Kibuye Project overview




AASU’s first community project is focusing on the village of Kibuye in North Eastern Kamuli, on the shores of the Victoria Nile. Kibuye has an estimated population of 60,000 people and is spread over 27 by 35km. The majority of the population is highly dependent on subsistence farming and barter trade within village in order to survive.

Before the project began, Kibuye was dependent upon one borehole for safe drinking water. Due to long lines when collecting water many have been choosing to fetch water from the river, which has caused illness through water born diseases. The village also only has one school, consisting of two classrooms accommodating roughly 600 children. The children that can’t walk the distance to the school simply don’t attend. The majority of children do not attend school, either due to distance or family circumstance, consequentially 80% of Ugandans over the age of 15 are illiterate.

So far within the Kibuye project AASU has been able to buy four acres of land at the East end of the village on which we have built a bore hole and are currently building classrooms for the Arise and Shine Nursery and Primary School which is due to open for the start of the school year in February 2011.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Our newest volunteers and their AASU experience so far!


Hello everybody.

We are Maartje and Ildi, we live in Holland and we study social work, specialized in children.  We both always really wanted an internship abroad to learn about ourselves, the people in Uganda, and the culture. When we read the information about Arise and Shine Uganda, we were instantly thrilled about the organization. They achieved so much in only one year, that’s great! So, we are very glad to work for this organization. We already met a lot of great people and feel very welcome.

We are going to stay in the babies home to help the teacher with the lessons and the activities. We are also going to give workshops to the mothers of the babies' home, so we can share our knowledge. But we hope we can also learn from them.

This week we started making a work plan and goals for all the children. We made 4 groups, namely the older children, the younger children, the babies, and the disabled children. Each group has a different goal. Every day we want to do an activity with all the groups but the goals for the children are different.

One of the activities from last week was ‘bubble blowing’. It was amazing! The children liked it so much and they were very creative in catching the bubbles. They all wanted to blow and they had a lot of fun. Even the disabled children and the babies participated in the activity. They couldn’t blow by themselves but they really enjoyed watching and catching the bubbles. It’s good to see that the older children care about the younger ones and also the disabled children. The older children blew bubbles in their way, so they could try to catch them. It was a great experience for us to see the children work on their goals in a playful way. It was nice to see that all the children had so much fun, even the disabled ones.
Photos of the bubble session will be posted on the AASU facebook, enjoy!

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