Friday October 24th

This has been a busy week following our arrival at Entebbe on Sunday evening. We had a relatively easy journey from Entebbe to Mityana on Monday taking the opportunity to stop at Papercraft, a workshop using recycled paper to produce a wide range of stationary items.

We are staying in room A16 at Kolping House in the centre of Mityana which remains the best place for us to be based to allow us to meet all those we need to be seeing but having the disadvantage of being rather noisy at nights!

With a list of around 30 tasks to undertake while we are here, after discussing a plan for our 3 weeks here with John Bosco, we visited Ekiwomulu on Tuesday  to briefly see what was happening. We had the opportunity to discuss our forthcoming activities with Samuel the head teacher. Wednesday morning allowed an opportunity to visit the Café. The project is progressing well and the hope is that the Café will open while we are still here but time will tell. Work was being undertaken to complete the vehicle access and also a porch over the main Café entrance. It certainly is an impressive structure and has great potential to help move Esuubi forward to a self-sustaining state.

The vehicle entrance under construction

One major success on Wednesday was a trip to the tax office! We have been struggling to sort out tax registration for Esuubi here in Uganda to enable us to import a shipment of items needed for the Cafe. The process has been somewhat difficult but with the assistance of an amazing man in the tax office the necessary registration was sorted out and the necessary work to authorise the clearing agents at Entebbe to act for us  was completed I have to say it really restored my faith that things can function effectively here after all!

Yesterday was spent doing a walk around all the buildings at Ekiwomulu to make a job list. Overall the buildings remain in good shape but there is still the need for guttering and plastering of the walls of the various buildings. We fortunately were present when both the electrical installers and the water filter servicing agents were on site. We were able to avert a potential problem by ensuring the solar panels for the electrical installation were placed on the roof of the administration block rather than on top of 8 foot poles where they could have easily fallen victim to the 200+ small children on the site! The water filters were also serviced although 2 of the 6 sand filters have become non-functional and will need replacing but the filters nevertheless provide a regular supply of up to 60 litres of drinkable water for each house when they are fully functional.

The solar panels waiting to be roof mounted

The batteries for the electricity supply

Today we have visited Ebenezer secondary school and obtained up to date photographs of all the students. We ended up visiting 3 sites as the students have had to go to stay at various schools that are acting as examination centres for their S4 exams equivalent to GCSE.

There have not been too many casualties so far apart from one pair of glasses that Ann sat on!

Ann busy in the Office!