Friends fund Uganda health centre
‘In rural Uganda there is a real lack of accessible health care. Many easily treatable conditions go neglected.'
Quakers have helped raise funds to build a village health centre in Butta, in eastern Uganda.
According to Friends Community Development Trust (FCDT), which is funding the project, ‘In rural Uganda there is a real lack of accessible health care. Many easily treatable conditions go neglected. The building we are raising funds for will contain a lab to test bloods, room for eight beds and a small consulting room for a doctor. We have confirmation that the government of Uganda will provide trained medical personnel for the health centre once built. The health centre will be modest by European standards but a quantum leap for the Butta community. The community are making their own bricks using local materials. Where trees are cut down for construction, ten new trees of local species are planted to replace them.’
John Brown, trustee and clerk to FCDT, said the trustees are ‘very grateful to all individuals, LMs [Local Meetings] and grantmaking trusts that have generously donated money towards this project’.
The new health centre is the latest project proposed and run by the local, rural community, and funded by FCDT. These include a carpentry project that developed into a building programme for young adults. The community then applied to the Ugandan government for support for a ‘seed’ secondary school, built by them, with teachers funded by the government. In rural Uganda attendance at secondary school can be as low as seven per cent, with very little secondary education for girls. This project now has 131 students, fifty-nine boys and seventy-two girls.
The region was affected by devastating floods earlier this year, with members of the community distributing safe drinking water. John Brown said: ‘Thankfully the flood waters did not hit the area where we are working but the school building we had funded was able to be used to temporarily house families who had lost their homes.’
Comments
Please login to add a comment
