The new year, 2012 has started on high gear with lots of dedication to duties by our day care staff and the volunteer teams spread all over the 11 sub-villages in Papoli and 5 other neighboring villages that share common facilities like borehole wells, school, clinic with the people of Papoli.

We designed an inclusive strategy that groups our small labor force coupled with volunteers into 4 Sectors; namely 1.Onsite day care service- catering for average 85 little kids who are brought to the day care centre on daily basis; 2.Home based care service for children who are being weaned from regular daycare and are given assistance from their homes numbering 52; 3.Community health education, where our staff go out to the people to teach and demonstrate to them how best they can improve upon their health right from the sleeping places, kitchen, compound, latrines, bathing, food preparation-cooking, vaccination against killer diseases like TB, tetanus,measles etc and 4.Medical treatment at the day care facility for all groups of people from Papoli and beyond. We involve the community membership into active voluntary participation that results into less external requirements; including participation.

We have also started construction of four in one unit for our health technical staff who currently live a distance to the work site; the community members have been very active here, they baked 42,000 bricks which are more than enough for the project and completed sinking pit latrines. Collected local construction materials like sand, stones/hardcore, aggregates etc. Work is in progress and our target is to have the staff occupy the new house by May, all going fine. Having medical staff at site will enable them attend to many emergencies including at night and also take care of the boarding students in our new primary school hostel that has been named after Martha Kawala.

We have also started on construction of a big store and office space all of 40x30 ft for storage of our health centre supplies like beds, mattresses etc and offices for our community workers. Construction is now at roofing level and when completed we will gather all our things now scattered across some small stores in the village and have our staff in better office accommodation. Other partners; we have continued to engage the district local government, World Vision area programme office, Tororo general hospital and other players in the field of health and actively participated in influencing their health service delivery in the rural areas of our district. Our partnership with VPI-Village Partners International is great and growing; the linkage with others through VPI like University of South Florida, The American Foundation for People with AIDS and others are maintained and continue to grow daily.

Emmanuel Ofumbi
PAPOLI