Dear Friends and development Partners,
KHC celebrates three years
Greetings to you all and welcome to our August news update. We have reached another milestone, our third anniversary on July 27. We celebrated this achievement by having a staff day out at the Entebbe botanical gardens and the Entebbe resort beach. We had lots of fun, games, dancing, singing, swimming and socializing. It was a great day out and provided the staff and volunteers with some relief from our busy schedule of supporting KHC clients.
On October 14, we plan to have a week’s celebration of our achievements through an exhibition of our services and a formal ceremony. Invitations will be sent out to all friends and partners before mid September 2010.
Culture without Borders
Our founding director Ms. Anni Fjord in Denmark and a group of her friends have come together and set up an organisation called Culture without Borders. The group has been extremely helpful in supporting us by promoting our work and with the sale of beads made by our clients. They also conduct presentations about our work to members of their community and collect donations on our behalf. The monthly contributions help with administration costs and school fees for the AIDS orphans and vulnerable children.
Summer Time
It is that time of the year when our friends in Europe and parts of the United States of America enjoy their summer holidays. One of our volunteers with the beads for education project Elin, is away in Norway enjoying her holidays and using this opportunity to market and sell beads made by our clients. She has held a number of presentations and met many potential customers and store owners who have shown great interest in promoting our products. Good luck Elin and thank you for all your time and effort.
Visitors’ received
In July we were honored to receive the US Embassy small grants coordinator Ms. Connie Hansen who came to see the new developments at KHC especially the Orphans and Vulnerable Children’s activities. She visited the day care program and met the children enjoying themselves learning the alphabet, painting, drawing and playing. We are really grateful for her support to our palliative care and OVC programs and the overall encouragement to continue our services to the community.
We also received a group of visitors from Direct Relief International (DRI) and the African Palliative Care Association (APCA). DRI through APCA have provided us with free medicines for treating opportunistic infections and medical equipment to facilitate the care we give our clients. We had an extremely interactive time with them and shared our achievements and challenges. We also went out into the community for home visits to one of our patients who is paralysed and bedridden with advanced AIDS and another patient with AIDS and Cancer (Kaposi’s Sarcoma). Both patients are seen weekly by our home care team who provide palliative care. Thanks again to all the visitors for taking the time to come and share with us.
Capacity Building
As an ongoing process, we are always on the look out to for opportunities to improve our quality of work. In early August our Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator, Community Coordinator and Administrative Assistant attended a work shop on Project Planning, Management and Monitoring and Evaluation by Embergo Consult. They will also attend another workshop on proposal writing at the end of August.
In the last week of August the KHC clinicians are going to attend a 3 day national HIV update meeting organised by the Joint Clinical Research Centre and the University of Wisconsin, USA. Also at this workshop KHC has been selected to present a case study of patient management.
Operational Research
In April 2010 KHC in collaboration with ‘text to change’ started a 6 month Pilot study on the use of mobile phones to improve antiretroviral therapy adherence rates. The study has so far shown remarkable improvements in the adherence and clinical parameters the final results will be released in early October.
A second Quality of Life survey was done on a cohort of 100 patients who have been on antiretroviral therapy for 2 years. The follow up study was done by Laura an International Health student from Leeds University (UK). The results showed an overall good quality of life of the patients.
International Volunteers
KHC has partnered with Dialogos youth group, a Danish non-governmental organisation, who send young volunteers to get experience in medical and psychosocial work that we are doing in the community. In July Maja , a student nurse spent time in the clinic and our OVC activities including the day care program. It was a real pleasure having her around and we will really miss her enthusiasm and energy.
We encourage more volunteers to come and help support our work at KHC, all we need are people willing to give their time and skills. If you know anyone who may be interested please ask them to send me an email at sguma@08gmail.com
Till next time our friends, I hope you have enjoyed reading our update and please add any comments or feedback on what you would like us to include in our monthly blog. We enjoy reading your comments.
'You are the hearts we are the hands'
