Visit of the projects in the field of Maison des Enfants du Monde
Uganda, August 2005

Maison des Enfants du Monde travelled to Uganda last August 2005 with the aim of monitoring all the projects carried out in favour of street-children and prepare the activities for 2006.

We have visited the new centre of our local partner Uganda Children Centre which is situated closer to the city-centre in the neighbourhood of Makyinde. The centre is bigger that the previous one and has five rooms for the implementation of the different activities, an office, a kitchen, a bathroom, a room for the nurse’s consultations, a room for the tailoring workshop, as well as a big garden for all the outdoor activities. Thanks to this change, the children are able to have more space for the activities and have a better access.

During our trip, we have been to the slum of Katwe where the social workers of UCC have a room where they organise every week the workshops of literacy and numeracy to teach the young children basic knowledges to be able to start school. The children are very motivated and participate very actively to the class.

We have visited some of the schools of Kampala in which the children are registered, such as Katwe Primary School which welcomes 17 children of our programme and the secondary school North Road (in the picture) where are registered 7 teenagers. We took this opportunity to visit the schools accompanied by the pupils and discuss with the headmasters. The headmaster of Katwe Primary School who appreciated very much our project, informed us that he is going to provide a room of the school to the social workers in order that they organize literacy workshops every week.

We also visited the workshops of vocational training where 30 young people follow their trainings, particularly in hairdressing, mechanics and tailoring. We could discuss with the artisans who are training them and met young people having finished their annual formation and who were engaged by the same artisans, which is very encouraging for this project of vocational training.

Moreover, we visited the families of the new children registered at school and living in the slums of Kampala who kindly invited us in their houses and were very thankful of the work done for their children.


Wednesday: Day of the street- children

Every Wednesday, around 40 children who live in the streets go to the UCC centre in order to receive a meal, take a shower, consult the nurse if they are ill or injured and participate in all the recreational and educational activities prepared by the social workers. It is very important for these children who have lost all the links with their families and try to survive every day in the streets, to be able to go to the centre where they find assistance and counselling.


Festive day of Sundays

Moreover, UCC organizes every Sunday a great festive day to which all the children of the programme are invited, therefore approximately 180! During this day, the children took part in many recreational activities, played football, presented the dances they have been preparing, received a meal and consulted the nurse. We took this opportunity to offer to the children all the gifts which we had brought from Belgium, clothes, school material, soaps and toothpastes, sweets, etc… And the children had prepared us a great surprise while having made themselves some toys, dolls, ceramics so that we bring them to Belgium. All these toys will be exposed at our next activity which will take place in November.