Food Insecurity

Who’s a Farmer Now?!

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One of my earliest memories from childhood is being awakened in the middle of the night to go to the groves and light the oil pots due to an imminent freeze. I didn’t get out of the car or (of course) play with fire, but I remember it clearly. I also remember playing in the packing house as the conveyor belts ran full of beautiful oranges.

My grandfather always had a small vegetable garden at his house and would eat sweet onions like an apple as we walked back to the house. (Which I found horrifying!)

As an older (cough cough) adult, I dream of having a farm one day. I just didn’t know it would be in Uganda!

But we are farmers now!

We officially own the land (with paperwork started), witnessed by the neighboring landowners and the local community leaders. It has been surveyed and marked and we will start building our fence soon.

Honestly, I keep having to pinch myself that we own this land. Land that already has papaya and cassava growing and soon ready to harvest. That already has a partially finished brick building ready to be finished into a home for our caretaker and storage.

I’m still hoping for a farm a bit closer to home one day, but I am absolutely staggered at your response to our need for food, and for another vocational skill to teach our teen moms. It has so far exceeded our wildest expectations that I’m not sure there are words to express our gratitude.

In Luganda, “Tweyanzizza nnyo, tweyanzeege!” (We are so grateful, thank you very much!”)

Blessings,

Jennings

PS While we may be farmers now, we aren’t actually farming yet! Our project to help us bridge the gap between our budget and rising costs is 30% funded on DonorSee – we’d love you to help us so we can fully restock in 2 weeks when classes resume. Click the button – it’s super easy, and 100% goes to the program!

Click here for FOOD!

Who’s a Farmer Now?! Read More »

It’s “Summertime” But They’re Still Coming To Class!

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Uganda doesn’t have “summer.” I have spent a lot of time over the years trying to explain seasons, daylight savings time, and why our daylight is short in winter and long in summer.

When you’re on the equator, it’s a hard concept to grasp!

Their schools also don’t have a summer break. Typically, a school year starts in January and ends in December, with two breaks. As a vocational school, our schedule is a little different: we have about 5 month terms, with the last few weeks being exams. Other than Christmas, we’ve never actually taken a “term break” until now.

WHY are we taking a term break?

  • Well, first, the staff is TIRED! We’ve instituted a ton of new programs this year, including the literacy class, the computer lab, the daycare, the clinic, and Advanced Tailoring.
  • We went from 20 students per term to 60+. That meant Mama Santa is cooking a whole lot more food each day.
  • We went from 8 residential girls to 12, with the addition of our dormitory.
  • We went from 4 teachers to 9.
  • And finally, and importantly, food-inflation has more than doubled what it costs to feed all these people every day.

Everyone and our budget needed a break!

But we also recognize that we have girls who are particularly vulnerable to voluntary or involuntary sex work, starvation, and abuse. The girls in our Literacy program, both from the first term who are awaiting the start of Term 3 to learn a skill, and from this current term, have no way to make an income yet. For very many of them, the meals they get at the compound are the only meals they get. They are at risk of bad peer groups who influence them on drugs and alcohol use.

We just funded a food project on DonorSee to provide the extra food to keep these girls fed over this one-month break. But they don’t just come for the meals – they come to dance, to practice their English, to watch a movie, and to hang out in a safe place.

Our staff is taking rotating days off during this time so that we can accommodate the girls coming in, and the teachers are even coming up with some games and activities for them. We’re all committed to creating change in this community, and it doesn’t stop because school does!

Thank you for your tremendous support. We couldn’t do it without you! Follow us on social media (links below) to keep up with what’s happening at the compound during this break.

Blessings!

Jennings

PS. WE DID IT! We crossed $50,000 in all-time donations on DonorSee yesterday. That means we went from $30,000 to $50,000 in 27 days! WOW!

Patricia is in the Literacy Class and will start S4L Tailoring on August 15th. Her supplies project is over 60% funded – we’d love your help to get her set up for success! Just click!

Help Patricia with supplies!

It’s “Summertime” But They’re Still Coming To Class! Read More »

Ways To Help During the Current Food Crisis

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Stories like this one are popping up in Ugandan media, even as the government is trying to ignore the severity of inflation and supply chain issues. As the President said recently, “Just don’t eat wheat – have matoke instead.” (Sound like any French monarch you recall?)

Now, Karamoja and the northern portions of Uganda that are bordering South Sudan are very dry and arid. The Karamoja tribes are herders, and can travel large distances to find grazing for their cattle. But what is happening there is coming to the rest of the country if it can’t get a handle on a few things:

  • Stopping the export of commodity crops to other countries until the supply chain problems ease
  • Forming some sort of safety net program for the extremely poor who have never recovered from the pandemic lockdowns
  • Stopping the new post-pandemic policy of charging at “free” hospitals

I’m not holding my breath, and we’re not waiting for the government!

Here’s how YOU can help the teen moms and teen girls in our programs – as always, 100% goes to our programs:

  • Become a monthly donor on DonorBox. We will receive the money in 1-3 business days.
  • If you are a big Paypal user, we are part of the Paypal Giving Fund. We will receive the money electronically in up to 45 days.
  • You can give through GreatNonprofits, too. We get a check within once a quarter. (Leave a review while you’re there so we can be a 2022 Top Rated Nonprofit!)
  • We are a verified charity with the National Christian Foundation (NCF). We’ve received one donation through them, and it was a check delivered fairly quickly. They take no fees.

THE BOTTOM LINE – we’ll take money however you want to give it to us! 😀

Thank you for your support!

Webele nyo,

Jennings

PS Make sure to follow us on social media for the latest updates!

Ways To Help During the Current Food Crisis Read More »

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

The Farm Project Has Launched! Read More »

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!

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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

Why a Village School Is So Important Read More »

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!

There’s a Growing Food Crisis In Uganda Read More »

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

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The Girl In the Chicken Coop

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On Monday, we were alerted to a teen mom in a very desperate situation. 

Two years ago, Clare left her village (some 15 hours away by bus) and came to Kampala to work as a house maid. As happens more often than not, she became pregnant. She was fired, and the baby’s father disappeared.

Her family would not pay for her to come back to the village because of the baby.

Now, Clare and her 1 year old son live in what is basically a chicken coop. It’s about 4’ off the ground, and has about 4’ of headspace between the “floor” and the ceiling. The total size is 4’x6’, and someone is raising rabbits in the space underneath her.

When she can, she takes in clothes to wash for 1000 or 2000 shillings. (Her rent is 30,000 shillings.) She can go several days with no customers and no money. 

The social workers visited her in the morning and reported back on Clare’s situation. We took a bigger team and bought some emergency food to get them through a week or so. (Prices have literally doubled in the last two months, which is a whole other post!) 

I have seen some bad living situations in my hundreds of visits to the Namuwongo slum, but I have really never seen anything like this place that Clare has been living in. The only good thing you could say about it was that it is just one home off the open space around the railway, so it isn’t as closed in and awful as many places are. But otherwise… it really was horrifying.

We spoke at length to Clare. When we discovered that her family would take her back with the baby (many Ugandan families won’t) but they wouldn’t assist her in getting home because of the baby, we determined that the best solution was the temporary food, a mosquito net, some soap, and transportation back to the village.

In the next several days, our team will purchase the ticket, escort Clare and her son to the depot and get her safely on the bus with her belongings, and contact her family to let them know she will be arriving and when. We will follow up to make sure she arrived safely.

We have a project on DonorSee to reimburse our budget for this expense — we’d love your help to fund it. It’s already 25% funded! As with all our emergency projects, we solve the problem FIRST, and then seek to repay our budget.

We thank you for helping us continue working with teen moms in the slum!

Send Clare to the village!

Blessings,

Jennings

The Girl In the Chicken Coop Read More »

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!

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