A visit from the Raising up Hope children’s community project
Today we were lucky enough to have a visit from Raising up hopes community project. The children from the community project are part of an out reach programe run by Patrick, William and their team from Raising up Hope Uganda.
The children from the community project are still living with their families but receive outside support from Raising up hope such as providing them with clean clothes, food and washing/hygeine, which the families are unable to provide the children for varius reasons. This program enables children to stay in their families where they are loved and cared for, but being provided with all the basic needs that they need support with.
The community children are involved in other support such as fun games of football matches that are organised by Raising up Hope, giving them a chance to interact with other children in the same position as them and to gain confidence in themselves, and most importantly to have fun!
When visiting us at UWEC we enjoyed taking them around to see the animals, and again stopped at the chimpanzees a bit longer than the rest of the animals. This group of children were told that the chimpanzees also need lots of care just like them, as their families couldn’t look after them as well, but still loved them. They were explained that they get nice food and lots of care from their care givers.
In the afternoon, the volunteers worked with the children with various creative activities. Lots of painting, expressing themselves through art and making puppets and drawings. The older group took part in building a cartoon story board. The children were all asked to write a story of a chimpanzee. Each child without anyone asking drew pictures of chimpanzees and other animals from the zoo that hadn’t got any food. The pictures expressed that when the animals were sad, they didn’t have any food, and that when they were happy the animals did have lots of food. We found this a very interesting observation which was told by Patrick, saying they did not have much food at home.
The day went really well and we all enjoyed working with the children. At the end of the day, Patrick and the children made a big poster for us that said ‘Thank you Yebo team’ which we will put on our wall in the UK.
We hope now to support the community project in the future through our community programs.
