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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

Aliat Philip, Lotudu Paul & Lokior Francis

The girls went off to a 5 day camp on Lake Victoria which they thoroughly enjoyed. They swam in the lake, trekked through forests and ate great food! Back in Jinja the boys had a sweet hunt at our Magwa house. Over 2,000 sweets were hidden and they competed in 7 teams of 10. After 2hrs the sweets were counted and only one sweet separated 1st and 2nd place. Here is a video of the fun.