Greetings from Papoli.

Yes, the Lord continues to answer our prayers and lots of good things are continuing to happen in Papoli, many people want to be associated with our success!. We are however facing challenges due to success as well, neighboring communities are coming over and we just have to accommodate them. Today we realized 98 kids, note, not all these kids are HIV positive and already tested, our strategy is to take in malnourished , sick kids who have symptoms similar to HIV carrying person or those whose parents died or are sick from HIV/AIDS, we also do this way so as not to have people having stigma and thinking that all the kids n the facility are sick and so are the parents! Other challenges are that community members are pressing for OPD and we have had to start treatment for the kids under our care. This we just could not do otherwise, we treat common diseases like malaria, flue, cough, skin rash and other HIV related disorders. We appreciated that all the parents, guardians and care giver could not afford taking these kids to Tororo general hospital or TASO. For now, this treatment may not require additional budget for we are “pouching” on the feeding account to cover this cost. We have had kids gain weight at amazing speed and this makes us so happy and gives us the zeal to go on and on and even extra miles!

Tomorrow, we are starting construction of a shelter that will serve as a dinning hall and training hall. The number of kids has out grown the space planned so the community members have cut some poles and we will get a small hall about 10x30 ft, grass cover. We will use it for training mothers on a number of child care and nutritive issues and will serve other purposes.

From these pictures, you will see:

• Sick kids being feed and taken care of at the safe house
• Mothers and care givers of the sick kids working in the gardens located at the lower end of the health centre property, they are clearing gardens for planting highly nutritious sweet potatoes that I collected from Gulu and the National Research Centre…it was breed specially to support nutritive requirements of people who are malnourished and those infected by HI and AIDS
• Some kids trying on dresses made from pillow cases that were donate to us by Tanya..American Children’s Foundation. Since there are very few pillows in Papoli, we had to get innovative and it has worked perfect, also it has been a practicing lesson for the women tailoring class
• You will also see our field social workers giving out a number clothes, bed sheets etc that were part of the Tanya donation
• You may recall that I reported on us initiating VCT- voluntary counseling and testing for our community members, yes we did test some 100 people, you will see some pictures of that
• You will also see pictures of our counselors at work with community members