Ekkula

Ekkula is a home built in Kiwangala for girl orphans whose parents have died from AIDS. The house was constructed by the Dutch organization Livingstone last summer for students at Children’s Sure House who had no homes of their own. Wilma Schinkelshoek, a social worker, and her husband Sander were sent by Livingstone to oversee the transition of the girls into their new dwellings.

Ekkula means “something good; something beautiful”. The Schinkelshoek’s had the intention to call the house “Pearl of Africa” after the famous Winston Churchhill quote about Uganda, but in Luganda, the local language, there is no word for Pearl. If Baganda people speak about something good or beautiful they say it is Ekkula.

At this moment there live three girls live in Ekkula. They are: Vicencia, age 13, Mariam, age 12, and Sarah, age 10. All of the girls prefer staying in the house to their previous living situations.
“I like living at Ekkula,” said Sarah, because it’s close to school and it’s got electricity.”

The Schinkelshoek’s have returned to Holland, but the girls are now being looked after by Hope, a Ugandan social worker. A short distance a way, CSH has undergone construction on a home for orphan boys.

Kitchen Gardens

A Kitchen Garden is an efficient way to grow vegetables on land where there is a limited amount of space. The CSH Home Sustainability Living Approach Program have been teaching farmers, who live on small plots of land in Lukindu village, to build kitchen gardens in their homes.

The Kitchen Garden has many advantages. Vegetables are grown above ground on a layer of manure so the gardens can be built on rocky and otherwise unfertile land. The gardens can be built close to the house where they can be accessed by the sick and elderly. The structure is designed in a way that frail gardeners do not need to bend down to cultivate and harvest. The manure core provides a place for compost. The soil around the core becomes fertile immediately. The height of the garden and un-compacted soil promotes roots growth.


Steps to making a Kitchen Garden:

1. 1.5 meters of manure is piled into a tower controlled by a ring of cassava poles.



2. Soil is collected in a mound 2 meters in diameter around the manure. This gives the garden a pyramid shape.

3. An indentation is created and reinforced with cassava poles to allow farmer to irrigate manure center.

4. A border of banana tree trunks is placed around the base to discourage erosion.

5. Cabbages and other vegetables are planted around the mound. A layer of straw covers the mound to prevent erosion, insulate, and protect young plants.

6. The garden is irrigated and composted by pouring water and organic waste down its core where moisture and nutrients will seep down into the surrounding soil.

Home Sustainability Living Approach Program is Launched

On December 11th, 2008 the villages of Lukindu and Kiwangala came together to officially launch the Children’s Sure House’s Home Sustainability Approach Program’s model farm. The farm is at the home of John Ssentongo. He found that most of the his neighbors living in the area, many of whom are orphans and vulnerable children infected and affected by AIDS, were only eating one meal a day. Better food security was what the community needed.

A donation of seeds from Seed and Light International, an American NGO and planted them at Ssentongo’s home. His neighbors soon became interested and 25 local farmers formed a co-op. While they cleared the land and prepared nursery beds, Ssentongo and taught the importance of good nutrition, how to provide a their families with a better diet, and improved methods of farming. As the season progressed, the co-op took the seedlings grown in the garden and transplanted them in their own homes. Seedlings were also donated to students at CSH, where they started a community garden, and the local church that meets at CSH for service on Sundays.


The vegetables were ready for eating in December and the community, including several local councilmen and agricultural extensionists, gathered at Ssentongo’s home to celebrate and proclaim that his farm was a model for the village. After the first harvest, an estimated 125 people now have improved access to better nutrition. There are also countless others in the community that have changed attitudes in their eating habits.

“Before this project,” Ssentongo said. “People did not even know the value of vegetables. They did not even eat them, but afterwards, people are eager to grow and eat them. They are even aiming to get a surplus that they can sell to get income for their homes.

This coming planting season the co-op will continue their good work within the community. They will strengthen CSH’s agricultural program by offering vocational classes. The school will expand its community garden to the capacity that it can provide a school lunch for its 850 students. That way no one will have to live on an empty stomach.

Okwegatta Gemanyi Basket-weaving Group

Okwegatta Gemanyi is the name of a local basket-weaving group that lives in Kiwangala, a small village in rural Uganda. Okwegatta Gemanyi means “Unity is Power” in Luganda, the local tribal language. Kiwangala is located in Southern, Central Uganda. It straddles the Rakai District where the first outbreaks of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa were first documented in the 1980s. The disease has affected most families and left the area impoverished. The group is made up women who want to make some extra money to pay for food, clothing, and their children's school supplies. They currently work from their homes making baskets from sustainable materials that have been collected from the local swamp. Okwegatta Gemanyi also teaches weaving to teen-aged girls at Children’s Sure House, a school in Kiwangala that provides free education to orphans and vulnerable children. Richard Ssenkindu, a teacher who is currently pursuing an education degree at a local University, assists them. Another man in the village helps haul materials from the swamp. The women want to work together to eventually develop a co-operative.

Okwegatta Gemanyi has agreed to follow the tenants of Fair Trade. These include creating opportunities for the disadvantaged; transparency and accountability; capacity building through improve management skills; promoting Fair Trade through honest advertising; payment of wages at a fair price; encouraging gender equity; working conditions; discouraging child labor that affects their well being, education, need for play; ensuring good environmental practices; and not taking advantage of small producers for middleman profits.

For more information on how you can assist Okwegatta Gemanyi or to purchase a basket, contact childrenssurehouse@gmail.com.

Older Persons Program

AIDS has devastated Kiwangala and its surrounding parishes. In some families an entire generation has been wiped out. The elderly are traditionally cared for by their families if they become too frail. However, in many families only the grandparents and grandchildren are still alive. However, they are unable to care for themselves or their homes. Children’s Sure House has reached out with donations of food and household items like sugar and soap to individuals within the surrounding villages. They have even built new houses for families whose homes have crumbled from neglect. Now CSH plans to alleviate the long term suffering of the population by introducing programs that promote self-empowerment.

CSH’s Older Person’s Program will work together with its Home Sustainability Program to assist the older persons so that they continue to be productive in their homes and community.
This collaboration will develop the following activities to aid the elderly:

1. Provision of psychosocial counseling services.

2. Free education for the family’s grandchildren from Children’s Sure House and promotion of the Ugandan government’s Universal Primary Education policy.

3. HIV/AIDS sensitization through outreach.

4. Income generating activities through small-scale industries and
the use of locally available materials.

5. Persuasion of elderly property owners to lease out dormant land.

In addition, Makerere University’s Faculty of Social Sciences has partnered with Children’s Sure House to conduct field work on the livelihood of vulnerable members of the elderly population in the Kiwangala area.

This is a typical home in Kiwangala village. However, this woman cannot maintain the upkeep on the structure. The mud walls are caving in and rain leaks through the grass roof that has gone unthatched.

These are the participants of the CSH Older Person's program. They are caregivers to their orphaned grandchildren who are pictured below.

For most of his life, this boy lived with his grandmother in the house in the background. Recently, CSH was successful in mobilizing the community to build the family a more secure home.

Building a Firewood Saving Stove

In Kiwangala the majority of the village can only afford to cook on firewood or coal. Recently, collecting firewood has hurt the area's environment. The primary 7 class has built a firewood saving stove at headmaster Moses Kiwala’s home as a demonstration to the community. They have designed the stove out of bricks and clay so that wood burns more efficiently.

Below is a description of how CSH built their model stove:

This is a tea kettle set to boil in the existing cooking area. It was not much more than a campfire.

The students first dug a shallow pit, six inches deep, adjacent to the wall of the cooking wall. The depression was three feet long by two feet wide; the expected area that the stove would sit upon. Bricks were then stacked into place to create the general shape of the stove.

The new stove has two top burners for sauce pans. A passage way connecting the two opennings allows heat to circulate within the stove. There is also a small ventilation hole poked into the back wall that also promotes heat flow.

This is the hole where firewood is fed lengthwise one piece at a time into the stove. The bricks retain the heat so very little wood has to be burned for the stove to get hot.

Local clay was mixed in water and then used as mortar to fasten the bricks permanantly into place. Then the entire stove was covered and sealed with the leftover clay. The stove had to dry for about a week before it was ready to be used. However, that didn't stop the Primary 7 class from celebrating immediately after construction was complete.

Uganda's Ministry of Energy has also produced several good designs for firewood saving stoves. You can find them here.

Farmers’ Update

The farmers of Lukindu village are getting ready for August’s planting season. Before dawn, every Friday they drowsily meet at the village borehole to fill up their jerrycans and then trudge up the hill to John Ssentongo’s model farm to irrigate the fourteen nursery beds that they have planted.

The farmers have combined their skills and efforts into a co-op where they will share their agricultural knowledge and reap the fruits of their labors.

The seeds sowed include cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, eggplant, greens, and flowers.

They have been experimenting with a variation of designs to fully utilize the strength of the soil. Most seeds were planted in traditional rows bordered by banana tree trunks and shaded from the sun by banana leaf shelters. Some plants will be grown circularly around a dirt hill with a manure-centered cap. Water is poured over the top and runs down the side to provide a nutrient rich snack to the seedlings.

They will donate the seedlings grown in Children Sure House’s nursery beds to 15 families in September. The benefiting families will be instructed in nursery bed care, receive the harvest, and learn seed saving techniques to sustain their nurseries for future planting seasons.