Ema - 6 months on and doing good!

On the 20th Feb this year I posted a blog entitled 'The Highs and One Low of an Acholi visit' (http://softhearthardfeet.blogspot.ug/2016/02/the-highs-and-one-low-of-acholi-visit.html if you want to read it again)

The 'low' was the visit I made to a dear friend, Catherine, and her husband Jonathan, and their 3 day old baby, and hearing about how they were struggling to feed the baby as they didn't have the money to buy baby milk that was guaranteed safe to drink, and yet because Catherine was HIV +ve she had been told she couldn't breast feed.

It was a heartbreaking situation - seeing the desperation on the faces of the lovely parents, as they had to cope with knowing that due to their poverty, each time they fed their baby, they might be giving him contaminated and potentially fatal milk.

Well today, I was able to go back, and visit Catherine and baby Ema again. Jonathan wasn't around, he was out trying to find work, but what a joyous time it was to meet up with Ema, now 6 months old, and thriving!

Thanks to some financial donations, we were able to give Catherine the money she needed to ensure that Ema had good quality milk made with safe water, and just look at the outcome!

What a wonderful answer to prayer! Praise the Lord indeed :-)

Baby Ema with Catherine his mum 

Baby Ema fascinated by the 'selfie' camera mode!

Konka – the next bit of the jigsaw

Matthias is another of the gold miners in Busia. When I met him, he voiced his own thoughts in praise of the Kacha.

He said: ‘it has saved us our life as we have less use of mercury and so we don’t have as many dangers of using mercury any more. Now we only use a tiny amount to do the final amalgamate. This is so much better than before when we had to use more. There are so many dangers associated with Mercury – first hand for those using it, also the risk of children getting contaminated by it when they come by to see their mums; if the women are pregnant it is extra dangerous as the use of the mercury can affect the baby; and then of course we don’t know if it is in the water systems from being spilled, or from the washings. The environment has suffered through using the use of mercury in the gold process, and so have we. If we can process the gold without using mercury it will make our lives so much better, so much healthier, and also for our children. And it will make our environment so much cleaner and better. We just want to be free from having to use mercury, so if we can get the Konka as well that will be our prayers answered’

And that is our aim: to provide the miners with the final pieces of equipment that they need so that they will have the ability to do the full processing of the gold in a completely mercury-free way. The full set is one Kacha, two Mastas, one Konka and one Smelter – once they have all the pieces they will be set. Their lives will be mercury-free,  they will be recovering more gold from the same amount of ore, they will have time to carry out all the other aspects of life that make up the day-to-day routine of rural Ugandan life, and they will be gaining some more income so the children can go to school, healthcare bills can be covered, clothes can be bought, and repairs to housing etc can be made.

What is really exciting is that, thanks to the input of Ugandan NGO EWAD who are facilitating a whole range of additional pieces of training, and work-based improvements, the miners, and the groups in which they work are moving ever closer to becoming certified as fairtrade gold producers.

One of the lasting memories for me about visiting these gold miners, apart from the depth of praise and rejoicing that they had for the impact already made by the Kacha, and the hope that they have for the added benefits of the Konka, was the paradox seen between their lifestyles and the mineral they are finding.

Here they are, digging for gold – an item most associated with wealth and prosperity, and yet many of the miners are living in rural poverty, and in houses, some of which are perched right on the edge of gaping holes in the ground that are the mineshafts. The least we can do is equip and empower them to be able to achieve better working conditions, better living conditions, better family lives and more hope for the future.

It has been a fascinating visit to Busia to meet the small-scale artisan gold miners, and their cooperative groups. My thanks go to EWAD, and especially Margaret, Joshua and Kevin, for leading, photographing and driving respectively. Also to EWAD generally for all that the whole team are tirelessly doing to help transform so many lives.

Thanks also go to Greg Valerio for introducing me to the project in the first place and to the Guernsey Overseas Aid Commission for donating the money to CRED to enable purchase of the Kacha and Mastas.

A massive thanks goes to the miners – for their welcome, their willingness to show me round and answer what must have seemed like some pretty daft questions, and for all the hard work they put in day after day after day – I feel so honoured to now be involved in their lives, and in helping to transform those lives for the better.

But most of all thanks be to God, for so beautifully and perfectly linking all the different people together who feature in any way in the story of Kachas, Mastas, Konkas and Smelters in Uganda.

PS if you want to be part of the story – it’s not too late! Go to http://cred.org.uk/gold/ to make a donation J

Kacha and Mastas – life-changers on the gold front

Rosemary is a small-scale gold miner living and working in the depths of rural eastern Uganda.

She doesn’t actually do the mining – that’s the work of the men. But her task, along with that of several other women in the village, is to spend hours at a time sluicing and panning the powdered ore, to find what gold they can.

It’s back-breaking work, and the returns are such that the women have to pan from morning to night to try and earn enough to make ends meet. As a result they barely get time to see their children, or cook food, or do any of the other chores that go with living a subsistence lifestyle without any of the mod-cons we take for granted.

Life is harsh indeed, and the older children often end up having to take on the role of surrogate mother to the younger ones, whilst the parents work at the mines.

But, life is taking a turn for the better, thanks to the installation of Kacha and its associated Mastas: a ‘wonder machine’ as one of the miners described it to me. I have had the joy of spending a couple of days with the miners in Busia district, and hearing for myself the impact of the Gold Kacha, which was installed in the area in April this year, thanks to some funding obtained through CRED Foundation from a donor fund in Guernsey.

As Rosemary said: ‘until now life was just about finding food to eat, covering education, and getting from day to day. Now, with the Kacha, I am looking forward to being able to have a little more than that. I am looking forward to being able to look after my family properly’.

This ‘wonder machine’ that Rosemary is so excited to be starting to use, uses centrifugal force to extract gold in much greater quantities than was being extracted by panning and sluicing. Whereas before the miners got 65% of the gold at best, they are now recovering 96% - that’s a significant improvement to say the least, and equates to a lot more income for the family. It also extracts the gold much faster, meaning that the amount of ore that used to take a day to pan, now takes an hour, giving the women more time to spend doing other things.

Betty, one of the other women that I met reinforced all this when I chatted with her about the Kacha:

‘The benefits to the women are many. For example it is easier for us as there is now less heavy lifting as we don’t have to stand at the top of a Z and load the ore onto the mat. Also we don’t have to spend a long time panning. Before we might be panning for a whole day, now that has gone.

We get more time with our children – we can be there for them more. And we have time to go and do the garden in the morning before going to the mines, so we have more healthy foods.

We get time to do the cooking as well. Sometimes before we would be so tired we would just go to the café to get some food in the evenings. Now we have time to cook for ourselves and give the children a good meal.

We feel that our parent role is better fulfilled now, and we feel happier with ourselves as parents.

And for the pregnant women it is much better as it is easier on the back’.

What more do I need to say! The Kacha, with its associated Mastas (two sluice boards that make up part of the process), is changing lives for the better. Our aim is to get funding for even more of these pieces of equipment, so that they can be installed in more small-scale gold mining communities and help spread the benefit even further.

NB: There is one other bit of equipment that needs to be gained  to complete the suite of mercury-free gold processing, and help pave the way to fairtrade gold status – the Konka – but I’ll tell you about that another day. For now let’s just rejoice in the Kacha-inspired improvement in the lives of Rosemary, Betty, and so many others.

Acholi Adult Literacy success stories

When I was last at the Acholi Quarters, back in February this year, I met some of the men who had just started going along to the Adult Literacy Classes.

The classes, which had been set up off the back of CRED Team Trips, had been running for a year by that time, but initially were just for the ladies of the cooperative that we work with. As the benefit of the classes became apparent (increased confidence in speaking and reading English, ability to understand signs, increased confidence with numeracy, and writing etc), the men started asking if they could also take part in the classes.
After some discussion amongst the ladies, it was decided to open the classes out to men, and the first eight joined the group

Today, I went in to the Acholi Quarters to meet with Harriet and chat through a number of bits and pieces relating to the project work going on there, as well as generally catching up with her about life in the community.

It was with great delight that Harriet shared with me a couple of stories of the participants of the Adult Literacy classes:

John had always wanted to be a carpenter, but because he had only had very basic education, that had been cut short by the conflict involving the Lord's Resistance Army, he didn't have the confidence with  numbers to be able to do the measuring required, or to read numbers from a plan and translate that into the lengths of wood that he needed to cut.
But thanks to the Adult Lit classes, that include numeracy skills, John has reawakened that bit of his early learning, and gained in confidence sufficiently to be able to prove to a local carpenter that he was worthy of employment.
John the carpenter - an Acholi Adult Lit success story:-)

The other story was another of the men - I confess I didn't catch his name but he had always wanted to be a builder. For him, the first obstacle to employment was his lack of spoken English, which meant that he wasn't able to understand what was being asked of him on the site (where English was the common language due to being a place where workers from so many tribal tongues would be found).
But thanks to the Adult Lit classes, and all the practice at speaking English, that obstacle has now been overcome, and whilst he is still quite quiet when it comes to speaking, he is very good to understanding what others are saying, and as a result is managing to hold down a job.
It's not a high-paid job by any means, but it is certainly better pay than his previous work in the quarries, and it is also more regular pay as well.

It was so lovely to hear these two stories, that show what a positive impact the classes are having. The hope now is that we can find a way to set up some more classes, so that more of the adults that are desperate to learn and help themselves work their way out of poverty can benefit.

Thank you to everyone who has helped make this first tranche of classes happen; praying for the provision for the next lot.