By William Logai Ochieng | Eexecutive director
Despite the glimmer of hope, South Sudan remains a troubled nation. South Sudanese people are continuing to flee into neighboring countries, and long-time refugees in those countries fear to return home.
I saw the situation for myself on my recent trip to Northern Ugandan, near the South Sudanese boarder, where I visited the projects we have supported for many years. While HOPE Ofiriha focuses largely on the huge need in northern Ugandan where refugees are settled and in South Sudan, it is not easy to forget that for 17 years we have been helping various South Sudanese ethnic groups, who have fled to Uganda during Sudan longest war. With your support, we are determined to go on helping them. They have suffered terribly in the past, still live in fear, and there is little chance of them returning soon. Many are amputees who lost limbs from landmines while fleeing from South Sudan. Others lost members of their families through the ethnic cleansing that took place before they left. Our support over the last few years has been in microloans to help South Sudanese women living in Uganda as refugees. I was able to visit several families who have been helped by your donation to establish small-scale income generation activities. Two of these impressed me. The first was a woman who sells noodles, sauces and other food items in a small local market in Kibuli in the outskirt of Kampala. She has gained a large number of regular customers, and when I visited her, she had a queue of customers. Both stranded refugees and newly arrived, waiting to be served. As always I am extremely proud of the fact that GlobalGiving is supporting work that helps those who are the most unfortunate and overlooked. It is so important that South Sudanese refugee women can look after themselves and not be dependent on handouts. We need to help as many of these women as we can to establish simple projects such as food making, pig rearing, and local brews for income generation. In the next quarter, HOPE Ofiriha posts a new field update report to let you know how your contribution is making positive change in the lives of refugee women, their families, their children, and their community.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.
