When the rains are coming, people start to plough  their gardens.... After a couple of months of drought, the land is dry and sandy, but even after one good rain shower, the new grass is coming out and when you thought that there was nothing growing, it was all dry and soil, you are every time again so surprised what there is all hiding in the ground... The ground is green again and the plants are growing....

The story starts with the picture of this cute little boy... We called him Paul and we think he was around 6 months old. On March 6, we received a phone call from a police post in the village. They had found a baby in the bushes, near the trading centre of the village. The villages are often very stretched and they mostly have a small centre, where the police has a post, where a couple of small shops are and where often also a very small market is. They found the Babyboy, laying in the bushes. The social workers hopped in the car to go and pick the baby.

We had a team building day, yesterday in Amecet. That is always a puzzle, because we can never close the place for something like that... we have the children in the house and we always have to care for them.. So we organized it at 12 o'clock noon till 3 pm. We fed the toddlers a bit early, so they went in bed for their after lunch nap at 12 and we started our programme.

This is a picture of Simon, one of our former children, he came years ago in Amecet, sick and malnourished. After some time, he was re-settled with his grandmother, we kept checking on him from time to time. Now he is with the help of our Tante Suus fund, learning how to repair motorcycles. he will be able to get a living, while he lives in the village. 

Emmanuel, or Emma as he is called here, has a new mammy, who loves him already, she wants to care for him and she wants to raise him as her son!!

After having been working here for almost 28 years, I still see and experience things or situations I can hardly believe......

The 3 little girls are almost the same age, the left and the middle one are from Triplets, their third sister is still with the mother, the right child is 2 weeks younger and her mother is only 16 years old. They are all from November 2023, so they are are around 1 year and 3 months old. They should be walking and talking, instead they can hardly sit by themselves. 

Meet Zoya and Zarah, they are part of triplets. Their sister, Zarida, is the middle one of the three. We know the three already for a while. they were born in Soroti hospital on 14 November 2023. That means that they are now 1 year and 2,5 months. We have been asked to see them when they were maybe 3 months old. The mother is single and only 20 years old. That time she lived in the home of a good Samaritan, who felt for her. The 3 little girls were very small and especially two of them were very tiny. They had been born 3 months too early. We could have helped that time by taking 1 or 2 of the girls to Amecet for a while. But the grandmother came and was very hostile to us, she believed that we would sell the girls.... So we just explained what we do in Amecet and offered to bring some clothes, soap and milk formula as supplement, because the mother could not breast feed the three girls. 

In this small coffin lays the little body of Jeremiah. He passed away this morning at 8.15 am. Very peaceful, the little heart just stopped....

Jeremiah was born in the village on 1/12/2024. His mother has a mental sickness, nobody knew the mother was pregnant, nobody knows his father. The mother gave birth at home, she was alone at that time. Jeremiah was a preterm baby, very small and very weak. He was her first born baby. The  baby was brought to the health centre and from there, Jeremiah arrived on the third of December in Amecet. His weight was 1.5 kg. 

In the blog from November 3, 2024 I wrote about the 3 mini baby's we got in one week.  It was quite a challenge, in the beginning we had feed them every 2 hours by NG tube, we had them together in one room, doors and windows closed, so it would be a nice warm room. We were very alert for sickness and how much they drank every day, how much they were gaining etc. 

On December 17th Caroline was brought to Amecet. She was brought by an organization, which works in the villages with families and children who are HIV+. Caro was HIV+, she was very malnourished, very weak and very unhappy.  The situation in her family was also not really stable. They were looking for a place where she could get stronger and more stable in her health. In the past we had received more children in Amecet via this organization. Caro came to us after a week in a hospital. Caro was 13 years old and her weight was just over 22 kg.