Over Easter the children had four days off school. To keep everyone occupied we organised two football tournaments, one for the seniors and juniors and another one for the little ones. The girls have now been playing football for over two months and many are extremely keen so we had mixed teams of boys and girls.

The Luchiks (Little ones)

There were 12 teams who played over 40 matches and we ended up with a winner from each age group. The children took it very seriously and many teams had their own practice sessions and warm-ups.

Luchiks practice

Recently the children’s primary school were part of the girl’s district football tournament. Two girls from 1moreChild represented the school, which was knocked out in the quarter-finals.

Main St Girls (Lakamar & Ichumar)

School holidays are about to start and we are in the process of opening a new girls house. Details to follow…

Football spectators

Thanks to the generosity of so many of you we have recently been able to take on some more children.  Last week we took on 25 new boys and they have already started school.  Most are 6-8year olds who have never been to school, never worn shoes and never sat still for more than 2 minutes!  As a result we are dealing with numerous blisters and improving concentration.

The boys have been coming to our Tuesday evening football sessions for many months so we already know them well.  They are great fun and very wide-eyed.

We started playing football with the girls over a month ago and they have been loving it.  About 20 girls from the local slum have been coming along and we plan to take them on in the coming weeks.

If you are interested in sponsoring one of these amazing children please let us know.

The businesses of both the primary school leavers and the former scrap boys have seen mixed results. The students have been away on a camp, but have returned and started up their businesses again this week. They have all been very faithful workers and have earned some valuable money for them and their families.

The business boys have spent many years sharing rooms in the local slum and spending their days wandering the town looking for scrap metal. For them to focus on a legitimate business has, for some, been a hard adjustment. Some have struggled to stay motivated and others haven’t wanted to give up their care-free life of wandering the streets. A few have really succeeded and started making a proper income. Only four of the ten we gave loans to are still working, but they are all making daily payments to our loans officer and learning a huge amount about business all the time. Of the other six, some have outstanding debts and others have handed back their stock.

We are excited that four of the business boys are doing well. One, Teko, has started a successful sweet stall in the slum village. He is able to move his stall to any community gathering like a film being shown or church to make the most of any opportunity. He has been able to support himself and his younger brother on his new income. We are continuing to learn from all the boys and are hopeful that over time we will learn how to encourage and motivate more of the boys into becoming serious businessmen with exciting futures.

In Uganda the new school year has just started. This is a good time to assess which children are really vulnerable or on the streets and not just hanging about during the school holidays. We are now looking to take on more girls and boys and to start two new homes. All these children will need sponsors so please pass the word around if you know people who may be able to start a monthly donation. Thank you to all the amazing 1moreChild supporters for your on-going giving.

After over a year of dreaming of ways to help the boys who spend their days collecting scrap – we have started. We started meeting 6 weeks ago with the main aim of asking them how we could help them. We were very aware that we didn’t want our assistance to become dependence so we provided questions hoping they would come up with some good answers.

We started by meeting over a meal and a low-key discussion about small business with many real life examples. It progressed onto actual ideas of starting businesses which has now resulted in us providing the first loans. We have a core group of around twenty, 15-20yr olds. They have all spent the last few years collecting scrap metal to sell for food and rent. All live in the local slum village of Masese and have no prospect of anything more than this.

We have now loaned six of the boys enough money to start small businesses and two of those have already paid off their loans. The loans range from $4 to $20. They meet daily with our project manager, Moses, who collects their loan repayments and helps them manage their money.

Three times a week they have practical maths lessons and once a week we meet for a time to discuss ideas, issues and to give out loans. We’ll keep you posted…

Many very generous New Yorkers have donated some great t-shirts to 1moreChild. Over 80 t-shirts arrived last week via California and Cairo.  They are fantastic quality and the children were ecstatic.  Enjoy the video!

Three weeks ago the 5 boys in our final primary year completed their exams and have finished primary school forever!  Just over a week ago we did some small business training with them and they all started a small project.  Two decided to sell hard-boiled eggs.  Two chose to sell groundnuts and one decided to sell paraffin for lamps.

We loaned them all enough to buy the little equipment (buckets, baskets, jerry cans, etc) and stock (eggs, salt, g-nuts, paraffin, charcoal) they needed and sent them on their way.

All of them have been amazed at their own success.  A good unskilled salary here is around $2 per day and all the boys have been earning over $1 per day.  The most industrious is Emong who started selling 30 eggs a day and is already selling 60!  With his profit, he is now providing his sick father and four younger siblings with at least one meal a day.

All the boys have paid off their initial loan and are learning some great life lessons in the process.  They are also doing computer classes every morning for two hours. We’ll keep you posted on their progress.

Last week two amazing new football kits arrived for the 1moreChild boys. As you can imagine there was high excitement as they were donned for the very first time.

One is for our First Lane boys team and the other is for our ‘Luchiks’ team – the little ones.

On Friday we played 4 inter-team matches with the highlight being the Luchiks beating the juniors with a wonder-goal from Longoli Moses.

The kit was donated by Darragh Moher and his wonderful team of supporters – thank you all!

You may remember that last year we tested the first 40 boys for HIV and were astonished (& relieved) to find all of them were negative.  This holiday we organised a local EU funded organisation to come and test a further 62 children.  Again, to our amazement, all the children are HIV negative.  What a huge blessing for them to start out in life with a clean slate.  We hope to build on this great start through education and mentoring, in order to keep them free from AIDS for life.

It would be remiss not to mention the children and swimming.  Without doubt, one of the favourite activities this holiday was going to a local swimming pool for the afternoon.  Other members of the public are less enthusiastic when we arrive at the sight of 40 children jumping into a swimming pool, but the children just jump straight in.  When we last went swimming in December none of them could swim or even float for a few seconds, yet they loved diving underwater and had no fear of the water whatsoever.

After spending five days camping on Lake Victoria and having swimming lessons every day at the camp, many can now swim at least 10 metres.  This is a great achievement and we are hoping to build on it, especially as they are growing up on Lake Victoria and the Nile River.

By the end of the juniors’ swimming session, most were diving into the deep end and swimming all the way to the shallow end –  an amazing achievement of something they wouldn’t have dreamt of doing only months before.

This school holidays has been exciting, busy and full of learning. The main aim of this holiday was to help the children discover reading and inspire them to read books on their own. None of the 120 children had ever read a whole book before and culturally, reading is never done for enjoyment, but this holidays most age groups have read two books.

All this was made possible through two fantastic volunteers, Al & Victoria, who have been with us for the past three weeks running our holiday programme. They asked Ed Wood from ‘We Love This Book’ to contact a number of publishers on our behalf. A total of over 200 children’s books were then donated by Usborne, Random House, Puffin and Egmont. We are so grateful for the very kind support of all involved and the impact on the children has been immeasurable.

We have had times of reading chapter books to the children and other times where they could just pick a book and read it to themselves or even just look at the pictures. They have absolutely loved it and are so keen to read more. The factual books (with lots of pictures) and older books (Robin Hood, etc) as well as the “Very First Readers” have been the most popular and we are hoping to build up a small library so that books are always available to the children.

The Jinja marathon took place last month with over 1000 runners. Three weeks beforehand we held a running ‘trial’ for all the 1moreChild children where the top ten runners were then entered into the 10km race. The 1moreChild boys were by far the youngest, but were all in the top 100 with the fastest being Lorot Moses.

The Jinja district football tournaments took place recently in which the boys’ primary school, Main Street Primary School (a school of 1000 pupils), competed. There were two age groups (seniors and juniors) and to win, each team had to play four group matches, a quarter-final, semi-final and final. The senior team had seven 1moreChild children involved and they reached the semi-finals narrowly losing on penalties. The junior team, involving eight of our boys, won the tournament and now head to the National Championships in August.