank it up, harvest the big tubers, then replant it and let it keep going.

We also have mature matoke and mango trees and have planted bananas. Moses is getting us free beans for planting, as well as some small trees from a friend. We’re looking into moringa – we may be able to get some small trees free from the government!

This project already means so much to our team, and now we’ve brought home the first produce… It’s truly amazing, and we can’t thank you enough!

Webele nyo!

Jennings

DONATE: FARM PROJECT!

PS I did a one-hour interview with DonorSee for an upcoming Spotlight feature. I edited the footage I recorded on my phone, so if you’re interested in how Ten Eighteen was born and what we’re up to, you can check it out here!

The Farm Project Has Launched!

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Our FARM PROJECT has launched on DonorSee!

There are some values that we hold at Touch the Slum –

  • Sustainable change
  • Personal responsibility
  • Hope + Growth

This goes for our own work in the community, for what we try to instill in our girls through counseling and education, and for how we plan and dream for the future of the Namuwongo project.

The 50%+ food inflation that Uganda has experienced has really stretched our budget while limiting our food options. We have had to limit our carbohydrates to mostly posho with a little bit of rice, and we’ve also had to reduce our fresh produce to the general population so that we can make sure that our breastfeeding teen moms get all the nutrition they need.

This has led us to the farm project. The farm will be able to provide all of the vegetables that we need, and eventually fruits such as mango and avocado. Girls who are interested in learning about farming and agriculture will be able to visit the project a couple of times a month, which will give them a wonderful skill for their future.

This is a really large project for us, but we know we will be able to fund it on DonorSee thanks to you and our wonderful partners there. Below, I’ve itemized the expenses so you can see where every penny will go. 100% of donations will go to the project (minus processing fees), and we’ll be keeping you updated all along the way.

Click the button to see the project on DonorSee — we need to get 10% of the funding before DonorSee will show it in their feed, so we’d love your help today!

TAKE ME TO THE FARM!

BUDGET

2-3 acres of arable land $11,500

Green house $1,460

Cement fencing poles + wires $2,640

Farm tools $500

Water pump system $1,100

Motorcycle $1,775 (for the caretaker, deliveries, etc)

Caretaker home $2,500

Maize milling system $1,775

Fertilizer & pesticides 1 year $350

Caretaker salary 1 year $500 (plus room, board, transport, etc)

TOTAL $24,100

Webele nyo!

Jennings

How a Farm Will Let Us Lean Into the Wind

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Every week day, Mama Santa makes lunch for about 75 teens and adults, with another dozen or so children. The lunch above was on the day we went to the market for fresh groceries, so we go the added treat of eggplant, carrots, and avocado. Most days, we just had beans (made with a little onion and tomato) and posho or rice.

Posho is the least expensive carbohydrate available in Uganda — it’s finely ground maize mixed with water and cooked firm, or else mixed with water or milk and a little sugar for a porridge. On its own, it doesn’t taste like much, but it’s filling and good with beans. However, eating nothing but this day in and day out is not a recipe for optimal health!

For an increasing number of our day students, this is the only meal they get each day. There is no food at home.

Even before the daily price increases of the last 6 weeks, we had decided that we needed a self-sufficient solution for the growing food issues. We’ve spent a few months researching and pricing everything from laying hens to concrete posts to acreage, and will be launching our new farm project on DonorSee on Monday.

This is our biggest project to date, and our second “large” project on DonorSee. We have our computer lab thanks to our first, and we are even more excited about the farm.

Not only will we be able to provide vegetables and fruits, protein from eggs and moringa, and grind maize on site, we will be able to take any girls interested in learning about farming and agriculture out to work the land. While many of our teens’ families came from rural villages, our girls haven’t learned the skills that their parents and grandparents knew — and they are excited to learn!

Monday, you’ll get an email with the project link. For now, you can click the button below to get a preview of our project video. We need the project to be 10% funded from our own donors before DonorSee releases it to the wider platform, so we’d love for you to spend some time over the weekend watching the video, looking at our social media, and committing to a donation for Monday. Any amount will help us, and 100% goes to the project!

Farm Project Video Here!

Webele nyo!

Jennings

PS We were a Great Nonprofits Top Rated Nonprofit for 2021, which brought in a good number of donations through their site. We have til October 31st to get 10 new 4 or 5 star reviews to continue our status for 2022. We’d love for you to pop over there and leave us a review – it doesn’t take long! Click the button!

Yes, I’ll leave a 5* review!

Why a Village School Is So Important

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As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of institutional schooling. Our family homeschooled for 13 years, and the pandemic years certainly taught us a few things about the state of education.

BUT…

In Uganda, and especially in terribly poor, remote areas like Rwakobo Village, schools are critical. Especially schools like Wells of Hope that operates on a pay-if-you-can tuition system, with no mandatory uniforms, no testing fees, no “bring a broom, a case of toilet paper, and paper or you can’t come” rules.

For 40 years, this village’s children either didn’t go to school at all, or had to WALK nearly 10 miles each way to go. (It takes a half hour in the car to reach the closest town!) If they were lucky and had relatives in a town with a school, they could attend more easily, but for most, school was not even a remote possibility.

I absolutely believe that reading, writing, math, science, and geography (they learn American geography in primary school – for some reason no one knows – and don’t learn Uganda’s geography until secondary) are important. It’s a key to MORE in their lives.

But even more than that, for these village children, it’s a safety net.

  • They get food at school. For many, it’s the only food they get in a day.
  • They have advocates in their teachers and the administration, who are able to spot abuse and illness.
  • Gideon, Gilbert, and the other staff regularly visit the homes — even those that are 2-3 miles’ walk from the school — to check on families, to see why children have missed days, to try to help the families prioritize education.
  • For the girls, being in school has at least stalled childhood marriage practices. (We lost a handful of girls during the lockdown closure to this practice, and it’s heartbreaking.)

I know that many people, especially those familiar with the overall abysmal academic performance of schools in countries like Uganda struggle with the idea of helping them. For our newest board member Mikkel, the social and welfare aspects of supporting schools was new — and a game changer.

Because of the overwhelming demand when schools started back up after the 2-year break at the end of January, Wells of Hope took out a loan to build a second “real” building. (The photo above is the current P2, very overcrowded classroom!) We have been fundraising on DonorSee to get blackboards and furniture. The first classroom’s furniture project is over halfway funded — we just need $175 to complete it.

Click the button to donate!

Let’s buy desks and chairs!

We so appreciate your support!

Webele nyo,

Jennings

There’s a Growing Food Crisis In Uganda

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Just like everywhere these days, food prices have gone crazy in Uganda. While somewhat lucky in that it only gets 60% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine (vs 100% for many African countries), it also usually gets a lot of the remaining supply from India, which has cut off wheat exports due to their own problems.

Additionally, fuel has doubled in the last several months, so that per gallon it’s now over $7.30. (They sell by the liter and it’s always more than here in the States, but this is brutal!) Obviously this effects the price of everything!

Finally, seasonality + fuel prices + supply chain problems have created a huge food crisis in the country, and particularly among the poorest — which is who we work with.

Our own food budget at the compound has doubled since January — and we’re even buying less food! Some things are completely off the menu, like chapati, and serving sizes have been reduced a bit to try to stretch the budget.

After a lot of talk, we have decided to create a large project on DonorSee to purchase 2-3 acres of land to start a small farm. Not only will this give us a sustainable source of food, it will also allow any girls who want to learn to grow food the chance to get new skills. (There’s not a lot of farming in a slum of 30,000 people!)

The project will launch next week! We’re still finalizing some prices, since everything seems to go up every day, and working on a video to show just what this project can achieve. We hope you’ll check it out once we launch, and help us continue our goals of sustainability and teaching lifetime skills to our teen moms.

Webele nyo!

Jennings

PS To donate to the farm project, click the button!

BUILD A FARM!

Wow, You Really Came Through!

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YOU GUYS ROCK!

Seriously, maybe I need to go away more often because just in the time I was on my trip, we raised nearly $4000 on DonorSee!

FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS! Wow. I’m blown away!

What did you accomplish?

  • blackboards for the new Wells of Hope Primary building
  • a substantial start on part 1 of desks and chairs for the building
  • orphan Miriam’s medical care after she was hit by a boda
  • almost 60% of the transportation for Kellen to her father’s burial
  • medical care for teen mom Mabel’s two sick children
  • a metal crutch for Emmanuel, who was born with one leg
  • help for Clare, the teen mom living in the chicken coop
  • an exit package for teen mom Gloria, to set her up for independence
  • restocking food for our teen girls
  • mosquito nets for 25 students in Skills for Life
  • an emergency intake for 15-year-old pregnant teen Sylvia
  • a 4-bed dormitory for homeless students in Skills for Life
  • medical treatment for Jen’s UTI

Y’all, I was only gone 2 1/2 weeks! THIS.IS.AMAZING!!

Your support while I was gone, beyond this amazing giving, was so appreciated. I got emails and messages on social media, and it was so encouraging. Because it’s hard over there…

Great. But hard. Thanks to all of you, the trip was a success in every way. I really can’t thank you enough!

Webele nyo!

Jennings

PS Becoming a monthly supporter is a GREAT way to help our work! As little as $10 a month makes an impact — $10 can provide food for a teen mom and her child for a week! Just click the button to get started —>

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

We Got Fired – From Serving Food!

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Yesterday morning, we left Kampala at 7am and drove straight through to Mbarara. It was a 4 1/2 hour drive west, and, after we got out of Kampala traffic, was pretty easy.

We went straight to Hopeland Primary School, where we toured all the classrooms and then did the devotions gathering with all the students and staff. the kids sang, Ronald taught a lesson, and we presented them with a new soccer ball and volley ball.

Then it was lunchtime, and Ronald and I were roped into serving. I’m not sure why serving matoke and beans was so difficult! hahaha But somehow, we got fired from the job — no kids starved, fortunately, as the others kept the line going. (If it had been up to us, they might have finished around dinner time!)

After lunch and checking in the hotel, we walked up the road to the soccer pitch that a local high school allows the school to use. Those kids PLAYED! (As did Ronald and William!) The girls took the volley ball to play one game, the boys took the soccer ball for another, and the small kids took an older ball and played their own. They ran and ran and ran… and it was HOT! But they had a total blast, and it was great to watch them.

Today, we will head out to Rwakobo Village and Wells of Hope Primary School. We had hoped to spend time tomorrow, which is Martyr’s Day and a national holiday, around the village, but Gideon’s wife Winnie is in the hospital and they may have to go to Kampala tomorrow. (Prayers please!)

We will spend the morning with the kids at Wells and filming some new projects for DonorSee. We’ve got a BIG, exciting project coming up in a couple of weeks, which we’ll be shooting footage for, as well as a new ecobrick water tank project for Hopeland School.

I’ll be home in a week – that’s hard to believe! Thank you so much for your support while I’ve been here. We’ve funded quite a few projects and gotten a few new monthly donors, too. We’re so grateful for your partnership!

Blessings,

Jennings

PS If you’d like to become a monthly donor, click the link! Even a small monthly donation helps so much – and 100% goes to the work, so you are making a huge difference. Webele nyo!

COUNT ME IN!

Inflation Hits the Slum Hard

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Just before I sat down to write this, Ronald sent me today’s quote from President Museveni on the food crisis happening in Uganda right now:

“Africans really confuse themselves… If there is no bread, eat cassava. I don’t eat bread myself. The issue of skyrocketing commodity prices, like petrol and fertilizers, is man-made by our friends in Europe.”

That was it. Don’t eat bread. (For what it’s worth, most Ugandans never eat bread. They do make chapati from wheat flour, though.)

So anyway…

Our food budget in January of this year, which included other items like office stationery and detergent, was about 4 million shillings, or $1100. For May, it’s 4,480,000sh for just the food, and another 1.3 million for the supplies, soap, detergent, and toiletries. That’s $1585. Nearly a 50% increase.

We do have a project up on DonorSee to help with some of this cost, and we’re working on some other ways to increase fundraising around food costs. One thing we AREN’T doing is not feeding our girls, their kids, and our staff.

If you’d like to help, there are buttons at the bottom of this email where you can either give a one-time donation to the DonorSee project or become a monthly donor in any amount to help us with our ongoing costs. We’d so appreciate your support!

I am also attaching a link to a new video that Bob Ditty’s assistant helped us make from the footage they shot in March at our compound and in the community. It’s really great! Click this button. (Yeah, I know there are a lot of buttons today… Sorry about that!)

Let me see the new video!

Thank you so much for your ongoing support! I know things are challenging everywhere right now, and that you have a lot of places you could invest your money. We really appreciate that you choose to invest in the future of teen moms and girls in the Namuwongo slum. Webele nyo!

Blessings,

Jennings

Take me to the DonorSee food project!

I want to be a monthly donor!