Changing Childrens lives in Uganda

My name is Saskia and I am an advocacy volunteer with USDC, the organisation which AbleChildAfrica works with in Uganda. My work in the first few weeks involved traveling around Uganda and meeting disabled children, their families, teachers and local officials.

It was an honor and a privilege to be able to do this. I met inspiring and incredible people who are overcoming difficulties and barriers that no one should have to face.

I found out pretty quickly that the impact USDC has in the lives of disabled children in Uganda is dramatic. They literally offer a life line to children and families who are living lives which are simply unimaginable to me coming from England. I met physically disabled children who literally dragged themselves 5km a day in order to get to school and secure the education they knew would change their lives. I met parents who had given up everything to fight for the rights of their disabled children. I met school teachers who spent their free time going to the most remote of villages to find and enroll in school disabled children who were being hidden at home. In the areas where USDC does not yet work due to lack of funding people knew about the organisation and were pleading for USDC to come to their district.

In each of the districts we visited members of the Parent Support Group, which USDC supports. They took us to meet families whose entire family life had been changed. In Lira (North-East Uganda) we met a family who had nearly fallen apart when their little girl was born with club foot, something which would be corrected at birth where I come from. Left unchecked club foot can be completely debilitating. This little girl had stopped being able to walk, she was in huge pain, bullied by other children, and her parents were ostracised from the community where disability is seen as a curse. They had started to hide the little girl and had become desperate as they had no idea what the solution was. The parent support group found this family, USDC funded corrective surgery for her and counselled the family. They also work to change attitudes in the community by providing information about disability and are working with the family to get her into school when she is old enough. Without USDC this little girl’s entire life would have been very different.

I also made a point of visiting some of the districts where USDC does not operate to see if there was much of a difference. Uganda is made up of over 85 local districts. Currently USDC only has funding to operate in 15 of these. I noticed a dramatic and unnerving difference. In some of the districts where USDC is not present the levels of disabled children in school were shockingly low, the facilities were terrible if in existence at all and levels of health care and knowledge about disability were appalling. Human rights exist and Uganda has fantastic national policies on disability and yet people are still suffering. It is USDC’s hands on community based solutions that translate this into reality in the places where it can afford to work.

I met one 19 yr old visually impaired man who was studying with 7 year olds because his parents had refused to send him to school seeing no value in educating him. It was only when he reached adulthood and could openly defy his parents that he stared school. He was one of the most intelligent and determined young men I have ever met. Yet he has wished away his entire childhood so that he can make his own decisions and get an education. This would not have happened had there been a USDC presence in this district. Parent Support Groups would have been out in his communities finding and supporting him and his family. There would have been active work in local schools to ensure that disabled children get to school.

Traveling around Uganda showed me that a lot work still needs to be done. I also learnt that over the past 25 years USDC has worked up a holistic model of support which WORKS – where USDC is people’s lives are better; it is as simple as that. One of the parents put it like this “USDC came and brightened our lives. They have given us the power to stand for ourselves with our children and make things better.”