The
Friends of Dowden, P Borland and the Parish of St. Thomas More
in Finsbury Park, UK was able to support us during our first
year under the new management by providing the necessary funding
(Shs 7 million) to help with the internal partitioning of the
clinic. They also took
the initiative to ‘sponsor’ the clinical officer
for a year thereby enabling funding to be made available for
drug and equipment purchases.
We
have also been supported by individual households with donations
for particular parts of our service, such as midwifery from
Mr &Mrs de Meneze, or laboratory services from Mrs Lockwood.
Cecilia and John Whelan and Mr & Mrs Mugan have made one
off pledges whereas others prefer a standing order arrangement.
A sum of £10 a month is a dinner out
for a UK resident, but 10 people doing that pays a nurse's salary
every month.
During the first part of 2005, we resumed construction
of the new facility and have been assisted in that by a large
grant of £1,000 from the Justice & Peace Committee
of Sacred Hearts church in Cheltenham, UK as well as pledges
from family and friends of £800 and £1,000. These
represent substantial support and enable the new facility to
be plumbed, have electrical installation and painted respectively.
We completed the work and moved in at the start of July 2005.
The Friends of Hope Clinic Lukuli -
NGO and companies
We have been able to equip the new facility
and expand our services through the support of the Rotary Club
of Makindye, through Past President Charles Kabunga and the
subsequent club presidents, and Past President Stephen Lloyd
of the Cleeve Vale club in Cheltenham and the subsequent club
presidents. The Matching Grant, with Rotary International, provided
over $20,000 which included medical instruments, a large programme
of malaria management including net retreatment and net distribution,
our essential power back-up system and beds and furniture.
We have also received $5,000 (Shs 10 Million)
from Aggreko Plc who has a long term role in Uganda as the providers
of 50MW of diesel power generation for the national grid. Aggreko
staff were trained by Hope Clinic Lukuli in HIV awareness and
to develop their workplace policies. In addition to printing
information materials for distribution to the community, they
made the donation which has enabled additional maternity equipment
to be purchased and two extra staff to be employed for nursing
and counselling.
The Kampala business community has been willing
to receive requests from Hope Clinic Lukuli and as noted on
the Tour page, we are grateful to the construction assistance
received from:
- Hima Bamburi for 100 bags of cement;
- Roofings Limited for 20% discount on all the steel, partly
mitigating world price rises;
- Standard Signs for providing and offering to maintain our
signage;
- Hwan Sung Industries for 30% discount on the uPVC windows
and mosquito screens;
- Roofings Limited for extra support by discounting the green,
plastic coated wire fence;
- The Tile Centre for the tiles and basins fitted to the
maternity shower and toilet, the other patient washrooms and
the tiled laboratory surfaces;
- CTM for the tap fittings which are in every medical room
with basins;
- Security Group for providing an alarm response system to
safeguard our 24 hour services to the community, our staff
and our patients;
- AIG Uganda, our insurer, who provided a large donation
which negated our premium in the first year of the new premises;
- Belgian Technical Cooperation for enabling us to buy a
Solar Construct water heater and contributing towards the
remainder of the plumbing costs.
The
UK charity, Hope for Children, has responded to our request
for a grant and has provided GBP840 to enable us to provide
health advice to the poorer youth in our ares including homeless
and those at risk from exploitation. We will be providing t-shirts
to raise awareness of our services oriented to the youth as
well as HIV tests for those completing the counselling towards
voluntary testing.
Through Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO-UK) we have begun a
link with Dr Tania John who is based at Mulago, the main teaching
hospital in Kampala. She is spending part of her time on the
Ministry of Health COBES programme of community based education
and we expect the new Hope Clinic facilities to be a base for
that outreach.
Population Services International (PSI) are an organisation
that has taken the benefits of branding and strong marketing
techniques and applied them to the task of educating and encouraging
use of medical services: family planning, ante-natal check
The
Aids Information Centre (AIC) have recently agreed to help the
existing clinic develop its Voluntary Counselling and Testing
(VCT) services which AIC already provide from their main office
at Mengo in Kampala. Following an initial tour of the clinic
and the new facility under construction we have agreed to a
twice-a-month programme whereby AIC will bring their counsellors,
lab technician and testing staff and spend a whole day with
the community around Hope Clinic Lukuli. On 22 June this was
advertised through an AIC drama team at the clinic and on 29
June 2004 we had our first AIC testing day. This was very successful,
with over 40 people being tested by mid-afternoon, compared
to 100 that the established AIC offices see per day. It is very
encouraging that the population's interest in their HIV status
could be served by our clinic and we appreciate the work by
AIC in serving that demand. In August we expect the counselling
sessions to occur in the new facility and soon after we would
hope to become a formal AIC outreach centre, the only one serving
the 300,000 people living in Makindye Division.
