I made a very quick trip to Uganda in October for the graduation of my protegee, Angella Kanyiginya.

This goes back 12 years to when I was President of North Walsham R.C. in their 50th year, and wanted a good international project for the special year.  At the time I was working in Uganda regularly, and felt the project should assist AIDS orphans, so I organized a scheme for funding students in a village in western Uganda, within sight of the snow on the Mountains of the Moon, initially through primary school, but later secondary as well. 

School-Aid's aims are to:

• Improve educational resources for schools in Africa
• Foster non-political links between UK schools and African schools

School-Aid’s objectives are to:

• Increase the supply of used books, educational materials and sporting goods from donor schools in the UK
• Expand the recycling activities and logistics to transport the goods to needy African schools

Rotary International, Gates Foundation and UK Government pledge critically needed funds and urge donor and endemic country governments to help end crippling childhood disease

Rotary International, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the British and German governments today committed more than $630 million in new funds to fight polio, a crippling and sometimes fatal disease that still paralyzes children in parts of Africa and Asia and threatens children everywhere.  In addition to pledging needed funds, leaders urged additional donors and leaders of countries where polio still exists to join them in an aggressive push for eradication.

I travelled to a number of isolated villages inside Chin state, Burma cut off from the outside world, going deep into the jungle. Along the way I saw deep holes (sometimes as much as 2 meters deep) where villagers had dug deep into the ground and resorted to eating a type of tree stem/root “yam” called Tung/Bakô, because the rats had eaten all their other crops. Yet sometimes they could not retrieve the “yam” as large stones blocked the yam, so they would go hungry…