World Peace Day

September 21^st was World Peace Day!

Today we were able to attend a function held in another city in our district, Kagadi, with others from our organization. There were lots of skits on topics from domestic violence to men saving some meat for the children, cultural dancing and singing and they even had a tent testing for HIV and one for save male circumcision. Overall, it was a great time.

Cultural Dancing at the Event

Matt's so Handy

Last week Matt helped the staff at the Health Center to assemble an incubator that had not been in use due to the staff’s lack of knowledge on how to assemble it. The incubator had been sitting in the supply room for about 2 or 3 years and after doing some research online he was able to construct the incubator and put it in use. He also trained the staff members on how to operate, trouble shoot and maintenance the machine.

This will help the community since there are no other functioning incubators in the town, the nearest being over 1 1/2 hours away. This will also benefit the Health Center since it now has an operational incubator to assist with new born babies who need it. 

Another Week in the Field for Ashley

A new month and new projects. This month Ashley is working with her counterparts finishing up training on trenches for groups who haven’t received trainings and starting trainings on VSLAs. Finally some finance stuff for Ashley and she even got to facilitate all of the trainings for the week.

So, what is a VSLA? Village Savings and Loan Associations are formed by groups within the community, in this case the members of the agriculture self help groups have formed their own VSLAs. These people, in many cases, do not have access to lenders and these associations provide a way for the farmers to both save and take out loans when needed. Most groups meet weekly or monthly and there is minimum amount they are suppose to save each month. The group is completely self-governed and ran and my role is to provide training to support and strengthen their groups. The majority of the groups had not received any formal training on VSLAs but instead took the knowledge from other groups they had been in and applied it.

Many of the groups had run in to the same problem. Each person was saving the minimum and nothing more. This for one limits their personal saving as well as the interest they can earn and limits the amount of funds available to the group as a whole for loans.  The main fear: someone takes a loan and never pays it back and they lose all of their money.  Thankfully I worked in personal loans for 5 years and was able to give the groups good advice and guidance to solve these issues. I also introduced the concept of member passbooks and ledger cards to improve bookkeeping with some groups. The groups use notebooks that stay with the treasure that have all of the group’s savings and loan records. What happens if they lose these books and better yet how does each member know and have proof of how much they have saved or owe in loans? That is where the importance of the members books come in so each member has their own records so in the case that the main book is lost or stolen they have a back-up. Overall this week was a success and went very well.

One group practicing filling out the new ledgers and member's passbooks

Birthday and a Kitten

Matt celebrated another birthday in another country, this time from Africa. This year he got an unexpected surprise.

Back Story:

Ashley had mentioned to her counterpart they we have a kitten back in The States and would love to get one while we are here. She might have mentioned it too many times. This morning at work she waited for her counterpart and when he arrived on his motorcycle, she went out to greet him and heard a cry that sounded like a baby. “Do you hear that?” he asked. On the back of the motorcycle inside of a box wrapped in a tarp was a kitten. We have a kitten now.

Happy 26^th Birthday Matt!

We decided to name him Stacey like his sister Stacy back home in The States. Hopefully she won’t mind. Honestly, we couldn't stop calling him Stacey so it has stuck.