U.S Army Soldiers from the 316th ESC were supported by the Ugandan Guard Force in Balad, Iraq in 2007-2008 where they met the main gate guard who always practiced his English with everyone in the unit. We became friends on Facebook and enjoyed seeing the work that he was doing in his local community. We saw how far the U.S. Dollar went in Uganda and decided that we needed to help this community and the elementary school which only went through the third grade at the time.
In 2018, we established a non-profit organization to help the Kaguma Education Centre (KEC), called KEC-A Village of Hope, focused on how we can support the children, school, and the community. Their facilities are not conducive to learning and they had no electricity, internet, running water or modern sanitation.
The children needed better education and food and nutrition to stay alert school. We needed to help the school, as they had no processes in place to run the organization and we had a vision to add one class each year until grade 7. We needed to help the community with clean drinking water, and the school office with power and internet so we could easily connect with them. We want to help the community with other development projects that will put money in their pockets so that they can pay their school fees.
We have had many accomplishments and now have three nursery school classes and grades 1-7. We brought solar power to the office as well as computers for the staff. We’re training them on how to use computers. We partnered with another non-profit to dig a “well” and now they have clean drinking water. We purchased 7.4 acres of land and our long term goal is to build a new modern school with concrete walls and floors, instead of the dirt/mud floors and walls they currently have. In addition, we have also focused attention on medical issues and raised money to provide eye surgery for a young teen in the community who was having problems seeing because of eye scarring.
They say a mind is a terrible thing to waste and we believe in education and giving back to the extremely poor of Uganda by giving hope and financial support to the school
We look forward to empowering the community with improvement projects that will provide income to the parents so they have the funds to send their children to school.
Another critical effort is instituting a food and nutrition breakfast program which will increase enrollment of the school and provide the children the nutrition that they need to stay alert in class. For many of them, this will be their only meal of the day.
“Give Happy” and please help us support these sweet children who are desperately in need of our support. Teamwork makes the Dreamwork!!
