ISEE Solutions

Investing in Sustainability, Education and Empowerment Solutions

ISEE Solutions - Investing in Sustainability, Education and Empowerment Solutions

Update September 20

Greetings to you all,

I hope that you are well. September has been kind to us down here as we have continued to be kind. A lot more rain and we have been told that this might be the same for this season. A friend in Kenya was also telling me about her organization and trying to lobby for work that involves preparing people living in the slums of Nairobi. Preparing them for the forthcoming rains that might destroy and affect their houses.

The highlights of the week involve having cleared the PUL that is used to make sanitary kits reached and cleared for the taxes and other fees. The problem is that it has taken longer yet inland to reach me. It has taken about 25 emails back and forth trying to get it delivered to my home from where it will reach its intended destination. This is good because even amidst the challenges faced, reusable pads will be delivered to more girls within the boundaries of Uganda so that they can stay in school during this phenomenon.

This week, our work continued with our wonderful Mamas as they continue to struggle and thrive in their communities. The economy has continued to take huge deep as fuel prices have soared through the roof with a little going for as much as 5,450/- Uganda shillings per litre. This is about $2 CAD for just a litre of fuel. This makes transport more expensive hence increasing the costs of all goods and services — even the essential things like posho, beans, and tomatoes.

Amina with her soaps

Amina has started okay with her business. It took her a couple of days to measure the powder soap in portions that would match her target in terms of recouping the invested capital. It had to be measured carefully because it is easy to make losses in this kind of business. The extra bag was easier as it was already measured and packed by machines at the factory. I am glad we had this going already so she can be ready for the next term which starts in a few days from now. She has one daughter who is in a candidate class so it is very paramount that she finishes this level of school. However, she is loving her business and I have had to supervise quite closely to ensure we are on course with growth and consistency most importantly. She goes out and sells during morning hours and comes back in the afternoon to also sell some local herbs at her home. She has started to limit the involvement of the kids because she fears making losses at the initial stage. I encouraged her to involve them more because they are beneficiaries hence the need to involve them.

Justine

Justine has also continued to heal and it was good to see her standing comfortably on her left foot this time around. The immobility has surely affected her activities because this burn hindered her from going to the market to do the shopping herself. These farmers’ produce are very tricky to buy especially if you are shopping for someone else. The buyer has to know what she wants and also know the prices as sometimes prices here will change according to the demand and supply of the produce. I got a call from her and from last week, they have significantly improved their home. She was worried about the support we gave her, and I reminded her that our interest is in them having stable homes and sustainable businesses. Otherwise, she had repaired her entire floor and walls on the outside. She had one of the people she cared for in the past who came by to see her and saw what had happened so he asked her to call the builder and they made the respective upgrades. She had one unfortunate even when her grandson was involved in some unfortunate activities that he had to be apprehended. 

Annet

Annet has continued to struggle with her soap unlike Semmy who had home training and now makes incredible soap all by herself. I am tempted to bring her the trainer so she can have that going too. It was hopefully the plan that would ensure she increases her income but looks like we are lagging behind a bit on this one. We will have to buy her a measuring scale because it looks like this scale is what elevated the productivity of the soap making. It had been losing form and taking longer to dry. The good thing is that she still has a lot of ingredients and I have now been inclined to support her again with another training and weighing scale. This will help her a big deal in stabilizing and making the soap. I was happy to see her in the market buying books, tissue paper, socks and other small things for the little ones to go to school. This is the reason why we empower our Mamas to be able to send their kids to school.

Irene

Irene is also doing okay at the moment. The salon looks great and I hope it can be kept that way. Like Amina, Irene also has a daughter in a candidate class and I would like her to also go through this grade of school. I love the fact that the silverfish business worked out for her well and now she has restocked her salon along with another lady from the community to try and create a stable business.

Hadijja

Hadija is also doing great at the moment. Just the rains destabilize her but only a little because when it rains and the ground is wet, work is a bit hard as she works on the street as you can imagine. Her foot is doing well too and though she battles the loss of her daughter, she seems to be accepting her grief and living through it. I love seeing this woman work. She is focused and determined to make it work at whatever cost. 

Rovence

Rovence is also doing well. Although the food has been increasingly expensive, Rovence has managed to keep business going and customers are slowly improving. The customers had been very scarce recently but things have seemingly improved over the last week and she is happy about it. 

My hunt for Anna M, who has worked with us before in our reproductive health clinics and then turned to Mama Nguvu has been very tough for me to catch. I like Anna and I have tried my best to ensure that everything works out. I have followed her up and encouraged her to do projects but to no fruition. I am learning to let people loose. I will continue to look out for her and see if there is a chance.

Florence has not had the best of time these last few weeks as she is struggling a bit with her salon business. Otherwise, the chips are doing well and her peanut butter business is doing fine too. Her baby is doing well and her daughter (Angel) is also doing good as she has been sick recently. She has stomach ulcers and they tend to affect her during school days.

Francoise is doing okay. I love that she is looking incredible, her skin/face that had an irritation is now gone. She thought it was more of the water than anything else so I asked her to only wash her face with boiled water or purified water and it looked like it worked. Of course, beans and maize are a bit scarce but she is very positive this time. I am so glad that things are going well for her.

Uganda has been both a blessing and chaos at the same time. We have had so much rain in the last few days including today which went for more than 5 hours. Chaos in a way that we had three bombs removed from public places like churches and another place I can’t recall. 

I got to meet Semmy too at her home this time with her son. She is doing well, getting ready for school as the two boys and a girl have to go back. She has been on a spree of making soap and has restocked more than several times. She is doing very nice blocks of soap and involving her son who has been very active in both making and selling soap. She had to look for another component to add to the soap because it was wearing out so fast as customers noted. She is grateful for the business and has not been afraid to mention it as she is trying to save up for the children’s school fees.

Jane

Jane is doing okay. Her season has been such a mess as the rain has surely affected her water sales as people tend to harvest rainwater. Therefore, she is surviving on her paperbag business in the meantime, which is also not doing great. She has a grandson who broke his leg and they have been trying to rehabilitate him and get him back on the road and most importantly school. They have tried local healers and she says they have made way.

Henry

Henry is doing well with his chickens and pigs. The downside is they gave us two cocks and yet she wanted one out of the six we bought. He wanted more female birds to have more eggs and chicks at the end but he is one hen down. The other thing is that we expected that we would get local birds but by the look of the eggs he is getting, it looks like they are not entirely local birds. Local birds tend to lay white eggs and these are not white but rather pink. Otherwise, they are giving him several eggs and if he could increase the feeding, he could get more eggs.

Immaculate

Immaculate’s drug shop is not doing bad at all. One of the attending girls is preparing for her graduation ceremony as a nurse so she will now start to attend without supervision. She said that one of the challenges is that some drugs are still not available but whatever they have is serving the community well and they can’t complain much really. 

Harriet

Harriet is doing okay. Of course some challenges especially with her customers taking too long to pick up their clothes because the kids return to school next week and her daughter has not even shopped for her schooling items. This is the daughter that her husband has refused to support because he is not the real father. Otherwise, she is grinding more and trying to ensure she buys her daughter the books and scholastic items required for the third term.

Maria with her pigs

Maria is doing okay. The piglets have grown fast even though food has been hard to get. The guy who supplies her with the special food mix has not delivered it as his supply too has been very limited. She has therefore vamped up the greens thanks to the rains. The piglets are getting a lot of milk and it has caused the piglets to grow but also become sick a bit so she has cut down on some of the wet foods. 

Rehema

Rehema is doing okay. A little low on hair products but has been struggling a lot with one of her grandsons who is ill with measles and has many sore bumps on his body. This has affected her work generally as she works at home. Otherwise, I would like her to continue on that trail to make sure that her business survives.

Thank you again for your unending support to this program and we couldn’t do any single part of it without you. This coming week, we look to increase the number of chickens for Henry as it looks more doable, plus assist Annet with her soap endeavour so she is back up and running. We appreciate you immensely.

Report by;

Andrew Echel

Director of Programs, Uganda.

ISEE Solutions Society

September 10 update

Greetings to you all,

Happy New Month of September. Wow, time surely does fly and it all goes away in the blink of an eye.

I hope that you are well and that the smoke and wildfire effects have reduced in your atmosphere. I am one of the people who struggle when the air is smoky and not fresh so I feel for all of you who are in the BC area where the fires were.

The week was not bad at all and as promised I was notified of the fabric rolls that are to be distributed between Yimba and Margaret Hasasha. They have arrived in the country and we were able to clear both the taxes and agency fees so I look forward to receiving them this week and delivering them to the concerned parties.

I also visited a few Mamas right from Maria whose pig gave birth to 6 piglets and it was a bit exciting as they all looked healthy and alive. She was happy to notify me and we also worked on getting the food supplies as the season has really not been good with the feeds and leaves from the garden. The extensive drought has affected lots of farmers within the country. Otherwise, things are well for her and she will be looking to offload some of the pigs that have refused to respond so she has enough room for the 6 new piglets.

Lilly

Lilly is doing well. The sack of silverfish has been depleted and has now ordered for more to come this week. She is also doing well with her tailoring as the orders have come in more this past week so a lot of work for her. Her daughter is back for the holidays so they are working together as Lilly is tailoring. Her daughter is also selling the fish in the market. The tablecloths she makes require a bit of skill so, she has to be the one to do the tailoring.

Betty in her shop

Betty is back and running, I had the opportunity to see her during the week and she was quite happy to see me too. She had been battling with brucella and typhoid at the same time. She was admitted twice and she says, “…I feared for my life..” The treatment seemed not to have responded quickly so she was admitted again and then it worked. She is now back and she had to return the machine as it had a fault which required some working on luckily for her, it still has its warranty so they will fix it for free.

Amina

We were also also to set up Amina who has been on the waiting list for the soap resale business for some time now. She has just recently recovered from a surgery on her hip that involved the removal of a lump. It was successfully removed and she recovered well but it required a lot of money which was then taken from her chapati business. After healing, we had to find another way forward because children are soon returning to school so the need to be financially sound is required. She was very happy and she said that they would try to sell as quickly as possible so that she would have some money to take back the two children to school.

Angel

Angel “Nalongo” which means twin mother is doing fairly okay this holiday. The business has been slow these past few weeks as food has become an issue in our country. Some Western and Arabic countries have discovered a supply of foodstuff like matooke, onions and tomatoes and have invaded our economy. They are offering good money for these things and taking it all over to their countries creating scarcity within the Ugandan markets. These things have almost become unaffordable for even people like me who have to cook at home because we can’t cook without onions and tomatoes. If you know Ugandans, “We love our food in some oil”. We literally fry anything so having these items not easily available or affordable then is disaster.

Margaret

Margaret is back from the village. I was able to meet her but nothing much rolling on her behalf but she is generally okay and much healthier. She hadn’t set up camp for her tailoring on the day I went to her house but she said, she was doing some little work slowly. Her eye has recovered a lot better and she is still looking forward to continuing with her tailoring.

Pulakiseda

Pulakiseda is doing well. The grocery has stabilized in the sense that she has maintained all the stock we boosted her with. She has not pulled out anything at the moment so I would like to see where else she can grow. We worked on the budget the last time so I like to see some effort when we visit the Mamas. I was able to grab a few things for home like rice, sugar, cooking oil and tea leaves. 

Hamida

Lastly, Hamida has nothing going on at the moment. She told me that she has something up her sleeves but she is waiting for some money to be able to get the chicken feeds. One of her challenges is feeding. She is always first to book and pay for the actual chicks but then she runs out of the feeding money because she spreads the money around catering for the kids. This last time, she had to send her daughter to nursing school. Her daughter is at that sensitive age so she had to send her to school to prevent her from the scarvenging men on her village. There was no come back from that line so I surely did understand.

Amina making sure the body driver goes safely

It was really amazing to set up Amina with her soap business. We have been working on setting her up when we finally did, it was good to see her with her daughters smile at the shop. She was accompanied by her daughter who traveled via motorbike (boda boda) and Amina took a taxi as I felt like she needed to travel much safely especially after her surgery. Thank you for making Amina happen, it is always a privildge to serve with the Mamas but also seeing their smiles and faces light up to a possibility of a better future.

Mwebale nnyo.

Report by;

Andrew Echel

Director of Programs, Uganda

ISEE Solutions Society