Meet Jessie Maughan. Together we will be managing over 20 volunteers to carry out a variety of development projects in Uganda. Jessie and I just finished our first year of the Masters in Public Administration program at BYU. We were actually on the same team in our first semester of the program, and we've become great friends. We weren't expecting to get paired as co-directors! We are a good team and we look forward to working together.
We've arrived
It was a long trip: from Salt Lake City to Houston, Houston to Turkey, Turkey to Rwanda, Rwanda to Uganda. Then a two hour car ride to Mukono, Uganda, followed by a four hour car ride to Mbale. Couldn't want to hit the sack!
When we first got to Mbale, our goal was to find a house within 24 hours. Eight homes and five days later, we found a house!
We had to find a place that would accommodate 20 volunteers, that was enclosed by a cement wall, that was within our budget, and that was habitable. In Uganda, the housing process is a bit different. They show you a house that's being renovated. Once you've committed to purchase the house, they finish the renovations and clean it out. You have to imagine what the house would look like if all the renovations were finished, and if all the dead cockroaches were cleared out!
Once we decided to buy the house, we sat down with Moses, the caretaker of the house, to negotiate the contract. We started low, he started high. We ended up deciding on a price of 1.4 million Ugandan Shillings per month. It's pretty sweet that you can find a house with five bedrooms, and four bathrooms for about $560.00 per month. We had a good friend, Saleh, with us the whole time to make sure we got a fair deal. Saleh has been a loyal friend to HELP International for years. We've been staying at his hotel while we waited to find a house.
We typed out the contract, saved it on a flash drive, went up the street to a printing business, printed it, signed it. Finally, we have a house!
Partnerships
HELP International's model of doing development work is to partner with local government and non-governmental organizations that are already doing good work in the community, and we assist them with their work.
Our first wave of volunteers will arrive May 15, so we have about two weeks to form partnerships with organizations that do impactful work.
So far we've seen several organizations. We visited the HIV/AIDS Support Network (HASN), an NGO located in the Namatala slum. Their mission is to provide support and counseling to people in the community that test positive for HIV.
We visited Child of Hope, a Christian charity that produces a huge social impact for slum children and their families in Eastern Uganda through free education, healthcare and welfare.
We also visited CURE Hospital. CURE has hospitals in 10 different countries. CURE Uganda is a specialty teaching hospital that treats the neurosurgical needs of children, with an emphasis on hydrocephalus, neural tube defects, spina bifida and brain tumors.
We've visited a number of other organizations, such as Mbale Regional Hospital, the Foundation for Development of Needy Communities, Namatala Primary School, Educate, and many others. These organizations are incredible, the people that work there are so pure and good.
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