Face to Face With the Ugandan Crisis

March 7, 2006 — -- As the focus of world leaders at the Group of Eight meeting, the Live 8 worldwide series of rock concerts and President Bush's Africa initiative, 2005 was the year that the world's spotlight shone on Africa. The attention was welcomed by relief workers such as Joyce LeMelle, the Save the Children U.S. field director in Uganda.

LeMelle deals every day with the humanitarian disasters caused by war, the AIDS pandemic and extreme poverty that all aid organizations face in their work on the continent.

"You are dealing with people who are really very poor. We're working to try to alleviate poverty and so sometimes that can be kind of painful but it also makes you realize how much work needs to get done," LeMelle said.

A relatively young and tentative democracy, Uganda emerged from the violent dictatorship of Idi Amin and the devastation of civil war during the 1970s and 1980s.

The brutality, however, has not stopped. The ongoing conflict in the north of the country between the fundamentalist Christian Lord's Resistance Army and the civilian population has displaced more than 1.6 million people and left a multitude of massacres and mutilations in its wake.

Away from the horrors of the north, other problems continue to threaten the country. More than 1.5 million people in Uganda are HIV positive, with the virus affecting mostly those adults between the ages of 20 and 49 -- in other words, the most productive members of Ugandan society. Along with the economic devastation caused by HIV-AIDS, the virus has left 1.7 million orphans in its wake and continues to remain a serious threat to the population as extended families and communities strain to cope with the fallout.

Among the various nongovernmental organizations with a presence in the country, Save the Children U.S. has worked with disadvantaged communities in the Nakasongola district since 1999. Nakasongola has a population of approximately 126,000 people, around half of whom are under the age of 15. The organization's development work has focused on aiding the communities by providing food and health, security and learning opportunities for both children and adults.

With education being one of Save the Children's primary interests, the organization has set up 43 nonformal, community-based education centers for children called Chance schools. These Chance schools currently serve 3,917 children in small classes with programs that follow the Ugandan school curriculum, while Save the Children provides the training and technical capabilities, as well as material support to teachers. Alongside the schools, adult literacy circles, often made up of the pupils' parents, run in tandem to assist the community as a whole.

Making Education Flexible for Working Children

Setting up education projects in these rural areas has not been without its difficulties, LeMelle said.

"Our schools were set up in areas where children don't have the opportunity to go to school," she said. "The majority of them have to work. Either they're the ones who are fetching water in the morning, or they're the ones taking the animals out to drink, so they don't have a chance to go to the regular school because it takes too long, so our schools have a flexible day. We also have a flexible calendar because we understand that sometimes children are needed to help with the harvest."

Most of the health concerns of Save the Children center on mothers and children and HIV-AIDS support groups; the organization also works with the Nakasongola district health office on its malaria campaigns. Malaria is the biggest killer of children under the age of 5 in Uganda, so Save the Children has put in place immunization and education campaigns, and treats those already infected with the disease.

Households affected by HIV-AIDS are particularly vulnerable to poverty, as the majority of those infected are the breadwinners in the family. Every month LeMelle holds meetings with the Save the Children team at the Nakasongola health office and encounters many elderly people who are left caring for their grandchildren as their sons or daughters have succumbed to the ravages of AIDS.

"If the parents have died and there's a chronically ill older person in the family, it means the income in that household has decreased; those are things we have to focus on in our work here in Uganda," she said. "Even our staff here have been affected by HIV-AIDS, so I think the work that we do revolves around working with the community as a partner, and that is something that can become a model for other countries where HIV-AIDS prevalence is climbing."

As well as providing food-security programs, HIV-affected households receive monthly food rations and are connected with support systems that allow vulnerable individuals to build their capabilities through development, such as acquiring fishing skills or making tablecloths to sell so they can support themselves.

LeMelle is passionate about the idea of giving a community the means to take on the challenges willingly with the right support. Her dedication to this idea means that she places lot of emphasis and faith in the local team in Nakasongola, whom she credits with making the projects a success.

"We are on the right track. It takes a long time, it's a lot of changing people's behaviors and that is a long process," she said. "If I didn't have the team that I have we probably would be back here -- they're hard-working, dedicated, mostly Ugandans. We couldn't do the work that we do if we didn't have them."