Life in an IDP camp

If you are in the UK and listen to BBC Radio 4, or follow the BBC news, you might have noticed a lot of reports and coverage on Northern Uganda, The Lords Resistance Army and the elections that took place yesterday.  .http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12472574

Many of the reports refer to IDP camps - Internally Displaced Persons camps and I thought you might be interested in seeing these pictures I took during my first trip to the IDP camps around Gulu.  The photos show just how grim life is in these camps.  The huts (you can't call them houses) are so close together which means a huge fire risk as they do their cooking inside... there are no medical facilities or schools and you can see that the children are very creative in their toys - string and banana leaves make a football.  You can see bigger pictures here: Youtube version of photos .

Our farmers in Northern Uganda all lived in these camps for more than 10 years.  Thankfully, they have now left the camps and returned to their homes, which is no mean feat.  Their homes were destroyed and they went home in an atmosphere of fear and with no belongings, food or income.  I am really looking forward to visiting their homes and seeing all these people in their right environment, not herded like animals.  I still find it hard to accept that animals in our farms here in the UK have a much better quality of life than the people in the camps.

So here ends my second attempt at a blog - there is another one for February which celebrates moving into the 21st Century and using technology!  It would be great if you could click on the "follow button", so you automatically receive updates - which I hope and plan to be more often than our older updates.

Seeds for Development finally catches up with 2011

Well here we are catapulted into 2011!  Here at Seeds for Development, we thought it should be the year to embrace technology... so I'm giving it a go by writing a blog rather than sending the clunky emails of old.  I hope it works and that it makes it much easier to update you on what we are doing.

This is partly driven by the guilt and shame of realising that you haven't seen an update for 6 months.  Of course this doesn't mean that nothing has been going on!  Quite the contrary, but not too much that is visibly obvious.  Lots of plotting and planning on how we grow in a sustainable way.  So this is how we are going to do it!

Firstly, Our group of 20 farmers in the Nama Farmers Group, in Mukono (here are 6 of them).  We have tried to work with them for 2 years.  Finally, we have overcome the challenges (which were not rocket science, just a matter of a missing number on the bank account!!) and last week transferred £500 to them.  This will allow them to buy bean seeds and also get help with the labour.  These women all farm their farms single handed and so a bit of help with labour will allow them to greatly increase their yield.

When I visited Uganda last July I spent quite a bit of time with our friends at Send a Cow Uganda (SACU) - www.sendacowuganda.org  and I am delighted to share with you that in 2011 we will begin a partnership with them which will allow us to increase our reach out to farmers in a rather significant way.

We currently support 6 groups (one new one in northern Uganda since updating you last summer).  Working with SACU we will be initially working with an additional 8 groups in and around Gulu.  Our plan is to advance the money for seeds to these 8 groups - bringing us up to 14 groups!

SACU will also provide life skills and social development to our 2 farmers groups from Olwal and Parabongo.  During their time last year in Uganda last year, our 2 wonderful ambassadors Libby and Pete found that whilst our farmers were making money and great progress in their farming lives, they were unfortunately not making so much progress in their social development - things like personal hygiene, HIV awareness, Malaria prevention etc.  So SACU will be supporting them with a 12 month programme.

All of this takes resource to manage.  Thanks to a wonderful large donation - and with their agreement, we are able to support SACU with this for one year (to start with).  This will allow us to have much better visibility of how our farmers are doing and also start to manage the financial side of things more locally.

Another wonderful gift to Seeds for Development was made by a very good friend with strict instructions for us to use it to grow the charity, which will in turn allow us to help more and more farmers. So with this fabulous gift we are embarking on 2 projects.  Firstly to bring our website into the 21st Century and secondly to develop an income generating idea we have.  More to follow on the income generating idea... and watch this space for the new website - which won't be glitzy but will be so much easier to update.

I think this is enough for a blog isn't it?  I hope it brings you back in touch with what we are doing and apologies for keeping you in the dark.

Thank you so much for your continued support and, fingers crossed, we will continue to update you on a far more regular basis via this blog - assuming it works!