The Yebo world cup!

Today we had great fun, playing football against the local school which was organised by Silver who works for CSWCT.  The volunteers were greeted with great hospitality from the staff and pupils of Kusubi high and we set out for our football match, many of us were very worried about playing as we had never played before!

Heidi and Theo took off to a flying start, keeping the ball well controlled.  With Emmy in goal things were looking great, but then went down spiral as the first 2 goals were scored by the very good school team, who had been told to play an easy game for us!

Half way through the game, we were given 2 players from the school to have on our team as we were doing very badly! But these 2 boys had to have their arms tied behind their backs to be fair to the others. They very helpfully scored us 2 goals which was great!!

A great game was enjoyed by all of the Yebo volunteers and we very much enjoyed meeting the school, the teachers and pupils who made us feel so welcome.  We had a great day and a lot of fun was taken from this. A big thank you from all of the Yebo team to Kisubi high staff and pupils and also to Silver for helping to organise the day.

It was a great experience to visit a different side of children, to the children we had been working with from the orphanage and we really enjoyed the day.

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.

The children who live on the street visit us for the day

Today was a very special day for the Yebo team as we had a group of special visitors.  25 of the children who currently live on the streets in the slums were picked up by our bus and brought to UWEC,  the wildlife centre where we are staying.

Most of the children have never been outside of living on the streets as have been born into them.

Having visited their home the day before, we did not know what to expect of them, and because of the place they were living, we automatically presumed that the children would not be happy at the centre which made us quite anxious.  However when the children arrived they were the most beautiful bunch of children.

Patrick and William, who work with the children on the streets had chosen 25 children who they have known for a while to attend the day with us where we would be doing some activities with them and meeting the wildlife and chimpanzees. They had been to the street slums early that morning to wash and dress them in clean clothes ready for the day which we were all looking forward to.  For most of the children, this was the first time they had been out of the slums as many of them had been born into  the streets for many different reasons. The children each have their own individual life story, many orphans, abused, victims of prostitution etc.

We started the day by introducing all of us to them and vice versa.  What we didn’t realise was that most of the children had already met us the day before on the streets, but just looked incredibly different in another environment.   We took the children around the wildlife centre spending a lot of time at the chimpanzee island.  The children all sat on the steps by the chimpanzees home and were told that the chimpanzees also had gone through difficult backgrounds, but they had now been given the chance to have a better life, and although they were not near their old friends, they had now made new ones and it wasn’t a bad place.  The children were told that they shouldn’t ‘give up hope’ and that the chimpanzees had now been rescued and brought into a different environment, even though they may have not known what would happen to them.  They told the main thing they should take with them from this visit was the feelings of the chimpanzees before and after they arrived at the sanctuary, and to never give up hope.  The children were all very silent when listening to this.

After looking at all of the animals the children were provided with a meal for lunch with a drink.   We were told by Patrick that this was the most exciting part of the day for them! He told us that the children will normally get their food from garbage bins, bags and sometimes if they are lucky will take the left over garbage food from the local hotel after they have closed. The water that they drink is not clean.

The children said that they really enjoyed their meal and drink and couldn’t stop talking about it after they had eaten it.  We were glad that we were able to provide them with a meal.

After lunch we proceeded to the activities room where we had organised a number of different activities.  They were slightly different from the children we had been working with before, as we made animals, primates etc out of garbage, and also used different forms of art that would be more suited to their abilities and ages. The activities were very creatively put together by the volunteers, and the children were drawing pictures of things that they thought they had learnt about the chimpanzees and their homes.  Every picture in that age group we observed drew a picture of a house, with a family, dogs, trees etc outside, which we found very interesting.  One of our volunteers, Dani, used her social work training skills to observe and identify different behaviours in all of the groups of children that we had been working with on the different visits to the centre.

The day went really well and the children appeared to have had a great day. They loved bubbles and balloons and it was great to see them having fun.  This opportunity for them to use art to express their feelings also showed us how talented many of them were and what wonderful skills they had, and how clever many of them were.

A couple of the children had just laid down on the floor of the room we were in and had fallen asleep. Patrick and William let us know that these children don’t normally get a lot of sleep and that the smooth floor in the room we were in was a very comfortable place for them to sleep than what they are used to.

So this day had taught us a lot of things, one being that we should never judge a young person or child from where they are living and their behaviours.  Allowing room for both of these things enabled us to work well with them, and get to know them each as ‘talented’ and ‘beautiful’ children, rather than the same children we had just ‘walked past’ the day before in their home in the slum.  How grateful we all were to have been given the opportunity to work with these children, and to get to know them as individuals.

As we said goodbye, we felt very sad, some of us even shedding a slight tear as the children were driven off in the bus, as we suddenly realised they were being taken back to their streets in the slums.

Living on the street to having a future

In the afternoon after visiting the slums we were able to travel about 2-3 hours away to a piece of land that  has been donated to Raising up hope Uganda orphanage.

The land is in a rural area and far from where the children are living on the streets. Patrick describes this as being an important environment and that being far from where they are living now is vital.  He explains that sometimes the children living on the streets will run back to where they are living on the street due to having their friends there, and knowing where they are.  This project aims to help the children’s recovery in a different way.

Patrick and William, directors for the orphanage who support the street children living in the slums, are planning to use this piece of land to become a small sanctuary for 5-10 children from the streets, to enable them to gain new skills looking after animals, taking care of them and being around nature etc.  The land also would like to be used for growing vegetables so the children are also learning about sustaining their livelihood. The overall project aims to give the children a chance to take responsibility for themselves and animals.  The local community are also able and welcome the care and support that the children will need from them, by teaching them social skills and other behaviours that the children have not had the opportunity to be taught.

The community also provides a therapist who is able to help the children with the traumas that they have faced.  This may work well in conjunction with the animal section.

Our volunteers had a great time meeting the community and also helping to dig up some vegetables that they are growing on the land to take back to the orphanage.

We hope to support this project in the future.

Visiting the children at the slums…their home

The volunteers went with Patrick and William who run and manage Raising up hope to the slums where the children from their orphanage have come from.  As their orphanage is full up, they still go into the slums to help out the children who are living there.

Walking through the slums with our guides and Patrick, we watched and walked alongside young children and teenagers who slept in cardboard boxes, in mud and sewage, who lived as prositutes to survive their next meal, who scavenged from garbage bins for food, or who would raid the local hotel bins for scraps.

We walked by children laughing, dancing to their music playing from speakers, and children crawling into the side of small shacks to get shelter.  We passed young teenagers smoking and drinking and also those who were happy to see us with big smiles on their faces.

We were taken with great caution for our own health and safety, through parts of the slum which were easier for us to walk through, but at the same time, aware that we were being kept safe, and those around us weren’t. We had been told that many children had lost their lives in a local canal, due to being chased by the police and as we walked the children showed us where they slept, between bin bags and dirty wet, muddy floors.

We walked for just 15 minutes and saw for our own eyes, just a small glimpse of the environment that the children live in.  When getting back on the bus we were able to change our clothes, making sure we were clean and free of any germs, using our antibacterial hand washes, stopping off at a ‘well presented’ wash room to wash our hands etc with water, just to make sure we were extra clean, getting back onto the bus to describe where we had been as ‘horrific’.  People live here 24 hours a day…we went for 15 minutes and then had the chance to make sure we were clean with new clothes on within 15 minutes of leaving the area on our bus.

“Yes, makes you think doesn’t it”

Children’s chimpanzee drama day

Today was also another special and lovely day as the Yebo volunteers got up early to prepare and go over their drama play activities that they had planned for the children to take part in.

The volunteers had previously planned their stories and activities and were running through the drama plays before the children arrived.

The plays had all been directed to the ages of the different children and the groups that they had worked with the day before.  The volunteers had also made up a chimpanzee song to teach the children to the style and tune of 5 green and speckled frogs, which was turned into…5 little chimpanzees!

The aim of today was to focus more on the chimpanzees and their stories.  The volunteers began to really use their knowledge of all the things they had been learning about chimpanzees in the past week to work on todays project.  The individual chimpanzee stories given to us by one of the keepers was used to make a drama story with actions for different feelings.

When the children were in front of the chimpanzees, we had them all seated on the steps.  At first they were again told about the life of the chimpanzees and how they were bought to UWEC sanctuary.  The volunteers began teaching them the actions and feelings in the stories of the chimpanzees which were being told to them. They appeared to enjoy this and picked up all the actions very quickly.

After spending longer with the chimpanzees and learning more about them we went back to the room where we were doing all the activities.  Each group put together with the children some great stories about the chimps and their lives and made these into drama plays where they used ther masks and music shakers that they had made the day before.  These were great and all of their characters really came to life.  The drama was performed to all of the people in the room which were the volunteers and other children.  They then proceeded to give us an amazing display of music and drumming which we all found amazing.

Blackie who is one of the primate keepers who is getting involved in the project spoke to the childre  afterwards and asked them questions such as what have they learnt in the past 2 days. The children appeared to be very responsive and positive in what they had learnt.  They spoke about taking care of one another like chimpanzees do, and that they can have similar lives to the chimpanzees who are also in an orphanage just like them. Blackie spoke to the children more about the link between their diffrent traumas and the chimpanzees traumas and how they can see that the chimpanzees have been through very hard times  being abused , orphaned etc and that the children will see that they are not alone in what is happening to them.

this was a great day for all involved and the positivity of the work really started to shine through.  We hoped that the past 2 days have been beneficial to the children and have also moved the project forward, to the next developmental stage.