By Alison Hall MBE | Founder of Seeds for Development
I know I shouldn't have laughed, but there was no way that this baby could deny it...she had been at the porridge, quietly slurping her way through buckets of it before she got caught with porridge all over her face!
That was one of the lighter moments of our recent trip to Uganda. I told you last time that we were off at the end of May after nearly two and a half years of not visiting the projects. It was wonderful to come out of the airport into the hot African night, with the air full of "that smell". If you have travelled to Africa you will know what I mean and if you haven't, you will just have to humour me and imagine you can smell cooking, fires, nature, dust and heat - and you will just have to go and visit.
Covid, Climate Change and now the conflict in Ukraine is putting unbearable pressure on the poorest people in Uganda. The most vulnerable literally have no food. We met this old man sitting under his mango tree. He spent all day waiting for the mangoes to fall out of the tree so he could eat them. When the mango season finished he had nothing. So we have been sending money for emergency porridge to be distributed to Mango Man and around 100 other people in his situation. Tragically we were too late for some and they died of hunger. Can you imagine... in 2022. I started Seeds for Development in 2007 because I couldn't get my head round people dying of hunger when we chuck food away. Fifteen years later, they still are. It makes me so angry. When the big aid agencies said that COVID will put progress back by about 20 years, they weren't wrong.
Of course there were some great moments during the trip - visiting the nursery school we built during COVID, watching hte foundations being dug for the next one and catching up with friends and families that we hadn't seen for ages. But the lingering memory will be one of sadness and frustration.
Not all gloom and doom here though. Last month an amazing thing happened. We were called by a group of teenagers asking to volunteer for Seeds for a week - as part of a programme they were participating in during their summer holidays. We had a day to prepare what they could do ... they were also fundraising for us as part of their activities.
They LOVED the fact that 100% of donations go to the projects on the ground and that they could choose their project for the money to go to. They chose PORRIDGE! Their mission was to become our digital agency for a week and create social media posts! They had so much fun and raised enough money for more than 7,000 cups of porridge!
I hate asking for money (which probably makes me the worst fundraiser in the world) but if you are able to spare just a few pennies or pounds or dollars to provide people like Mango Man and Porridge Face with some life saving porridge. It costs just 8p for a cup of porridge, so your money goes a very long way.
Thank you for support and reading this.
Sending you all best wishes
Alison
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
